SAVED

Todo lo puedo en Christo says the tag on the back of the old Chevy beater with the barely there bumper straggling like its trying to catch up to the rest of the car. This is my favorite backroad in Caroline County, the one where the poetry comes through me most clearly, the one where the slaves call at me from the old Quaker homes and the marshy woods, the one that made me realize that whichever came first: human's delineation of the political boundaries of a land; or the land urging humans to delineate it first--regardless, places have a song, a Call all their own, a personality unique to the crying of its birds the moaning of its streets or how its trees find ease to sway.

I look at that bumber sticker and wonder if I know the Latinos inside that busted car. Then I think how merciless it looks, again and again, when I've been saved.

And then that's it, and the poetry's here...

And the song itself comes through me and out all busted, too, disjointed kind of like my latest dreams. Lines about Hondurans, their high, round cheeks and eyes deeper and darker then all the other countrysides and too their very light skin. Followed at once by the way the trees look early in the morning in the fading summer light, the green that changes on the bow how if your still, you know the slanted up way it has right now is because the light is actually coming from within... Or the wisteria, still glowing, but how she like a old sad lady surveying her faded skirts, is looking down...
Then Charlie, who's been dead almost a year, is speaking to me he is saying over and over again Lord make me an instrument of your peace and these are the same backroads I drove that night that I got the news about him. And what would happen if I pulled over the car of Spanish dudes and said, I'm it!! And so are you!! Christos esta aqui, conmio conmio and con ustedes, too!! Holding my heart, on the green backroads with the light green slant of trees and the long, long shadows on the other side. O! Mi Corazon!

Then I think how twice this week I've dreamt about her, the old friend that was most close to me all the way back then, the one I haven't spoken to or with in so long. And it clicks, how it used to trouble me when she'd show up in my dreams like that and make me want to scream, but that now it is good medicine. For there is nothing to figure out in her Second, Third or Fortieth Coming, other than Life, the thankless and the unanswerable, the humble sweep of the great fine hand. The way she sings deep in the utter boundless landscape of me of proof that I, that she, that Life will always be. And that's it, and that is all: certain backroads are where her bones lay and they feed the meat and juice of the land, and of all things that spring forward from those places to sing.

And this gave me peace because with others, too, that is how it shall be...

No more mantles for the myths of their flame

Only a graveyard, with a live ghost singing

& much as we are our ghosts

we are our friends

After that dream of her I dreamt of Cades and Walsh. They'd just gotten in after a long time of travelling and were tired, but ready and dancing behind their eyes was the simple clean need for some fun. I rushed to the kitchen and prepared a thoughtful stack of candied treats for them, and they took them, ate them, savored them, one by one, of a plate at my hands.

And then I think of Facebook, and how in the beginning all I ever did was look again and again at the wall and information about me. And what a narcissist I am and how that makes me laugh and grin most deliciously at me. And how hard it is to try to fake it that somehow that's not true. Walking up the sidewalk to the Family Support Center in Caroline County, the last of the words came through...

And if you dont get it I'm not going to bother to explain

to you words or poems make no more difference

than the rain