I’d initially written the second chapter of Lavender Burning, titled “Sophia: Love Through Your Blood And Anger”, but I decided against releasing it at this time. It deals with things a bit too recent and raw; time needs to pass. Instead, what follows are the first four poems in a suite titled the mystery gardens. I started this a bit over a decade ago, chronicles of trauma and desire, but hit a wall after writing the first two of the “black fruit” sub-section. A few weeks ago, the bell was rung and I drafted quickly two parts of the “white roots” section. I am publishing here just the first two “white roots” poems, given the excessively raw nature of the “black fruit” poems which are more or less autobiographical trauma confession written from a similarly excessively raw place. If you are still here, however, I assume you can handle a bit of intensity, even if in my current and still quite new run at talk therapy it is precisely the thing I am trying to temper given its hectoring and disrespectful form hurting people I love and care about.

the mystery gardens: white root I: twin bone

there is girl buried beneath the ruin of boy
it is not the same grave but the same coffin
those slow bones of lipless heads so close to kiss
her hand on the sallow pit of his cheek, in prayer

the dim lights along the boys back, old fires lit in black bramble,
make no shape or sensible geometry,
no map of rational heart nor head.

a shared sternum and, wrapped round, a torus-shaped heart
beating its circuitous rhythm through tachycardia and dystrophy
wraps them in the same blood, a cocoon,
the coffin skin that unifies those bones and binds them together
sibling-self

below the belly, above the head, is another face
eyeless now
the trachea extending up through two mouths and two hard palettes
through the plates of cranial bone
until like a lily it forms at last a horn
decked still with human lips
that flesh dry and murmuring and unable to cease its hum

each face pleads to blend into the other
that these cheeks and those lips might meet on the same head
brow and chin, the curl of their hair a union, this spiral being
like emergent horn

old satin lining paints an orange room
soft rotting window for stones and worms
but neither head turns
one over the other, the hourglass self
as the sands of the slowly deteriorating brain pour from skull to skull
each convinced only the other should possess
a mind a map a root system, blind to its trunk,
sprouting boughs
birthing fruit

the mystery gardens: white root II: logos

there is a litany of names
the phone book chanted in plainsong
old reference guides and encyclopedias with busted spines and crooked vertebrae
spilling the black blood they guard wickedly
so three tongues in one mouth rotating can speak them
il canto sancro
checking your face in the mirror with each syllable
looking for some flicker of recognition
that by accident you stumble phoneme sputtering
to a true name
something fit for a spell and to commit to wand

but letters like masks tumble, make oceans, heaps which flow and churn with inward tide
and the thing hangs agnostic in the sky
your dull star

you did not once blink
and the streaks of that beaming being did not blur your eyes
as tears would soak and genders be changed
and that stoic loving thing remained
a father’s face with motherly grace
dividing love between you in a rain of arrows
that even in your dark there was distant glinting
and wordless susurrous of whispering feathers tucked deep in their shafts
you holding your own hand

still thyself tongue
rich in belief that word is flesh, that one makes another
let yourself at last be silent
stare, unblinking, and witness
these shafts of light that are my love for you, coiled and sleeping
shining on my own body
son to son