Brother I was seven. My brother was seventeen. My hand in his hand, together we walked the streets of our town, short quick legs, long steady strides to softball on the nursing home lawn, to the library for me to read, while he escaped for some fun with his friends at Liggett's pharmacy. My world was an accident of imagination and reality, tea parties, boiling water, and third degree burns. His world a collision in passage, an emergence out of childhood into the real world of responsibility, a protector of me. At twenty-two he made his way to Germany riding that cold war train of the world's fear on the tracks of the Army draft. I knew he would be safe. Elvis had been there.  At Thanksgiving relatives gathered. My brother's sleeked back duck ass hair, his chinos and tee shirts had given way to shaved peach fuss and the sharp smart shoulder back, chin up satisfaction of the proud young man in uniform. Stories rang with new words like `boot camp', romantic places like Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The women lovingly rubbed his upper arm. The men laughingly jabbed at his shoulder, how  much of a man he had become. That was before the army, the sad long hard time, the explosion in his mind.

The Voices They are riding in the veins and arteries in the subways like little thieves stealing the mind. They talk, talk, talk and I don't know who they are. They are riding on the ears and tongue and the feeling of the skin in the wind, high riding on the el, the noise, it's deafening. In the clack clack clack of the sound of the train there are words, syllables of words. They must be put together. They have meaning. They know the meaning. Father knows the meaning. It's a train. It's a train. It's the A train crossing the continental divide, a ceremony cutting to ribbons, a shift, a rift, riding high on the edge of the cliff. Don't let me fall. It's the Mattapan Mental, MADapan Mental, the Boston State Mental, the naked men rocking mental, rocking back and forth on the cold concrete floor. It's the Mattapan shaking limb, lip drooling mental, making sounds without meaning, making sounds that the soul alone can decode. We are riding the rails holding on to each other. Brother, talk to me. Talk to me. Hold me close.

Song of Darkness I walk on the shard glass fragments of my life watchful for the possibility of blood. I am careful, wash myself in salt tears, bind my feet with the skin of animals and know all that can be done is done. I dance now on the jagged edges of my love heedless of the blood. Moving on an earthquake I reach with hand and heart into hot fissures. I am the archeologist of the eternal excavating layers of the soul. I reach through the glass of ancient waters, through tiles, rotted wood and the bent steel frames of time. I stir the cauldron of ooze, cries, screams, of dreams and births; all the while making love in the ripe fields of the dead. I am the anthropologist of cultures, the snake in the tree, the apple, and I am the woman. I reach for seed bone, magician bone, sorcerer bone to sing the voices of my soul. I hear the cry MAMA. Am I calling? or is someone calling me? Sound of dancing, whirling, swimming in the juice of life. Is grief more compelling than this wild joy? Under this sea of earth have we reached the mountaintop? The bones of children dance. Why do they dance, done in as they are by fire, by rage, by famine? Tied to death how does life sing? My body knows what to do in this hour, knows what to do in this hour. I bend holding dirt like light in palms, in hot hands, hands of fire. In the seed of sorcery's dark bones flesh contorts, masks form. I am tiger, leopard, cat, and lizard. I am the mold of your life creeping in, devouring your sustenance. Feed on me as you would your cat or dog in lean years. Gnaw on the human bone. lick the ripe flesh that drips from it. Hear the snap of human bone, your cartilage, your ligaments, your muscle. What holds you together anyhow? In this dance of bones what holds you together? I say. I say rain may touch this parched earth. Who knows what seed might sprout? I hold my children like lamps of light and tend the flame. Who am I? I am the beggar woman knocking at the door of time. My legs are green. My breasts drip tears and sap. A thousand incarnations of ants, maggots and worms sprout from my body even as leaves sprout from these arms that move like hawk, like eagle, like the great eternal bird soaring and rooted in time. I am wild dancing flashing, molten fire moving through form, these legs, these hands, these eyes.

Rumi, Francis and Shams I. I was sinking into the belly of fear as if it were a god to be worshipped, that summer I divorced my husband and my mother lost her mind. The bombs were dropping in the Balkans, exploding in Oklahoma City and two women working in a Brookline abortion clinic were killed in the name of God. Even with this, I kept calling the pain I had mine. I wanted it gone. I wanted that day to arrive when I would be mysteriously whole, expecting in the American way, there should be such a day, when I would somehow rise above it all, enlightened as a phoenix out of ashes. If I did not, something was broken in me, an irredeemable unlovable defect that was me. I put this self-opinion between me and my God. Yet a madman was tearing his robe, ripping it off in ecstasy, shouting, "Make me real." A man who could barely walk was playing real music on a fiddle made of sticks. A real gambler was laughing, weeping, spinning, dancing, and crying out, "I am broken open. How great is my glory!" I could hear them. II. At sunset they are seen bowing with the faithful. In the night they wander amid the bodies of the dead. Hands, which have traced the cheekbones of grief's face, linger in the air. Cries pierce the inner ear, "Bismillah, in the name of God, let this long night be the dawn." They look like drunkards at prayer with feet turning, turning, spinning in the Sarajevo square.

Animal Eyes Tomorrow I will go to the river even though the bear are still awake and the moose mean with rut. I will make my way to the wilds where nothing is news, into the freedom of God to thrive or die there. Are the years of wolf and seals now gone? Different animals inhabit my dreams, the doe, the hare, the moose, the horse, the dog. I have been away from the wild too long. The feet of the holy ones are wild in the dust. They sleep in caves and bathe in cold ashes. Their lives are oceans, their hands are stars. Their wild animal eyes flash with no shame. They risk their own nature to become real compassion, sharp claws, deer eyes, cloven hooves, teeth bared with laughter. I want to tell you God is like that. I want to tell you I am like that too.

Raven's Blood - Gulf War I for Bob Corrigal, S.J. We met in restaurants, exchanged secret packages of holy things. I brought the balance rock, agate from the Mexican temple, a seal's tooth, fresh cedar leaf and a shell for burning. You gave me a pimento jar of black ooze and winked. "Raven's blood", you said, "first oil from Prudhoe Bay." You were so proud of your Yup'ik grandfather, a healer, a shaman, a medicine man. Priest, half Eskimo, half Irish, you could no longer choose. You said no Mass but saw circles of healing, and died singing to the Holy Spirit, eagle feather and sweetgrass above your head. We must live in communion now. After you died I gave away the shark necklace, felt the pain of regret. I could not bear its obligation. Tonight I hold the jar of Raven's blood in my hands. It spilled in the sound the year you died. The animals are poisoned. Elders in Bethel still fear hell for practicing tradition. The young still kill themselves, not knowing who they are. I hold the jar of Raven's blood. It spills now in the land of Ur, where Abraham set his altars to the unknown god, in waters that feed the Red Sea where Moses took the children to freedom. It flows into the sealed rooms of Israel, like it flowed from our Christ's wounds on that bloody Passover Day. We fight Islam now. Raven's blood pours over me in some truth of spirit. I stand between cultures not knowing if I am in Bethel or Ulster or at the Wailing Wall. I am weeping and calling out to the unknown god.

Breath Everything is so noisy. I can hear the trees moan. I can hear the mountains settle deeper into themselves. In this wilderness of silence life is loud. I lay beside myself. The rise and fall of my own animal breath strangely comforts me.

Late at night in the solitude of my bed while the mind tosses and the body moves it comes over me, a weight that wraps around me like wings or legs after long love. It stills me inside its being. Within its breathing I sleep.

Between the breaths the center is silence. With no need to glean the air about me, a long time I am still.

Beginner's Mind        Georgia O'Keefe at Ninety Apprentices to a Potter I. Nothing is cleanly desert. Under her fingernails the clay is mountain flowing molten fire as the sun steeps her skin in the red sizzling sand of the land. An Aztec weaver woman watches. An Navaho ghost spirit hovers over her hands. An underground spring is gone to geyser. She is not thinking of Steiglitz, her old lover, or the bold way desert cactus flash with flower in her dreams. In the fiery kiln of her own hands she works the clay she holds. II. The potter is not old. The sound of the hum of the wheel and the tap of his foot on the wood comfort. His brown hands cover the frail thin bony fingers of what she has become. She breathes over the moistening clay with its ground bones of snakes, dust of scorpions, dried pigments shaken from old canvas. In the sand Franciscan bones gone wild with the savages are singing as the potter is singing a song so ancient it has no words. The ear leans close to the heart to here, to where they bend over the lump of clay, his hands, listening for a baby's breath. Here under his touch color disappears, only the wet and the sound of the naked clay beating under the flooding sun, and the rush of blood in her ears, her throat open to that first cry. What breadth of spirit could have prepared her for the piercing eagle call, her fluttering tongue alive crying out of her brittle bones, singing in her skeletal hands? We live to know this truth.