Fan Ogilvie

PRAYER FROM A PARENT

It was almost impossible to recognize him at the morgue.

He had been shot so many times

he looked like the rag toy our dog drags around..

I couldn’t believe another human being

could fire so many bullets in someone

who lay helpless on the ground.

Was it because he stuck out his tongue?

Or lunged at him the way the principal did?

My son was feisty and just—

yes, at six he was just,

“that’s not fair” his favorite quote.

Our house still rings with his voice.

He was trying out all ways of becoming—

from jet pilot to jockey.

I know there is no way to get over his death,

but just one thing I beg of you, Lord,

do not let him lie still, do something with him.

Please God, do something special with him.

December 2012

To remember the slain children at Sandy Hook Elementary School

*

FLY BY NIGHT

A large transport of the first order older than day hovers over the earth 

like a stealth bomber programmed to make scheduled or emergency 

landings to receive those prepared those surprised a giant vacuum to eliminate the overflow of guests sucking from them their last breath

seizing them gently permitting no more in breaths or out breaths

lifting each one into its maw before the craft soars past school yards 

past fields at harvest past the sun setting seemingly slowly 

over grasses hardly noticing a chill in the black moonless air 

dark intruder dropping carcasses on every continent every sea

not registering myriad dreams souls may have dearly held until this. 

*

IT TOOK THIS

Is it good to lose one’s way is it inevitable in the sense that there is a way to know it is to lose it like falling off a wire from the Empire state building to 

the Brooklyn Bridge if that were possible to rig like our lives you are not

entering Manhattan you are entering a valley still a valley fold of two fields 

once home to cows the cow pasture once contained a bull at whom 

you could shake red bandanas expecting him to charge that 

was the adventure on that piece of road now quietly but vertically looking beyond the fields at the valley the river and the bridge not in view but 

crossed so often they are implied the child who walked this road school day after school day knew the same things she knows now 

a desire for the road to become potato chips a couple of nasty terriers

to not run down from the top of the hill to challenge her or bite 

saving the greatest challenge for home where she took a snack a straight line to her room homework inside outside impossibly changed

an open window revived freedom she lost when she entered the front door how can that be so confused how can that be she can not make 

the inside work others and there were others walked up the hill to the house entered the house stayed a short time in the house went out again  

all the others there were others came inside were not suffocated by the closed in house is not true they knew they could take it  

a short while then they left without more poison some canker some worm 

of disease or disgust each of the others felt or sensed a lostness 

they could pretend to cover up and not speak of  a language so suspect 

she would spend night and day trying to make her way inside its 

cavernous structure finding in Turkey her soul so like Capadocia       

much later when the fields and the road become flatter when her own breathing became more regulated when the terriers died when the 

enormous foot she witnessed stepping on the marble step at the top of the hill before the graveled not paved road dives rises again to her house the 

enormous marble bleeding flesh foot unleashed a waterfall to flood the back of the hill with some ablutionary will some absolutionary power

unstoppable grace took place outside on a road a road she knew it would take this to appease her child’s uncompromised memory not changing 

what goes on inside but perhaps suggesting new possibilities for this pain

a largeness that even those lost in it and because of it found unfathomable. 

*

HIGHER ELEVATION

After eleven years in a verbal draught did they swoop down on you 

announce their presence were you supposedly dead or in a stupor any sign

of epilepsy or concussion were angels in vogue so to speak there were fairies thought to inhabit important centers but angels those creatures who keep a 

barrier if you will between simple mortals themselves like Seraphim who accompany God perhaps in nine orders of celestial beings there was a level 

not terribly busy much less rigor in their dealings with man who came to you really touched you not just imagined by your huge seasoned desire to be 

touched again she was out of the picture you were ahead of her parting 

had bid adieu but those angels the grace gravitas of those angels can not be 

over stated in your poems I for one keep being drawn to them as a need to be drawn to some magnetism some power glory we felt at one time or another 

we were capable of still feel that thrall whether emotion or deed as our definition of being there is more I will return when I come or came back it is 

always to you you are larded under the skin or injected into the blood stream 

of language a cry crye of tears tears the poignant ever-pointed thorn into 

there just there the place of ever-desired pure event not happening ever-not 

happening ever-aware of absence and desire thorn turns needles 

so angels who dwell in painless ether become solace powerful creatures we adore who ignore us wholly having wings

move away from the trial of the human yet who in rare instances not having completed the separation recall desires’ desire instantly 

plummet headlong to the ground not to die but to walk or creep 

leaden bedraggled on the surface of earth stripped of their higher elevation.

*

LE VIANDE EST TENDRE

Beaucoup de dire de lire de fear mais le viande est tendre et c’est 

le plus important choix que je parle maintenant comprendez vous

all this could be turned on its head this is what we have to go on but consider it culd/wuld will be different when we meet the ones

who have been in flight a million or more years measured in instants by those who are coming who have seen us before we see  

them they will add to the surprise of being they will have their own ways not because they are true but because they work they are 

here for what purposes we have yet to discover they are not the only ones they and others will divine us by the heat of our 

hearts they will be surprised some of us are so cold so unable to 

walk forward to greet them after such a long journey it appears

they too are poets speaking in terms that shock alive all they see

and touch they have no idea of leader so well they work together

they have no idea of religion so well they know miracle they have no gender but a profound practice that celebrates seed and egg

within each when it is time for creating new ones what do they 

look like to us which is not how they look like think of a candle 

flickering in the night sometimes still three separate colors blue yellow white that is they as they come to us and sail out of sight.  

*

WATER PAINT CREAM

You might as well say rose sweater hamburger what pin point part 

of the brain keeps analogies and metaphors whirring in their boxes

associating pears sandwiches soup but not two days after your 1%

milk his and her soy milk his and her cereal a look at me dumbfounded

wounded like a dog helpless to go any farther but shit hit the fan

the morning after you cooked flounder or was it cod went to bed never 

got up the same again as the blood was flowing coagulated from your 

heart to your head later much later two days later we would learn to 

your iliac arteries your femeral arteries your popliteal arteries your anterior

tibial femeral posterior tibial arteries in your calves to your feet

no one knew until so much damage was waged on your body 

Dr Conrad and staff had to siphon out clots for six hours like dredging 

canals of near solid and liquid matter to let fresh blood flow again

this we think had been going on for some time so dense was the clotting

what is left after sewing up what could be sewn a human’s desire to be 

human to be able to understand what birds cats camels have in common

what pears sandwiches soup have in common what planes taxies bicycles have in common what water paint cream have in common

but to this day you look foreign to you and me when I say rose sweater 

hamburger is this so strange to the part of the mind which connects

which sees connections among things that not to see those connections

leaves one standing in to look around as if for one’s self  an enormous 

theft committed in the dark after a blow to the brain from 
a damaged heart  a flood of coagulated impersonal blood.  

 *

© Fan Ogilvie

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