GOSPEL SALT
by Andrea Gibson
Sometimes I get so nervous when I speak
I can feel my heartbeat in my tongue.
And my heartbeat talks faster than an auctioneer
but this is the last place
I would ever try to sell you something from.
When I get really scared
I imagine my grandmother
is standing behind me
with her pipe-organ arms
hugged tight around my chest.
She says, “Listen, I know you run your mouth
so your mind can rest.”
Now rest
is no broken levy staring up at the water.
It is the bite marks a mother leaves on the hurricane
while her daughter climbs to the 9th ward rooftop
to spray paint, “We are still here.”
Yes we are.
While some days we will barely get our feet wet
most of the time we’ll have to wake
and shake the tidal wave off our music stands
to make space for the notes
of a brass-knuckled saxophone
carrying the tattered hope
of the ocean’s prayer.
All these words
are just paper boats praying they can get there.
Tell me we will get there
before we come up broke,
believing that people, like levies
have to hold themselves together
when often it’s the falling apart
that gives them grace
that ensures no one ever
builds a condo over their open hearts.
Three years after Katrina
I found a sea shell
beneath an oak tree in New Orleans City Park.
I can still hold it to my ear
and hear the song the folk singer sang
the night she left so much blood on her guitar strings
and I knew I have never been touched right,
knew we could be instruments
if we could just let our kite strings
be turned by the lightning.
Tune me to the thunder.
I am already shaking like a matador’s hands
like California shook in the 1906 earthquake
when 28,000 building fell
and the people said, “When 28,000 buildings fall
do you know how many walls are no longer there?”
All that was left between them
was the gospel salt of their sweat
as the carried each other from the rubble to the street
where each night they carried the piano
to be played by a new refugee.
Some wishes can only be made on the stars’ dust.
I know most of the time my shine
cannot hold a match to my rust.
So ask me about the rain.
I’ll tell you my mother says, “The thing
about wheelchairs is they keep you looking up.”
Says, “Forests may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive than a tree
that learns how to grow in a cemetery.”
So when my grandmother died
I started wearing her thimbles on my fingers
when I’d type out poems,
hoping every key I’d type
would sound like a footstep of someone coming home,
the way my friend came home from Iraq
and named his baby daughter Viva.
We have all fought for our lives
more than we know,
survived our own questions.
How does one grieve a poisoned sea, a bleeding gulf?
can even the moon handle the kind of gravity,
that pull to surrender?
I say science can spit an atom.
But what if Eve could put Adam back together
by reminding him the garden is just a seed
sometimes so small it can fit on the tip of your tongue?
Say, “flint.”
Say, “spark.”
Say this is me hitchhiking with a green thumb,
hoping to grow something in the trust
of someone picking me up
on a day I have fallen for the wreckage.
Remind me
that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.
Plant my feet in the one thing that flowers
when everything else erupts. Usman,
an immigrant from Pakistan,
could not stop saying, “Brother, Brother, Brother,”
to the Jewish man whose hand he held
down ninety-eight flights of stairs
to escape the fall of the Twin Towers.
That is the only hour I can set my heart to.
The moment we realize sometimes
it is the metal in the wind chimes that reminds us
how soft the breeze is.
And maybe my grandmother only believed in Jesus
because she believed He came back
wearing that whip on his back like a halo.
Either way, this world
has picked me enough times for the madness vase
for me to know sanity is not
running from the window when the lightning comes.
It’s turning the thunder into grace,
knowing sometimes the break in your heart
is like the hole in the flute.
Sometimes it’s the place
where the music comes through.
