Universal Sign for Seeking
Off the seaside highway, a weed flowering is never
a weed. Such flowering hours are a call to move
one’s body closer to the body of desire, which is a call
to move this body closer to the earth, to loam. In my head
my heart moves like an apparition of faith. In my head
my heart like death had long stretches of absence.
In such years, I went looking for their names only to find
vessels emptied of meaning. Little scrapes, shallow
wounds. Shells of horseshoe crab torn from limp and leggy
underbellies. Broken bottles, shards the color of childhood.
In my heart, the head went seeking after a body to call
my own. In my heart, head was a failure I fumbled over
before learning to seek beyond the body. To seek beyond
the body, look for color of lupine in the face of one beloved.
To seek beyond, seek out salt for eyes and warmth of bread
for stomach. Seek out the charged, clichéd thrum of cricket
and katydid. Seek cicada. Seek the porch and the sun.
Seek house wren and hermit thrush. The red-winged
blackbird and those weeks spent before backpedaling
into fear. Seek comfort, seek calm. And the fetch
of any ship as it ferries life along. Seek out the dunting
toll of the bell buoy and the aging flight of breeding kestrels.
Seek out the shallow of the shoals. Seek the closeness
of the wave as it crashes along the stones of shore. Seek rain.
And memories of tender whispers from lost lips. Seek the call
of a skirt off the bed and loons on the moors. Seek friends
their friendship. Seek black-tinted sunsets and the body
of love to rest one’s head comfortably on your thigh.
Seek and seek and seek and then seek some more, your empty
hand a bloodless ridge shadowing our sightless eyes.
John T. Howard is a Colombian American writer, translator, and educator. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Wellspring House Retreat and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University. His poetry can be found at Salamander, Notre Dame Review, PANK Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, swamp pink, and elsewhere. His creative nonfiction is published with The Cincinnati Review. For personal and political reasons, he publishes all fiction using his matrilineal surname, as Thomas Maya, and he resides in the greater Boston area with his daughter.