the greater and the lesser vehicles

Ransomed art, he calls it, after the DUI
after he was in prison, this
former boxer, former oil worker
rehabilitated alcoholic
unveiling from serapes
the image of the gavel
—god’s judgment

in pigment ink
one Sunday in Mesilla
outside the stations of the cross
outside the white basilica, the stations
of the marketplace awakening—beads
silver jewelry, stained-glass chiles
feathered webs of leather, dream catching

According to the priest, the blind man sees
through grace—the vehicle, baptism
According to the soulscapes that he paints
in pinks and purples, in turquoise-colored
pencils—this life is but a bridge
between the wilderness of sin
and heaven in the mountains
where yucca wear the flower-
faces of the Tiwa

and now my face like smoke

—for David, after Komunyakaa

Now I face the shrine of photographs
I placed on silk, a pattern of the clouds,
the mountain that is Fuji. The soft repose
of roses from the garden, as offering,
the candle burning and the porcelain dish
that holds the stick that’s burning, the crane
that never flies from stone, and when I turn
ever slightly, now I see the flame that is
the other nature of the smoke—inside
your face, inside the yellow mane that was
your winter jacket—and now, from light
behind me, the pale gray clouds of morning
rising, trees surfacing the face that someone knew
of you in high school. I turn again, and now the light
in splashes, your face, my hair on fire.

My practice is simple: I walk, I imagine, I breathe. In the morning or sometimes early evening, I take my cat-walk through the neighborhood, attentive to the colors of the leaves, mindful of my feet touching earth; I imagine clouds becoming rain, becoming oceans, becoming clouds again—the circle of no birth, no death—and I breathe, taking in the suffering of the world, asking for happiness for all sentient beings.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Along with the poetry prize and book publication from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize, the James Still Poetry Award, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. She has served as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review and on the editorial board of Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Awards include individual artist awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.

More on Kathleen Hellen’s work can be found on our Links page.