Begin Here

from the archive, for the New Year

BEGIN HERE

I wanted to find you a story of new
beginnings, so I began
where anyone would:
from the collective unconscious
of Google,
but don’t ya know if you type in
“new beginnings,” you get thousands of sites
that start from despair,
beginnings folded in with recovery,
unwed mothers,
all kinds of sisters and brothers
rising from the gutter,
like phoenix fires,
lovely, but,
I thought
save me jeezus,
we’ve been there.

So I wanted to begin again:
what if there is no down
to rise up from again?
So I think of creation made again
and here is re-creation,
Recreation,
god’s sport on the ballcourt,
We take a pause to play,
re-play our way of being ,
remember,
re- member
we are members:
not drops, but ocean,-
reclaim our place on the court of play,
this life,
not a recovery, but a celebration,

‘cause each animal makes play
in the same way,
be you weasel or wombat,
with the same look, an invitation, like a soft stroke
of a laughing brush, saying
remember?, this is what we’re here for.
Now, show me whatcha got, doll!
Try and bite me…!

Yesterday, a three year-old
Showed me his favorite shark,
an ornate wobegong...
the ornate wobegong,
a shark with daisies on its back,
no lie,
a shark,
with daisies on its back.

So let the soft animal
of your woebegong body
tumble against mine
and love what we love,
because every beginning ,
yes,
carries death
as its lovely cousin,
the rise and fall of each
breath, baby,
One big accordion
…so let’s get on with this polka.

~Eilish Nagle~

Burned (from the archive)

Burned,

beyond belief, though she can tell
it has been this way for many years
--a mistake on a top of a train,
live wires arcing
through his small frame, shooting volts
through the soles of his feet,
stigmata--
yes, this happens, or a pipe bomb
in a trashcan in the backyard or even
a father, lunging at him,
a wounded beast, gascan in hand
after his mother left,
there are so many ways this can be
it doesn't matter, he is here
at the cafe, face
half-cooked, skin fused over one socket, arms
mottled in every shade of distress
she looks
without looking, like everyone else, sees
his white cane tapping, thinks she can
look a little closer, now that she knows
he can't see her seeing although she knows
he can
always see people seeing that's the way it is
when you are
but she has no shame
takes a good long look and he turns
toward her so she can see him staring
at her staring, eyes lidless and black, hawk-frozen,
still a blur for him, hands feeding
air for the scones somehow he knows
to grab a currant not a cheese roll
by mistake or maybe he just takes what he gets
and that's that fumbles for change
his coins spill to checkered tiles and no one
moves, he is self-sufficient after all, and he finds
most of the coins but not the quarter he needs
it is down there somewhere, he douses
with his cane, scrapes his shoe
along the floor he's almost got it
but misses and she is omniscient, can see
what he can't, but she bends
down, scoops up the quarter, hands it to him just
as he asks if anyone sees and she sees
places on him that are not burned, places where flame
hopscotched across flesh, leaving skin unscorched,
like hill fires that take one house, leapfrog over
the next he takes his scone
to go and she is left drinking her half-leaded
latte but she can still see him drop
the warm bag on his kitchen table, lean
his wand in the corner, move
toward a patch of sun to feel the warmth
on his skin he takes his shirt off she knows
the graze of his leathery fingers, not over the small
buttery patches untouched by flame: under his arms, nor behind
his knees, nor his sex, hard and smooth as a dancer's thigh,
but across the lacquered scars of his chest,
his grafted clavicle,
where nerves closer to the surface
shiver, remembering, at his touch
what it is to feel too much

--Eilish Nagle

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning

A month before I left you, the mice came,
leaving nibbles in our pears
and turds among the grape nuts.
Each brazen spring they waltzed

across sunlit tiles to celebrate
their grand fecundity in the darkness
of our pantry. So we unwrapped
the glue traps in silence,

laid them down before us
like a pact, end to end like barges
along trade routes, a daisy chain
around the stove, across the pantry

threshold, knowing the engagement
this would require of us.
Snappers do the work for you,
hard and swift, while you're at work,

or asleep, perhaps, leaving only
a small bundle that is flicked,
clean and easy, into the trash.
But glue traps demand your presence,

reserve your catch on a tiny tray
until you hear the panicked scream,
one that is mistaken for squeaking,
but the first time I heard it

I knew the sound, that keen
diminished note; I knew
it was my turn. I filled a bucket
with warm water, a gentle bath,

scooped up the plastic tray
which had caught just the hind legs,
so when I raised the mouse
toward the bucket, it arched

its back and flailed its free limbs, and I felt
all of its body, a fistful of fur
and tail, no heavier
than a spoon of butter, a quarter cup

of raisins, with its small determination
of muscles, defiant tendons
like spring twigs, all of this
strained against me, against the red

bucket, and I could feel it and still
I held my breath and dunked it
as it reached its claws
like rays toward the surface, mouth gasping

open and then it stopped. It stopped.
I had expected it to thrash
like a man, like some large
animal; I was unprepared

for the limpness, how easily
it crossed the line of surrender, how easily
I had acquired the expedient hand
of a god

and though you had done this
before, you could not see me
alone in the kitchen, leaning
over the stainless

steel sink. You could never know
how efficient I was,
and how easy the next one would be.

Eilish Nagle

rhizomes

on the eve of your waning
you rasp nonsense to me
carried by cords woven with IV's, other tethers
ICU telephone, intense, one way to sound you
over moon miles of long, long distance
tho' I've been calling to you at night, send the zikkr down
in my own backyard, next to the hydrangia, just south of Buddha's knee
put my mouth to the earth as I thrash all of this at the only thing large enough to hold it

if you spark your ignition
you know that wave carries to Jupiter and back
before you can say Jack-
rabbit
if starting a car is a celestial event
then my song thrummed against
these acacia roots can relay through
a collaboration of species, from tree
to rhizone to languid worm
(who are all pulse anyway),

through veins of quartz lodged in the mountains
between us, thru tendrils of the anenome
in the weakened bay below your window,
and finally to the water in the cup
by your bed
put the phone down and drink,
and every cell of your body will recognize
my voice as your own, calling
the sound of your true and hidden name.

these words between us, born of tired lineage of longing,
sadness inherited by diggers and orphans
wails and pipe drones, a keening for keening
they were mistaken

that thrum pulse in your chest, your temple,
your last kidney, is your answer to this
thrumming earth, resonates
with the conduction of this,
just love
it's just love naming itself

now is the time for daughters to lullaby fathers
in a dream you dance, unburdened, across shallow water


Eilish Nagle

Leaving Black Rock

Leaving Black Rock

This place was water once,
an ocean, till someone
pulled the plug, and mastadons,
blinded by salt and sunlight,
surrendered their skulls…

You can see what held it together
by what is left--the space asks you to abandon something
beyond rusted transmissions, bucket seats

which carry you to an empty place to fill you up,
put heart and sweat into building something
--dreams turned in your hands like pinchpots:
greenware, boneware, stoneware, stone--
fired in the kilns of longing

What you sacrifice
must be beautiful, the barter
must be meaningful
You cannot trade a few used D-batteries
for the silk slip
someone loved her in,
You cannot trade a short
shabby wicker man
for all of your ills purged on this playa,
You need something

bigger than mile after mile of clean slate
bone white
clay, salt that leaves its signature
in cracks, little hexagons
of alkaline, silicates of soil
taking their place in ordered chaos,
telling you what it is in its breaking apart

(gypsum in your pores after three days of salt walking,
parched skin like your arizona grandma's bare heels,
torn and feathered at the back)
the fissures map the way in,
unravel the seamstress' jagged pattern.

Someone was born here at dawn,
slipped like a trout from her dark wet sack,
took the hero's journey from fin to foot
into the light, eyes wide open...

You have to make
the journey,
you have to bring
your water,
you have to shape
your survival.

Why don't you turn,
sister,
your blinker's been on
for jeezus knows
how long




Eilish Nagle
Black Rock Desert, 1996

true

What is your true nature? breath asks me,
Part lover, part Zen teacher
slapping the back of my hand
Til I awaken
You want mountain? Easy--
Sling me across the landscape
like the body of a voluptuous
sleeping grandmother,
or a river
calling one fickle moment after next--
go on, just try to step into me twice

I could claim my calm pool and my drop
rapids and my many, many eddies
But that’s too easy
because really what lies at the bottom
of each breath

is the line of ants doing the bunny-hop
along the edge of my bathtub,
and you know what we are all asking,
what you are already thinking—

Why do ants carry their dead?

This tiny army of pumped-up amazons
hoist their fallen sisters onto their backs
and carry this mystery with each body,
as they spill into the hole at the edge of the caulking

..they carry them back and devour them to absorb their memories

...they are delivered to the great ant graveyard
and laid to rest where their sisters,
like weeping elephants, will visit
season after season, to graze their antennae
against the beloved and hollow exoskeletons

… when they tap each other as they pass
on opposite commutes, they’re playing
an endless game of telephone,
so when the deceased are dismantled
like old motherboards
the punchline is finally retrieved,
the fruit of a million messages
passed a million times.

I sit for 20 days in silence,
every moment a wrestling match
with god, and a hope
to emerge with my life purpose,
or at least a better sense of humor.
Instead, I emerge from the cave
with only this:
Ants..carry…dead…why?
and the oracle I consult
heaves up a thousand pages of Darwin
and a thousand more, asking the same question

I know the answer is there, but I prefer,
I think, to end my days not knowing
but imagining

because
every time I ask, that long line
of the humble and mighty sisters
carries me back to the colony
where everything,
sublime and grotesque,
is happening at once

Eilish Nagle
4/11/11

Pigeon yoga in three breaths

Pigeon yoga in three breaths

I don’t care if you call me
A rat with wings--
I’ve heard worse.
We gutter dwellers, so misunderstood
I wish I could claim crane,
or lion,
or, Shiva help me,
a Warrior,

but some mornings I have
to curl my bent wing to my heart
and bow down
to the fact of this,
taste the tar as if it’s nectar.

What if you find that your power
animal is an earthworm,
a crafty trilobite,
a small black ant carrying
its dead sister back home?

We imagine grandeur, but the god
hands us a broom and says,
here,
now this,
And this.
This time around,
you are the soiled cousin
of the angels’ white dove,
flying donuts
‘round that holy spirit,
and laughing

--Eilish Nagle
2/23/11

On a piano found in a field

On a piano found in a field

I’m reeling it in, A Virginia Reel across the strings
Plucking the lower keys with my big toe,
Lay my toes

across the mahogany,
my mahogany southern body
my key, my white teeth clacking middle C
This is where I’ve ended up
Finally,
blood flowing through ivory

Sorry, sorry,
dear elephant who never lived on my street
but dies in the living room each time a third grader
huffs her way through Chopsticks,
Bow your head to the pachyderm
Bow your back to the staccato plea of each key
And each tiny bum on the leatherette bench

One key per breath,
finding the space between the notes
Keep the blood flowing downhill toward the mouth,
always downhill toward the mouth of river, of white teeth, now open
lips holding stories told a thousand times,
in that gap-toothed smile
between the atoms

Eilish Nagle
from the archive, 2012