This poem is a letter to tell you that I have
smelled the hatred you have tried to find me with. You would
like to destroy me. Bone splintered in the eye of one you
choose to name your enemy won't make it better for you to see.
It could take a thousand years if you name it that way, but
then, to see after all that time, never could anything be so
clear. Memory has many forms. When I think of early
winter I think of a blackbird laughing in the frozen air; guards
a piece of light. (I saw the whole world caught in that sound,
the sun stopped for a moment because of tough belief.) I don't
know what that has to do with what I am trying to tell you
except that I know you can turn a poem into something else.
This
poem could be a bear treading the far northern tundra, smelling
the air for sweet alive meat. Or a piece of seaweed stumbling
in the sea. Or a blackbird, laughing. What I mean is that hatred
can be turned into something else, if you have the right words,
the right meanings, buried in that tender place in your heart
where the most precious animals live. Down the street an ambulance
has come to rescue an old man who is slowly losing his life.
Not many can see that he is already becoming the backyard
tree he has tended for years, before he moves on. He is not
sad, but compassionate for the fears moving around him.
That's what I mean to tell you. On the other
side of the place you live stands a dark woman. She has been
trying to talk to you for years. You have called the same
name in the middle of a nightmare, from the center of miracles.
She is beautiful. This is
your hatred back. She loves you.
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