Mind Training Slogan 27: Work with the Greatest Defilements First

I can hold a grudge against water. Life’s always been scarce for me. 
The way it runs down a forearm, off the elbow to pool on the floor 

as I wash my face, the uncontrollable waste. The way failure  
clings like two wet sleeves. When I wing it and flop, there’s guilt 

(blame it on my lack of discipline). When I rehearse and miss, 
I feel shame for all God hasn’t given me. There are rituals 

for stanching loss, distributing risk, and who doesn’t resent  
involuntary donation? Blood, years, belongings. A parking ticket 

left on the windshield protects, but one bite from a mosquito, 
one cancer, can’t defend you against another. Phone, cash, cards 

must be stashed in different undergarments, pockets whenever I leave 
the house. And then, there was the time I drove a dangerous highway, 

thumb-drive buried in my bun. I stood beside the empty road, lined 
with shade-less mesquites, watching the car-jackers speed away, 

my suitcase and computer in the trunk, files and poems bobby-pinned 
to my skull. All those years, I thought it was profligacy, the eleven 

children my father once boasted of having by almost as many women.  
This was a dinner party in the seventies, population a ticking bomb. 

What will you do when we run out of space? a disgusted guest asked. 
My father stood up and slurred, I’ll make room, flinging his arms wide. 

Not even my passwords are retrievable without a password.  

Wind in a Box 

The landlady in black knocked, gesturing wildly. Anemos, she cried. 
Anemos!  It had been a sleepless night of wind and neither of us  
spoke Greek. Spirits? we hazarded. Ghosts? How did Latin for enliven 
turn into anger? May your animus be brief! I wish I could be 
amicable, but civility is built on form, form on what is 
predictable. The doorstep's box will be ripped open, the packer’s breath 
released, the cardboard flattened, tied, and trashed. Another order fulfilled. 
The ancients said we contain earth, fire, water and air. Terrance Hayes said 
the sonnet is wind in a box. On the highway, the wind urges me 
into an oncoming trailer the way I fight the tongue's urge to swerve 
into the dentist’s drill. Nine months in a windless box, and every breeze 
freaks out my newborn, eyes squeezed tight. How to keep a ghost from finding you,  
finding this body—a spare room in an island house that lets air move 
through as it hugs rock. Kneel down and hold your hand to the threshold. Feel it. 

BRANDEL FRANCE DE BRAVO

Brandel France de Bravo is the author of Provenance and the chapbook Mother, Loose. Her poems and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She teaches a meditation program developed at Stanford University called Compassion Cultivation Training©.