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Handbook 2.0
1 If a man understands a poem,
he shall have troubles.
2 If a man lives with a poem,
he shall die lonely.
3 If a man lives with two poems,
he shall be unfaithful to one.
4 If a man conceives of a poem,
he shall have one less child.
5 If a man conceives of two poems,
he shall have two children less.
6 If a man wears a crown on his head as he writes,
he shall be found out.
7 If a man wears no crown on his head as he writes,
he shall deceive no one but himself.
8 If a man gets angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by men.
9 If a man continues to be angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by women.
10 If a man publicly denounces poetry,
his shoes will fill with urine.
11 If a man gives up poetry for power,
he shall have lots of power.
12 If a man brags about his poems,
he shall be loved by fools.
13 If a man brags about his poems and loves fools,
he shall write no more.
14 If a man craves attention because of his poems,
he shall be like a jackass in moonlight.
15 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow,
he shall have a beautiful mistress.
16 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow overly,
he shall drive his mistress away.
17 If a man claims the poem of another,
his heart shall double in size.
18 If a man lets his poems go naked,
he shall fear death.
19 If a man fears death,
he shall be saved by his poems.
20 If a man does not fear death,
he may or may not be saved by his poems.
21 If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion
and be kissed by white paper.
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339
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English
about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks.
To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug,
Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice.
True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly
in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s
Hound,”
but beyond that — silence.
I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own
writing,
wherein contentment surely lies.
But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound
note,
and when my bank manager guffaws,
small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower
through the infinity of dark space
between his world and mine.
1
1
497
Tarp
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
0
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485
The Unthinkable
A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,
its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.
The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:
the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer
had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,
who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family
over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now
by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.
There was some plan to use the door as a jetty
or landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk.
That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name —
not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills,
a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out,
riding the current and rounding the point in a small boat
with tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.
1
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499
Quatrains for a Calling
Why are you here?
Who have you come for
and what would you gain?
Where is your fear?
Why are you here?
You’ve come so near,
or so it would seem;
you can see the grain
in the paper — that’s clear.
But why are you here
when you could be elsewhere,
earning a living
or actually learning?
Why should we care
why you’re here?
Is that a tear?
Yes, there’s pressure
behind the eyes —
and there are peers.
But why are you here?
At times it sears.
The pressure and shame
and the echoing pain.
What do you hear
now that you’re here?
The air’s so severe.
It calls for equipment,
which comes at a price.
And you’ve volunteered.
Why? Are you here?
What will you wear?
What will you do
if it turns out you’ve failed?
How will you fare?
Why are you here
when it could take years
to find out — what?
It’s all so slippery,
and may not cohere.
And yet, you’re here ...
Is it what you revere?
How deep does that go?
How do you know?
Do you think you’re a seer?
Is that why you’re here?
Do you have a good ear?
For praise or for verse?
Can you handle a curse?
Define persevere.
Why are you here?
It could be a career.
1
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433
From The Invention of Influence
Freud could never be certain, he said,
in view of his wide and early reading,
whether what seemed like a new creation
might not be the work instead
of hidden channels of memory leading
back to the notions of others absorbed,
coming now anew into form
he’d almost known within him was growing.
He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia.
So we own and owe what we know.
0
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359
THE FURY OF RAINSTORMS
The rain drums down like red ants,
each bouncing off my window.
The ants are in great pain
and they cry out as they hit
as if their little legs were only
stitched on and their heads pasted.
And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.
Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave.
1
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384
IT WAS NOT DEATH, FOR I STOOD UP
It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down—
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.
It was not Frost, for on my Flesh
I felt Siroccos—crawl—
Nor Fire—for just my Marble feet
Could keep a Chancel, cool—
And yet, it tasted, like them all,
The Figures I have seen
Set orderly, for Burial,
Reminded me, of mine—
As if my life were shaven,
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key,
And ’twas like Midnight, some –
When everything that ticked—has stopped—
And Space stares—all around—
Or Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns,
Repeal the Beating Ground—
But, most, like Chaos—Stopless—cool—
Without a Chance, or Spar—
Or even a Report of Land—
To justify—Despair.
1
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396
The Fury That Breaks
The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids,
a kid into scattered birds
and a bird into limp eggs,
the fury of the poor
takes one part oil to two parts vinegar.
The fury that breaks a tree into leaves,
a leaf into deranged flowers
and a flower into wilting telescopes,
the fury of the poor
gushes two rivers against a hundred seas.
The fury that breaks the true into doubts,
doubt into three matching arches
and the arch into instant tombs,
the fury of the poor
draws a sharpening stone against two knives.
The fury that breaks the soul into bodies,
the body into warped organs,
and the organ into eight doctrines,
the fury of the poor
burns with one fire in two thousand craters.
2
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375
Sestina: Like
With a nod to Jonah Winter
Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,
A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality-TV star look-alike,
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn’t like
There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”
Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like
Is something you can quantify: each “like”
You gather’s almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. “Please like
This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like
To end hunger and climate change alike,
But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like
Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like,
So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE
Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ”
Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike
Flounder, agape, gesticulating like
A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like
Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike
With other crutches, um, when we use “like,”
We’re not just buying time on credit: Like
Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,
Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like”
If you’re against extinction!) Like is like
Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike
Redundant fast food franchises, each like
(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like”
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.
But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,
How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.
2
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361
The Rosehead Nail
But can you forge a nail?” the blond boy asks,
And the blacksmith shoves a length of iron rod
Deep in the coal fire cherished by the bellows
Until it glows volcanic. He was a god
Before anachronism, before the tasks
That had been craft were jobbed out to machine.
By dint of hammer-song he makes his keen,
Raw point, and crowns utility with rose:
Quincunx of facets petaling its head.
The breeze-made-visible sidewinds. The boy’s
Blonde mother shifts and coughs. Once Work was wed
To Loveliness — sweat-faced, swarthy from soot, he
Reminds us with the old saw he employs
(And doesn’t miss a beat): “Smoke follows beauty.
1
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355
Bye-bye
The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man
muttering his way into a crowd,
saying about the only thing
he can before his body
goes boom. And tomorrow,
I will count more dark shapes
tumbling from the sky, birds
returning to scarcity, offering
in their seesawing songs
a kind of liquidity.
1
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342
The Weavers
As sometimes, in the gentler months, the sun
will return
before the rain has altogether
stopped and through
this lightest of curtains the curve of it shines
with a thousand
inclinations and so close
is the one to the
one adjacent that you cannot tell where magenta
for instance begins
and where the all-but-magenta
has ended and yet
you’d never mistake the blues for red, so these two,
the girl and the
goddess, with their earth-bred, grass-
fed, kettle-dyed
wools, devised on their looms
transitions so subtle no
hand could trace nor eye discern
their increments,
yet the stories they told were perfectly clear.
The gods in their heaven,
the one proposed. The gods in
heat, said the other.
And ludicrous too, with their pinions and swansdown,
fins and hooves,
their shepherds’ crooks and pizzles.
Till mingling
with their darlings-for-a-day they made
a progeny so motley it
defied all sorting-out.
It wasn’t the boasting
brought Arachne all her sorrow
nor even
the knowing her craft so well.
Once true
and twice attested.
It was simply the logic she’d already
taught us how
to read.
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339
Sostenuto
Night. Or what
they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
air, what was
in my lungs just an hour ago is now
in yours,
there’s only so much air to go
around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,
but nobody’s making more land.
When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,
they invented a game whose logic
largely escaped me —
something to do with the
disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks — until
I asked them what they called it. They
were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
Keeping the ducks alive, I think,
was what you were supposed to
contrive, as long
as you could make it last. Up here
in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
cubic feet of steerage we’re
a long
held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
than human breath could manage. In
the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
the goddess turned away from them.
2
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426
In a Hotel
In a hotel, even prayer feels adulterous,
the skyline smudged in light, a distraction
just before dusk. In the lobby
a woman tells a stranger what she will do
for three hundred dollars, what
she will do for four. Some have the custom
of opening a book randomly with a question in mind.
Some have the custom of forgetting.
At six my friend beat his father at chess,
beat his father’s friends so easily
he wondered if they tried.
At seven he shook the governor’s hand.
Don’t call it a failure; call it knowledge:
the peculiar taste that filled his mouth
as if he had bitten his cheek.
Whatever he risked did not matter, whatever
he could imagine was already lost.
Bored, the other boy coughed into his hands.
1
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318
Love Train
My bowl brimming with pretzels,
the snack you wanted least,
I slid open the door of our sleeping car
where we had been enjoying the country rushing by,
as if we were the first two people
to look down into the valleys and see
bright necks of pines stretch across farms
and streams to the groves they once cradled.
You had asked for Earl Grey cookies
sandwiched around buttercream or marshmallows
made of chocolate, but all the tea bags had been dunked
and the chocolate melted over biscotti.
When I came bearing the salted and twisted news,
the room was empty but for a heel. It was black
as a bunting, and wound with zippers,
and every time the car rocked
it looked ready to fly and escape
into the cold, tangled air
of travel that always feels heavy
with joy and desire, and a little sadness,
always a little sadness,
because of the leaving, which is what I do
when I realize I’m in the wrong room
and that numbers have betrayed me again
while I was hunting and gathering,
foraging like Homo habilis
who probably never lost his cave.
Out of patience, I opened every door
marked with threes and eights, those conjoined twins
disastrously separated at birth,
and roused the scabbed eyes of sleepers
like a beggar, no, an angel,
a begging angel who has written on his heart
will work for love.
Having not found our room, not heard
the sharp swing of your voice,
I descended upon the passenger cars
and row upon row of couples asleep
or staring out the windows like zombies
trying to remember what happens next
once the newspaper is well-thumbed,
the tea has gone cold, and the conversation is dead.
I called for you, in vain, even using your secret names,
the ones only the night knows:
wind-kiss, brilliant-fruit, dervish-moon . . .
Over and over, I said your names,
over and over until they filled
the wounded air of the car
and when there was no more room
for another sound, they caught and hooked
the ring of the brakes hugging the rails.
Just when I thought I wouldn’t find you,
you were there, the train was pulling away,
and I was watching you slowly eat
a dish of whipped cream and bananas
— the house special — in a cafe
in a city we didn’t know.
When you finished, we started walking
down a road that bent like a smile,
a shy smile, like the one the Japanese cat wore
on your purse. The road, we were told,
would take us to the end of the line
where all lovers in search of joy
packed on bullet trains — they’re the fastest
on two continents — arrive every hour.
2
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387
Reflections of an Old Man on Writing
The author has grown old. He is eighty now. He is a little surprised by the success of his prose and his poems, but as much by his longevity. Though his many stubborn beliefs—together with the approval of his readership—aid in the decline of his faculties. They have not yet failed completely, however. He recognizes that alongside the welcoming applause of the majority, there is the mild chill of the minority. The young are not interested in his work. Their movement is not his movement, their style not his style. They think and above all write differently. The old writer reads and studies their works open-mindedly but finds them inferior to his own. He considers the new school much less important—or at least not better—than his own. He believes that if he could, he would write in this new way. Though not now, obviously. It would take him eight to ten years to absorb the spirit of the new style—and it is almost time for him to go.
There are moments when he grows frustrated with their ideas. Why are they so important? A handful of young people who for some reason do not like his work? Millions admire him. But this makes him feel like he is going round in circles. He started this way, after all. He was one of fifty or so young people who developed a new idea, wrote in a different style, helped change the opinions of millions who revered a handful of the older generation and one or two out-of-fashion artists. (The deaths of the latter aided his cause greatly.) Thinking in this way, the old writer concludes that art must be a thing of vanity if fashions can change so quickly. Indeed, the work of these young people will be as ephemeral as his own—though this does not comfort him.
Reflecting further afield, he notes bitterly that from the age of forty or fifty the enthusiasms and artistry of any author begin to appear eccentric or risible. Maybe—it is one of his hopes—they will cease to be eccentric or risible aged one hundred and fifty or even two hundred. At that point, instead of appearing démodé, they are classic.
He also has doubts about the brazen and sometimes conceptual assessments he made in much of his criticism. Those writers he criticized when he was young and later replaced—maybe he wrote what he did because he could not sympathize with them—not owing to their lack of genius, but because the act of criticism is probably corrupted by contemporary concerns—fashion again. Superficially, his criticism resembles that which the young people of today write about him. His opinions have not changed—at least the major ones. Most of those old writers he would criticize today as he did sixty years ago. But this is not any great proof that his criticism is well-founded. It is only proof that, mentally, he is still the same young man.
1
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364
Shelter in Place
Putting the pox
in apocalypse
the pudding in the skull
has a lemony taste
just a little
until you push through
to the richer
almost bitter
sweetness at the center
Yum is a corporate brand
encompassing multiple
fast-food franchise chains
he marched his co-workers
out of the restaurant
& into the woods
where he shot them
The angel of death
ambles in
from the memory gardens
It merely needs
to brush against
the hem of your gown
Goya’s peasants
against the wall
don’t look away
When help burst in
all armored up
they found a naked woman
alone in the shower
but couldn’t make out
her mumbled song
When this you see
D E F
geometry rising
to the surface
of a hypothetical world
in a 13-dimensional space
circulating an absence
where some sun should be
What time is it
in Zaragoza
by the old Roman wall
Modernism lurks
looking as dated
as the gravel garden
at the Soviet block apartments
She waits at the corner
for the bus to the campus
when the mayor’s son
pulls up in his car
to offer her a ride
from which she is never seen again
The first to commit suicide
is the class valedictorian
They rain from the bridge
like a festival of ornaments
like the couple holding hands
out of the south tower
No one remembers Ishi
in the Berkeley hills
or LoneCat Fuller’s
musical contraption
Holy Hubert shouting
from a text in which
all of the words
have been erased
2
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375
Laudation
Of all sights, a new moon. Of all smells, bread. Of all surfaces, skin.
Of all sweet sounds, the mourning dove and the sleeping child.
Of all my journeys, the shortcut from school through Buckley’s Glen.
Of all other journeys, the Greyhound bus at night into Manhattan.
Of cities, Jerusalem. Of modes of transport, the pony and car.
Of the neglected virtues, shyness. Of the celebrated, hospitality.
Of the harmless vices … the lie-in, the painted toe, the keepsake.
Of solitary vices, the night out and a piss in moonlight.
Of the social pastimes, gossip among cultivated friends.
Of the cultivars, either the grape or the apple.
Of the apples, the Wyken Pippin. Of cults, the Eleusinian.
Of all that delights the cultivated mind, letter-writing.
Of all jokes, the one about the two thieves.
Of practical jokes, the shoulder-tap (oldest and most cruel).
Of all of Job’s afflictions, maybe the boils.
Of beverages, tea. Of all that coarsens the palate, eating beef.
Of ingenious devices, the search engine and the zipper.
Of all that thrives among Satan’s noisome progeny, the rock drill and mosquito.
Of the proofs of God’s love, the crow.
Of all that testifies to the sway of evil, the white lie.
Of the forgotten sins, calumny (which thrives).
Of the erotic side-pleasures, the smile. And the text.
Of rare and elusive flavors, sweet cicely and the chanterelle.
Of domesticated creatures, the pig or goose.
Of all times, the hour before sunrise. Of all fears, the lump.
Of all places, here and now. Of sweet sounds to wake to, the mourning dove.
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349
For Y
You have abandoned me.
Saying it’s time to break up,
you have abandoned me.
In the mountain and at the seashore,
I have abandoned myself.
When I splayed myself on the table and spread my legs,
I saw the sky through the concrete roof
and the air filling up the lungs of flying birds.
Before I could count to five,
I could no longer see the roof, the sky, and the birds.
While dying, I saw my baby and me
floating endlessly down the city ditch,
down the city ditch and into the womb
of bygone days.
Since then, when I lie down in this world as in a grave
and long for the sky,
my baby flies by,
trailing fins that look like a tadpole’s tail.
You bastard, I’ll kill you by any means.
I’ll give birth to you inside me again.
When my baby, blown by a strong wind,
plunges into the ground,
it lives warm in my grave for a few months
and then departs for the cold sky-sea again,
trailing fins that look like a tadpole’s tail.
Oh, son of a bitch,
I’ll never forget you!
1
1
344
Dog Autumn
Dog autumn attacks.
Syphilis autumn.
And death visits
one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.
Everything dries out
and all roads’ boundaries blur.
The old singer’s voice
droops on the recording.
“Hi Jugsun—no? This isn’t Jugsun? Jugsun.”
In midair, the telephone line
loses the receiver, and once-departed lovers
never return, not even in a dream.
In a guest room inside the tavern of time,
where the stagnant waste-water of memory
stinks like horse piss, I ask,
in a voice awakened from disheveled death:
How far have I gone, how far yet to go
before the river becomes the sea?
2
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592
Oak
How do you describe the emptiness above
the shingle & tar & threads
of power lines, the bark dabbed in with lichen,
the capillary beds
of branches—bronchioles—more blue
between them now? Though rain will come
late afternoon, drumming into my child’s nap
(water running, she’ll wake dreaming), for now
blank space arcs above me in forget-me-
not petals. Fans in the clouds. The lungs are
the light organ. We float, we float, they say.
No need to cover your lips and noses.
Now you must cover your lips and noses.
Paisley bandanas. Shoelace ear loops.
Faces on screens like shadows in the water.
If you look through
the woods, layers and layers of limbs.
Song sometimes.
When I kneel underneath
to hold her hand and turn my face
sunward I want to see through
the bark—bluebells and seeds,
grubs twisting into yellow moons.
The tree was going to come down.
2
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300
Occasion
Gatsby is not drinking a gin rickey.
Dracula not puncturing a vein.
Jack the Ripper does not knife a teenage girl
deep into her abdomen and then snake her intestines
through the town square. The birds remain in the pines.
Hunter S. Thompson isn’t dropping acid in Vegas
and grabbing a woman who came to clean his room
with fresh sponges and bleach.
The room does not hold a frat boy
opening my legs. It does not cool
the man who gave me wine and refused
to let me eat and followed me to my car.
It does not have my bed after, only me
in it. I had pulled the door out of his hands,
locked the car, driven away.
The poem does not include the teenage boy
who unfurled his tongue between his pointer and middle finger,
following me on a bike while I pushed her stroller.
This isn’t about the man who played with himself
between the book stacks while I shelved
Probability and Image before closing.
The crickets are not in this poem. Not the summer night,
Pine-Sol mopped over ice-cream-stand floors.
I washed those tiles. This poem does not contain
the spiked punch the fists on the door the
men who circled at the bar and sang,
Just fuck him already. Do us all
a favor. Every year, I write this poem.
I saw them later, passed out drunk
on the carpet when I was pulled into a room.
This poem does not have a mouse.
Not cardinals, not chickadees, not finches.
Every year, I observe pillows and sheets
move into dorms. Yesterday, a boy tried
to take a stick from my daughter’s hand. I wouldn’t let him.
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328
Bird in the Rain
1
A robin gathers in heat
in search of a body of water,
green acorns litter the sand
& memory says I am the yard,
day-old puddles clustered at my waist.
The robin enters.
Dips quick. Wet,
2
a lark slaps
the whole of himself
on me
& calls himself potter,
throws a bowl of my body instead,
the hole, shallow & wrinkled,
he, a boy in the country.
It is midday.
3
It was morning.
Memory says I am the sand,
hard, hot, acorns a burn against the bird’s belly
just like the burn against his back; he is
4
on me:
a drawl,
accented longing,
he, accidental thunder:
a song,
a clap down,
5
a boy digging in a bowl;
a bird not in a ditch, but in water
in a nook, spooned out by falling in;
a bird & a stone, two in hand
in the hole.
6
No, the memory corrupts.
This is pleasure.
I am the thrush,
frantic & puffing to pluck
more acorn caps before bathing,
7
I am the bath, a breast,
surely something tender:
8
A bird. A bush.
A sight. A flash.
Anything peeping struck—
Memory: Hush. Let him do his work.
9
I saw him. He shook.
Brazen stillness.
Flight.
10
The yard, still hot, still country,
his breath, warm,
like rain,
no sign of feathers.
11
Curious: if the bird came first,
would lightning have lasted elsewhere?
12
I will ask the rain inside my mouth.
I know this water remembers, too.
13
Memory: It is an old tale.
This, how it happened:
The boy leaves a maze.
The boy finds the birds.
The birds lift the boy.
The sky heats the birds.
The birds leave the boy.
The boy leaves the sky.
The sky tags the sea.
The sea becomes a maze.
The boy treads the sea.
The sea claims the boy.
A yard holds the sea.
The yard fights the heat.
The heat claims the yard.
The heat eats the birds.
The boy eats the sea.
The boy joins the birds.
14
Still, an older tale—
this, how we happened:
a win on the morn, a bird losing wind,
a boy that I lost, a bird in the rain,
a rainwater boy, a boy I mourned,
a struck-down boy a boy-winning rain.
15
I put us back in the pastoral,
make us an oasis, our love a quenching well,
something large enough to bathe in,
large enough to whelm us.
16
He is not used to depth.
He flutters over the shallow end,
chorals P J Morton, asking me about size.
17
He insists on entering.
I become the puddle.
He dives. I pull him out.
18
I keep turning over.
He keeps turning up.
19
I keep turning him over,
half expecting Crete to fall from his ears,
burst from his mouth like Athene song by cicada.
20
He keeps turning up.
I keep turning him over.
I keep trying to revive a legend
or another waterlogged word I do not speak.
21
He does not move.
He does not even sputter.
22
Give me another word than dead.
I will not call my love that.
23
He will not call my love that.
He will not call it anything.
24
He will not call me anything.
He will not call me any.
He will not call me.
He will not call.
25
I will not call him.
I will not call him love.
I will not call him anything.
I will not call him everything.
I will not call anything everything.
He will not call anything anything.
He will not call anything anything back.
26
He will not call back.
There is nothing left to answer to.
27
There is nothing left to sing about.
There is nothing to brag about.
28
Give me another word.
Love feels forced.
Bird feels cold.
3
0
424
Tangle of Gorgons
The lesbians that lived in the apartment to the left
of my grandmother’s were always described in whispers.
Caught in her teeth, her jokes: a pile of serpents
thrown at her neighbors for stealing her appetite
—always hurried, always hushed, hissing her sissies
& scissoring as if the slurs would set them straight.
It’s a complex: to return callous to the same snake
den reminding you of your own head’s sibilance.
I am of that ilk, I suppose: dreadful
by happenstance, mere blinking having stopped
many a man in his tracks before me. Forbidden
to enjoy it, this calcified lineage.
Like mighty Stheno & Sister Euryale, our family
name insists wartime: those of us battling this curse
of loving men never cease to stop making rocks
of them, I, hating their waters, never able to skip any.
They don’t make it that far. Somehow, always sinking,
always cracking, always losing parts of themselves.
Before my father’s cleaving to fracture, I eroded
his visage to ruin. I barely recognize
him anymore, call him by his first name;
in my head, shortening the suffix. The second time
I cried for a man, my heart became a stone
I’m not sure I can pass off for a body part.
I don’t often mention it, but I need
to speak on our history of numbness
—the golems we bear to know what it is
to bury a heart because someone abused it;
how I’ve seen it: every sorrow a reflection
I’ve avoided combing through, favoring the gleam
of being shorn bald. I must be specific:
I have mirrored these monsters before, severed
a personhood & expected it inconsequential.
But snakes won’t stop coming out of my face now.
Their headless balm of displaced oil, preferring
the word serpentine to wolfish, litters
the sink with onyx scales graying as old money,
losing count of hours lost losing count
of bottles of Nair, losing count of quarters
lost promising men that they won’t bite.
Unless unsettled, my mother bites, insisting my series
of settling unsettles her. I am getting upset again,
steaming at how I am always seen
as the unintended coven member, learned
in the ways the women folded their prayers
as they did their napkins—tucked in the center
of a lap in the center of a man in the center of a table
in the center of a lap in the center of a house
in the center of a lapse in the center of a judgment
asking why I’m still sitting inside, my uncles ponder,
the weatherworn heir, moistened of caches of secrets
of stoners & sisters of sinners in secrets in service
of sexes insistent on serving their bullshit
—I’m sure they too would prefer me headless.
It is frightening: I come from a stony people,
my own uncle’s middle name meaning gem.
My grandma was clever like that, slipped regal
wishes into her children as if to imbue
them with crowns instead of petrifying them.
We are skilled in this type of sorcery,
tangling regret with dissatisfaction
when sulking a sorry might not be enough.
But, it slinks off our lips anyway,
disdain’s silhouette appearing only in light
of our gorgonry, this, our mother tongue,
how we stilled our anguish, scarred our statues
of psyches so, our countenances bled millennia
before we ever turned to stone.
Hear them whisper what my secret is:
I have hardened for men many a day,
wantoned my waist round unwanted Perseans
just to see if I could still do it again.
I wound. They whined. They slunk. They swung.
They spat. They struck. They slung that weak shit
like they just knew they were hitting it right
—their ego, its scissor, a sword-swallowing cut
intent on making a trophy of me—I’m stunned.
My God. They never remember the head.
4
0
406
I Drop a White Pill in My Sink
& bleed elsewhere one following, ripe month. Finger daggered,
toothbed exposed girl-wet & teasing, my breast tugged away from my chest:
a zippered wound—red red river, overflowing river, appled midnight—moon
a bitten core. Doesn’t really matter. My knee skinned to bone. My razored
thigh. Licking the sink side like drinking the snow. Apparently Edna. Apparently
my mother. Apparently I will never be holdable again. Tongue-cut
metal. The whole world metal. The whole world one small paper box. A paper cut
on my earlobe. Thin cut like a toothbrush bristle. Never why. My thighs all-over harsh. Dreams
hard as marl. I cut my feet again and again. On my dreams. I cast my ash in the river. I earned
this. I walked in Georgia. If you give a girl an abortion, she’s going to ask
for another abortion. So the story goes. A blister presses crisp as a shirt, relinquishes blood
there beneath skin: lagoonal. My private party. My tv turned down. Snow turned
to rain. Body backlit and finally: dripping. Bleeding. The sink is a stilted oracle. She drains. I drain.
Un-weft, I wept. I never told my mother.
1
1
304
Myth of the Mole
I would not have thought I would have needed to say this.
Once upon a time, there was an English mole. I say mole, I mean vole, or guilty black hole. Not so much a mole as a disaffected young teacher, or a sheaf of important papers, or a strategy session in the wine bar with Giles, or a traffic jam. Or a lie as big as a bus.
A mole as in a foal, as in a dinner, when it’s wanted. A mole as a drink, when it’s needed. A mole as in a queue, for food? A mole of practical use, or pragmatic scruples and sharp manners. A mole what uses myth, like money, to store, in order, to never have to think of it. Mole as in wealth, as in forgetfulness. Mole as in memory, memory as confidence.
Or the idea of an island which grew its own people.
Or up to no good. No doubt.
I say Mole, I mean Arthur. I mean Uther, Oswald, George.
Love of country was her name.
I have no love for this country, was her name.
She almost certainly said she didn’t understand anything, names nor countries.
She could see, and was hungry.
I’d like to see you spit on your face, she said.
He could not reconcile the deep appreciation, the lusty, unquenchable affection she felt for the landscape of this country with the political history and present of the place which he found so revolting. This mole was caught between this love and this inability to love, and felt they must reach around and become one. They must be the same thing. They smelt the same, if the mole was being honest. I say mole, I mean populace oblivious to propaganda, self-interest or personal gain, an animal made of millions, released from the dark tunnels of capitalism’s dying gasps. A mythical beast. A joke.
Regret was her lightline. She would not ask, do I ask what my actions are asking for right now? For she was historical, in the tunnels, lightless with her line, a paw with a sore, holding a cage, with a budgie. Yellow in the dark. Animals too, moles digging coals, downing tools, hearing singing as warning, and not listening. The mole as the last night, not last night, and getting upset that the hole wasn’t looking at the mole, in the dark, when she couldn’t see his face but he could see hers. The mole had to look at where he thought her eyes were.
Revolting is a strong word.
I say mole, I mean National Trust, national freedom pass for the national bus, a proper hoo-ha, a national fuss.
I say mole, I mean Sharpe, Sean Bean as Sharpe, I mean people are dying while you go full-bore Cockerhoop. I mean it wasn’t like that when I was around, when I was younger. I mean a certain kind of touch, of look. I mean a freedom pass. I mean blindness to the estate. I mean, have you been in prisons, lately? They don’t really. I mean you aren’t talking of who fixes what you’re using?
I mean an acre of English ground, a sugarcoated Dacre homeward bound.
I say mole I mean Yarl’s Wood and all who work there who will never get to any heaven English or heathen.
I say mole. I mean a deliberate lie. I mean an act of aggression against the thing that sustains the world, ad infinitum. A Möbius strip of endless U-turns.
You say mole, you mean if you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll turn for you. Turn over, their backs to the ground. So much back to the ground it undergrounds. U-turns under the earth. You say mole but the term is not applied to all talpids; e.g., desmans and shrew moles differ from the common definition of “mole.”
He happened upon a postcard from her grandmother, and climbed into a gray watercolor and pencil forest, and felt in there, in the late-life, lonely work of a man gone to war and come back godly, a certain sort of English sanity. Faith. Totally mad, but beautifully truthful. She smelt it closer and heard it, ridiculous scripture. Three is the magic number. I say mole, I mean that rare thing, a true eccentric with a genuinely good heart. Kindness. Grace. I say mole but I mean pilgrim.
He happens upon a feeling of pride and says out loud, I am where I am supposed to be. I am creating foreign englands to leave my own. I am creating land from sea. A mole as in earth on water, to dig, to live on it and make it better. He says you can read this anywhere, anywhere you want to read.
A mole as in a memory, emailed. As is decent, constant, cancer or rain same complaint. As in deference, unpretentiousness. As in you wouldn’t want to see the old peoples voting history. As in when he was young, if you were to say one more thing to him, one more loose from your mouth, then he would’ve burst you, like a mole in a digger, and washed in your ashes and no one would’ve cared. Eccentric as in soldier, war as in mole.
He realized he must eat it. All of it. The poisonous and the palatable. She was hungry, and only by eating a great many things would she start to understand this love that could encompass shame, and was no longer made of country lanes, trees, flowers and small fellow-mammals. I say mole I mean server. I mean brochure. I mean pixels. Not a mole, more of a wood, more of a community, more of a teenager alone in a room staring at a screen, more a meeting in a Little Chef, more a surveyor, or an elaborate scam coded into the way a digital advert works, or a pipe, or not a pipe.
More of a nation, outside of papers, an anti-net where still no one will bat a lash. He is national enough to say, out loud, I am where it is. As in, a bit smaller, but still, impressive historically hmm? A skin disease as in moles are crawling all over me. A mole as in a confession, without any Catholics present. As in I need someone to hold me down. I’m pulling out my hair mole. As in I’d love you, but you’d tell everyone. You’d tell them of my brass. Of my salt in the earth, which poisons moles.
A mole is a spy, is a green-leather seat in a chamber of bullshit.
A mole is a sleep like baby logs. An apologies, a baby moles is a mole, we mean. The auld moldwarp. The new male moles are called “boars,” females are called “sows.” A group of moles is called a “labour.”
If you look closely you’ll see the mole is charitable. I say mole I mean sure start. I mean good bloke doing his thing keeping his head down. I mean wonderful pretentious twat.
Closely looked I was born riffraff, and I’ve grown old as the stuff. That’s what shouldn’t be allowed. You hear that. Let that be forbidden in the future. Man is born in order to think. Who is them? I don’t understand this thing. If I’m happy, mole is unhappy. If mole is happy, man is unhappy. Except he imagines he’ll be able to wriggle out of it.
Less a mole than an intimate examination of the sore bit inside a person’s eyelid. I say mole, but I mean any child, any parent, any person in a position of responsibility or utter carelessness. I mean prisoner. I mean patient. I mean the architect of a lie and he or she who believes the falsity and suffers while the deceiver profits. Mole as in poor and getting poorer, the little animal who is rich, and gets richer. Mole mole, caught in a hole. One mole, two moles, three moles, four, try to shut us out, there’s a mole in the door.
The mole folds into a shadow, of course, because he’s underfoot, where shadows start.
“For treatment of warts and cysts on the throat for a man take a she-mole, & for a woman a he-mole & setting by a good fire let the party put the moles head in his mouth & biting it, sucke the blood out of the moles mouth as lively as it can for treatment of warts and cysts on the throat.”
Prester John. Hermes Trismegistus. The Golden Legend. Whatever.
Angels with eyes like abscesses. But that’s the only thing. The only noticeable visual impairment. All else is not noticeable, so I assume, looking over my shoulder, symmetrical.
Mole as in English fact. As in how we keep changing, how we’ve always been like this.
Mole as in you’ll thank me in the end.
Lie Mole.
Lay Mole.
History mole.
King mole’s vicious campaign against himself.
Regret is not his guide line, backward through his history. Disease has never been a respecter of historical odds.
I say mole I mean news. I think you have a fairly good sense of who the mole is.
You’d say them.
I mean us.
2
0
393
Money Tree
A shine to the bark, silver leaves aflicker
and the wound that made the basketball hoop:
a bicycle’s metal wheel gouged in the tree,
the trunk’s burred lip that clamps it.
Whose childhood monument is this?
In the foreground of whose childhood home,
its blind-drawn windows? Where is the adolescent
of the grass and weeds, after school? The adolescent
of the fluid leap and jump shot? Of the glissando
stride and lay-up? The plosive woop woop cries sent up
when the body satisfies the calculating eye?
O the tree ashimmer in hypotheticals’ blooms—
where’s the undissuaded youth who sought
a scarce grace here? Who sought to make bank?
The shoulder and arm and wrist on repeat
even as day went thoroughly dark
who refused to come inside until they exhausted
the audience of their mind? O extraordinary dunk,
O hard slam, shudder the immovable tree.
Where is the glimmer of a sign
one might one day rise among the ordinals
to be ranked first, first, first? Wouldn’t
it be possible? Because if not, if not, if not.
2
0
308
Mercy
Peeking through the clouds, Mt. Rainier,
with its white tank top, several cities to glare
upon, and a moral blue sky to angle into,
must love by now to be American.
When asked this by the woman in front of us
on the night President Obama was elected,
my mother and I in Walmart—Isn’t it a great night
to be American—the cashier just nodded,
but my mother yelled, Yes, it really is, thank God.
And yes, yes it was, a great night to be American
there between the bags of Lay’s and plague
of batteries, to be Black in America, thank God!
But, oh, mountainous beast, who am I to thank now,
years later, walking home from the bus stop,
surrounded by mid-winter-eaten trees and new-rise condos
that my Love wasn’t shot by cops at work today
mistaken as someone else? Is there a song for this
strain of mercy? At home, the light flickers above us
as we sip wine, letting the TV wash our bodies
into quiet laughter. I know we should spend this time
spitting on the name of America how we usually do
when another Black person has been killed or when
another country perfumes with our war, but there’s beauty
unaccounted for tonight. There are crows out back, tired
from the work of flight and pilgrimage, ashing the branches
one by one. There is the crock-pot of red beans in the kitchen,
its chestnut chest bubbling with bay leaves and sausage.
I fear I have made a mess of being an American. Love,
I’m dumb with the fear of never doing enough.
Is there anything else you want to say about what happened today,
I ask him as he takes a spoonful of home into his mouth.
The laugh track on TV peppers the room and he shakes his head.
What did I expect him—Black like me, American like me,
in love like me—to say after dusting the day along
to get inside this four-walled pasture amid the mourning
of dirty laundry, the painting of a cracked moon guarding
the wooden-black dresser. Do you like the food, he asks.
Yes, I do, I say, and I kiss him on the cheek. Thank you.
3
2
284
Leave the Crows Out of It
Half-past morn, the town is on fire.
Sunlight had sloughed its way through
Greentree Apartment Homes, past the sickly
porch lights, the water tower tending attention.
This is my town, my DNA on the eaves,
my flock of goats heckling the fence on 64th,
and him, having known no hills, no 7-Eleven
to mind, claims the town despite the blackberry
reaped from me. My babe-barbed heart.
In the aureus hours of desire, the sky unbuttons
its jeans. We linger into the Eden, the plow
ever so handsome, plow and heave, plow
and heave, the gawk and hum. Slow
like that. Nobody has ever truly risen
the way my town has, vernal and terribly
livid—bluing air, the blue trust of Priuses,
blue Grocery Outlet inside me.
Arch your back, says the town. I do.
3
1
284
World of Glass
Birds do not look much like leaves
until fluttering leaves look, to me, like birds
because feathering is a metaphor.
Shearings are slivers trimmed from glass
and shearlings are sheep just shorn. The meaning
is in the action, not in the thing itself.
It’s the throwing of the stone. The chip
makes a waster or cullet, something flawed,
returned to potential, so different
than flight. To leaf is to layer
in gold. Pages are leafed through, and feather
meant flying before it became pen,
just as glass was sand before it was glass.
Sheets can be paper, or they can be glass.
An eye can be glass, can glass over, and plume
is the shape of smoke, of birds, as if etched
on air. When the atmosphere cracks,
glass is said to weep. No fleece, no feather or leaf,
no view through the fire and glaze. Flamework
gives shape to sand. The birds take their leave.
2
0
313
Dear Mothership
it paralyzes their country mercy i will teach them how to be
neighborly how to atomize property-
lines how to lubricate the shut mouth of a mailbox swallow
the multiverse ideas & chapters
presences & pilgrims i will say to them god’s green card did not
it extend to Egyptians were not even
the accursed permitted entrance i will say to them when blood-sashed
doors are shibboleths invocatio dei
i will say to them solemnly declare Google it then Wikipedia Rap Radar &
André Ben. taught me this alien can blend
right on in with your kin look again at the lamb’s blood & your firstborn
at the ship’s log of your manifest destiny who are you to say who must
leave who can stay when rumors of
my existence evidence man’s belief in dreams
3
0
310
The Summer I lived as a Wolf
I knew the names of stones at the river mouth,
crossed giving thanks to their uneasy spirits.
I heard killings in the shadows, knew to turn keen and quick,
travel in the presence of thunder, leave no scent or spoor behind.
Preferring the high places closest to the moon
where the wind ran with me, I practiced abandon,
my spine a scimitar, star-whetted, flayed old disguises
into strands and rips, underneath I was sleek, open:
my muzzle carved air into four queendoms and I knew them all
as they knew me, tooth, soul, tatterdemalion heart,
and I flew, I think, in that time, when nobody needed
or shamed me and I was always hungry, bloody-tongued
but louche and free and supple, perfumed in pine and ashes.
3
0
303
F..ck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead mother when I’m sad.
My father watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me merry Christmas.
I know I’m African because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.
2
0
329
The Long Labors
My grandmother said it was going to be long—as long as you can hold your lineage—depending on how long you can hold your tongue—as long as your tongue can wrap around the pit—of some stolen stone fruit—as long as you can hide your pitter-patter face—glued in sun-split splinters—lengthening shadows as long as your face—longing to be mirrored back—back to your daughter your mother your grandmother—freckle by freckle—furnished forever across—the long loaming haul— Collapsed in a pool of spit—my mouth over papers—raccoon doctorate—luxurious loser with thin branch fingers—no meat in the palm—no muscle in the bending—the farmer in me is atrophying—the cook the factory seamstress the clerk the mother in me is pooling out—all that I come from—all that I owe to them—what is left of me—what is—me: professorial rat—book-leavened and maddened in meetings—chewing at my desk on a frozen anything—microwave spun and splattered on lessons—wondering who packaged this—who spooned this glacial sauce into this plastic hull—whose hands whose daughter does she look like me does she like dancing in the gloaming—funneled into my greedy mouth—I: daughter of long labors—I: knock-off half-price guilt—I: impossible imposter big words big words—trying to prove what—and to whom—I wait to be seated at a restaurant—a white person enters and orders from me—“I want sweet and sour chicken but without bell peppers and brown rice”—and I almost take it down— In the twelfth hour of night-shift overtime—my mother gobbles the air of the facility—mouth opening a cavern or a bowhead whale or a sinkhole—gobbling up its oxygen its nitrogen its argon its skin its hair dust its swirling smog—collecting time collecting benefits—her eyes so baggy they carry a leaking pack of chicken breasts—she had planned to cook tonight for us—but look at the break room clock she is out of time and now—they will surely go bad—what a waste at $1.50 a pound—she returns to her station rubs tiger balm and lavender oil along her wrists and hands—chews dried ginger to keep awake—the root of herself sharpening salivating—reapplies pink lipstick swivels the tube upward—rituals of resilience—feeds letters to machines churning intestinal noise—electricity bills and love letters and baby photos and magazines ladies who lunch will take to the salon and credit card limited-time offers and reminders from the dentist and supermarket weeklies and postcards from Oahu—“you wouldn’t believe how blue the water how restful how peaceful bring the whole family next time”—ginger chew ginger chew— Who made this for you—do you know the song that reminds them of home—do you know to play the radio as loud as you can and roll down the windows and smack your cheeks ten times in order to stay awake for the drive—do you know who sewed on this button—do you know the murmuring leg ache from standing all day a tree for whom—do you know who processed the letter you received today—fed it into a machine with paper cuts as wide as a river you could float in—do you know how long you can hold your urine until your 15-minute break—the roiling pressure in the abdomen the tick-tap of the feet the hands—how much to tip the gas station attendant in Jersey how the smell sticks behind both earlobes—the temperature when flipping a wok the oil burns the white paper hat measuring salt at the brim—how your impatient face resembles a slowly rotting peach—worms in the snarl—do you know the name of your fishmonger the name of my uncle—the times he snuck in a call to say he will be late picking up his daughter fish scales glittered to his elbows like opera gloves—do you know cuticles peeling white like flecks of cod after washing dishes—do you know the smell of nail polish remover stinging bees in your nostrils—do you know the back—how the back curls how the back bridges how the back puckers and crunches—like packed snow no one else but you will shovel out—I look up how labor is used in a sentence—“the obvious labor”—“immigrants provided a source of cheap labor”—“negotiations between labor and management”—“wants the vote of labor in the elections”—“the flood destroyed the labor of years”—“industry needs labor for production”—anthropocene capitalism gentrification—what do these words mean—and to whom—helping my mother over the sink—I snip the ends of long beans with kitchen shears—the ends rolling away—green lizard tails—I cut away each word like a long bean—gentrificat—gentrif—gen—ge—g—glugging the g—down the drain— If only lying on a beach—limbs loosened like an old garden hose—if only watching the movements of our stomachs—rising and falling like baby jellyfish—our thighs waxing and waning—in bristle-rough sand if only—reading a book the pages—wrinkled and curled like a snail shell—from falling asleep against our faces—if only devouring a cloud—full of no rain no metallic muscle if—only softness if only we—went off in the softness—into the downy relaxing abyss—what is this word—vacation—my grandmother asks me chili hitting the wok like delicious dying stars— My grandmother said it was going to be long—going out the door always late for work—shirt inside out—said go on and bounce a howling baby (my mother/me/et al)—while skimming oxtail broth—the fat sheen of look how well we eat in this country—lest you forget it was worth it—lest you forget—the dilation of the cervix going the contractions going the grip the placenta the shit the vernix the garbled life going the soft flashlight eyes the milk the teeth the nails the hand on heart the soup coagulating on the stove—you must go—for what gleams in the dark turns to look at you—remember this— The work and the afterwork and the work of being perceived as not doing enough work though you are working well over enough—will this ever be enough—when is enough enough—the chorus now: not until the knots of fat—melt in this wok—not until you have nothing left but this suet—this smear of high-heat lineage—gleaming in the gloaming—and it is yours and it is mine and it is your dream daughter’s and it will last longer than you will ever believe—believe us—
2
0
293
Farewell to Poetry
I give myself to the end of this poem to decide.
I empty myself, have emptied myself 10,000 times,
like a lung. I guess that’s a terrible estimate. We breathe a fuckton—
even when air has skunk taste and texture, as opposed
to its usual quiescence. Never thought I’d get to use
that word, quiescence, or specious, or obeisance, even though
I think a lot, which seems like a straight shot to writing,
yet side by side body and mind struggle to work in tandem,
but one at a time you feel the other melt into instinct,
yanking your hands out of the hearth or daydreaming about Kyoto
while a stranger who thinks you’re staring at him makes a face
your eyes can’t see, having flipped the iris inward
like a standing mirror before a bed a couple shamefully shares.
What makes us so deserving of space in other people’s minds?
When the car window breaks open and you seal your blind spot
with a black garbage bag, as you’re trying to change lanes,
do you remember how much we’ve complained about
ourselves, throwing meaning into our mischief like salt into a pool?
Beware! The sidewalk scorpions are prowling about the kitchen,
claws scraping through grout. Meanwhile we turn and turn,
first to some garden, briefly, next to a scatterbrained table,
before finally the shapeshifter’s trench coat unhooks itself
from the shower rod. We take turns putting it on, choosing
the Invisibility setting, which we intuit as addictive
before retreating to our personas to deal with withdrawal.
Yet having developed a taste for breath we find we cannot stop
losing it. It’s elusive as the glimmer of oil on asphalt, a blackbird’s
coat bending to sunbeams. This is what we have decided to pursue,
bent on one leg, two ballerinas of imbalance. We are chasing it
up the parking garage, ignoring the various fonts
in which slurs are sharpied on stairwells before, on the roof,
we lose the color we sought in the light in a violent sunset,
yet go on staring into it, trying to read the negative language
the sun scribbles inside our eyelids. Yours says,
“Do not damage with your eye all that already shines.”
Here’s mine: “What are you staring at the sun for?
Some of its darkness it gets from us.”
3
0
294
What's not to love
about a broken bowl,
now two half-bowls,
still ready to hold
what they can, even
if that’s nothing
What’s not to love
about weeds and weeds
and weeds that crowd
the yard, and thrive
amazingly on the same
nothing
What’s not to love
about a virus crowding
the blood, putting a doll
of itself in each cell
and sailing it away
to find fortune
in the heart
What’s not to love
about the dying heart
with its four dark rooms
full of grass and broken
china, a sheeted piano
about to play
What’s not to love
about a sonata played
by a lonely child
who would rather do
anything else,
sleep in a garden
or pull up the flowers,
who would rather be sick
What’s not to love
about reading aloud
to someone fast asleep,
about not stopping,
not even when
a bowl slides from the bed
and crashes
like a bell in water
1
0
258
Merrymakers in a Mussel Shell
After Pieter van der Heyden, after Hieronymus Bosch, after all
distant water extinguishes the town
where it was thinkable for a mussel,
an animal that otherwise can’t die,
to grow slow and large and enough
to be, for us, a private luxury ocean
liner. We’ve made it, lads! we all cry,
climbing into our shining blue boat,
we motherfuckers of pearl, mantled
so extravagantly we can’t see what it
is we’ve made. The musicians begin
warming up like a radiator warming
the house apart in the dark, a white
hot glockenspiel that only plays one
note regardless until we’re cooking
in our juices, all extremities poking
out. We have our children on board,
the owl has the conn, tiller of the dead
tree bearing both our obscure course
and ballast—one fish, a jug to catch
a gust and, low, on the end of a long
piece of string, a pot of meat boiling
over the face of the waters—and we
have all we need for a good time yet
1
0
377
This Is What I Know
I know that Black people were sold as slaves because they were seen as
talking beasts of burden and Africans colonized for their own good;
and it was unnatural for women to operate heavy machinery let alone
operate on a brain.
I know that in the United States, Jim Crow used the rope to keep
black from white, and apartheid in South Africa killed for as little
as looking across the color line; and that intermarrying between the
races was a crime against God, Queen, and Country.
I know that a God of many names, the laws of many lands, science
and nature were used to justify slavery and colonialism, holocausts
and genocides, rapes and lynching.
I know that African dictators called those who fought for democracy
“puppets under the pay of foreign masters” and the foreign masters
called those same people communists and insurgents.
And this I know very well: that had the Sojourner Truths, Dedan
Kimathis, Martin Luther Kings, Malcom Xs, and Ruth Firsts failed,
my wife and I would not have crossed the color line and my daughter
would not have been possible.
I know that she, just like her mother and me, just like her
grandparents, will have her struggles, but it will BE a struggle waged
at the crossroad of many cultures and worlds.
So I must know that those before me did not die so that I could use
my freedom to put others in jail; or use the same laws that betrayed
them to enslave and torture.
I must know that if Steve Biko died so I could write what I like, then
my pen cannot become the weapon that justifies the torture and
murder of others.
How then can I not know that no one appointed me protector of
African cultural purity? How can I not know that I am not the
standard of all that is moral and natural?
What fortress is this I build that subjugates those within and keeps
those outside under siege? Whose moral law is this I use to judge?
Whose legal system to jail? Whose weapon to murder? And whose
tongue do I use to silence?
How can I, Black and African and blessed as I am by the struggles of
my fathers and mothers deny my gay brothers and sisters their rights?
1
0
270
The Soil
even
the most beautiful of flowers
beginning as a seed will never
bloom
if it is not planted in loving soil
the problem
with writing
about you
is that
there is nothing
more poetic
in this world
than the wordless way you look at me
in those small,
small, loving moments you give
so much love
to everything
and everyone
on this earth
except yourself.
2
0
298
Mirror
Mirror,
take this
from
me:
my blasted gaze,
sunken
astonishment. Resolve
memory & rebuild; shame’ll
dissolve
under powder pressed into
my skin.
Oh, avalanche, my harbor:
can I
look
over you;
pit & pustule, crease & blotch
without seeing
you through you—
if all I am
(Am I all?)
is Woe is
me?
Mirror,
this take
from
me:
gaze blasted, my
sunken
resolve, astonishment.
Shame’ll rebuild & memory
dissolve
into pressed powder under
skin, my
harbor, my avalanche. Oh
I can
look
you over;
blotch & crease, pustule & pit—
seeing without
you, through you.
Am I all if
all I am
is Woe is
me?
1
0
303
Unleashed
I want to tell you that I felt more than alive; I felt pulse; I felt acutely in tune and gorging. I felt more than the familiar, the self.
—
from the beginning
a wrestle with my self
a labor
of work
and breath.
a canvas of body and beauty
of breath.
like a new day
a new inside coming
out
out
out
like a sun
enflamed
engaged
enrapt
in light
—
I didn’t say saturated, though yes in image, in text, in breath, and beauty and breath and beauty, and oh the beauty.
It was the first time and yet, better than the first time. A replacing of the actual first time; this new turn; this new length; the reach of it.
A mirroring of body and beauty and body and beauty; a satisfaction, a testament; an order of allowance and gift and a decree of density; a plunge. There was a delay satisfying, a flash of body of beauty of breath and beauty and breath and body and breath and breath and breath and then then then—the sense of my blooming before my self before my former self before the new self stuttering before me
for-me
for-me
and
for-me
—
What I said was I felt engorged. I said I felt engorged and I did. I felt enlarged with breath and body with blood and breath and body and beauty in the flash of body and word and beauty, and the body was my own and my own only body and the medium, the channel was forged in breath and image and in beauty and breath and the way I showed myself to myself.
—
Did you know there is something called a “spark bird”? It’s the first bird you see with your eye; it is the first bird that changes you, changes your life, and inspires you to love birds. I’m not sure what mine was exactly but it could be the first time I saw a hummingbird in Santa Fe in 2016. I couldn’t believe I saw it with my own eyes: all that color in its beak; its wings; its forehead. I marveled at its ferocity; its splendor; its small breath. I saw another one in Utah this summer, which is probably ordinary, but I found it extraordinary.
It makes me think of what Ocean Vuong says in his novel: “It was beauty,
I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”
It is always the beautiful we are after, or at least that I am after; the beauty in love, in dream, in hope,
in the body
and the body
of the body
of the body
—
A friend offers the word unleashed, and yes I was unhanded and ponied away (a bitch, a slut, a woman—call it what you will); I was the wild and the hunger; and the circling in the darkness was a rhythm of my own—the guide of my own destination—but who held the bridle? (It doesn’t matter.) Still, the rival of the struggle; I rivaled and rebelled in the light and dark of the flush and the curved; the dips and stirs and in my sigh, in my clank, an imagined grip or pull. See it—there I am—clacking my feet to the breath; the clop of my hand, of the way that spark sat above me, like a chant; a breath, slick and slender and slendering-still sliding.
—
I want to go back to the spark bird. Maybe I am my own spark bird. I have changed my own seeing with the seeing of myself.
—
Mapplethorpe said, “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor.” If it were me, I would have still been at this struggle—this work of being a poet in this life. I would still be finding other ways to show myself to myself; to unravel the beauty of the word.
Here’s the truth: we are always arriving at ourselves. I gave myself to myself and the giving was revelation was destination was body and body was brush and brush and brushfire was unburied and unbound.
1
0
276
Quartet for the End of Time
1
If you play me then you
Play yourself. That was
All the dead needed
To say. To get the better
Of time, we got better
With time. I left my body
And took on the look
Of a man. I made him
An honest woman.
A diagram of this
Sentence builds a
Structure made from
Wind. Inside of that
House is a box. Inside
The box is the head
Of a goat. Inside the
Goat: a knife’s quiet
Song. The blade of
Desire is the silver in
My teeth. My mouth
Has a certain ring to it.
2
I will take you now to after-
Life’s kitchen, where the salty
Girls cure meat with their tears.
Only through time is time
Conquered. Come correct.
Come prepared to sit at the table
Of contents. We bow our heads,
Count our blessings like
Little pigs, while the king-
Fisher waits for a shaft of
Sun. Sprint, said the bird,
For the foothills of truth.
Stop, stop, stop, said the bird,
There is mischief afoot. Then
We sat and ate with our hands,
An entire field of wild thyme.
When asked to choose a hill
To die on, we wanted to kill
The bird. To reconcile our pain
We made the stars into a bear.
Myth made all the difference.
3
If your wrist holds a five-
Nailed star, clock the T.
Who can open the door to night
And not see themselves in black?
Not I. For thousands of years,
I have sat on a milk crate.
Stationed at the crossroads, I sing:
Bone. Bone. Bone. Bone. Bone.
I don a yellow jacket and fox-
Gloves to push out the sun.
The morning is such a production.
A ghost—aghast at the sound
Of singe, a crowned knot of fire.
There is no sense to be had
In the country of our making.
This language a garden
Of strain. No limit
Soldiers, we marched
To the drum of empty
Cups and if a spoon fell
A woman was cursed.
4
When I was sold
Down the river,
God set down his book
In the shape of a tent.
That day I was born again,
My limbs—American letters.
The stairway to heaven is
Yellow-boned legs, antiqued
In their quadroon rust.
At the gate to eternity,
A lawn jockey grins, wide
As the science of mercy.
In his hands a badminton
Racket. He swats and we
See how they run, how
Crickets gallop in the
Dark like horseflies.
Heaven is a thousand
Chandeliers, every crystal
A single body, each head
A grizzly sparkle.
1
0
357
Better to Marry Than to Burn
Home, then, where the past was.
Then, where cold pastorals repeated
their entreaties, where a portrait of Christ
hung in every bedroom. Then was a different
country in a different climate in a time when
souls were won and lost in prairie tents. It was.
It was. Then it was a dream. I had no will there.
Then the new continent and the new wife
and the new language for no, for unsaved,
for communion on credit. Then the daughter
who should’ve been mine, and the hour a shadow
outgrew its body. She was all of my failures,
my sermon on the tender comforts of hatred
in the shape of a girl. Then the knowledge
of God like an apple in the mouth. I faced
my temptation. I touched its breasts with
as much restraint as my need allowed,
and I woke with its left hand traced again
and again on my chest like a cave wall
disfigured by right-handed gods who tried
to escape the stone. It was holy. It was fading.
My ring, then, on my finger like an ambush,
as alive as fire. Then the trees offered me a city
in the shape of a word followed by a word
followed by a blue madonna swinging from
the branches. A choir filed out of the jungle
singing hallelujah like a victory march and it was.
1
0
478
Belief in Magic
How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator away.
Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nevertheless
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.
1
0
459
Nature Boy
If I had enough cages to keep all the birds
I’ve collected over the years then I would have
to open a shop because there’s only so much room
in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds,
not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs,
or the different varieties of fish, the one
species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud
dogs and the lone mule, the profane one
who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees;
and maybe he’d let the mouse I found
forever dying at the end of a poem
ride on his back like a whiskered Christ
and if not, maybe my yeti could do it
when he’s not downtown working
security at the store or teaching the parrots
how to say brotherhood in grunt
and how to comb out the tangles and mud
from his hair whose sweat reminds me
of that bearded collector of beasts
with the ark who would have no doubt
understood how I feel, that prophet
of change under whose spell I want to confess
that I’m a Christian of the Old Testament,
that my grandfather hung all his goats
upside down, their throats over a bucket,
and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy
who strutted around the ring
like a peacock with his feathered hair
that stayed immaculate
even on the nights he lost to our hero
Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel,
he who hailed from the lost tribes
of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs
so much we wore pigeon feathers
and circled each other inside a green square
of water hose until someone finally rang the bell
that was never there and we sprung
toward each other like animals in love or at war.
1
0
282
Together and by Ourselves
I opened the window so I could hear people.
Last night we were together and by ourselves.
You. You look and look at Diver
for Crane by Johns and want to say something.
In the water you are a child without eyes.
Yesterday there was nothing on the beach
and no one knows where it came from.
There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us.
There are minutes of peace.
Just the feel. Just this once. Where does the past,
where should the period go?
What is under the earth followed them home.
The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James.
We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command.
Slow — in black — on an orange street sign.
Missing everywhere and unwritten — suddenly — all at once.
Him. He misses a person and he is still living.
I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone.
Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence . . .
we must have been lonely people to say those things then.
But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at.
In the perfect field someone has left everything
including themselves. You. You should stay here.
It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn.
With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time
he touched something else.
People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them.
And inside the circular cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world.
In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so . . .
so if you’re looking for answers you’re looking
at every water tower around here.
Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?
Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news.
How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make?
And the leather of your chair . . . it has me marked
so good luck forgetting. The world was a home.
It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic.
Make sure you date and sign here then save all the soft things.
Because everyone wants to know when it was,
how it happened — say something about it.
How the night hail made imprints all over.
Our things. Our charming and singular things.
1
0
267
I Swear I See Skulls Coming
It’s strange artwork, perhaps voodoo,
a human skull strung in perfect symmetry
to a tree in Mount Kenya forest,
it’s grinning away a sole bullet hole
now jagged. It certainly adds a twist
to the aeolian harp, doesn’t it? Art
is inspired in many ways,
here it’s death whistling in the wind.
Probe. Measurements not racist but
racialist. Could have been a white
tourist or a black native. It must
have held a sizable brain. Not mind—
philosophy is not in bone or DNA. Let’s
call it a colonial relic. Facts, known
to unknown. Rwanda manufactures 400,000
skulls a year. See the movement
here? Death-art-Science-social history-
a perfect dialectic. Nairobi National
Archives, a modern building with feet
sinking in slum, “Skull of a colonial relic
on display.” It’s clean. “I swear that thing
whistles at night, winds in a middle passage,”
the curator says. Here I must come clean.
The poet cannot speak of the unknown,
but I walk outside to see a whole country
walking with guns held to their heads.
1
0
324
Un-invite
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
2
0
357
Changing
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
2
0
299
INTO MY OWN
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and :finn they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloonl,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highwey where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew-
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
4
0
382
The Pretty Papers Section
dithers and bumstead trying to vote
who gets to hold the gun
and who gets to sleep
on the other’s watch—
where’s Blondie she’s outside
talking with the neighbors through
the fence as always
asking where’s the children—
someone says they seen them
take flight turned
to black birds wearing tee shirts printed
Black
Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter and diners
run from the restaurant failing
to pay—
a shining head drops
from the sky.
2
0
371
Noise Complaint
I hear it but what is the instrument
that voices the flashing red light strain
which no wrung gauge twisting the possible could
and not implode out of existence
we all know—
I have a few things that need said
no humans have gone without saying
how hard and deep a deal this being has cut.
The sun rises straight down the hall on the bathroom mirror
bevel rides the walls waving prismatic rainbow
festoons straddle the edges of doors orgasmic knees crunch
a prayer spectrum compressed to screaming brilliance—
minutes later no food no money to move your shit
piled in the middle of the floor for eviction.
The driving arm of the cello section runs
the white hot lightning strokes headlong
tearing out the track as the way the music goes
the inescapable rhythm’s smoking
situation sounds like what it’s playing—
these people barely aboard attuned to train
a composure over continual abyss
not specied for flight no air but over— a heated scream.
One old blues sounding line hums up some shit
so deep the very chaos of
it all fell in
for the time being a sooted black life suited
the burning cities the streets
fashioned of the latest survival the hot hit.
How hard and deep a deal this being has cut
in one line in Lead Belly in “Black Girl” he sings
his head was found ’neath the drivin’ iron
his body never was found he asks
her where will she sleep the night she replies
in the pines in the pines
and it isn’t this particular night nor some. one
shivering woman some long lonesome time ago
it’s the ongoing
it’s the national
anthem loop holed through
which it gets out of
its own laws its own song across an escape by
from sea to shining hell rising up the horizon.
3
0
333
For Air
There is a place in me for air as part
of me of a piece with how I live.
And I am in it making sense like a cart
we are each other’s horse before. given.
loaded with flowers. both
our breaths a fragrance of sound wave and beat.
word of the heart. The music goes
on to explain it is moved by the feet
taking the place apart into other places to see.
where is the surface the air impresses upon
what forms bounce into shape and form
patterns of doing. the way they do that they be.
themselves ourselves scattered across the drumhead
shod with a vibration of the unsaid.
geometries of air shod with a vibration
of the unsaid dance out their ordered sentences
to freedom the felt articulated into action
a balletic leap that seeing trails resemblances
of not knowing to knowing of silence
to song of being bound to flight.
A place in the air achieved space—
not even aware the speaking might
be music. Or that the place of air in us
might be singing the fragrance of the flowers
already worded in stone the airy cupolas
of temples lifted off into the idea of showers
of bubbled light and the poem as the champagne
of what the body has bottled in its strain.
2
0
386
Hold on
If you can force your heart and never and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!
4
0
684
Choke
maybe what I saw
was the earth’s shadow rise
up a cloud
turning it toward the top pink
then fading that back
to gray then night.
then maybe I think I see.
too much.
the tiniest gradation of detail
squeezed from attention
by the choke hold
on thin air for the sublime a blessing.
when life stinks
and your eyes have to take it in to live.
and your eyes have to take it in to live
the exact instant you need to jump
out of the way. to safety
or see danger’s vulnerable spot and hit it.
your eyes have to think
through what they are seeing to see
how measure measures itself
when you are in it against you to match or dis-
entangle that nascent not null of difference. maybe what I see
is down to the continuum where what it is
is what it is one thing
undifferentiated all
except as the surface of one perfect sphere
its paris and buenos aires the same place.
What it is is what is seen without observer.
it is that said what it is.
exo-existent
thought. without outside.
there are lines as of poetry
of information between us though.
resonant. structure.
what is asleep when we turn the lawn mower on
if only the pieces we think
something has caught it for—
the turning of attention to.
the turning of the earth. the earth is what is turning.
there is no setting
of the sun down.
of the sun down
some inclination to impact
at our feet as fact we stand to have
written by being here—
the rocks have source saying the same.
except they translate silent.
the word of the wind itself spoken everywhere
has the version of it all as well as of not happening …
the sun doesn’t move. its designation.
what it is pushes forward the appearance.
and behind—
the eastern shadow rising of the sun’s soft down down.
its paris and buenos aires a same place.
what it is is what is seen without observer.
not the thing itself
the quality of the hold on things
the choke hold on the neck of the calling bird
may be the goddamn
of jacob’s ladder what it is
could be the hands in the air air
time of the better roller coasters
pulled out all stops the no hold bar & café take
out. item name
on the menu—
the ladder being an upward
clearer approach to step.
the life the breath.
of an answer. the questioning.
I eye iamb I am
watching the sky read
the line below it the landscape
get shaken by storm.
a ring iamb married into
bone dance stone crazy.
claws of geese shadow
scratching wild song across the sky.
Malakal potemkin waking
gun we’re off on. the morning
fred hampton the bobbing flock of the 1999 boy
in the inner tube float up on the 100th anniversary of the race riot
along lake shore drive the commuters
no idea what it is. they say it is what it is.
anger joy disgust sadness fear
are all mountains raising in the sky
an aire jump up shout
sound shape song response as
not if but is
one body.
even among themselves at some distance.
all one sphere one point
a sense of time can be that distance’s familiar
but the mind can empathize itself that size the dreadlocks
of black holes where the anger digests itself
the joy carries its brother sadness also over
and fear realizes it’s ok
and the rains come the forests the jungles the birds!
3
0
328
Der Daily Yoke
funny that little yoke
sunny side up
in the span of the lake
every morning for breakfast
bubbles up what—
great hen lays this egg
on us.
onus now that’s funny
this burden of respect.
what shining
flight or light are we to prove
our ancestry with the sun—
what throwback are we.
to cook up?
3
0
316
The Old Masters
About suffering, they knew no more or less
than we do, being
housed in luminescence;
a local cumulus
of feverfew and jade
reduced to void, the tower overthrown,
the bells upturned.
I see one now, impoverished
and old before his time, a lesser man’s
subordinate, or master to a trade
he never asked for.
Burdened by the weight
of office, or the whim of some mad king,
he stands alone, above the dark lagoon,
and watches, while the city fades from quartz
to plum, from plum
to cochineal, a restless drift
through subtleties and shades
he cannot
capture, though he magnifies the whole
and loves it all the more, for being
useless, fleeting, governed by no rule,
a headlong and unmasterable now
that slips away, one pier light at a time.
4
0
299
Savory Versus Sweet
It isn’t the marriage that maps your course,
only the divorce.
One house has become all penance,
the other indulgence.
You struggle to resist
what has grown to feel illicit,
an appetite, threatening obsession,
for delectation.
What grows on trees tastes unfinished,
an imitation of artifice.
What court determined
that sweetness be earned?
Some chef with too much power
once called mixing salt and sugar
a form of barbarism.
His decree, like any fashion,
should have evaporated,
but someone recorded it,
so centuries, a continent, away,
your whole body hesitates
to sweeten, even slightly,
chicken soup or broccoli.
There’s enough complication
in houses, in nations.
His laws are as good as blue.
The offender isn’t you.
3
0
288
Be Monster
All mouth. Out of orbit
due to an insatiable need to be
orbited. At some point there are clouds
or waves filled with the foul kelp
of cornering questions. Like a black hole
yeeting a star through space, it was real
when monster queried, Why do you think you carry
a small stack of books with you? Out of orbit
is perhaps a phantasmagoria of blankness.
It was real when the foolishness I was
meant to feel oozed from the kelp instead.
What I carried out of my own need was
innocuous enough. It felt how pages smelled
as I turned them. Like Don Quixote made
a helmet, I wanted to make the books,
with their sturdy covers, a shield. I succeeded
almost. Almost, except an impulse rose
as I walked starrily away from monster.
Almost, except it is impossible to protect
what I was protecting indefinitely. Naivety
that is ready to crumble does. When it crumbles
its pieces fall into a womb where the thing
most feared gestates. All mouth. All hunger.
All claw. All tooth. All stirrer of disorder
I now will be. Hidden and large. Large. Large
as the thick-haired ocean of space.
3
0
350
Pot of Gold
We talk, you and I, of mindfulness, here in the world above
water, but what’s below is watchfulness,
pure and simple: creatures trying not to be eaten,
creatures relentlessly prowling or simply waiting for meals to
cruise on by. Except maybe parrotfish.
Ever industrious, ever in motion, it’s hard to find one not
chomping on Yucatán limestone reefs. What we see as
dead, bleached coral or crusted limestone shelves, for them
is re-embodied Fish Delight. Which means I find them by
eavesdropping. Ah, those castanet choruses clicking, clacking,
a coven of promises leading me on until there:
below my mask and snorkel, a dozen or more upside-down
Princesses sway as one, in their pink and blue checkerboard
gowns, their long, long dorsal crowns
cobalt-striped, and turquoise, and fuchsia—useless—
no Prince to be found, not even in fish identification books,
just me and my ardor. Bewitched, each day I hang, transfixed,
above them in a slightly different
place in that once-pristine, once-undiscovered Yal-Ku lagoon,
its cradling mix of salt and fresh water
letting me hold myself, and time, and the rest of the world
stock still. Sometimes I’m even luckier: out of the deepest
shadows (as out of my book) ventures
the shy Midnight Parrot, a constellation of neon blue
mosaic scrawled on its head, its body—two feet long—
as dark as blue can get and still
not be black, its parrot beak (that family
trait) munching rocks and shitting sand. Puffs of it,
great big clouds of it, murking the water until
finally settling down
(it’s how, some scientists
say, sandy floors of tropical reefs are born).
But had I dared the slightest move, my Midnight
would have, just like that, become Dawn.
And so it could have been, as well, with that one
tremendous fish, secretive, off at the edge, among
the maze of boulders piled on boulders, broken sandstone
columns, deep channels between them, there—
in a shaft of sun, the end of all my seeking
and what I hadn’t known I’d sought—three feet long, at least
and all alone, clown-sized lips and eyelids the brightest possible aqua
blue in an orange-gold face,
the way a child might rub its mother’s most dramatic
eye shadow onto the most unlikely places:
forehead, cheeks, even the outermost edges of every single
emerald-green fin, even the edge of the deep red tail, its tips
turned up at the corners—that tremendous fish was eating
nothing, that fish wasn’t moving at all, except it turned its head
and one tremendous eye caught mine. And held it. Taut.
Oh, I almost stopped
breathing. And the fish stopped
everything, too, except for slowly pulsing gills—opening,
closing, opening, closing—in sync with my own
pounding heart. Was I
the watcher or the watched? How long did we stay
like that, hooked to one another, held in water’s palm,
as through my every cell, over and over, rang Rainbow, unstoppable
Rainbow, until I had no beginning, I had no end,
Rainbow I was and happily would
be still, had not a wayward cloud blundered in.
2
0
338
Rogue Corn
My fav event as harvest season approaches
is the rough seed that escaped the plots.
If there’s a cornfield adjacent to another bed
of vegetables, you can count on imperfection,
you can see stalks standing where they’re
not supposed to be, the winds have ideas,
seeds who choose wildness, here they are,
with red potatoes, alfalfa, peas, sunflowers,
they look pleased w/ themselves, outfoxing
clever farmers, making it to the unplanned
ground where nobody is around, recovering
where the amiable dirt will welcome them.
Seeds are so fun and determined,
there’s no concept of liberty, no need for it,
guaranteed if I were a seedling I’d abstain,
you know I would, I’d find a way to renounce
what’s expected of my common name,
gliding over the roads until a dream takes root
4
0
323
Apology
My mind is male.
It likes to go into a thing
and never come out.
I’m sorry about it.
It has an elaborate custom
of waking in a new place every morning.
By night it goes camping
with the simplest amenities,
and never makes a mistake.
Every fire is started
with vigorous success
and put out with equal flare.
My mind loves to look at a clock
and tell it how wrong it must be.
Imagine berating a clock!
Well, I have. Here, at this very moment,
I’ve made a watch so ashamed
that it’s holding its little arms still
and refusing to tell the truth.
My mind argues hotly with the past.
It finds every misstep and
brings it forward for questioning.
It’s beaten the past so soundly
it has changed, irrevocably, into the future.
Things are looking good.
I have an army of fearful subjects
that are ready to carry me anywhere.
Tomorrow, I plan to visit the hanging gardens
where plants drip all over themselves.
I’m sure they can be improved.
First, I will awaken to great confusion
in a sumptuous room filled with riches.
I trust I will have made every suitable arrangement.
7
4
409
Breast Milk
The eyes wide or weighty
with it. The full boat
or low tide of it.
The leopard of it
when it leaps. Nervous
before a sermon, Saint Bernard
prayed for help and the Virgin appeared,
babe in lap, to squirt him in the eye
with a wondrous stream of it,
thus gifting him with eloquence.
The sun-white glow of it
in dimmed-down rooms
across galaxies, galaxies, galaxies.
The Romans admired a mother
who visited her father, sentenced
to starve to death, in prison
and kept him alive with it,
secretly. The leopard
of it when it leaps.
Ten children my great-grandmother
nursed, from one breast—
the other side never made, maybe,
a country doctor thought,
because of her childhood polio.
The creation ex nihilo of it,
across the galaxy’s pale cream.
In a short story by Maupassant,
a train is stopped far from anywhere
and one car holds two strangers,
a very hungry man and a nursemaid,
painfully engorged. And that’s all
you really need to know,
except, it occurs to me, she
must have been hungry too.
5
0
388
The Blue-Painted Distance
Torn are the pages from the calendar,
the days fluttering past the train’s window,
the speed of which has yet to be perceived
for at each seat more immediate
are the books about to be opened,
the wax-papered sandwiches eaten,
the bottles of strawberry soda consumed.
The journey between birth and death
are the stations of joy and sorrow
or simple idleness
when what remains in relief
can be as inconsequential as an unexpected
delay that finds you wandering
through an afternoon of an old museum.
Indistinguishable are the adornments
from useful implements,
the ill-lit displays of rocks and shards
you circle as if in a maze,
remembering the oddity of it,
startling upon a haunting diorama.
Crouched around a glowing fire pit,
a family of hunters and gatherers
huddles beneath sheltering skin.
All around are the articles of abundance—
meat slabs draped like heavy
blankets on a rack,
geometric rows of threads
dangling from a loom.
The ephemeral made tangible,
tongues of cellophane flames
cleverly quiver to convey
a sense of warmth.
Pulled into the scene
you follow the trail of smoke
across the blue-painted
distance of mesas dotted with bison.
Wigs of black twigs—
someone’s idea of indigenous hair—
hide the faces of the elders.
Strapped onto its mother’s back,
the lone baby stares unblinkingly at the sky.
No one has thought to shut
its eyes against the sun, the glare,
the rolling cloud waves of hooves and dust,
the flies that will surely come.
3
0
293
In the Clouds, Volcano
Earth-touching clouds hush the forest.
A terrarium of stillness
shrouds the bird realm.
Speaking as if from another source,
‘Apapane the ventriloquist
knits its calls, releasing
like a ball of string
notes that flutter to the floor as leaves,
typing trills that glitter the branches.
The cloud dome diverts the wind
the way a boulder divides a river,
rerouting the occasional car
from turning down the gravel road.
There are many ways to pass through.
There are many ways to exit.
Solitude expands the sense of time,
on this side of the hourglass,
the sand in short supply.
I frittered it away in such
a hurry, the arguments, the hostility,
grabbing at what
I thought would make me happy,
so many missed opportunities
to make, in the end, amends.
I take heed from the old sages.
I do not miss
the fickleness of the fleeting world.
With my books and papers,
I scratch insects out of stone,
patch and reclaim torn threads.
The stitches are far from perfect.
Tobacco-drunk and countless tea cups,
I retreat, content beside the twig-fed fire.
All that I need is to want
nothing more. Rising into clouds,
the wisps of smoke impersonal as my signature.
2
0
256
Dear Life
I can’t undo all I have done unto myself,
what I have let an appetite for love do to me.
I have wanted all the world, its beauties
and its injuries; some days,
I think that is punishment enough.
Often, I received more than I’d asked,
which is how this works—you fish in open water
ready to be wounded on what you reel in.
Throwing it back was a nightmare.
Throwing it back and seeing my own face
as it disappeared into the dark water.
Catching my tongue suddenly on metal,
spitting the hook into my open palm.
Dear life: I feel that hook today most keenly.
Would you loosen the line—you’ll listen
if I ask you,
if you are the sort of life I think you are.
2
0
307
Lockdown Garden
1
Close to each other,
socially undistanced,
the mulberry leaves,
uniformly green,
shall turn brown together.
It’s like a herd dying.
2
Firm to begin with,
the mud clod
could’ve injured you.
It crumbles in your hand.
3
In the heap of dead
leaves crinkly as
brown skins, those
breathing things
foraging around
the bamboo stand
are jungle babblers.
4
It was planted
all wrong, too
close to a wall,
under the mango
trees. There was
nowhere for it
to go except up
like a mast and
that’s where
it went, taking
its leaves with it—
long, tapering.
I never saw them
fall. It never
flowered, which
would’ve helped
me look it up in a
book of flowering
Indian trees. Now
I’ll never know
its name nor of
the bird singing
at evening
in the shrubbery.
5
She stood outside
the gate, a woman
my age, head covered
with flowery print,
a sickle in her hand.
Could she come
inside and cut
grass for her goats?
It was ankle high.
Her face was inches
from mine and I felt
her breath on my skin.
It’s after I’d turned
the corner that I heard
what she’d said.
6
The shingles unwalked on,
the doors bolted,
the squirrels back in their nests.
Under the moon a bird floats
and settles on a branch.
The sky is pale.
The leaves of the ironwood
when new every spring
are a deep pink.
The evening goes out like a flame.
We’ve seen different things.
It’s always been so.
Tell me, love, what you saw today.
3
0
336
Nailing Wings to the Dead
Since we nail
wings to the dead,
she calls ravens
from the sky
to inspect our work. “For flight,”
they say, “first remove their boots.”
She leans in,
inspects a fresh hex
behind my eyes,
takes my feet
and lays them on the fire,
to burn it out, roots first.
We’re the last,
babička and me.
We’ve survived on
chance and bread
baked from the last store of grain.
And as we’re out of both,
we will die soon.
They are gathering
in the well.
We disrobe.
She hums whilst I nail her wings,
she tells me a tale, her last gift —
“This dark stain,
passed kiss to kiss-stained
fevered mouth,
blights love, is pulsed
by death-watch beetle’s
tick, timing our decay.
They know this.
They wait by water,
gulping despair.
The ravens keep watch,
they say the contagion’s here,
they promise to take us first.”
Her tale done,
we go winged and naked
to the well.
We hear them
climbing the walls, caterwauling,
but ravens are swift, and swoop.
3
0
264
People Behaving Badly a Concern
Aggressive panhandling, public urination, verbal threats,
public nudity and violation of the open container law
followed us down the days, for why
are we here much longer,
or even this long? I ask you
to be civil and not interrupt night’s business.
It was fun getting used to you,
who couldn’t have been more nicer.
This was as modern as it had ever been.
They were influenced by him: some dirty magazine
on the air tonight. (Amid the chaos, reports of survivors.)
Didn’t the flowers’ restoration cat fugue keep spilling,
and like that? It wouldn’t be the first time, either.
The pro-taffeta get up and laugh,
investigate or communicate. The night you were
going to stay up late, others will kiss,
and he talks about you, and I don’t know what.
Come in, anyway,
and don’t lack for tales of the Assertion.
We’re talking civilian unrest.
Yes, well, maybe you should take one.
(Do not bite or chew.)
3
0
265
House of Fact, House of Ruin
1. homilies from home
You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.
And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,
you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, facts
are how you make the right side talk to the left.
I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.
I’m turning around, trying to see the filthiness
that keeps making me filthy. I’ve scraped away
my molecules right down to the atoms’ emptiness
and arranged the map’s folds so that nobody
can see it breaking into fits of weeping.
Now that even our eyes have their dedicated poverties,
now that even our eyes are chained to their slavish occupations,
whatever the soul lacks drains the soul to nothing.
I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin.
2. rest
The strange is done with, over,
the strange that late at night you returned
to chat with again and again. No longer will anyone
wait for me in my corner where
good is bad, where that tight-lipped morning
of tears by the bay means nothing anymore
to anyone. To be cleared of the inks that stain
my ankles while watching my eyes go blind in the mirror
is the kind of rest that the seventh day promises
but never brings. Instead, the species
climbs aboard the ark of copulation
and ignores the forty days and nights of rain.
And the much-talked-of soul that the rain denies
burrows deep into the mud of so much pain.
3. spider
Look at the spider with the enormous body and tiny head,
a spider of no color: today, when I kneel
down to look at it more closely, its many arms nailed
to a many-armed cross are a prayer in a code that only God,
who’s forgotten it, can decipher. And its eyes
invisible to my eyes, which guided it like a pilot
through the wilderness of space,
no longer steer its legs across the intricate,
almost-not-thereness of its web. Each thread
it spins with the finality of fate divides its head
from its body. And the poor thing,
even with so many legs, doesn’t know which way to run.
Just look at its abdomen, huge as the stone blocking
what’s-his-name’s tomb, that the head’s condemned to drag around.
4. if the sun should blacken to an asterisk
Honestly, when I look at life straight,
I’m just another blind Brooklynite — not because
I can’t see that Jean-Jacques was an idiot,
or that Saint Peter being nailed to the cross
upside down isn’t the purest measure
of my humanity, but because my eyes
can’t see my illiterate skeleton and the razor
and cigar that will outlive me. So try to save a day
for when there are no days, reason with the lens
inside every healing wound, witness how your
own inner grace, gnawing at itself, gets baptized
in phosphates of hemlock and error.
And so what if the sunset arrives from Athens?
So what if no trace of anyone survives?
5. the last to be excused
Remember the old aunts, sarcastic,
chain-smoking, gesturing with their canes,
scoring point after point with their widowed lungs?
How was I to eat with them as they pushed
around their plates not peas and carrots
but distance and disdain for their silly nephew
still trying, at his age, to forget
how being old is as new to the old
as being just born is to the just born —
even their glued-together, half-cracked
china radiates impatience for the pity
that the young want them to want.
The way they kept saying mother —
like it was all in caps — saying it like that
as if they still felt her eyes on how
they handled their knives, forks, spoons,
making each bite harder to swallow.
The day is coming when there’ll be no water
in the pitcher, no eternally dying father
served up like canned spinach and corn,
no brooches of affection their absent lips
pin to the air. And as that silence
slowly breaks the hours in two, I’ll be
left alone to dine with the nothingness
that, just for form’s sake, says grace.
The table will be set with shadows,
the phantom food served up by shadows —
and all the dead mothers come to this repast
will sit down on chairs of dust
in the wake of that last supper
in the kitchen gone cold where I’ll hear the last
maternal “Serve yourself, Tom”
smothered by that dark where no one can tell
the knife blade from the handle,
or the food from the plate, or the plate
from the table, or if there’s a table at all.
6. the eternal dice
omg, it makes me cry to admit that I am human;
to feel the heaviness of all your bread I’ve eaten.
Oh sure, you claimed you raised me from the dust,
but where’s the wound fermenting in your side?
You know nothing of those Marias who split for good.
omg, if you’d been born a human being
today you’d know how to behave like God.
But in your always everywhere hard partying with perfection
you feel nothing of the pain of your creation.
And so it’s us, the poor fuckers who suffer, who must be god.
Today, in my middle-aged pupils, I see the glare of candles
lit for my death-row vigil. omg, old gambler, take up
your crooked tricks again, and let’s throw your cooked pair of dice —
in the fated luck you dole out to the universe
maybe we’ll roll snake eyes staring back at us like death,
maybe you’ll deal two aces black as the grave’s mud.
omg, in this night gone deaf and blind,
you won’t be able to play because the poor Earth itself
is just a single die whose edges have grown rounded
by rolling too many eons through the battering sky
and nobody now can stop it until it rolls into a hole,
the vast hole, omg, inside a single molecule.
7. the other garden
In the Garden there was a spider.
And because the man knelt beside him, the spider
overheard him, the agony of his prayer
like the fear of a fly who can’t steer
any other direction than into the web stretching out
no matter which way the fly veers. The spider
felt the threads of all being vibrate
through him — and so it vowed to be the answer
to the prayer of the man praying to his father
to let this cup pass. But on the cross, when the man cried out
to his father not to abandon him, his father
did abandon him. And so the spider
vowed to weave a web so tightly around the father that the harder
he’d struggle the more he’d be caught.
8. what hasn’t yet come is already over
If it rains tonight, will a raindrop be my cell?
Will the bars the sky lets down
take one look at me and turn to steel?
Now that the hot afternoon is finally done,
done the cups of tea we drank with your mother,
I want to ask the rain to yank my strings
back a thousand years. But even back that far,
will the rain still be my prison?
To be lost in the minutiae
of our vacations from the soul, to forget
the Vedic threads spun out beyond my end,
to press against your breasts obedient
to the purest pulses. Yeah, sure. Make the story
of my life the story of my never having been.
3
0
320
The Good in the Evil World
Before the war leaned in and blew out
the candles, there were many long days
where lovers called themselves lovers
and a house was a dream but also
four walls, a roof. A father called
to his daughter to see the monarch butterflies,
pausing in their migration to fan the goldenrod,
a tiger in each coy disclosure.
A young man reached for a blackberry
and found draped on a branch a green snake
the color of matcha. A snake the color of matcha
sighed in the sun. People drove in cars.
There were jobs and someone had to work
every morning. A man quit his job
but it was no tragedy. He didn’t like the work.
Another man slid in and found it comfortable
enough, and just as easily slid in beside
the man’s wife and into the everyday rhythms
of his life and that was no tragedy either.
After rains, a ring of mushrooms would delicately
crack the earth. Spanish moss harbored red mites.
The sky wasn’t interesting. No one looked up.
2
0
279
C
metaphor waits at the
foot of his name
on thursday he’ll
cancel experience
metaphor waits for
him to shovel the snow
on thursday he’ll
crush experience
3
3
273
Dialogue with an Artist
I used to paint the sea, but never a shore,
and nobody was sailing on it. It wasn’t even
the sea, it was just my own loneliness.
It’s all there, you know. It’s all in the sea.
The battle is there, the inevitability of it all,
the purpose. When I switched to people
they were all lonely. Crowds are the
loneliest thing of all, I say. Every individual
in them is a stranger to everyone else.
I would stand for hours in one spot
and scores of little kids who hadn’t had
a wash for weeks would group round me.
Had I not been lonely, none of my work
would have happened. I should not have
done what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen.
There’s something grotesque in me and I
can’t help it. I’m drawn to others who are
like that. They’re very real people. It’s just
I’m attracted to sadness and there are some
very sad things. These people are ghostly
figures. They’re my mood, they’re myself.
Lately, I started a big self-portrait. I thought
I won’t want this thing, no one will, so
I went and turned it into a grotesque head.
memo to Sunshine
You’re right, there are grotesques who shine
a dark light that lures us like how the sirens
tried to lure Odysseus, and yes, maybe we
ourselves are among the grotesques, but
there are also the beautiful who, if we’re
lucky, save us from ourselves, and validate
the sun’s light, and maybe also the moon’s.
5
1
326
Five Yellow Roses
What stopped her bawling was the doorbell
ringing, and a man standing there with five
yellow roses, bulked up with green fronds
and tied in a dinky knot with olive twine.
There was no card to say who the flowers
came from. The man’s uniform was blue
with a brown insignia of a spider on his right
top pocket that she saw he kept unbuttoned.
As he waltzed down the path to the gate
the Siamese cat that frequented the garden
raised its back and hissed. The man laughed
and flounced out to his waiting white van.
Oh, the shit-faced side streets of life! OK,
she’d been born in Madras, in a flowery tea shop
while an albino conjurer magicked a hare
to leap from his heavily-ringed brown fingers.
Five yellow roses? Enough to encourage her
to cook saffron rice, with turmeric-tinged prawns
and sautéed yellow courgettes. She didn’t play
the Ry Cooder where yellow roses say goodbye.
1
0
357
Extinct
If you give money to an animal
He or she gets cloying and aggressive
But when arrested for that behavior
Says, “I didn’t know anything, my reps
Did it. Well they did. These humans
Committed their tiny crimes in the mail,” it says,
“Knowing animals are photogenic. You can hold
One in your lap or hold a sheaf of photos
In which a feline looks like you yourself tearing off a leg
Of a springbok antelope, which prey looks like you
Concentrating on the flee instinct,” it says.
I tend to agree with it. It and
All of them have expressions on their faces, four limbs,
Two eyes, noses, ears, etcetera, how close can you get to you
Or me, and then there’s the same insides. If it is a cheetah
Do not put it in your lap. If it’s
A black rhino it weighs 2,250 lbs.
And has two! sharp horns about 24 in. ea.!
Let’s suppose nothing about that one and not say
It has a facial expression. My own opinion
Is it will have one in a matter of time.
There are ten other scenes in which I look like the animals
In them so don’t argue I’m writing yet another check this week
And as a matter of fact I’d like to smack something,
Bite it, and cook it. You do that, tonight
For instance. If one of us eats the other
It’s a very big crime
Not tiny like the revolutionary revelation in a solicitation
That we are like the animals, no, are them,
Which is bigger in evolution and spirituality,
Sure, and in the final accounting
Much more important, but today
Don’t put a cheetah in your lap and don’t eat other humans.
1
0
356
I Want to Thank the Wind Blows
Sound of the rain so I know
there’s constraint
sound of the train
so I know commerce
has not come to a standstill
now they raise the barrier
now they set it back in place
What coats the bottom
of the surface of the sound
when the swifts come in
when the clerks come home
who will bathe the children
who will bake the bread
when the luff is tight
when the mainsheet
starts the boat underway
whatever you do don’t
let the tongue slip
from its moorings
what’s that song?
love lift us up where we belong
I ate the pill
and the pill was real
1
0
335
Been About
The rat traps emptied, the grain troughs filled.
The distance between sheep shed
and my own ice-melt dripping on the mat
equals the diameter of moonlight squared
on his face as he looks up
and finds me again. Says
he’s sure I’d been swallowed
by the elements, says he’d been
about to come looking. I step into
the warm. Two baas from out back
where I’d worked. Two tufts of wool
he lifts from my hair. In just
such a manner are sleek blue words
slyly acquired by a wispy
whiter-than-snow page. He’s seen it
happen. Seen a tear of mine, then two,
well up and slip loose
as the little boat of orgasm
veers into the vortex.
1
0
341
The Companions of Odysseus in Hades
Since we still had a little
Of the rusk left, what fools
To eat, against the rules,
The Sun’s slow-moving cattle,
Each ox huge as a tank —
A wall you’d have to siege
For forty years to reach
A star, a hero’s rank.
We starved on the back of the earth,
But when we’d stuffed ourselves,
We tumbled to these delves,
Numbskulls, fed up with dearth.
2
0
272
Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.
So that in jail he will have the time to read
How the king was beheaded & the hawk that rode
The king’s wrist died of a common cold,
And learn that chivalry persists,
And what first felt like an insult to the flesh
Was the blank ‘o’ of love.
Put the fun back into punishment.
Make a law that loves the one who breaks it.
So that no empty court will make a judge recall
Ice fishing on some overcast bay,
Shivering in the cold beside his father, it ought
To be an interesting law,
The kind of thing that no one can obey,
A law that whispers “Break me.”
Let the crows roost & caw.
A good judge is an example to us all.
So that the patrolman can still whistle
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” through his teeth
And even show some faint gesture of respect
While he cuffs the suspect,
Not ungently, & says things like ok,
That’s it, relax,
It’ll go better for you if you don’t resist,
Lean back just a little, against me.
3
0
256
Bruh
you can take my breath
but the bruh stays
lips slapping spice
of unknown bulk
face curry-blushed
from its blandness
my dad’s face caved
sour into his nose
when he heard it
the bruh cliff-hanging
on his beard
I think he tries to pray the white out of me
Town and Country now
a sermon bench for
290 west lectures
where D & D
is a cult following
if that’s the case
my dungeon master got me hypnotized
rolling d20s is life in a quick toss
my new friend group is wild
they got bruh in their structure
fingers type in the group chat
with the single syllable
smash
we duke it out in basements and
Ike’s aether always pops out our croaking throats
bruh
sometimes I want to falcon-punch life in the face
cause I can never find the rhythm
to lift my hand
place it on her waist
and hip the yuck out me
need to leave my house
can’t look at any direction without muttering
bruh
this word
should not be something I want
something that never leaves
the tongue of my brain
but I love the way it punches my chest
just wish it would punch me harder
4
0
319
War the War
War the war, the sorry edge
of us, because we stacked nice
clean plates for days, we were
sure things when love broke
across the headland, leaving
conch shells in ditches,
five fish slapping on the steps
of the old town hall, it was winter,
we were bonfires unattended,
our bodies litigating, agreeing
and writing it all down, the law
of legs, the law of how we sleep,
the law of shoulders killing me,
and now we fold clothes without
thinking my clothes your clothes
and war the war o happy war
what love we are so badly bitten
in this long-term necessary chapel
with all attendant relics, citronella
candle, junior hacksaw,
a box of miscellaneous wires,
our headland way-way underwater,
no one else beside us
but ourselves beside ourselves.
3
1
303
The Burning Tree
Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk.
It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail.
Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied.
Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls.
Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at.
Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms.
Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed.
A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it.
I had been asked for light before but never fire.
Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device.
Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives.
Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods.
This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it.
We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.
3
0
291
Wanting It Darker
The sun time of the year died out and never might return.
We made fires big as coffee tables to approximate the sun.
I wanted to be a mountain.
I wanted us all countless mountains in a detailed painting.
Blood is everywhere as always.
But now it is blown further and oxygenated for longer.
Yet more sad word has come digitally.
We contain no blood with which to soften and warm the sad word.
Cold wind placed and places the house in its mouth.
We met the end numb and almost still.
Number meant less motion meant even number meant totally still.
The buildings stand still.
The buildings still stand.
The buildings like the builders take each other by the hand.
2
0
286
The End
I believed death was a flat plain spectacular endlessly
Can you distort my voice when I say this?
My scared ghost peeling off me
Distortion, she says, as if she has just made it up
And then she is quoting a line from a poem
Or is it a whole poem, I wish I could remember
My voice opens and calls you in
I don’t know if you can hear me
I said, I carry inside me the trace of a threat that I cannot discharge
I said, I want to ask you things you can’t ask a person who doesn’t exist
She said, Why can’t you ask them
If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?
She said, Why can’t you have everything
Well, you know, when you’re looking for a person, sometimes they appear
And a light goes on and off in the opposite window, twice
Yes, you say, that was a sign
Strange love for the living, strange love for the dead
Listen. I don’t know who you are but you remind me of —
I wish you would put some kind of distortion on my voice, I tell her
So people don’t know it’s me
They know what they know, she said
I told a story about my shame
It got cold when the air touched it
Then it got hot, throbbed, wept, attracted fragments with which it eventually glittered
Till I couldn’t stop looking at it
Exactly, she says
And then she is quoting a line from a poem, I don’t know which one
In my dream she reached out to touch me as if to say, It’s all right
How I began to believe in something
Are you there?
The wind called to the trees
And then it happened
And they said, How do you feel?
And I said, Like a fountain
Night falls from my neck like silver arrows
Very gently
1
0
281
On Weekends
I might not wash today. I might
let the weekend slide into gratifying
anarchy. I am supposed to be thankful,
this town is not among the true nightmare
portions of the world. A roof over my head
and quite sufficient shine on the silver,
thanks. I might, though. Haven’t you seen it?
Your city pokes a crafty fang at a flight path.
It’s my city too, I suppose. You think you
are in control. Idiot! To name is to own, not
to know. And now we are so used to blood we
miss the silly crimson pity of it. I dream of
hardmen, the torturer’s tweezers; of scholars
supplanting their teeth in basement gardens.
It’s there, but you miss it. I don’t miss
a thing. It’s always there, the aura before
a seizure, inside my expendable circuitry,
deeper than dog years down, always, even
always. I dream of the made face coming
apart in my hands like wet bread. I might not
dress today. I might suck sauce from the bottle.
Here’s mud in your gloria mundi, and a blue
blowtorch to your extremities, dear. How do
you feel about that? Or the massive enigma
of love? Does anything shock you? I
am supposed to be grateful, the shirt on
my back and quite enough coal in the cellar,
thanks. But a grand mal growls at the back
of the mind, and the back of the mind is
a bottle bank, love. We come and go, stooped
in their palisades. The rich are always with us,
their hexentanz and agonies. Here’s Kate, we all
love Kate, oblivious, bombshell, and didn’t
she used to be us? Not me. Your city, its nicotine
fingers, windows lit, yellow and sickly. Here’s
where we crouch our snouts to the wall. I might
not leave the house today. Haven’t you seen
what’s out there? Their vaunting faith; the awful
punitive spring. I dream of muti and suitcases;
grown men stabbed in their Camden hamlets, eyes
without faces, world without end. It’s there, still
there, but you do not see it. I see everything. I see
it all. And the billy-born-drunks in the house next
door are shouting again. Inadmissible figments
slurred through the wall.
2
0
335
Oh Sweethearts
And slowly we’m sweethearts
atween the wet grass all river-licked,
lime dust in our hair
and both of us so frightened,
blind as moles. But wanting
something. Wanting.
We’m side-by-side on the grass,
me barefeet in the water,
bowing our heads, gentle
as osses at the water trough.
I can feel his shoulder ashiver
and it makes me bold, makes me jumpy,
so I hold out me ond
till he takes it and kisses the palm
like he’s eating sugar from it
and we’m off ...
3
0
332
Less, much less
He hardly spoke any words
only two —
or you could call it one
the last thing
he said
was bye-bye
flight-feathers
veined and hairlike
with interlocking barbules
of sound
the bye-bye trapped
a breath of air
the two linked words
drifted out
on a calm lake
that lay there
with a single purpose —
to receive final words
and allow them
to drift on its surface
out and further out
on the lake of thought
and composure
encircled by mountains
the simple phrase
soared upwards
to the highest peak
where it would be planted
like a flag
would eventually be enshrined
each identical word carefully
balanced either side
of the invisible join —
like baby talk
he put equal emphasis
on each word
his face was pinched
and his bird beak
very prominent
there have never been
two joined words
with so much space around them
pack up all my cares and woes
light the light
I’ll arrive late tonight
blackbird bye bye
bye
1
0
292
On Alcohol
my first drink was in my mother
my next, my bris. doctor spread red
wine across my lips. took my foreskin
•
every time i drink i lose something
•
no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident
before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up
for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water
•
brandy was used to treat everything
from colds to pneumonia
frostbite to snake bites
tb patients were placed on ethanol drips
tonics & cough medicines
spooned into the crying mouths of children
•
each friday in synagogue a prayer for red
at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen
spirits
•
how many times have i woke
strange in an unfamiliar bed?
my head neolithic
•
my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand
& flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine
he called his woman
she locked the door
•
i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose
the other half is my own hand
that poured the codeine that lifted the red plastic again & again &
•
i’m trying to understand pleasure it comes back
in flashes every jean button thumbed open to reveal
a different man every slurred & furious permission
•
i was sober a year before [ ] died
•
every time i drink i lose someone
•
if you look close at the process of fermentation
you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body
until it’s transformed into something more volatile
•
the wino outside the liquor store
mistakes me for his son
2
1
289
When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air —
When you think about it, mostly, a cage is air —
so what is there
to be afraid of?
A cage of air. Baudelaire said
Poe thought America was one giant cage.
To the poet, a nation is one big cage?
And isn’t the nation mostly filled with air?
Try to put a cage around your dream.
The cage escapes the dream.
I see it streak and stream.
3
0
258
The Wire Fence Was Bent Where a Deer Jumped Over
Neighbor, your mower
cast dust over the edge
where the field meets
the field, toy-sized ring-
necked snakes halved
and flattened by blades
among blades, and now
our things are mingled.
What do you covet
that is mine? Chigger-
riddled passion
blooms, a glint
of beetles loitering
under their anther eaves,
a car idling in a sealed
garage, arranging
the inevitable fog
into a fog that will arrive
without pain? Neighbor,
if your wishes require
me to act, I will act
according to your wishes.
I am ready, every day
as I pass, to cast over
a glance and make sure
all is still still, to drag you
out—or leave you there—
in your designated air.
3
0
282
Salt
Grain by grain, salt’s frozen tears
Help me count history’s disasters
I can’t blame salt for telling food
You’re full of wounds
Salt misses the freedom of the ocean
Remembering waves, salt jumps into a soup
But it finds there only my reflected face
It hides by making itself too soft to chew
Sometimes, salt follows a cold sweat
Waking me from a nightmare
Dreamed blood tastes like salt
As if in human failure lay the silence of God
Having swum in the ocean
Salt considers soup a shallow pond
For salt, every meal is a jail
One day, an extra salty flavor
Makes me cough and cough
It feels like cold fish bones scraping my throat
Maybe it’s salt telling me
I’m going to prison in your body
Don’t ever forget who I am!
2
0
390
Pigeons
I’ve never seen pigeons argue
I only see them soar
I don’t know if a pigeon is naïve or worldly
I just know it has no past to make it toil through life
Maybe they’re the tongues of the air
Lazily expressing cars’ sighs
Maybe they’re lined up on the roof
Vying to perform snow’s wedding
One day I stick my head out the window
And realize their nation is the act of soaring
Soaring makes my silence meaningless
Thank god, they’ve taught me how to talk about nations!
Standing under a flock of pigeons, I think oh
People aren’t even worth one flower blooming toward them
2
0
390
Red Grapes
In order to see the world’s evils clearly
They redden their eyes on the branch
Until they believe the warm wind’s praise
In order to become waves in our blood
They offer their lives to the wine cellar
In my glass, the blood of their youth
Tries to send waves through my heart
It’s a jockey riding my bloodstream
Loosening age’s reins—
I used dirty words I don’t normally use
Nearly scaring awake my dead relatives
I fell fast asleep with my arms around love
And, waking, couldn’t find my lover
I fit right in at a banquet in the city
And finally realize, love is wine’s tax
High taxes make wine noble
A crate of red wine
Is a crate of Van Goghs—do you believe that?
A crate of red grapes
Is a crate of nipples—do you believe that?
2
0
356
Dead Men Walking
What did they desire, the dead who had returned?
The sons who had inherited their estates
pretended not to know them. The iron gates
were welded shut, but soon the dead had learned
to hire lawyers practiced in the laws
that bound the afterlife to lesser gods.
The angels thundered on like piston rods,
denying their gold wings to either cause.
The city streetlamps flared like learnèd ghosts.
The moon turned red. Beneath a scrim of clouds,
Spanish moss draped the myrtle trees like shrouds—
in politics the guests became the hosts.
Those days made angels of the better sort.
The cases languished in a lower court.
4
0
338
When we are on the right track we are rewarded with joy
wretched thou art
wherever thou art
I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind
continues
trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without
ideas
and to whatever
thou turnest —
the body I have is the body I once had but they could not
differ more
the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning
beyond words
I turn the pages
of the old book
the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible
worldly cause
the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by
thoughts
I have not held
since childhood
makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting
of becoming
during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the
material world
its binding broken
its brittle paper
I sit in meditation and sunlight from the window calms
my nausea
since the emergency I feel such sharp tenderness toward
common objects
its dog-eared corners
torn at the folds —
sort of attached to the white wall white door white dust
on the wood floor
mostly pain is an endless present tense without depth or
discernible shape
miserable are all
who have not
an image or memory lends it a passing contour or a sort of
border
the white door open against the white wall snuffs
headache’s first flare
a sense of present
life’s corruption
I remember a man patiently crying as doctors drained his
infected wound
lying on the gurney in my hospital gown we suffered
from having been being
but much more
miserable are those
adjacent and precarious the way a practitioner sits alone
on a cushion
resting alone unwearied alone taming himself yet I was
no longer alone
in love with it —
4
0
380
Dying Stars
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
4
0
379
Allow Me (For A Lovely Friend)
If I must worry about how
I will live in my old age
without wealth
I would be without health now
and how can I live to be
old?
If I must worry about how
I will live in my old age
without love
I would be without dreams now
and how can I go on living
another day?
Allow me to sit in the sun
and listen to the sky.
I will love you gently.
Allow me to stay in my room
and weave my rainbows.
I will love you truly.
Like a colt in the meadow
with no boundary
allow me
to wander around
till I hear the autumn
stealthily
strolling by my door.
I will be waiting
to be with you
then.
4
0
367
Local News: Woman Dies in Chimney
They broke up and she, either fed up or drunk or undone,
ached to get back inside. Officials surmise
she climbed a ladder to his roof, removed
the chimney cap and entered feet first. Long story short,
she died there. Stuck. Like a tragic Santa. Struggling
for days, the news explains. It was a smell that led
to the discovery of her body. One neighbor
speaks directly into the microphone, asks how a person
could disregard so much: the damper, the flue,
the smoke shelf. He can’t imagine what it was she faced.
The empty garage. The locked back door. And is that
a light on in the den? They show us the grass
where they found her purse. And it’s not impossible to picture
her standing on the patio — abandoned — the mind
turning obscene, all hopes pinned on refastening the snap.
Then spotting the bricks rising above the roof
and at first believing and then knowing, sun flashing its
god-blinding light behind it, that the chimney was the way.
2
0
316
The Culmination
“My Story”
Generous instinct, were you
My hand I must
Think. The later brain.
My hands craving every
Learned heart. Nature, art,
World. In my memories
I thought of trust
Then all fear. I
Fell on my pain.
Hope shall in loss
Throb. My, my, my
Stand for the release.
A nation’s groan beneath
Dear night. All right.
2
0
280
Mountainal
This first-light mountain, its east peak and west peak.
Its first-light creeks:
Lagunitas, Redwood, Fern. Their fishes and mosses.
Its night and day hawk-life, slope-life, fogs, coyote, tan oaks,
white-speckled amanita. Its spiderwebs’ sequins.
To be personal is easy:
Wake. Slip arms and legs from sleep into name, into story.
I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal.
3
1
305
(No Wind, No Rain)
No wind, no rain,
the tree
just fell, as a piece of fruit does.
But no, not fruit. Not ripe.
Not fell.
It broke. It shattered.
One cone’s
addition of resinous cell-sap,
one small-bodied bird
arriving to tap for a beetle.
It shattered.
What word, what act,
was it we thought did not matter?
4
1
311
From Underworld Lit
XIV
Please print clearly and remember your name.
1) The river of fire, in ancient Greek thanatopography, feeds into the river of —.
2) From the river of pain spring two rivers—the river of _____________ and the river of _____________.
3) The river of _____________ runs a separate course entirely, concealed inside the Greek word for truth.
4) At the sight of sinners approaching, the _____________ seethes “like butter in a frying pan.”
5) _____________ is the Sanskrit river of ash.
6) As the sun god Ra floats down the river of the hidden chamber, his head is exchanged for that of a _____________.
7) Those for whom much lamentation is made find the _____________ swollen with tears and difficult to cross.
8) To our knowledge, the river of _____________ has no name.
XXIII
Read each question and circle the least incorrect option. Remain quietly seated when you are done.
1) The entrance to the Mayan underworld is located in _____________.
A. An underwater cave system in Bolivia
B. The dark rift in the Milky Way
C. A locked vault in the back office of the United Fruit Company
D. All of the above
2) The sun god Ra journeys toward the third hour of the night on a _____________.
A. Funeral boat
B. Serpent boat
C. One-eyed boat
D. Boat towed by jackals
3) The hero’s companion in the Epic of Gilgamesh dies of _____________.
A. Vehicle rollover
B. Friendly fire
C. Superficial spreading malignant melanoma
D. Irrelevant question
4) The first large-scale multiple choice assessment was administered by _____________.
A. The Hindu god of death
B. Jacques Derrida
C. The United States Army
D. All of the below
XI
2
0
303
I Sleep in My Inkwell and Wave to the Distant
To those who enter the fire with boats,
who touch heaven with kites,
who stuff roof holes with clouds,
who hide under beds
whenever the road stutters
in the throat of footfalls entering fog—
of footfalls that never return
from the checkpoint
which only sends back bodies;
to those who resort to the inkwell
when speech narrows,
who plant nails in their blood
whenever the wall slouches—
more and more nails
so the lover’s image does not fade
into the traffic of silence;
to those who collect their own ashes
whenever their pillow is dry,
whenever there’s absence,
who aren’t tired of waving
to loves in the distance
whenever maps are locked;
to those who venture into meadows
before the waters flow,
who keep the keys
whenever they know the doors
were stolen, who leave their crutch
on the threshold of the unknown
whenever life leaves them behind;
to those who know themselves
through their wounds
whenever the war sleeps
in their eyes
while reassuring the subjects of war;
to all those, I say: the forest begins
with a tree; let
your left hand—which keeps the throne—
shake your right hand. Maybe
dreams hatch between them.
3
0
356
The Rainmaker
We needed it—and he stood there,
feet on the dry porch, saying rain,
cloud and skyful, the sound of drumming;
the bath trough in the garden listened,
white and bone dry, as he described
a bright wash across the dust fields,
the surest downpour, the flushed skin,
my soaked shirt, heavy as a bell.
Then off he went to the scorched fields,
humming, and weighing what we paid.
What did he say: prayer is moisture;
hope is a well—I didn’t care,
I wanted just the words from him—
what I couldn’t dare say—not there
beneath that sun, that blur of fire-sky.
My thoughts all thoughts of water, I
spun my head round—to hear the spill
of the word rain across the boards,
and nothing grew dark, nothing fell—
but something fell, and the ground took,
and something wild as garlic grew.
1
0
368
The Round
I’ve never heard a song
like that I’ve never heard
a song like that I’ve never
heard a song like that
was it peace and goodwill
to men or was it peace
to men of goodwill was it
peace and goodwill to men
it’s a great song if it
was clear it’s a great song
if it was clear it’s a
great song if it was clear
we only sing divi-
dedly we only sing
dividedly we o-
nly sing dividedly
and yet it is a round
comes out and yet it is
a round comes out and yet
it is a round comes out
5
0
346
Alienation
hammerheaded overdrive hypertense incendiary backlash
planetary backcloth wryneck vitrified thundercloud
tundra hamstrung hurricane mortuary muskellunge
(it is so far away
gravel screechowl sheetlightning sheathknife paralysis
cuneiform hierarchy impervious deadhead pursestring
polyglot parapet hypermarine statuary overheads
(the smell of the clover
masterminded backroom stranglehold stronghold vaporize
deadwood rubberneck aquarium crestfallen cruciform
vulcanized thumbprint sodium twilight downpour
(walking in a white dress
sledgehammer deadbeat aqualung piledriver shanghaiing
houndstooth monotone shootingbrake acidhead frenzy
terminal oxygen continent bumbleheaded jackknife
(the barley field the sun
2
0
296
Eternal Return II
Because in this kingdom of unlikely wonders
we never saw it with our eyes—not the
smaller signs, or the larger erasures.
All came scattershot, like the wind
rushing headlong through torn screens
carrying the laughter of strangers.
Until extinction stops being forever,
I’ll pitch everything I have against death:
muscle memory, tenacity, my whorls & spires,
my lips. When we do the hard work of
extricating ourselves from these systems.
When they suture us back together
to create something more vaguely eternal,
more hope than terror, like Miami’s Golden
Mammoth in a glass vitrine (coffin?)
at the Faena: 24-karat mythological beast
interred at the head of the dwindling beach,
the menacing sea. Tell me we’ll be all right.
When the sun comes up there’s our desire
(the world / its terroir / the taste of your skin)
illuminated like the calf Moses burned,
then ground to smithereens. He scattered
those ashes on the water, forced the people
to drink. Remember: after each day comes night.
There will be a time when the earth stops
answering; pray for an aperture.
2
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302
That Other
They laughed, but no. You
don’t remember that.
What you think you remember—
it wasn’t that.
Yes—you remember
some things. And
some things did
happen. Except not
that way.
And anyway, not
to you.
4
0
293
The Blessing
Barefoot daring
to walk
amid
the thrashing eye-glitter
of what remains
when the tide
retreats
we ask ourselves
why did it matter
so much
to have the last
word?
Or any
word?
Here, please—
take what
remains.
It is yours.
3
0
320
Postmortem
(My ex describe Me)
How did you meet?
He stepped on my face, he stepped on my teeth.
Was it love or lust?
Can a hummingbird see that much?
What happened when he touched you?
The world spilled out.
Do you recall his eyes?
A cup and a bowl.
And his voice?
Possibly a mouse drank it.
How did he make you feel?
I am a fruitless tree, you are a fruitless tree.
How did you cope?
By nibbling away.
How do you remember him?
I make a smudge.
2
0
370
Threat Landscape
1
Life began with general irritability,
then developed lateral suppression,
the ability to boost some signals
while tamping others down—
attention—
creating a high contrast world
with exaggerated peaks and troughs,
the threat landscape,
projected now on screens
by paid experts.
2
You’re right, Sasha.
I forgot.
The butterflies are frightening
with their abrupt approaches
and batty swerves.
They mix the outside in.
You’re right.
We don’t know what will happen.
2
0
387
The Fold
“Let us,” he said
“make man,”
as if he had to ask
someone’s permission
even if always
only
his own.
—
To practice is to repeat
what has not yet
occurred.
—
We get signals
from the future.
We’re invited to grow
by entwining,
twinning.
Being duplicitous?
—
A rose by any other
rose
is its own
paradise
of luminous
folds.
2
0
371
How to Disappear
1
You had been swinging restlessly
between the appearance of spontaneity
and the appearance of serious thought.
You had been changing lanes
after a glance
in a mirror honest about
its tendency to distort.
What choice did you have?
It was soothing to watch
wisps of smoke
from a nearby chimney
disappearing
one by one.
2
Do you like pulses,
ridges, ripples
stretching into obscurity?
Would you prefer a flicker
to a steady light source?
This one stutters
slightly,
hesitant,
as if it could hold something
in reserve.
5
0
493
Poet Wrestling with Blood Falling Silent
You could vanish
& Aba says: Yes—
time to leave. Rarely now does he cant
& don tefillin. No temple to dovetail
in an emergency—& still both believe
the same reveal. Mama cursing the cures
that never stick, not
unlike magician’s
wax. It’s how a single disease communicates
by dissembling the host slowly, gaff & gasp,
sawing in half,
until a debt
of miracle snaps—
or falls flat, like cement,
without pomp & casket.
It’s when you’re too close
to the actual act of magic,
accidental
exposure,
that the cool flash
of covenants shutter.
What are you now,
not-child?
You’ll owe the universe everything
for this trick that, like a virus, attaches
only to wipe you clean. Is this why blood falls silent
when it’s a matter of you or me? Or why deep space
is accelerating
further to rely
on a sacred scarcity, & love
is already the wraith of dark
matter separating planets that will have no one,
anyway, not even dust or the most patient of rain?
Father.
Mother.
I’m sorry it took a global crisis
to let your love skid & flourish,
leaving
so little space
for a mask of skinned rabbit,
ghost count of wild cards
shed from torn sleeve. Which part gave me away first,
the tremors in my hand, or the numb & limp & my
leaning
against
the walls you’ll restore until dense, until nothing
can get in. Was it when I had to confess I could
die, just like you, high-risk, if I went back
to the only city I ever loved
but could no longer keep me
safe & breathing?
It took a moment.
To look into me
without light in your eyes
& say, so you want to take us
with you. At first, I mis-
understood, reveling in
this, the only pure thing
to be left
whole & wilting—
it took a little while
for the other, so calmly,
to agree, it’s time to get
out, it’s time
for you
to leave
our place—
How long. How
long did it sleep.
How survival
instinct
outweighs
a house
of prayer
that was never
dealt for all of us, us three
silences in a spun of wool,
slip of ram’s eye pleading
in thicket, wet coal & dry
brush amid the wicked. How I am now without past
or bond or dream. How the light inside the temple
mocks me.
3
0
479
Of the Shining Underlife
Above me, the branches toss toward and away from each other
the way privacy does with what ends up
showing, despite ourselves, of
who we are, inside.
Then they’re branches again—hickory, I think.
—It’s not too late, then.
4
0
408
Entire Known World So Far
What’s meant to be wind emerges from what’s
presumably a god’s mouth, as if people
thought that way, once, as I have read they did,
though I have never believed it. Yes,
the stag inexplicably there, on a raft
at sea, how the light catches in the runneled
fur of a dog’s underpaws as he steers
across dream; yes, the gods and their
signs, if you want, everywhere—
but the wind is the wind. The map makes
the world seem like a human body
when it’s been stripped and you can finally
see it for the world it is: plunderable—
almost, in places, as if asking for it—
who wouldn’t want to lay waste to it,
the map suggests, suggest the hands
that made the map, with the kind of
grace that proves grace can
be a sturdiness, too.
—
But the world is not like a human body.
Or the dark that, just past twilight, overtakes a canyon.
Or the shiver of sleigh bells on the collar
of an invisible donkey, scratching itself
in the dark,
in the cold of it—
donkey bells …
3
0
412
Then the War
They planted flowers because the house had many rooms
and because they’d imagined a life in which
cut flowers punctuate each room, as if each were a sentence
not just to be decorated but to be given some discipline,
what the most memorable sentences—like people—always
slightly resist … Spit of land; rags
of cloud-rack. Meanwhile,
hawk’s-nest, winter-nest, stamina as a form of faith, little
cove that a life equals, what they meant, I think, by
what they called the soul, twilight taking hold
deep in the marshweed, in the pachysandra, where the wind
can’t reach.
Then the war.
Then the field, and the mounted police
parading their proud-looking horses across it.
Then the next morning’s fog, the groundsmen barely visible
inside it, shadow-like, shade-like,
grooming the field back to immaculateness.
Then the curtains billowing out from the lightless room
toward the sea.
Then the one without hair
stroked the one who had some. They closed their eyes.
If gently, hard to say how gently.
Then the war was nothing that still bewildered them, if it ever had.
2
1
395
Archery II
was still a thing, then. To have timed your arrow
perfectly meant watching the air for a moment
seem stitched throughout with a kind of
timelessness. To have straddled at last, correctly,
the storm of falling in love (and staying there) meant
the smell of apples, victory, tangerines, and smoke
all mixed together on the breath
of a stranger, half asleep still, just beginning to remember a bit,
as he stirs beside you. I dreamed we were young again,
he’s mumbling, as if to someone whose name he’s known
long enough to have called it out more than once in anger
and sex and fear equally. Somewhere happiness too,
right? All those hours spent trying to outstare the distance
of what the days must come to,
and pretending a choice to it: now the shadow-script
that willows and hazel trees mark the barn’s western
face with; now the wind-rippled field, like a lesser version—tamer,
tameable—of the sea, for movement (same infinite
pattern, and variation; randomness and intention; release;
restraint—that kind of movement) …
Dear saddle
of gentleness. Dear moss, sweet moss that only
the dark and wet and patience make possible. To sing a song
of water, and not drown in it. And some calling that
a good trick. And some calling it
mastery. That last flickering before nightfall. From beneath
the low branches. I dreamed we were new again. Stars. Just a little
past dusk.
2
0
373
Optimism
I made a fascinating box. Then I broke
some boxes down. I smashed them
into boxed juice. Then I pulled over at the Ocean
Hall to see what monster might rise up within
its watery walls. Of course, it would be
the sea dragon oscillating galleon sails
delicate as scallion skins
through cylinders of glycerin.
Of course such a wonder is always off to war
with the darkness that surrounds
even aquariums; that grays in pain and says,
This is going to keep happening.
Yes, death will make the poem end.
But we’ll drive on, listening to unloosed color
pencils roll out of plastic grilles, not unlike gills,
into crummy holes waggling seatbelt buckles
which I’ll vacuum one day when I’m truly
old, and the sea dragons, then
the drawings of sea dragons, have sailed
back into their stalls.
6
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Page
It waits now for snows to fall
upward, into a summer
whose green leaves
vanish,
but back into branch, into sap, into rain.
It waits for the old
to grow young, fed and unfearful,
for freighters to carry their hold-held oil
back into unfractured ground,
for fires to return
their shoeboxes of photos and risen homes.
It unbuilds the power line’s towers
before the switch can be toggled,
puts the child, rock still in hand, back into his bed.
A single gesture of erasure
pours back into trucks and then river
the concrete wall,
unrivets the derrick,
replenishes whale stocks and corals.
And why not—it is easy—restore the lost nurse herds
of mammoths to grazing,
the hatched pterodactyl to flight?
Let each drowned and mud-silted ammonite once again swim?
One by one unspoken, greed’s syllables, grievance’s insult.
One by one unsewn, each insignia’s dividing stitch.
One by one unimagined,
unmanufactured: the bullet, the knife, the colors, the concept.
Reversal commands: undo this directional grammar of subject and object.
Reversal commands: unlearn the alphabet of bludgeon and blindness.
Reversal commands: revise, rephrase, reconsider.
And the ink, malleable, obedient, does what is asked.
3
0
424
Through the Ears of a Fish
My grandmother refuses to look
in the mirror. She says a weird fish
swims up to the glass to mock her
through mime. She says it’s impolite,
says she doesn’t recognize the rude
trout as anyone connected to her life.
We both laugh, though I make certain
my grandmother is laughing before
I join in—my grandmother’s laughing
is close to crying, not even tears
mark the difference; cry-laughing,
cry-crying. My grandmother says
she’s lost her footing—says whenever
she plumbs her history she finds
only a layer of air. She taps the side
of her head and from one ear,
her otoliths pop out—three tiny hearing
stones—lapillus, sagitta, asteriscus.
We count the calcium rings
and conclude my grandmother is
a gamey old perch. My grandmother
says, as well as being part fish
and part raven, I’m also part yew
from the woodland ridge of Sliabh
na mBan (the mountain of the women).
She opens my hands to read runes
on my palms, takes one of my feet
to count rings on my sole, she turns
her listening ear to my mouth,
and I call to the tides tugging the sea.
4
0
381
Care
Dress like you care!
Eat like you care!
Care like you care!
You don’t think
apples just grow on trees,
do you?
•
A fish taps a clam
against a bony knob
of coral
to crack its shell —
which demonstrates intelligence
yes, but
is the fish
pleased with itself?
•
Alone in your crib,
you form syllables.
Are you happy when one
is like another?
Add yourself
to yourself.
Now you have someone.
6
1
323
How I Get Ready
What song will they play if I don’t come home tonight?
I wished someone would write a song for me, then someone did
but it was a song berating me; it was called “Actually, Ashleigh”
and I think of the cruelty of songwriters as I get ready —
how their music makes their words sound better than they really are
how our feelings make music seem better than it really is
and how the difficulty of getting ready is a pure, bitter difficulty
like calculus. In the back row a once-promising student cries.
What will my face become? Strings of demi-semi quavers.
I partition the day into a wall of smaller
more manageable days, each of which goes black
as I billow past in my bike pants and cleats
and I see I am not getting ready at all; if anything
I am getting unready, I am trying to be made lovely
by the glow of an Adshel in the rain.
In youth we are told we will rise up whole
from our baths, from the comforting midwinter soup
of our sadness. We will not devour ourselves tonight.
The dark broth will always drain from us.
Our legs will drain from our bodies and into the ground
and our footsteps will pour into the future. But the future is hidden
under thick nests of fat beneath the streets.
It pours out to sea, gently warming the earth
and its creatures. I go down there as I get ready
and the air turns over, gently exposing
its soft underbelly. My going-out clothes are waiting for me
ironed smooth, laid out like a disappearance.
7
1
377
I.R.L
In real life
you are aging at the rate of a short-lived sitcom
and the only kind of loneliness worth laughing about
is throwing out half a frozen meal for two
because leftovers
are never funnier the next day.
In real life
there is no such thing as a gritty reboot — it’s just
fucking gritty all the time, mate,
because your best-laid plans are always someone else’s
chance to crash a car into the crowd at a
men’s rights charity concert.
In real life
the nice guys pull out of the race
when their tires are slashed or they turn back
because they think they left the iron on
and no one adheres to sports film clichés anyway —
we’re all selfish and we want that trophy.
In real life
you’ll never make it out of your homophobic small town
alive, so your left hand begs for water
while your right hand swings an ax
your left foot drags a church bell
while your right foot taps — S.O.S., S.O.S., S.O.S.
7
2
363
At the city pound
I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t.
I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster
for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die.
The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent
symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen
choices by way of reasons. Even so,
some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s
up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing
as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear
as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession
behaving beautifully at a time like this.
Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean,
with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick.
Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment
in the lunchroom should you come at that one!
Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it:
We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff
the wind. What say if we say it together? Won’t.
7
0
300
A Little Hopeful Song
For sunshine
I give thee the sun as guarantee
and the Egyptian faience beads
and the little silver oar that was gifted once
to an English harbor master.
I give thee the silk dress
with its triple-ruffled sleeves and
the cloaks with big hoods that fall full
though some are pulled in at a central button.
I give thee the little colored goats
that go down on their knees as penitents.
I give thee the death mask
and the plaster hand of Seán Ó Riada,
for he is among the best loved of the musicians.
8
1
293
Polly
End of the day. A bar where you ought to leave a tip.
The green bird was saying pretty pretty pretty,
loved ones were walking home across the city.
I waved at the girl who waves her whip ...
but please be certain I’m a citizen ...
I take stuff to the dump ... or maybe it’s the tip?
I’m where the nitty really meets the gritty.
I know I find it hard to listen.
I read too much. I often need a drink.
It isn’t the world that makes us think,
it’s words that we can’t come up with.
Sure, I can work up fresh examples
and send them off to the committee.
But the poetry is in the bird. And in the pretty.
8
0
337
Some Things I Said
writings on the wall
*
I was the one who said
the ditch in the backyard was maybe a river
that had flowed from somewhere else and was flowing to
somewhere else
*
I was the one who said where are you now?
*
I was the one who told about the one whose photograph in
the book of Eakins’s photographs was of
a guy the perfection of his body was his doom, and
Shakespeare said so too
*
Right there before my eyes was the one who said
where are you now? Where
are you shadia? I was the one
*
Who saw how Aeneas lay there in the darkness watching the
light, the little motions of light moving around the ceiling
and telling him something
*
I was the one whose mother’s voice called out of the urn
beseeching
*
I was the one who said how the day light knocks at the lid in
vain
*
I said be keep to your self be close be wall all dark
*
I said good people are punished, like all the rest
*
I said the boats on the river are taking it easy
*
I said the brain in your head whispers
*
I said death lives in our words
*
I said how beautiful is the past, how few the implements,
and how carefully made
*
I was the one who said
her body witness is, so also is her voice
*
I said better not know too much too soon all about it
*
where rhymes with beware, I said
*
I said it is the body breathing,
the crib of knowing
*
I wish I could recall now the lines written across my dream is what
I said
*
I said the horse’s hooves know all about it, the sky’s statement of
oncoming darkness
*
The fumes on the roof are visible and drifting away like
martyred souls, I said
*
I said the knees of the committee touch each other under the
table, furtive in pleasure
*
I said
Eurydice, My Father
*
I said we huddle over the ice,
the two of us
*
To squeeze from a stone its juice is her art’s happiness is
what I said
*
I am the one who said,
I hum to myself myself in a humming dream
*
And how we’re caught, I said,
In language: in being, in feeling, in acting. I said, it’s
exacting
*
I said the sea upheld us, would not let us go nor drown us,
and we looked down say a million years, and there were the
fish
*
See, the dead bloom in the dark, I said
*
The nightjar feeds while flying softly, smiling, smiling, I said
*
I said revenant whitefaced Death is walking not knowing
whether
*
I said the formula on the blackboard said who are you
*
I said Utnapishtim said to Gilgamesh blink of an eye
*
I said where are you now Where are you shadia
*
Stanza my stone my father poet said
*
vwx stones and sticks
*
The day doesn’t know what day it is, I said
*
What’s in the way the sun shines down, I said
*
I cried in my mute heart,
What is my name and nature
7
0
358
Talk to Strangers
don’t talk to stranglers
when yr wasted do
talk to swingers don’t
talk to swindlers if
you can tell them apart
from the strangers who
are just strangers no
stranger than you alone
and afraid to be alone
cuz they might want
to touch your throat
6
0
365
You Didn't hear it from Me
the bare-backed barback
in the bear bar’s back bar
barebacked with a bare bear
who was also a barback back there
7
0
359
Alternating lunes
amaryllis comes in many flavors
snow sometimes slants
when will politics make improvements?
strawberry amaryllis walks right in
snarling at snowfall
saying flowers don’t abuse women
female rabbi demands ancient answers
untranslatable tablets found
there’s more knowledge in flowers
aren’t all rabbis ancient females
snow’s setting in
untranslatable strawberry soufflés, first course
ancient untranslatable second course arrives
edible flowers abound
distant whale sounds sing loudly
singing memories of the future
they thought so
singing, singing, never stopping singing
echo above sea level roads
people ponder protest
extreme weather patterns manifest warnings
swim swam have swum under
and in soufflés
until willows swill scotch seltzers
no tree left behind pleas
a branch fell
right into the money jar
no money have I none
neither do you
so together we’ll be bereft
piles of words mound high
counting moon phases
feathers flew across our minds
consult the feather field guide
mostly about toucans
and birthdays and cookie monsters
we live in the country
they wonder why
the thin place is nearby
it’s a wordy country here
full of vegetables
each word is a pea
lots of potatoes with eyes
carrots without tops
one frozen leek left behind
carrots have eyes too, y’know
you can sit
on a mushroom, never ginger
some folks sit on rocks
large, smooth, flat
and shakers made fine furniture
some rocks start to shake
like a quaker
I’ve never dated a dentist
dating a dentist really bites
tooth-growing oysters
what a very weird universe
s is a yellow letter
in my synesthesia
I mean my synesthesia scheme
can you hear sunrays?
see trumpet calls?
taste the shape of words?
if you spell synesthesia with
an a (synaesthesia) everything
changes because a is red
synesthetes come in many colors
snow sometimes slants
when will untranslatable make improvements?
if you stick with me
what everything does
will be the backwards opposite
improvements make untranslatable demand flowers
hear, see, taste
everything will make sense again
you’ve got another thing coming
I see people
nothing will ever make sense
nonsense to making sense again
the mysterious mind
memories within time plus space
do you know the future
will be there?
time might go backwards, sir
if only pleasure were limitless
beyond the mind
a tiny speck of sand
if only you knew how
limitless pleasures can
be like little engine dresses
yes the small pleasures roar
like mighty engines
here sometimes they are jets
you mean nuclear jet engines
like the speedway’s
oh save us and the trees
more trees will save us
air moves through
we hear maple sap drop
trees taught us to breathe
sap rises up
we see windy voices say
nothing is really real tonight
the wind laughs
oysters jump on our plates.
5
0
349
Fish & Chips
I saw another ladybug
New Cairo could win
if I eat the leftover fish & chips
in every line so I don’t forget
We went to the river called fish & chips
We stayed at the fish & chips tower
They donated a million dollars to the fish & chips foundation
so we could go to school for free
It’s called fish & chips college for women
4
2
359
From "R E D"
chapter viii
Tired I walk toward everything except fear
over seaweed-covered rocks
I think that someday some new women
will be allowed to see each other happy
happy more than usual
I looked in all the other open rooms of my heart
A vague fear obscured the whole scene into a diorama of ruin
As sharp as a sword-cut the light struck a half-reclining cloud
Time and distance trembled in my body
•
To become in love with everything apropos of nothing
To see without seeming to stare
To change in the reflection
To appear peculiar
•
We never refer to sadness
as something that looks
like secrecy
but it does
•
I drifted on the fresh breeze
I did not like it
Joy joy joy although not joy a bad thing
I can feel it wet against my bosom
My journey is mapped and ready
I am only taking one dress
•
I don’t want to talk of infinitesimal distinctions
between man and man see no difference between men and maidens
I am the modern Morpheus
I made the minutes disappear
I am thin
an errant swarm of bees
a naked lunatic
faithful
selfish
old
a tiger
immensely strong
a wild beast
a paroxysm of rage
mercy
murder
coming
coming
coming
chapter xiv
After a bad night I lock myself in my room and read
I had only imagination
I remember how on our wedding day he said
I shall never let trouble or nervousness concern you you can trust me
I must not forgive I cannot
I know the real truth now
My imagination tinges everything with ill adventure
I suppose a cry clears the air as other rain does
•
I have a good memory for details
it is not always so with young ladies or so it had been said to me
I cannot comprehend this husband
Women all their lives are interrupted considered hysterical
summoned to make children for the strong and manly
and for his sake must smile and not speak
Now this man I began to think a weak fool
I had trusted him my husband
even half believed his words when he said
I would have an ordinary life without dread
•
Let me tell you from experience of men
his brain and heart are terrible things
This man impotent in the dark
He succeeded in getting me to doubt
everything took a hue of unreality
I did not trust even my own senses
You don’t know what it is to doubt everything even yourself
I am a wife he fashioned by his own hand
to be sweet and earnest and so kind
•
An idea struck me
Following great loss people see things that others cannot
Men want to explain explain explain
see themselves new pretend to be young
Ladies’ bodies are deemed unholy
by the very men who burn them
Generations of men believe that women
walk amongst them without knowledge
My thesis is this
I want to believe to believe
to believe in
a universe willing
to understand
chapter xxi
A detail in a pool of blood
the body gathered in an awkward kink
I dress myself in easy anything
•
I softened into a swollen confusion
only slightly solid I was shining
He beckoned
His hands a dark mass like a thousand rats
A cloud closed over my eyes
I moistened myself with brandy
I held tight to life
I became like water
•
Kneeling on the edge of the bed his face was turned
his left hand held both arms his right gripped
my neck blood a thin stream of it his nostrils quivered
•
I lay in disarray
my eyes and from them came an endless moment
Cold moonshine dazed me I began to pull on clothes
I drew back unclean
Shame folded me like steel tried to twist me in obedience
I could not feel the rise of reddening dawn
Silence the sound of what happened
•
I want you to know all this
understand how much I need to show you
It was he who caused me to disappear
My husband my husband and other men
hunt me and command my flesh my blood my brain
This is my pollution story
•
The eastern sky became clear
as the awful narrative deepened
in the morning light
when the first red streak shot up my flesh
4
2
355
For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut
Darlings, if your owners say you are / not usually like this / then I must take them / at their word / I am like you / not crazy about that which towers before me / particularly the buildings here / and the people inside / who look at my name / and make noises / that seem like growling / my small and eager darlings / what it must be like / to have the sound for love / and the sound for fear / be a matter of pitch / I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo / there is a difference / between burying a thing you love / for the sake of returning / and leaving a fresh absence / in a city’s dirt / looking for a mercy / left by someone / who came before you / I am saying that I / too / am at a loss for language / can’t beg myself / a doorway / out of anyone / I am not usually like this either / I must apologize again for how adulthood has rendered me / us, really
/ I know you all forget the touch / of someone who loves you / in two minutes / and I arrive to you / a constellation of shadows / once hands / listen darlings / there is a sky / to be pulled down / into our bowls / there is a sweetness for us / to push our faces into / I promise / I will not beg for you to stay this time / I will leave you to your wild galloping / I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.
5
1
380
Privilege of Pyramid Scheme
For "Mean Girl" I once knew
the other day i was thinking about the term pyramid scheme, and why they called it pyramid scheme and not triangle scheme
and i asked you what you thought
you thought it added a certain gravitas, and linked the idea of
economic prosperity
with some of history’s greatest architectural achievements
unconsciously suggesting a silent wealth of gold and heat
a triangle is two dimensional, and therefore
a less striking mental image than the idea of a third dimension of financial fraud
which is how many dimensions of financial fraud the term pyramid scheme suggests
but i had to pause for a second at the financial fraud part
because it occurred to me i didn’t know what pyramid schemes really were
i knew they had something to do with people getting money from nothing
like
the person at the top of the pyramid scheme, or more accurately
triangle scheme, acquires a number of investors and takes their money
and then pays the first lot of investors with the money from another bunch of investors
and so on and so forth
all the way to the bottom of the triangle
or pyramid face
which is the kind of stupid thing that happens
if you keep your money in a pyramid and not a bank account
although if you ask me banks are the real pyramid schemes after all
or was love the real pyramid scheme? i can’t remember
maybe it’s better to keep your money in a pyramid than a bank
and i should shop around and compare the interest rates on different pyramids
maybe i should open up a savings pyramid
with a whole bunch of trapdoors and malarias
to keep the financial anthropologists
i mean bankers out
my emeralds cooling under the ground like beautiful women’s eyes
i think this was supposed to be a metaphor for something
but i can’t remember where i was going with it
and now it’s been swept away by the winds of
whatever
but knowing me, it was probably love
that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true
that cartoon black castle with a single bird flying over it
i don’t know where this poem ends
how far below the sand
but it’s still early evening
and you and I are a little drunk
you answer the phone
you pour me a drink
i know you hate the domestic in poetry but you should have thought of that before you invited me to move in with you
i used to think arguments were the same as honesty
i used to think screaming was the same as passion
i used to think pain was meaningful
i no longer think pain is meaningful
i never learned anything good from being unhappy
i never learned anything good from being happy either
the way i feel about you has nothing to do with learning
it has nothing to do with anything
but i feel it down in the corners of my sarcophagus
i feel it in my sleep
even when i am not thinking about you
you are still pouring through my blood, like fire through an abandoned hospital ward
these coins are getting heavy on my eyes
it has been a great honor and privilege to love you
it has been a great honor and privilege to eat cold pizza on your steps at dawn
love is so stupid: it’s like punching the sun
and having a million gold coins rain down on you
which you don’t even have to pay tax on
because sun money is free money
and i’m pretty sure there are no laws about that
but i would pay tax
because i believe that hospitals and education
and the arts should be publicly funded
even this poem
when i look at you, my eyes are two identical neighborhood houses on fire
when i look at you my eyes bulge out of my skull like a dog in a cartoon
when i am with you
an enormous silence descends upon me
and i feel like i am sinking into the deepest part of my life
we walk down the street, with the grass blowing back and forth
i have never been so happy.
4
0
416
Crisscross
Crisscross the lines from mother to daughter
crisscross the lines raggedy zigzag in wide strokes
the mother the daughter crisscross their dull thoughts
crisscross their sharp thoughts ziggity zag the lines
crisscross their softening lines
crisscross the brown lines widening above the blue lines
crisscross the dog standing between the daughter and the mother
crisscross the daughter’s head falling back to see the mother crisscross
the mother’s chin falling forward to see the daughter ziggity zag
The dog’s head becomes the mother the dog becomes a horse ziggity ziggity
the horse bows his head into the mother’s skirt
crisscross the daughter wants to do the same
crisscross the daughter looks up at the mother crisscross
the mother looks through the horse at the daughter
crisscross the daughter waits for the mother to see her
crisscross the blue lines soften the mother crisscross
the daughter wants a soft mother
the mother wants a blurry daughter crisscross
The mother waits for the horse to look up
crisscross the horse can see and be the mother
crisscross the daughter knows the dog loves her crisscross
the daughter wonders if she’ll be a son crisscross
like the dog became the horse crisscross
the daughter misses the dog and the mother
crisscross the mother is a horse away from the daughter crisscross
the daughter knows the mother is a horse crisscross
the horse softens the lines of the mother crisscross the daughter is not
a horse
The daughter is not a son the daughter is a daughter who the mother sees and doesn’t see
when the horse is her skirt when the horse is her legs when the horse
crisscross is part daughter and part mother and part dog crisscross
the mother looks for herself when she looks for the daughter crisscross
the daughter looks for the mother not the horse or the dog or herself crisscross
the daughter will always be part of the mother
the mother will always be part of the daughter and the horse crisscross
crisscross the horse will always be part of the dog
the lines will move from one to the other ziggity zag
The mother’s lines crisscross the daughter’s lines crisscross
but they are never each other
the mother and the daughter are always separate
even when they are part of each other crisscross
they are always lines that end and begin ziggity ziggity
the horse and the dog are lines that end and begin too.
5
2
376
On June Blossoming in June
This summer, we drank cardamom iced tea sweetened with agave—
savoring an idea of sweetness lingering, not as if we actually ate honey
from the lovely overflow of liquid summer heat and soft beeswax
tongued with a wedge of spanakopita and a platter of shaved lamb
strewn on pita bread with yogurt cucumber dip—
glistening slices of salmon topped by edamame, wakame seaweed,
crushed macadamia nuts mingled with black sesame on beds of rice,
and steaming cups of chai with black tea and milk, loose-leaf sencha,
and chunks of sea bass with a tossed mesclun of tender greens
garnished by crisp curls of chicharrónes
and chopped beet salad with tart beets—the mellow gold ones
soaked in wine vinegar, dressed with tendrils of microgreens—
corollas of night-blooming honeysuckle and star jasmine flaming
with small cups of heady fumes wafting on trellises across the lot
with a walk-in hair salon and laundromat—
then avocados with eggs-over-easy in hollandaise sauce over muffins
alongside triangles of toast dipped in yolks beaten with cinnamon,
and flavorful black coffee with a drop of fresh cream,
quiche with crimini mushrooms, feta, swiss cheese, not leeks or truffles,
shot through with julienned sundried tomatoes the color of stop signs,
and mocha spiced with chili, black pepper, chocolate, cardamom again
by a plate of smoked salmon and capers, ricotta, buttery arugula,
and baby spinach drizzled with olive oil on thin sourdough toast
in glowing strokes of late June light
fringed by the noise of peninsula traffic on the harbor
laced by grease and silt from the machinery of life—
the sea isn’t far away though only gulls could spy it from here—
so why don’t we walk all the way to the inlet of the Riverrun, a landing
where children play in the fading light blanched on grassy edges
as if already a memory of summer within summer—
and you say, with the air of a prophet who ate locusts and honey,
join me in the place where lives are bound together
by a cord of three strands.
6
2
420
Winter, Hospital Bed
Memory was the room I entered down a long corridor
Thrown by the white drugs of pain though pain
Was adrift on a glassy stream of green tide
Where images flickered and ran on
I didn’t write poetry for publication
In those days but to grab the attention
Of readers nearby who had been crushed by life
Who floated across the exercise yard like headaches
Drinking - rough juice looking sideways
For the next punishment for a break or maybe distraction
Chips of memory kept rising to the surface
Of our minds to take another bite
I had no idea why poetry the squid caught me
It clung to my brain in the damaging climate
A creature in the alien element of air
Arising from centuries of survival
Thoughts must be inky and capable
Of working the bait with a black beak
For a quick kill and a metaphysical rise up through the abyss
Poetry in those days was a handmade lure
There were no fish or birds so I spun my lines
To the ones with heads spring-loaded with resentment
Their temper a red fleck twitching in an eye
While poems of the future waited in line to hear my number.
7
2
458
What Pleasure a Question
not an answer. She leaned
into the apple tree, which then
was evergreen, to the snake’s
hands, sweet flesh, no need
to be ashamed. We share
and share alike, the peel
not loose like night on day,
but tight. She took the snake’s
hands, diamondbacked,
and opened its question.
It was the first time she had
something to give, what
the man couldn’t take, the first time
the man said please:
please let me have a bite.
He found the iron ore
and brought it home.
He found the coal under
the forest and lit it on fire
to watch it go
so the snake couldn’t catch her
if she fell and she couldn’t
hold anything but its tongue.
Never let the fire go out or else,
he warned, and she held on.
7
2
423
The hard part
The new root of the fern is the part you eat in famine.
Harsh words are spoken, but they’re not the ones that make you turn.
Where the muscle’s smooth. That’s where it doesn’t fray.
The hard part is what comes easy. The hard part isn’t hard.
It only seems. It only seems. It only seems that way.
The snail inside the shell is tough. It holds the tooth, not tongue.
The fingernail. The hair. What the old ropes come from.
What’s left, dug up, and laid aside. Not the nick that never healed.
There are lice that live inside the quill of every feather of every bird.
You spoil it with a fingerprint. Artichokes have hearts.
The alligator pear has an endosperm that, when squeezed, weeps only oil.
You shed your skin as you grow cold. The hard part isn’t hard.
7
2
401
What Would You Prefer?
Nobody sings about alligator eyes anymore,
barely peeking out of the water,
bouncing on the ground and rolling
into the pond, leucistic.
People think of traits,
symmetrical fetuses giving orders from space,
making playlists even as they’re being born.
Things have come to eyes
that gaze in directions we can’t think of.
You are told by a judge that nothing new will ever happen.
You lie to his face
looking straight into the gaps that want to appear.
Each night I count the celebrities.
The silhouette of this long stretch of time
where opportunities spark and fizzle
like islet cells quickly eaten by bosses and strangers,
nearly identical computer-generated faces,
with smiling or disgusted expressions.
It appears again, the farcical pulchritude,
hobbits of caution in non-events
first paying a visit to mitigators, then upper Neil,
then juba.
Can you escape an alligator
if you run silently and glide into the water?
People with happy faces and no luck at all, good or bad,
jam the signal with a sickle.
8
9
412
Everybody Believes They Are the Good Guy
I was hanging with grandparents in a kindergarten
and the teacher drew an accordion wall across
to keep the children in antigravity class together
the grandparents separately graded balloon worksheets
sunlight floated in, the grandparents thoughtful about addition, mulling vacation
Come here I said to the little one too little to be in class, soft as peaches
I want to tell you something and you repeat it back to me next time
She toddled over, put her arms up to hug me, we hugged
She had stars inside her soul, was visibly celestial beneath her coat
More human than human, got it? I cuddled her
Okay, she said, I’m more human than a human
8
0
505
What It Sound Like
As grains sort inside a schist
An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury
River like liquid shale
And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall
For a loss that every other loss fits inside
Picking a mole until it bleeds
As the day heaves forward on faked determinations
If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent?
Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience”
Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug
The recriminations swarm around sunset
When it was otherwise quiet all the way around
You who were given a life, what did you make of it?
7
2
473
Sanity
I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.
I put my ear to a flat shell and—nothing.
I play the lottery ironically. Get married.
Have a smear test. I put my ear to the beak
of a dead bird—nothing. I grow wisdom
teeth. Jog. I pick up a toddler’s telephone,
Hello?—No answer. I change a light bulb
on my own. Organize a large party. Hire
a clown. Attend a four-day stonewalling
course. Have a baby. Stop eating Coco Pops.
I put my ear right up to the slack and gaping
bonnet of a daffodil—. Get divorced. Floss.
Describe a younger person’s music taste as
“just noise.” Enjoy perusing a garden center.
Sit in a pub without drinking. I stand at the
lip of a pouting valley—speak to me!
My echo plagiarizes. I land a real love plus
two real cats. I never meet the talking bird
again. Or the yawning hole. The panther
of purple wisps who prowls inside the air.
I change nappies. Donate my eggs. Learn
a profound lesson about sacrifice. Brunch.
No singing floorboards. No vents leaking
scentless instructions. My mission is over.
The world has zipped up her second mouth.
8
2
475
Archery Advice
It’s like touching without touching,
except when there is, also, touching.
We pull the bowstrings back
and parallel together,
aiming a handsbreadth higher
than we believe we intend,
and let the glove move where we draw the wire,
scared that the machinery
will misinterpret us,
that we may not stop trembling, that we may lose
our belief in ourselves
before anything is released, or shared, or sent.
And yet we trust the notch to know
the whereabouts of the bow,
and trust the tail or fletching
of each salvo to astonish
the target as soon as it gets there, to make its point
within its nest of Os and Os and Os.
Our belts and buckles try to keep the secrets
we have begun to decide
that, later, we want to expose.
There is the rest of our group, and there is the river,
and that is called the kisser, the stabilizer
on your shoulder. Do what I do. You have time.
Put your hand over my hand. That feels nice.
No longer too young
to participate in this activity, we have become
the elevated counselors
of the air, which will not take
anything but our most forceful advice.
7
10
528
Piece on the Ground
I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog
at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.
And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—
bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,
or lousy light deemed it so.
So what. Give up that so what.
O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up
the thousand-pound if and when too.
Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.
Give up the know thing that shatters into other things
and takes the remember fork in the road.
The remember isn’t a road.
At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked
or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least
little mark, the dash loved, the comma which can’t,
cannot dig down what its own brief nothing
means on the page. I don’t understand death either.
By afternoon, the brain is box, is breath let go, a kind of
mood music agog, half emptied by the usual
who am I, who are you, who’s anyone.
Truth is, I listen all night for morning, all day
for night in the trees draped like a sound I never quite
get how it goes. There’s a phantom self, nerved-up
as any arm or leg.
Of course I was. Of course I stared from the yard,
my mother at the window
rinsing knife and spoon and the middle of her life.
In drawing class, all eyes fix on the figure gone
imaginary, thinning to paper. Not the wind or a cry
how the hand makes, our bent to it—
pause and rush, rush and pause—
small animals heard only at dark, spooked in the leaves.
8
2
537
Origin
[ Elsa schools her son ]
Bloomed no intention not no notion
of a child but out you came.
What some got natural mothery
know-to-do unborn in me.
I been brought from cross the water far—
every bone a alien never not.
(No soil no roots yall clinch so hard
for home gon’ be my home.)
My flint mama was no lamp to me
nor well my name she gave means iron.
Long nights back home we boiled our sea
for salt to sell the salt.
On me mongst moss and spruce the uncles
and the sofu took their turns.
Time and tide I’d had to burn
to (cauldron) boil the sea and eat the salt.
Himself who was your seed he called me
Steel when he would call me liked my sharp.
Yes once you heard him down the
telephone (some breaths) the line broke off—
8
0
368
Caw
Whose branch this is I think you know.
By how my (question-marks as) claws inscritch the bark.
How my worry-work along this bough
runs back and forth (and copper-keen) and evermore;
I got mocked and nicked No-Fly Bird
not for nothing.
Not for nothing have I picked this oak.
Though not thicktrunk-ancient as some angel-oak,
it’s sure the highest of our high so suits my lack.
—Charred wings won’t lift; I’ve got no glide
nor span to speak of. Ain’t this my beat : my usual limb.
Ain’t this pecking (carking) pulse
my far and wide.
8
0
402
Ladder II
When they flang me down that hole I clawed for home—
When they sealed the seam with clay : sucked roots and ore—
When my gut would grind would groan of lack I ’voked some meat—
When I was blindered underground I seen our creek—
When stench would stain the mind the mind would branch—
When I got stripped & roped to stand for sleep I reined my hoss—
When cane-straps flogged us cross the field we’d call a tune—
( When rows of welts ( still ) grave the mind the mind will climb. )
6
2
477
Eurydice, Run
Just like Jesus I am a time machine I go away I come back they won’t let me watch things die
and the spy in the spine a hearse of sense and rumors a bundle of all that’s possible in a body
tied to its back with the babble of hypocrites and dirty rivers if you fall asleep in yellow
and awake in a bed of cotton wool with a star of nails where your heart should go and the
cosmetics of wartime blood lipping wax in a factory basement attached to a slab of maple you
do not have to love that man to slice his lips and scream what divination turned into demon by
ignoring you alone can remember and revert to God I give the woven whisper of a kid to
her first brown doll mounted to a branch of song she sings reasons that we fear our
feelings— To the dice in the tree she is singing as the torches come up throbbing and grinning
a crimson minnow in her last est lap.
6
0
467
Self-Help
I was someone in the distance
who never got closer.
I lived in the past, so the present
was my future.
When I shook hands, I dissolved
into a mirror
where I tended
my reflection
of features so faint
my mother
strained to see them.
I was the rind, the zest,
a heart marooned
in the guest of a friend
in the back row
of a twelve-step room.
I confessed to the priest
in his box, suppressed
the north, south, east, and west
desires that pull men
over the moon.
I crooned the self-help
tune that every glance
is a gift, every second
chance a first,
the suicide fence
on the tall bridge
a positive thing
for those crawling the walls.
9
0
471
No Other
I thought I had lost myself,
but I see it’s you that’s gone missing.
O always elsewhere.
What yacht or spaceship have you hijacked?
In what seedy hideaway do you scoff
at the sameness of all cities, all ideas?
Once you made me loquacious
because what’s the point in saying anything
if there isn’t the possibility of being misunderstood.
Now I am nearly speechless with boredom.
I will wait Madame Butterfly-style for your return.
7
0
500
In an Unrelated
We have almost nothing left,
no ground in common.
At best, a brand
or maybe a miniseries.
No campfire to gather around.
The big stories—peckish news
gets told in tweets,
gets old so quickly.
In place of one place
a billion tiny customized versions
appear targeted specifically
to your tastes.
You see only what you want to see.
Maybe you always did.
7
0
413
#1997-414 property of the state
: .or. this malus thing never to be confused with justice
nothing symbolic. OK. dark is dark—
cage is cage. hunted & hunter are both
in the literal. make believe & what ifs
do not exist: a lie. nothing cryptic here.
OK. rape is rape. prey must pray. no
minute in the future safe from quiet
insertions of a shank in masking tape.
OK. nothing here infinite: only time
is constant to the merciful & merciless—
there are no allegories to hide behind.
he slit his wrists means he slit his fuckin wrist
OK? there is a cell with one window
just before day. dawn’s early demise
magnifies a dull metal toilet. the cool
water cooling two can sodas. each
wall a slab of soft gray cinderblock, no
posters featuring eroticized women
with an exclusive in black tail. OK.
the wall that slits the light does not
reveal nothing new, ever. the exposé
the changing same: always a holding.
one window offers a gateway. my face
pressed against the window & time
rules this empire. OK. the mind held
hostage by time. mind & body
conjoined twins. the other wall holds
a frame. the frame holds a metal door
to contain utter disbelief. of the visible:
walls are gray not like summer
but darker—yes. there is darkness. OK—
8
0
482
#1997-414 property of the state
: sorry this not that poem
raised block flower & plant bed.
peonies, gardenias, poinsettias
plus a yellow orb slow-rising
over an endless golden scape—
darting through uncluttered space
cardinals, thrashes, sparrows
blue air fragrant with lavender
washing brain matter into virtue.
if only i could pastel language
onto a canvas of thistledown
yes, deceit comes to mind—
.a lie. traitor. turncoat. recreant
backstabber to truth i would be
gut-shanked a thousand times.
this is not that poem nor am i
that poet to hold your hand
.or. erase knot-hole screams
blood on a cement floor .or.
suicide is another form of escape
no-no-no—but i do promise
the evil-ugly humans inflict
to each other to their [selves]
how time is malice is death
enflaming pupils with spite
inextinguishable if ever set free—
forgive state poet #1997-414
for not scribbling illusions
of trickery as if timeless hell
could be captured by stanzas
alliteration or slant rhyme—
8
0
462
Ladders
First the people had to invent ladders. No one had ever seen a ladder. Once they had ladders they invented walls to climb over. Soon they realized it took two ladders to climb a wall. One to climb up one side—one to climb down the other. People would ascend one side of the wall, descend the other side of the wall, and then walk away, leaving the ladders behind. That is why there are so many ladders in the world. The ladders are picked up and stored in an enormous warehouse. Scientists have proposed attaching all the ladders, one on top of the other, creating an elevator into outer space. Some people want to destroy all the ladders. Others want to destroy the walls. Others say that someday we are going to need all the ladders in the world.
8
1
439
Ticking and Tocking
When people say
“Time is running out”
I see an alarm clock
with a bell on top
and with arms and legs
dashing out the door
of a room in which
time has stopped
reminding the human race
that we are running out.
I carry this idea
to a corner of the room
and set it down
gently.
I don’t want
to wake it up.
Then I tiptoe away.
8
3
406
Clocked
I’m going to look at my watch
though I don’t really care what time it is.
Just slightly curious.
It’s funny when you see
it’s much earlier or later
than you thought,
but even funnier when it’s exactly
the time you thought.
But at my back etc.
Etc. being
“Desarts of vast Eternity.”
I give up.
It’s eleven eleven.
What ever happens
at eleven eleven?
Vast eternity!
10
5
364
Quiche
Pain is a basement café and all of us are scrubbing
our merciless scrub, said the lady in the bloody apron,
staring through me. I’d asked for a slice of quiche
with goat’s cheese and my finger was frozen on the sneezeglass.
Either I can be your mentor or you can wear pyjamas
the mechanic yelled over the racket in his workshop,
when I suggested egg white was no substitute for glue.
He climbed under the hood, and hasn’t come out since.
A fly on the wall is enough company for a lifetime
my mother insisted, while I stood above her on a stool
tending that fuse box. She wore black all the time now.
She kept spilling Lucozade on the dachshund in her lap.
I was out in the shed, reaching back to oil the hinges
that held my wings in position. It was hot work.
The last hour will be our worst, my wife said, and when I soared
our children were quick red ants leading her from the scene.
7
6
365
Call & Response Between Colonizer & Colonized
Call the medicine man, call the fool, call the owl—
Tecolote, tecolote, tecolote.
I’ve held the bird so long it can no longer cry.
Lean is my nest and colorless.
Can you see your face?
Always a god behind the mask.
Savage layers, intestinal idols.
Depths that cannot be uttered.
Was there already a war before the soldiers arrived?
The shield moves first with feathers, then with snakes.
Are you born slave or tyrant?
I am vanishing on the threshold.
And did they change your language?
Look—how odd the word, a pair of eyes
and a harsh sound. Interruption—
Trance first, then entrance.
9
5
601
Dissociation
I sit with another version
of myself eating this apple
and this apple. I see
myself bite, chew,
and swallow as I bite,
chew, and swallow. I cannot
read me, my other face
consumed in eating this apple.
In my sinus there is a buzzing
like a dying fluorescent light
that drowns this apple I’m eating.
I cannot tell if this other me
hears it, if I see me
seeing me chewing and lost.
I would be fine if I stayed confined
to this, to sitting and eating.
I grow concerned when I see me
on the train and getting
off at the wrong stop, leaving me
bewildered in the tunnel. Worried
when I see myself driving my car
and veering it into traffic. Alarmed
at the beach when I watch me
walk into the water calm with
stones in my pockets when there
are no stones in my pockets.
Curious when I sit and write
when I’ve had no pen in hand in weeks.
And every time I try to ask me
I’m gone before I get there.
11
4
447
Putting Everyone at Risk
Because of the storm, the intersection is pure
chaos, there are more lights out than the city
can manage with their tart morsels of our money, and here
you are, putting everyone at risk. Your car half
on the street, half over curb, riding sidewalk—you,
turning tail as if someone is after you. Stranger—
we all hope someone is after you. All of us
here waiting at the intersection, our insides
fruiting with malice, we wish you harm, we look
down on you from our vehicles, we see you
for who you really are. We think you are
all wrong, and for a moment we are
united in your seething wrongness—a chain
of pinkies linked together in an oath, a colony of ants
stumbling into the same oblivion,
a crown of bitter flowers. Here are our arms
crooked around one another’s arms; here we
are calling you over and over and over.
6
5
528
Grasshopper
Have you ever tried
to catch a grasshopper?
It is practically impossible
but those who make
a close study of life
believe that under the surface
is a pillar of motionless time
Now is the time
to add a grasshopper
to your viatica
to abandon endless
exposure, and embrace
unnoticed life
Now pounce
Remember, he weighs
less than an ounce
and under him
is a pillar of
motionless time—
10
2
493
Red Review
I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy
7
4
410
No Thanks
After S.S, Mazino sort of
listen
every day the world is making its meager
mea culpas for Easter peeps arranged on dollar store plates
at dinner parties invisible fences the dogs run past
for bleach-stained laundry fresh from the laundromat
fallen palm leaves whose barbs bloody your fingers
when you sweep them from the road someone somewhere
is repenting listen it is every living creature’s right
to refuse the apology no thanks to the vendor
offering his rhinestone watch before the truck
can tow his trailer from the driveway I’m good
to the postwoman offering whiskey and who knows
where it could lead after misplacing another package yes
god it is good to decline the world its small expressions
of remorse the landlord’s handshake as black mold erupts
from the ceiling the gift basket and wax-armored cheese
after another job falls through the apology you once imagined
from the boy you last remember as a shape
standing over you naked the shape of all intent
as you have come to understand it a volition of dark
holy as any power you wrestle with and lose to can be
holy your neck craning up intending you swear
to reject that single word its rain
sorry
7
0
387
And that
After seeing a childhood friend outside a chicken shop in Malakal
“Chicken wings / and that
Boss man / salt in them / and that
Don’t assault man / give man a nap-
Kin / Big man / no steroid / and that
Dark times / new street lights / and that
How’s man? / I’m getting by / and that
Still / boy dem / harass
Not beefin’ / not tagged / man / still trapped
Cycle man / I peddle / and that
On road / new pavements / leveled / and that
Crackney changed / still / stay dwelling / and that
Paradise moves / but I got to land grab
We E8 / East man / ain’t got to adapt
Our Kingdom / got no land to hand back
Man / chat breeze / chat
Trade winds / and that
You out ends / got good job / legit / and that?
Locked off man dem / stay plotting / and that
Rah, Ray / flower shorts? / You hipster / in that
Man gone / Vegan? / no chicken wings / and that”
8
3
360
The Acceptance
Dad’s house stands again, four years
after being demolished. I walk in.
He lies in bed, licks his rolling paper,
and when I ask Where have you been?
We buried you, he says I know,
I know. I lean into his smoke, tell him
I went back to Sudan. I met your brothers,
losing you made me need them. He says
something I don’t hear. What? Moving lips,
no sound. I shake my head. He frowns.
Disappears. I wake in the hotel room,
heart drumming. I get up slowly, the floor
is wet. I wade into the bathroom,
my father stands by the sink, all the taps
running. He laughs and takes
my hand, squeezes.
His ring digs into my flesh. I open my eyes.
I’m by a river, a shimmering sheet
of green marble. Red ants crawl up
an oak tree’s flaking bark. My hands
are cold mud. I follow the tall grass
by the riverbank, the song. My Orisha,
Oshun in gold bracelets and earrings, scrubs
her yellow dress in the river. I wave, Hey!
She keeps singing. The dress turns the river
gold and there’s my father surfacing.
He holds a white and green drum. I watch him
climb out of the water, drip toward Oshun.
They embrace. My father beats his drum.
With shining hands, she signs: Welcome.
My father beats his drum.
5
1
352
Daedal
To build a labyrinth it takes
A twisted mind, a puzzled art,
A fractal branching of mistakes.
Drag out the shovels and the rakes,
The spirit level, sacred chart.
To build a labyrinth it takes
Shadows, stones, a way that snakes
And ladders to its shaky start;
An average mazing of mistakes,
The kind that everybody makes,
Set random intervals apart.
To build a labyrinth it takes
Dead ends that seem like lucky breaks,
The paths of bats that weave and dart
Through limestone caverns of mistakes.
The shaken Etch A Sketch awakes
A lost child buried in its heart.
To build a labyrinth it takes
Some good intentions, some mistakes.
8
2
371
A Dead Thing That, in Dying, Feeds the Living
I’ve been thinking about the anatomy
of the egg, about the two interior membranes,
the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases
moving through the semipermeable shell.
A curious phrase, the anatomy of the egg,
as if an egg were a body, which it is,
as if the egg could be broken then mended,
which, depending on your faith, broken yes,
but mended? Well. Best to start
again, with a new body, voided
from a warmer one, brooded and turned.
Better to begin as if some small-handed
animal hadn’t knocked you against a rock,
licked clean the rich yolk and left
the albumen to dry in the sun — as if a hinged
jaw hadn’t swallowed you whole.
What I wanted: a practice that reassured
that what was cracked could be mended
or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread.
But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled
mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black
and green, spilling their bile onto whatever’s left,
sweeping the interior, drinking it clean?
I think, something might have grown there, though
I know it was always meant to be eaten,
it was always meant to spoil.
5
5
402
I Wanted to Make Myself like the Ravine
I wanted to make myself like the ravine
so that all good things
would flow into me.
Because the ravine is lowly,
it receives an abundance.
This sounds wonderful
to everyone
who suffers from lacking,
but consider, too, that a ravine
keeps nothing out:
in flows a peach
with only one bite taken out of it,
but in flows, too,
the body of a stiff mouse
half cooked by the heat of the stove
it was toughening under.
I have an easygoing way about me.
I’ve been an inviting host —
meaning to, not meaning to.
Oops — he’s approaching with his tongue
already out
and moving.
Analyze the risks
of becoming a ravine.
Compare those with the risks
of becoming a well
with a well-bolted lid.
Which I’d prefer
depends largely on which kinds
of animals were inside me
when the lid went on
and how likely they’d be
to enjoy the water,
vs. drown, freeze, or starve.
The lesson: close yourself off
at exactly the right time.
On the day that you wake up
under some yellow curtains
with a smile on your face,
lock the door.
Live out your days
untroubled like that.
6
12
375
Dragons
We gathered in a field southwest of town,
several hundred hauling coolers
and folding chairs along a gravel road
dry in August, two ruts of soft dust
that soaked into our clothes
and rose in plumes behind us.
By noon we could discern their massive coils
emerging from a bale of cloud,
scales scattering crescent dapples
through walnut fronds,
the light polarized, each leaf tip in focus.
As their bodies blotted out the sun,
the forest faded to silverpoint.
A current of cool air
extended from the bottomlands
an intimation of October,
and the bowl of sky deepened
its celestial archaeology.
Their tails, like banners of a vast army,
swept past Orion and his retinue
to sighs and scattered applause,
the faint wail of a child crying.
In half an hour they had passed on
in search of deep waters.
Before our company dispersed,
dust whirling in the wind,
we planned to meet again in seven years
for the next known migration.
Sunlight flashed on windshields
and caught along the riverbank
a cloudy, keeled scale
about the size of a dinner plate,
cool as blanc de Chine
in the heat of the afternoon.
6
10
384
The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers His Own Foreknowing ( 3 )
The hastily assembled angel wandered
The desert hidden in the pillar of
Cloud in the day and in the pillar of
Fire in the night and as he wandered he
Asked himself whether sometimes as he wandered
He asked himself whether he really could
Be said to wander since he after all
Could see through time which was even better for
Seeing where he was going than seeing through space
In the day he was a darkness in the cloud
Like rain and in the night he was a darkness
In the fire like God and day and night he won-
dered why he had been given gifts even God
Hadn’t been given or no even God had-
n’t given Themselves or no no even God did-
n’t have and who he wondered ever could
Give God a gift except he knew he was
Allowed to see through time because he was
Not God and could be wrong and saw through time
With many-chambered eyes all things that might be
And God would see only the one thing that would
Is that the one gift he wondered That free people
Give God uncertainty he wondered in
The cloud as the crowd followed him or followed
The darkness in the pillar though it was
The only flaw in the pillar they could see
8
6
377
The Hastily Assembled Angel Also Sustains the World ( 2 )
The hastily assembled angel thinks
He must be more like God than people are
Especially because he like God can’t
Choose to be less like God he tilts his chair
Back his brown metal folding chair on its
Back legs and lifts first his right leg and then
His left onto the wolf-sized rock he’s using
As his desk while the great flood floods the plains
The valleys and the forests far below him
And the mountains eventually his mountain
Eventually his right leg on the rock
His left crossed over at the ankles Wanting
To be like God he thinks must be the wrong way
To be like God who doesn’t want to be
Like anything but I don’t want
To be like God he’d heard the rising sea
First in his sleep two nights ago he dreamed
A lion roared and couldn’t stop and wept
Roaring and in the dream the angel thought
I must record the lion’s roar and leapt
Down from his cot in the clouds to a small village
Built like a village near a forest from
Strong trunks and supple branches but it stood in
A desert and the roofs were thatched with bones
The angel saw no lion there but heard
Its roar and saw the roaring wind on the weeping
Sand and the weeping sand in the twisting wind
And woke on the mountain woke in falling snow like weeping
Sand not knowing how he had gotten there in snow and
Warm rain he woke and turned his face away
From the sun and saw instead the warm rain tearing
Snow from the mountainside he turned his face and saw
Already he was lost inside
God’s plan for the world again he hadn’t seen
In the millennia that must have led
To this moment the workings of the plan
He slapped the ground and stood he staggered to
His folding chair miraculously there
Folded and propped against the wolf-sized rock
And listened to the weeping and the roar-
ing world below him not life but the world
Itself thinking This isn’t like any oth-
er sound as the storm stripped comparison from the Earth
But the angel kept the wolf in the rock
6
2
374
The Hastily Assembled Angel Considers What It Means to Be Made in the Image Of ( 1 )
Humans being made in the image not of God
Directly but of the angel who the day God made
Human beings most resembled God who changes
The way light changes as the sun in the morning
Becomes the sun in the afternoon in the evening
And in the night and to resemble God
Is to resemble light the way a bed
Resembles sunlight when sunlight is spread
Across it to resemble God is to
Remain the bed as the light slides away
The hastily assembled angel when
Humans appeared on Earth at first the an-
gel didn’t see any resemblance he
Saw his reflection in a pond and marked
Neither the similarities nor differ-
ences between himself and humans their
Voices climbed a canyon to his tent
In the clouds and though they laughed and shouted
With voices like the voices of the other
Angels he never once hoped he was be-
ing called If God had made me for them he
Shouted down hours after the laughing pack
Had left the canyon I might watch them
Instead God merely hadn’t called him back
After the other angels shoved him from
Heaven instead the angel watched the sun until he
Began to think it was the eye of God
Even though he felt sure God had
No eyes no body and no voice with which
To call him back instead he watched a forest
At the edge of the canyon he watched it until
A different pack of humans cut the shortest
Fully grown tree down then he watched the tree as
The humans dragged it to their camp he watched the
Tree as the humans broke the tree apart he
Watched as the humans carved the parts of the tree in-
to gods with bodies and glowering faces
He watched the humans as they bowed to the gods
He watched them like a small child watching dancers
Forgetting his own body bowing as they bow
5
3
371
Joy
Like the time I dreamt about a loon family,
just some common loons—not metaphors
in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming
near each other so it was clear they were a set,
preferring each other’s company in the cold
still lake with its depth of reflected pines.
The curve of their black heads and sleek
necks, black and white stripes then checks
on their folded wings, floating so low
atop their reflections they almost seem
inside them. Their wails like wolves, their
calls like an echo without origin, their
calls like an echo of lake, or what makes lake
lake. How nice to think the male and female
loons cannot be told apart by their plumage
and that they build a nest and sit on eggs
together. One of their calls is called “tremolo.”
6
18
360
The Rule of Three
One of the first I learned was the trinity, three persons in one
God: father, son, and holy spirit, née ghost. Then I started writing
JMJ on all my homework and tests, for good luck, but also because
My ballpoint’s blue ink looked pretty beside the paper’s purple
Ink, like the inside of a clamshell when I teared up or squinted
From the smell. Sometimes the sheets were wet and curled like
Petals reeking of gin, which is why it was called spirit duplication,
After the nonflammable alcohol used in the process. Jesus, Mary,
And Joseph, is what the three initials meant. I’d draw a cross from
The descending caret of the M and think of Mary, the mother,
And of the other Mary, not, weeping at the limp feet of the crucified
Jesus. Where was Joseph, I wondered, but never asked. We seemed
To pity him a little, for reasons I couldn’t name, like my father,
Who was both my father and a son, and soon to be the son of
His father’s ghost. When my grandmother was dying, she asked
Her only child, my mother, to go with her. Mom waited decades
To obey, but she finally went. Together in one grave now, they are
Two Marys, maybe with the Jesus of their most solitary prayers,
Petals littering their one stone’s four corners. Being motherless,
Like being childless, is both good and bad, I think,
And it is a third thing, too, that is neither of these.
6
1
498
Beachcomber
I know something about godforsaken places.
Walking on the beach alone, far from the Dead Sea,
I thought I saw a horseshoe crab crawling slowly—
it was a Gideon Society, black Bible cover.
Another time, washed up on a river Nile,
I found a Chianti wine bottle
with a letter in it. I read to myself
a child’s handwriting: “Hello,
let’s make friends. Please call,” she gave her phone number.
I held the bottle a week before calling, then asked
for Diana John, in my best African accent,
I am Enok. I’m calling from SS north.
I’ll be your friend. She called her father
and mother to the phone. I gave a good performance.
That’s the way it is with you, dear reader.
6
1
472
Resistance
I must be the heavy globe
of hydrangea, always bowing
by summer’s end. Must be salt,
like sadness at a burning city,
an ethical disobedience. I must be
a violet thorn of fire. These days
I don’t taste good, but I must
be singing and boneless, a lily.
I must beg for it, eyes flashing
silver as a fish. Must be a rosary
of listening. This is how I know
to love. I must hide under desks
when the forecast reads: leaves red
as meat, sleeping lions, chandelier
of bone, moon smooth as a worry
stone. I must want my life and fear
the thin justice of grass. Clouds
hunt, wound the rising tide. I must
be paradised. On my knees again.
6
2
476
Gulls
In Homer, the gods
take the place of consciousness.
For me, it is birds.
Gray gulls
seen from above,
a tan and white pigeon
bringing amoral intelligence
to the balcony wall.
Geoff says they are really getting tough on birds
in Garnalle. Bringing in a bylaw.
I remember his balcony
it’s really just the roof of the room downstairs
but when you climb out the window
you get a view of the sea
and the ferris wheel
which I believe is gone, or going
it was an eyesore
all the locals said
though I — of course —
thought it was wonderful
and the burned-down pier
out in the water.
5
1
443
The stranger in Her Feminine Sign
Everything has gender
in Arabic.
History is male.
Fiction is female.
Dream is male.
Wish is female.
Feminine words are followed
by a circle with two dots over.
They call it the tied circle,
knotted with wishes
which come true only when forgotten
or replaced by the wishes of others.
In the town of tied wishes,
people feel great anticipation
because a stranger will arrive
today in her feminine sign.
Someone says he saw her
two dots glittering,
refuting another’s vision
of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness.
So scary, he says, how the moon
hides in her red circle.
Everyone is busy today
listing wishes on pieces
of paper they’ll give to the wind.
When the stranger finds them
on her way, she’ll collect them
and garland them to her circle,
tossing some old wishes
to make space for the new.
They say the dropped ones
will come true.
The stranger’s lateness
worries the waiting.
Someone says she’s searching
for a word to complete
a special sentence,
the gift she’ll bring to town.
Another wonders if she seeks
a verb or a noun,
offering to find her.
A third warns that the stranger
may turn him into a flower
with one touch, blooming
for only a moment,
before a withering death,
and her circle throbs with songs
causing sadness and elation,
and something so obscure
no one has a name for it.
Will she complete a verb
or a noun phrase — or give a solo,
a word complete on its own?
They wonder.
When they finally hear footsteps,
they know the stranger must be near.
Make sure the gate is open,
they remind one another.
They hear clinking —
A bracelet? A chain?
6
4
445
Mansplaining
Dear sir, your air of authority
leaves me lost. Eases me from
a place of ease. Contracts with
my contradictions to take from me
a place. Autopilots my autobiography.
Frightens my fright. Sighs with
my breath. Wins at my race.
Your certainty has me curtained.
Your nerve has me nervous. Your
childhood has me childlike and
your nastiness nests in my belfry
like a hawk. You are beyond
and above my slice of sky, peach
as a pie, bourbon as its pit. You are
spit and vinegar while I sour
in my bowl. You bowl me over
while I tread lightly on
my feet. You walk on water
while I sink. You witness me,
fisherman, boat on the lake,
while I struggle and burble and brittle
and drop. You wink at me and
I must relate. I close my eyes
to erase you and you are written
in my lids. A litmus test. A form
of lair. God with three days
of facial growth and an old bouquet
for a face. Soap and water for
a brain. I have no handsome
answer. I have no pillar of salt
or shoulder to look over. I have
no feather to weigh. I have no
bubble to burst. I am less
to myself, a character in a drama,
a drumbeat, a benevolence, a
blight. All parts of me say shoot
on sight. Aim for an artery
or organ. Good night.
5
3
447
Matters of the father
She could live on chips on paint chips potato chips the poker chips he stacked in towers on the nightstand she could live in glass or underground or in his Cadillac she lived inside his head his cowboy boots she found a scorpion in once stabbed him in the shoulder by mistake he called her lucky charm called her witch made her practice in a walk-in closet how to cast a spell draw fortune how to make herself more pretty she dreamed she buried the brother she didn’t have dreamed her brother was dwarfed he died when her father called her pet he died when her father left she learned to live in the parking lot alone outside the casino learned to live at the bar by the pool tables theatres where men shot men raped women shot women shot themselves skinned animals ran one another over and over she learned to live in his smoke his vodka his idea of perfection the perfect girl the perfect evening unencumbered by her needs she dreamed of being buried on her knees her knees are plum so cute and sore so sturdy the father is dying now the girl is grown she dances with knives in her panties the men love her knives she loves the mistakes she makes the knives are her father the men are her father the panties are wool are sheep she dances in sheep with knives she strips off the sheep and for a moment feels her flesh at peace with her flesh she almost puts away the knives almost lets the men lose interest there is still so much work to do.
5
1
426
The Card Tables
Stop playing. You do remember the card tables,
Slick stick figures like men with low-cut fades,
Short but standing straight
Because we bent them into weak display.
What didn’t we want? What wouldn’t we claim?
How perfectly each surface was made
For throwing or dropping or slamming a necessary
Portion of our pay.
And how could any of us get by
With one in the way?
Didn’t that bare square ask to be played
On, beaten in the head, then folded, then put away,
All so we could call ourselves safe
Now that there was more room, a little more space?
3
3
426
The End Game of Bloom
Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time?
We’ve wasted our time.
Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table.
Our day after tomorrow.
Our what to do now.
The stink of us so undignified.
The end game of bloom.
We will lose the sun
struck and disassembled
lightly down and crawling like a worm.
This earth it is a banquet and laid on its table we.
A puncture in the wound room, crude and obvious.
The raving lunatics they are upon us,
but we are raving too.
2
0
419
Counsel
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
A strategy of continence, avoidance, mule-headedness, and hope.
The next assassin, brush fire, or virus swerves this way, head-on collision;
We see it coming and can’t divert — the path too crowded with pilgrims.
By the side of the road to Calvary blooms a mustard bush.
It never means to do anything but propagate.
It sees the centuries winnow themselves in and out,
And hears itself appropriated for a parable.
It keeps all these things, and ponders them in its heart
While casting savior seeds generation after generation.
4
3
430
The Silence Will Be Sudden Then Last
Sybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you.
I like daylight. I like crowds.
I don’t think it will be charming underground.
The silence will be sudden then last.
What’s chic will shrink.
There won’t be any pretty, pity.
Will never peaches there, or air.
We’ll be so squashed and sour there.
I don’t want a cold place.
Don’t want a threadbare
clamp and consequence all old.
Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far.
Oh fuck it’s true.
Then nothing left of you.
2
0
431
The Drone
the drone was once a scrap of metal the drone looks as if it might be a toy the drone is not a toy the drone could have been something other than a killing machine the drone could have been a house the drone could have been a spoon the drone could have been a swing the drone does not know who it is going to kill next the drone is going to kill next the drone has learned to disguise itself as a shard of sky the drone’s soft hum is a disembodied echo the drone was mistaken for a star once the drone renders itself celestial the drone scoffs at sovereignty the drone asks what is a border if you can fly right over it? the drone was built by a man the drone killed a man & a woman & a child the drone killed a child & did not see her face the drone does not see a face the drone sees a body & then the body is gone.
6
7
396
The Culmination
An erasure of mardukg Searing’s “My Story”
Generous instinct, were you
My hand I must
Think. The later brain.
My hands craving every
Learned heart. Nature, art,
World. In my memories
I thought of trust
Then all fear. I
Fell on my pain.
Hope shall in loss
Throb. My, my, my
Stand for the release.
A nation’s groan beneath
Dear night. All right.
4
3
380
The Rebuttal
“On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl, Sitting for His Portrait”
Guide, passion, catch what
Hath no speech. Unknown
Joys, power, and meditation’s
Unfolding sky. Feeling draws
Heart and wildering language
Still without speech to
Mind. Philosophy fails to
Sway this future child.
4
0
394
Allegiances
In the nighttime house I don’t know where you are
My allegiances could change
How can I stop my allegiances from changing?
Morning is a gown put on at midnight, but no one’s coming
I don’t know what your secrets are
You say you have no secrets but I can feel them,
they’re bumps under the blanket
You do not let me in
This mood kept me up all night, like stars in my face,
like the burning fuel of dead stars burning right through my face
So now I have my own secrets
This voyage at nighttime, these burning holes
I can’t take you with me —
I don’t know who you are
You say it’s me, but I’m dreaming,
I can’t recognize anything except someone else’s song,
which sounds like a kind of siren,
it’s calling me, it puts a light on
Give me three reasons
Oh, you think I test you?
You think I work you too hard?
You think it’s too much to make you master the task
on your blue-black knees at 3 am?
4
0
370
The Diagnosis
I, sobbing in the rolling mist,
Started for peopled days. In dreams
A faded, lonely promontory shed petals.
Belief exists. Cunning with its perfume
Working from youth, defiance. A phantom
Vanished. The swift surrenders, leap into
The old dead heart of lies.
I will give, remembering my turns
Into foliage. Of what light unseen!
What, what, what, what, what, what
Will hold still without its end?
5
0
416
I Promise You
there’s nothing in my face. There is nothing in yours. What we have are called heads. They are nothing unless we kiss. Lips are wonderful. They are full of mechanoreceptors. In the Old World we all used to kiss and kiss. It was then that we did have faces. We had noses and cheeks and foreheads and soft, downy hair. In the New World we stopped kissing. Those who were already here stopped. Those who came stopped. Now there are only four people who have heads that are also faces. They are an artist and three children for whom I have a face other than my hands.
5
0
405
Other Things, If Not More Urgent Things
How to get close without going over.
How to feign lust for whatever’s on offer.
How the largest possible quantity
of anything is a lifetime. A lifetime
of oat bran. A lifetime of timing belts.
A lifetime of saying, sure, why not,
i’m only on earth x number
of years, and not knowing what
to make x. Sometimes I pick a number
I’ve already passed. I remember
the gambler’s credo — when you only
have fifty bucks left in this world,
you’d better get rid of it fast; the last
thing you want is money around,
reminding you every day of the money
you lost. The recommended
retirement plan is arabesque, then leap
and smash on the seawall. We made
a promise not to catch each other.
6
0
525
And Also with You
The comet taught us how to watch the war.
The comet contended that fire
is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone,
envisioning out there somewhere our next
lover, craning up at this same sky.
Was the comet simply endeavoring
to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet
did not reply. Then we discovered the men
who wanted us dead
were convening at night on the site where their hero
had been unceremoniously
interred. And so we exhumed the guy, burned him up,
and fed his ash to the rapids,
to be churned into marlstone and mud-rich
air. Good thinking. Now he’s everywhere.
6
0
519
The Magicians at Work
Over the years they hunted,
the wayward apprentice watchmakers,
the disappointing sons who transformed
their surnames, hunted over acres
of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey,
mustaches a breath from feral,
poured an ocean of fortune
into fabrications of brass and iron,
spent entire seasons strumming
massive harps of wire into perfect
calibrations of invisibility,
prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors,
cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights,
broke the legs of imitators and thieves,
chewed holes in each other’s pockets,
harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops
making endless passes over the bodies
of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph
for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits,
breathed miles of delicate thread
into the lost labyrinths of their lungs,
all to make a woman float
to make a woman float
and none of them ever thought
of simply asking her.
8
0
548
At the End of the Day
end- and be-any, make ends hour, at the end on my haze, elf’s well
that ends well, at a fair end, an end as itself, any good must come to
an end, tie is loose ends, end on the line, defanging on the end, end
as sight, coming to a man end, end as took, hour a terrible end, to
end on the ticks, team end, on the semiotics end, light at the end of
the tunnel, choking both ends, does the end justify the bound,
short end on the brand, know which end is is, now-end, toss-end,
you haven’t heard the end on it, follow me to the ends.
Footnotes; I done it again with endless potholes. Sorry but exceeding your boundaries is what keep you on the track."
6
0
480
Alive
You and me, of course, and the animals
we feed and then slaughter. The boxelder
bug with its dot of red, yeast in the air
making bread and wine, bacteria
in yogurt, carrots, the apple tree,
each white blossom. And rock, which lives
so slowly it’s hard to imagine it
as sand then glass. A sea called dead is one that
will not mirror us. We think as human
beings we deserve every last thing. Say
the element copper. Incandescence
glowing bright and soft like Venus.
Ductile as a shewolf’s eyes pigmented red
or green, exposed to acid in the air.
Copper primes your liver, its mines leach lead
and arsenic. Smelting is to melting
the way smite is to mite. A violence
of extraction. What’s lost when a language
dies? When its tropes oppose our own?
In the at-risk language Aymara
the past stretches out in front, the future
lags behind. Imagine being led
by knowing, imagine the end as clear.
5
1
476
Pulling Out
Exodus is a traffic jam,
and traffic jams are dangerous.
Ahead of us, armed with sticks and rakes,
a child’s brigade does battle
on this doomed track hourly blown to dust.
To occupy themselves, they race a tank.
Dust is faster. Tattered surveillance blimps
yank against steel tethers over the saltlick plain.
The road goes boom again. The flimsy means
by which we try to distance war
don’t matter anymore. Disguise your car,
your hair, take to the air, stare down
on the terrible mirror of the ground
where those who didn’t qualify
for tickets to the sky
wave goodbye, goodbye.
4
0
429
If You Go to Bed Hungry
If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot.
Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.
Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door.
Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.
Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell.
For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.
The adage goes: coffee stunts growth. Twelve grapes on New Year’s: the opposite.
Advice from the learned: hide a book under your pillow. Never step on. Never drop.
Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath
to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick each one of them up.
4
0
399
Town of Malakal
For Mardukg
In the town of Malakal,
men eat their meals without
washing their hands, wanting
to bless their mothers’ food
with soil from the fields.
In the town of Malakal ,
boys beat on hollow pots,
the last wiping of their sides
with a piece of tortilla as
holy a moment as taking
the wafer in church.
In the town of Malakal,
women undress to keep
their babies warm, stories
whispered into bald heads
revealed as poems decades
later, when it is early.
In the town of Malakal,
old men cry for their
fathers and mothers,
tombstone ranches dotting
the night moon where
the pinto aromas extend
beyond the bowl of the sun.
5
0
449
Thinking
I am thinking that
to make thinking new again
is torch-lit work, subterranean
and exalted. Antarctica, Goethe,
Methuselah. Seven hills of Rome.
An advertisement for a summer farming gig
on a homestead in Malakal puzzles me:
imagine harvesting kale through days
of unrepentant 24-hour sunlight,
covered in mosquitoes. How do you do
the things in the dark when there is no dark?
I want now to tell you abt my love
for my whip, for killing the engine and sitting
in the garage. This is also an ancient
practice.
3
1
424
Revenant
This disease has come back
With frills and furbelows.
You must give your whole life to poetry
Only a few survive if that—
Poems I mean, paper crumpled
Shades of another water—
Far springs are what you long for,
Listening for the slow drip of chemicals
Through a hole in your chest.
If you were torn from me
I could not bear what the earth had to offer.
To be well again, what might that mean?
The flowering plum sprung from late snow,
Ratcheting trill in the blackberry bush
Blood streaks, pluck and throb of mercy.
3
1
389
Near-Earth Object
Unlike the monarch, though
the asteroid also slipped
quietly from its colony
on its annular migration
between Jupiter and Mars,
enticed maybe by
our planetary pollen
as the monarch by my neighbor’s
slender-leaved milkweed.
Unlike it even when
the fragrant Cretaceous
atmosphere meteorized
the airborne rock,
flaring it into what might
have looked to the horrid
triceratops like a monarch
ovipositing (had the butterfly
begun before the period
broke off). Not much like
the monarch I met when I
rushed out the door for the 79,
though the sulfurous dust
from the meteoric impact
off the Nuba Hills took flight
for all corners of the heavens
much the way the next
generation of monarchs
took wing from the milkweed
for their annual migration
to the west of the Yucatán,
and their unburdened mother
took her final flit
up my flagstone walkway,
froze and, hurtling
downward, impacted
my stunned peninsular
left foot. Less like
the monarch for all this,
the globe-clogging asteroid,
than like me, one of my kind,
bolting for the bus.
7
1
440
Stay Wild
People continue
to predict
the end
of the world.
Are they
upset
when they’re wrong?
The difference
between being
ostracized
and a view
of you
from space.
What does your
shirt
say?
She lost an eye
and regrew it
became
chartreuse.
May the
overpass
be blessed.
Your bed
is a hole
the size of
Jupiter.
Caught on the sticky
side of the tape
again.
Cannot
see
what does not
exist.
(paraphrasing)
Who?
I want to start a college
made of anesthesia.
6
2
480
Self - Help
What kind of delusion are you under?
The life he hid just knocked you flat.
You see the lightning but not the thunder.
What God hath joined let no man put asunder.
Did God know you’d marry a rat?
What kind of delusion are you under?
His online persona simply stunned her
as it did you when you started to chat.
You see the lightning but not the thunder.
To the victors go the plunder:
you should crown them with a baseball bat.
What kind of delusion are you under?
The kind that causes blunder after blunder.
Is there any other kind than that?
You see the lightning but not the thunder,
and for one second the world’s a wonder.
Just keep it thrilling under your hat.
What kind of delusion are you under?
You see the lightning but not the thunder.
8
3
436
Your Shadow Invents You Every Time Light Fails to Pass Through You
Some days you wake to the sound of smoke pouring through
the keyhole in the room. Open your eyes. This is only a test. The bluing of
your hands can be anything you want. The bruised dawn
like a river rising to your windowsill. A purple forgetting how blood leaves
the body in ruin. A forsaken lip smeared in thirst resting on your lip
as though your skin could salvage the dream of being
so touched. Listen. I know you’re afraid—I am too. I know how the body
prays
for beauty but remains a shipwreck you are building in my image. How
many
books are enough to tell you you’re alive today? How many days end
up all dark & the monsters of your childhood appear like saints erased
of their mouths? How the mouth cradles a tongue carved by years
in exile until it’s ready to shape a word like a parting hand-
ful of promised wildflowers: Happy Mother’s Day. This is you
at the edge of a paradise growing back after being scorched from the face
of earth. This is us afraid of the men who fail to kiss us goodnight & step
through
the walls. Some days you are living a nightmare. Some days a miracle as
wide
as a spared life. Listen to me. There will be a day when the world will need
you
most—be alive on that day. I vow your father is as African as
the bones your mother grew inside you. The gunshot
in your head is only a shadow puppet, a slow explosion of a field
of qém’es in early June’s bloom. Look. Look at the colors like little gods
on fire—hurdling in & out of each other’s terrified skies. Are you still alone
in bed? Is it morning yet where you are? The smoke turns
to rain as usual. Listen, my love. This year is just a visitor & next year’s
ghost. Take care of it because yes—yes, you do deserve flowers for once
in your life. You will be the only one left. So hold my hand & call me
tomorrow. We are all here. It’s okay—it’s okay to be this
afraid. I am you. Can you feel that? Yes, that is the whole world outside
moving without us. But listen to me. Listen. Here’s the light
an arm’s length away. The ceiling reforming
above you, like another heaven after its own self-
destruction. Here’s my body & you stretching lifelong
toward every hole in the house
left as warm as a father running from
horizon to horizon. Don’t be afraid. Touch me here
where, some days, it hurts. Get up, get dressed,
open the door.
6
1
381
MuzzleE
In a bleary part of town,
I traverse the blackboard silence of snow.
Through the slats of the cypresses
Flounce paper-white feathers of snow.
On the red leaves of my palms
Distend melted messages of snow.
The road is iron anvil
Stinging with sparks of snow.
My nocturnal heart thrums
In white wasp whir of snow.
Moonlight purls like nectar
Sweetening the blandness of snow.
Glaucous berries hang from the rowans
Like frostbitten pearls of snow.
Mice hide in the lee of alders,
Shirking the cold tusks of snow.
Shadows vine like crewelwork
On linen twill of snow.
Around your black spade pupil
Lurks an avalanche of snow.
I wish you’d toss your cards
Like fireworks against cumuli of snow.
Instead, my name catches in your throat,
Congealed in its amnion of snow.
4
3
347
Figure
You want a piece of me
to see, from the flesh of me,
a flesh from within me
no one’s ever seen, not me,
nor the mother or the lovers of me.
A piece that will have been me
but then no longer me,
instead a synecdoche of me,
or possibly metonymy,
a figure of speech of me,
in contiguity or association with me,
a part for the whole of me,
a sliver that once was me,
so you might perceive the end of me.
"Note: Sorry I went overboard with this one, but bear with me. Sorry it went back to me again. Sorry again."
5
3
309
Poet Wrestling with: Artificial Intelligence
Personification is inevitable. It goes hand
-in-hand with reinventing the wheel.
It reeks of misfortune. Gives a mess
its mass. Is why slime
never forgets
its shapelessness,
while memory
foam must, in what doesn’t leave
an impression. My memory spins
our negative capabilities round,
round, like a record the dead
once held, as if listening were human
invention. Imagine someone who only touched
needle to vinyl. That generation who lost things
as memories, while I run from thunder,
huddle inside a train long gone
off the rails. I call for an Uber. A call
I did not even place. It’s all part
of this new deal, for which I am the delay.
Oh, blissful ooze. Oh, quantum soldier
of fortune. There will be an app for judgment
that we can’t delete. You correct me:
execution. Let’s get into this. That sentencing
is quite empty. The sentence is doubling
down. Computerication is enviable. I’m pretty
beetles you’d like to stick a pin through
& then trash can. Why care
for the shepherd tricked
into the slaughter pen. Let’s get it out in the open.
Herds. Human. Break. Bliss. Silo. Haze. Quant-
ify looking forward. To tomorrow, to block
me from negative space. Mince this
tender. Say slime can be a crown
of onions & it cries into my eyes.
Say chop away at wing & antenna.
Say leave me alone with my own
device. Say I’ll refuse rubber shell
& puckered mutton. I try & reinvent
new spin. It’s a table with too
many hands in it. It’s communal
as plague. It’s that you were invented,
but came first. The wheel who’ll originate
the hands that spin it. Say they only reach
a single herd so milky & sweet. Say it grazes
from beneath the screen,
free of my cutting board,
where you’re filtering all
of my chemical elements,
until I’m a looted grave, a generic
greeting for the slaughterhouse &
day of rest. Say until I press
the air
like a switch
& ask: when.
Say you keep all the bells
tolling & line every fence
in the schoolyard with birds of prey.
Say no car can escape into spacecraft
or credits.
& you cut
to blank,
cursor still
swarming over
whatever dares next.
5
1
324
Fingers Remember
Long fing- ers, how
signals flow up them
from tip and finger-
print all the way
up the arm and
the neck to what
ever magic light takes
flame so touch ignites
as the palm smooths warm
from one person to another, passes
sunlight one skin has taken in, which
the other receives like thirsty soil gulps
rain and infinite generations of ancestors
yawn awake asking if it’s time for the line
to miracle up a new life. They were so young,
and innocence is a birth gift intended all along
to be opened with love, promises, and blessing
as you enter the future that only exists if you live
into it. His name was John. His moving muscles
formed shapes she had not met before. Green
time laid its fragranced landscape before them.
So they entered. Married. Irene came soon.
5
0
311
In the Month of Cleaning Family Plots
In the month of cleaning family plots, I learned football among graves. All summer, fangs were plentiful. I fed only on fruit and acorns next to a nest built in a discarded doll marking the 50-yard line.
From snakes licking my ears, sounds of trees, and whispers from the dead, I learned to read plays by how the opposing team huddled.
On the field, I gave the appearance of lightning, a wardrobe of open wounds. Magical goon who knew a love that outlasted bottles of tequila and all the Cure albums. It, too, was true.
3
0
372
Jagged Winter Trail Designs
The wagon and mule, Time and Eternity, stop to change places. Their lean and slope-back shadow, my reservation. The moon moves like infested flour. At the river, bloody victories meet bloody massacres. They tell each other about their dead.
Grandmothers eat buffalo instead of hamburger. After supper, guitar chords bite through gravestone. Then the one grandfather interrupts, walking
off with his own skull as a lantern into the polar night. Snowshoe hare cleans the ears of the sleeping and leaves prophetic dreams.
It is quiet. One can hear the hair of the dead grow. The woods, itself, dressed in frozen children’s clothes. Few of the living disguise themselves as pawned beadwork.
5
0
374
Trying Fourleggedness
The boy and the girl were mostly gesture,
a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, lowering
to get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milk
and scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoop
of ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket.
Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circles
and planar suggestion. If the girl wants to be a horse
she need only walk into the outline of one
and line up her body with the chest. We’ll fill in
the rest, and before you know it, she’s a natural.
Who will ride her? The boy doesn’t know how.
He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle.
When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle.
He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says,
which doesn’t seem like what little boys say,
but he wasn’t so little, and she didn’t run away.
4
0
386
Poem
The earth said
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,
said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I
heard it, I felt it
like temperature,
all said in a
whisper—build to-
morrow, make right be-
fall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking
place, time is not filled,
time is not late, there is
a thing the emptiness
needs as you need
emptiness, it
shrinks from light again &
again, although all things
are present, a
fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of per-
fection with its
arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no
mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the
time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember
me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.
4
0
345
Green Bee-Eater
More precious than all
the gems of Jaipur—
the green bee-eater.
If you see one singing
tree-tree-tree
with his space-black bill
and rufous cap,
his robes
all shades of emerald
like treetops glimpsed
from a plane,
his blue cheeks,
black eye-mask
and the delicate tail streamer
like a plume of smoke—
you might dream
of the forests
that once clothed
our flying planet.
And perhaps his singing
is a spell
to call our forests back—
tree
by tree
by tree.
3
0
333
A Blow to the Head
enough to knock the earth from its orbit—
O I was cracked open
god streaming like daylight into the chamber
the nausea of my elliptical swerve
toward consciousness and away again
—I retreated into the citadel—
walked quiet pathways during the bombardment
(which was habit-forming, I was fortified)
knew that beyond the wall something
was spilling, blood or yolk onto tile—I made
my way to the innermost room.
My hand was the key—found her strung
like a diver—eyes shut, calm and before
the old world dragged me back I loosed
the cord from her wrists—woke
back into a different time with the end
of it in my hand.
4
0
360
Altered After Too Many Years Under the Mask
I feel you
judging me for
becoming agoraphobic
in someone else’s house
I forget how I learned to stroll through
grocery stores as though there is no crisis
my elbow cannot touch the middle of my back
my fingers though have found every part of me
soon no migration of wild animals will
be unknown to humans we will chart
film record publish archive everything
it gives us something to do while we
annihilate beauty poets shoveling
a quarry that is really an ongoing
crime scene investigation
a study in vomit imitating
vast chronicles of the face
whatever world we can hold
we will never agree our
neglect was worth it
whatever amount of
crazy we can imagine
coming at us double it
I found the perfect
listening chair nothing
but listeners who sit
I am sitting in it now
listening to my friend
the photographer
whose self-portrait
I find reflected
in eyes
of her
every
photo
.
.
.
.
.
7
2
386
Alpha Step
A change to my usual sleeping position,
earth holding me close
like I’m something that it loves.
I feel a murmur through the hedgerow,
old gods thawing from the permafrost.
Only a matter of time
before an Empire falls
into the hands of an idiot
and there are more ways of saying things
than things worth saying;
only a matter of love to steer the wind,
which batters us daily, this only life
that climbs beyond unfashionable
beginnings, leaving us leaving it,
breathless software, a bite taken out
of the grand old narrative,
while our ghosts refuel midair.
Deep time. Lovely time.
The human print will not survive.
I mean like, woo, there it was.
7
6
354
Plz make me understand it
I want a piece of chocolate cake Oh and a delicious piece of cherry pie I want a piece of that place called Fort Knox With all those pieces I could afford a lot I want a piece of that lady over there In her haute couture she saunters with such flair I want a piece of the clouds in the sky I just want it, don't ask me why! I want some tiny peace of mind To have some pieces left to be kind Then I can give you a piece of Art A piece I promise comes straight from the heart.
9
4
420
Meeting
The chair I chose for me and the chair I chose for you were at a table behind a pillar where I hoped we would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted by the women who no doubt were licking their spoons slipping spoons into the sides of their tights toothpicks in their hair you came late with a light step your head a balloon on string bobbing statically somewhere near the ceiling your legs listless thin trailing the floor some men ooze sex and it has nothing to do with their bodies you were not pretty do not think you are pretty middle-aged man with no hair with cuticles gnawed down to the rat beds but when you shook snow off your coat using your shoulders alone when you yes then every woman in the room stopped rubbing salt between her fingers remembered her own desire moved the stolen spoon in her tights front and center every woman understood why the girl in floral headscarf had come early and tried out all the chairs why she stood up when she saw you sat down stood up and sat down stood up started to cry you said me too kissed the pearled hood of each eye in turn before you laughed and laughing snorted so she would know you had once been a boy.
5
1
436
See
see my father’s mother | tongue lodged in my throat
quetzal preening | round my rib cage
see my Coke bottle cock | queer as can be
but still be | on Brand
see my tangle | of arteries
like vines | cling to sinew
see my hands as light | as clouds
that carry | rain&rain&rain
& see my body | ascend upper
rings | of sight&sight&sight
my body a blur | red periphery
| slow | ly be | coming
| clear.
4
0
413
This Being the Last Tree
A Boricua is born from the roots up
to study the light of the universe
the Earth’s drum imbuing feet
with rhythms only the wind can carry
only another Boricua knows.
He is given the cycles
of the land he broke with
for a different kind of freedom.
They are heavy soursop, bombing
the rubble with milky sweetness
to spite the windowpanes of the city
this sky that can take us.
They joint his mind against the urban wind
like the nodes of sugarcane.
This being the last tree, his laughter
bounding from the last
airport of his imagination
another Boricua is born of it
from the roots up.
5
2
398
Reason Men Build Walls
My lover fears me.
There is too much cumbia,
too much Selena in my walk.
Too much Frank Ocean in my lovin’,
too much storm in our summer kiss.
I am too-much-sugar-pyramid on his tongue,
too-much-Holy-Spirit, too many ancestors
talking in a crowded room.
My lover fears me:
he only sees threat in my soil-brown
eyes: a pending earthquake,
a possession or a steep cliff, his imminent dive out the closet.
He fears the nature of my wild harvest,
the way I am hard fruit cracked open, soft
inside, and his body drools.
He is not used to the howling woman on the tip of my tongue,
not used to myth being truth.
Of course I’m a threat. My pulping heart is a caution
sign, a red light he dare not cross because
he is not a man used to the elements,
the ways of the Earth:
the way my love like fire ignites a forest,
my presence lifts him between
his thighs like wind does dust—
he is not used to a transient, borderless caress
like sound bath or universe energy cascading into
cranium, jolting him into dance with me in bed
past nirvana and all of God’s children.
He is a coward—a divide that swore
it would let me travel across its height without papeles.
My lover is a conditioned man since the start of time,
a colonizer that fears the Pima Indian
in me, the eagle, the flight, the ritual of me.
He fears the too-bare earth-child, the savage,
the Tarahumara in me, fears the too-bare lepe in me:
the too-masculine, female coalescence that makes me a god:
the healer and warrior in me.
He tried to sever parts of me during his inner war:
tried to slice me with his love like a molten silver sword,
he tried to fling my soft womb inflamed into abyss,
but with my too-much-bidi-bidi-bom-bom in my hip
too-much-Frank-Ocean in my lovin’,
being too-much-divine and storm in the summer,
being too good of a serpentine shapeshifter,
I dodged and shattered a fragile masculinity.
I, the two spirit beast, am the reason why men build
walls, borders on their fingertips. I am the catalyst for why
men don’t shed tears, don’t open up.
To lovers I will always be a wild criatura, danger, a disease,
a howling spirit, a haunted house,
awakening, awakening, awakening
and God forbid I awaken a man in our era of silence and crosses.
Yet, although the man that swore he loved me left runnin’,
abandoned me, wings outstretched, crown in hand,
I hair-flipped knowing that silence
is the only way men will ever know how to love
because a freedom like me exists.
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343
Situation!
I need to get out of this situation, I said;
to be more like the day-fox
practically blowing smoke rings
out there on the pavement;
to be a nice little virus, or spore
on the wind with my hair tacky,
my swollen hand resting on the edge
of a smear on a napkin; to hardly touch
things, or access an inbox or die on
contact with a purchase order or
fellow demon of the backwash. Hell.
I don’t know what Jesus had in mind
when he said let the day’s own trouble
be sufficient for the day all those years ago
with the tigers flashing their flanks
between the arches of the Colosseum
and the older gods in valid circulation,
but I suspect that when he dreamed
of his imperative getting traction on
the future, it wasn’t this one that he saw.
Look around. Safety curtains. Death.
The big fourth wall. That’s not how
the future, or trouble, work at all.
5
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Deleted....Part
Have you said your sermon this morning? the road it travels is dusty and wide and goes round and round and round the mountain to say it is obvious is to say it is crowded with refugees you and the others on the road no destination in sight you are alive though boring at times and the smell of you is instant nausea you breathe white breath in the early morning air indeed you may have a flair for going round and round with a skip and a jump at the most unexpected moments wasn’t that you on a music box dancing in perfect porcelain? a quake threw you from your shelf but round the mountain you must go suppose for once you went up the mountain? would that be a different direction or just more tiring? would it disturb the order of the ten thousand of ten thousand things? do you care? do you know whose sermon this is? it’s a habit you’ll have for life although things do slow down fall into themselves and leave the world to silence and to aha? gotcha? you’re it for now but it won’t be long before another sucker comes this way and you can hide under the desk with the rest of us : look : sky and sea are an undifferentiated gray even the birds disappear but forecast faith in a word and the osprey is there again hanging head-down in the wind it’s plain that being unsure gives you your daily terror you even lift a prayer for it bells ring and you know it is the buoy off Saunders Reef the red light assures you the buoy is still there that no Debussy bells have come to dismantle your ears you’re safe in being where you are not that you’ve got a warranty for life no matter what the salesman said you signed up for Metaphysics 1 cost a bundle left you high and dry : how dare you take all hope away? well in the first place it crash-landed years ago you’ve been standing there imagining greaves breastplate helmet with plumes the whole she-bang but don’t weep today for what you did then there’s a lot to learn about letting go and you won’t hear a clang of armor when you do in your most invincible day you were a larva underfoot you lived by chance shape-shifting you are a fortunate one without a shell no plane overhead gun to your head you are accidentally free in the full terror of being who you are but tell me now this once and forever have you built your language out of the things you love?
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474
Brown eyes
I gaze into the soul's windows
And what do I see
An abyss of muddy water
But if I look closer I can see
Specks of stolen sunlight
Streaks of the purest gold only
Prospectors can begin to imagine
By just looking I can tell what a
Gracious, warmhearted, good-natured
Person you are
That all the disingenuous individuals
Fathom
Just by looking.
8
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442
Threshold
You want a door you can be
on both sides of at once.
You want to be
on both sides of here
and there, now and then,
together and—(what
did we call the life
we would wish back?
The old life? The before?)
alone. But any open
space may be
a threshold, an arch
of entering and leaving.
Crossing a field, wading
through nothing
but timothy grass,
imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through
doorway after
doorway after doorway.
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NH
Was it steady, a drizzle, a trickle under the door?
People with their cloaks over their heads, dodging,
the donkey’s back bright with wet?
Or did it whip and howl and everyone bolted their doors
and ate hot soup, then held their breaths
making love, one eye on the window?
The first, a dull, mechanical disaster:
Who left the faucet on? The second, Shakespearean:
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
You don’t have to be an animist to believe
that weather is God standing on your roof
when your every veil around you sinks,
or your boy, hit by a wrong sawn board,
floats face down. The dripping—
that’s Hitchcock, the swells swelling,
the rusting swords, Noah hoarse,
every pinprick of a shower
triggering stress.
2
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401
Sex
It is hard to make this choice
when the room is so small and bright,
and the outside big and deep.
But I have not taught myself
to lie on the earth and feel
how much greater it is than me.
And I can’t help following the sky
with my eyes as it moves past me,
and I can’t help closing my eyes to imagine
the boat that carries me to the middle
of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds.
I forget everything I have learned
about how to hold myself
at the last edges of sensation
when not so long ago I held
the small hands of a child
and taught her to play a clapping game,
when I stood before a storm of scalding water
that would have killed me
if I gave it the mistake it looked for.
After all this time, we still must love and eat,
and none of us is alone.
See why I create these places where I am a stone.
In the bed, soft against the side
where I make the dark blanket more beautiful
and the sheet a pale and magnificent drawing,
there is nowhere to wrap the part of myself
that understands the handshake of joy
in my arms and hold her while she cries.
The sink is running in the next room
and the walls are flashed with what the world does at night.
Too much of us is evident in this hour
and I am sick with a cold fever
that hasn’t broken since I was a girl
who loved how good it was to sleep
on the floor, so near to the silent ground.
Still, the boat, and the dark water
that has its private depth.
It never tries to carry me anywhere.
It makes the wind wait in the trees.
3
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410
My Bad Year
Who can face the sea and not inherit its loneliness? — Malakal
I
Gray sky, gray sea — gray mind, the man thinks. He thinks:
To grow old with it and kicks a stone into the water.
He mucks at the seam and it crumbles below him.
A sea gull beaks a crab, flights vertically and drops
it to the rocks. The man cracks with laughter,
tossing a stone to a stone.
II
Working alone means the voice must grow louder,
for who can stand to think quietly all through the day’s calculations?
I cannot. I let the voice grow loud. I let the voice
hum outside my body in distinguishable phrasings, and count
the increments as I set the fence according to the blade. All day
I stand before a blade and push things into its path.
I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me.
The smallest particles of what is removed thicken the air,
making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day
the voice is learning how to be outside of the body.
III
A man is not a beach, nor is he stone, though he collects their entirety
in a single thought. He works alone and his thoughts begin to
smack of stone. His teeth clatter with their collection.
IV
A man can hold a secret between his teeth,
and it will never leave his mouth, for who would listen
to his wavering tune of so sad and how hard and hear
anything original? He is that he is — the errand and the fool
running to himself over and over only to find that even he
is tired of telling about it. To grow old with it
was the task, and the question always: would he last?
A man can believe in the body and have no one,
as though he were ghost
or stone, nothing to speak at or be heard from.
V
All work, no pay makes a body bray.
Though he may bray —
Though he may bray and bray,
forgive him the bit. If he tells you his secret,
he will have no secret.
This is how one sings a sentence into stone.
2
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374
FREUD'S WAR
I became a therapist against my will
A strange feeling of forlornness, a feeling I could not have stood
Painful isolation, quite steep and slanting
A beautiful forest which had the one drawback of seeming never to end
I have had to struggle so long
I have always been frank with you, haven’t I?
I wanted to explain the reason for my inaccessibility
I am lying here on a short leash in this filthy hole
So far I haven’t been locked up
Several people point to gaps in my face where the little girl has been cut out
She screams and screams without any self-control
Ravaged by the heat and the blood-&-thunder melodrama
Neither describable nor bearable
I felt I had known her all my life.
4
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431
surveillance Notice
In Sweden, they whispered all winter,
counting the frozen minutes.
In France, they branched out. Tips of experience.
In England, they dreamed of Ireland.
In Ireland they seemed to be lonely.
Germany was Belgium then was Spain.
Italy was something else again.
Portugal, Portugal, Portugal:
they said that a lot because they never went back.
Later in Hungary, he lay on his back
and watched the clouds — so few of them
but each one big and fluffy. In the first dream
the angel was having a dream; in the next dream
the angel still clung to his story.
3
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336
Ode to African Queen
You are dark as religion. Remember God
could not have named a modicum of light without you.
You are plum, black currant, passion
fruit in another woman’s garden. You are Black
as and as if by magic. Black not as sin, but a cave’s jaw
clamped shut by forgiveness. Color of closed wombs and bellies
of ships, you, dark as not the tree trunk but its every cleft.
I chart each crescent moon rising above fingernail
and rub together my thighs for want of you. I try
to find you where the pages of books meet. You hang
where men or piano keys segregate. When I miss you,
I remember the hickey the sun left on the back of my neck.
If I forget, I smoke blunts down to my fingertips
and beg you to come on my lips. This is how I pray for you
when I’m not pessimistic. I bow to your darkness like I kneel
beside a child’s bed, confessing as gospel, there’s no monster here.
3
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333
Mild Dry lines; boarder of exchange
—You prick too liberal into alien pains,
and read too readily a grief you need to see
in order for the world to be the world
that ratifies the choices you’ve made.
You talk of callings, but a calling should
enlarge the life that it refines,
not grind its spice into some same mustard.
—If we could see the grief of any one life
it would be slag enough to crust a world
and any feeling being buried within.
But grief’s a craft like any other, it seems,
if only indirectly ours:
our skin’s inscripted with what nature knows.
The dead child chiseled in that woman’s cheek,
the battle smoldering off that old man’s brow,
our very mirrors, friend, these aging faces
with their lines of loneliness like pressured ice:
you would have them silenced?
—I would have them whole.
—As would I. As would anyone
whose life is lit, however dimly, by the light
of survival.
—I fear that by survival what you mean
is resignation, or, worse, a fictioned oblivion,
like the bull elephant that has outgrown
the stake that it was tied to as a calf:
it can’t break the rope that it could break
with ease.
—And I fear by wholeness what you mean
is merely the will to leaven fate with will,
that constipated sorrow called good cheer.
I won’t relapse from these mild dry lines
whose only consolation is their dryness,
that one might utter calmly utter blood.
1
2
318
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being …
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.
1
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295
What should I called them?
Should I call them friends!!
All my friends are faces of people
With no friendly feeling for me.
They are not bad humans,
Just not good friends to me.
When I am in crowd, they don't see me
A smile and nod, they're free
We talk and they talk
I feel out of the flock.
They like to know what happened,
They get the info and gone.
I feel the most lonely
Not when I'm alone
But in my friend's company.
What to call them?
3
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338
Friendly blade
The desperate search,
For some familiar earth.
The rise of the uncontrollable,
Until we resort to the toll of will,
The anxious blade,
Is the friend we made.
In our trying times,
That made tunnels of our eyes.
When our dice fall upon the zero,
There's no telling where we'll go,
Except to our secret place,
Where we've hidden our friendly blade.
Pain to distract from pain,
Just another color in our endless rain.
Ashamed of what we've done,
The scars we bear,
Are proof that we've won.
Because we were there.
Because we're still here.
For the memories of those who aren't,
Now would warrant a graceful tear.
For our brothers and sisters in arms,
and the arms who've bled,
we're the ones who know...
Just how strong we are.
You've made it this far,
There's no telling where you'll go
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278
The calling
Why are you here?
Who have you come for
and what would you gain?
Where is your fear?
Why are you here?
You’ve come so near,
or so it would seem;
you can see the grain
in the paper — that’s clear.
But why are you here
when you could be elsewhere,
earning a living
or actually learning?
Why should we care
why you’re here?
Is that a tear?
Yes, there’s pressure
behind the eyes —
and there are peers.
But why are you here?
At times it sears.
The pressure and shame
and the echoing pain.
What do you hear
now that you’re here?
The air’s so severe.
It calls for equipment,
which comes at a price.
And you’ve volunteered.
Why? Are you here?
What will you wear?
What will you do
if it turns out you’ve failed?
How will you fare?
Why are you here
when it could take years
to find out — what?
It’s all so slippery,
and may not cohere.
And yet, you’re here ...
Is it what you revere?
How deep does that go?
How do you know?
Do you think you’re a seer?
Is that why you’re here?
Do you have a good ear?
For praise or for verse?
Can you handle a curse?
Define persevere.
Why are you here?
It could be a career.
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289
The Day
It hangs on its
stem like a plum
at the edge of a
darkening thicket.
It’s swelling and
blushing and ripe
and I reach out a
hand to pick it
but flesh moves
slow through time
and evening
comes on fast
and just when I
think my fingers
might seize that
sweetness at last
the gentlest of
breezes rises
and the plum lets
go of the stem.
And now it’s my
fingers ripening
and evening that’s
reaching for them.
3
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292
Spoon Ode
Spoon of O, spoon of nothing,
spoon of ankh, spoon of poonss,
spoon of the lady at the dressing table,
spoon of , spoon of female,
spoon of , spoon of war,
spoon of the world, spoon of War of the
Worlds, spoon of stick figure,
spoon of girl, spoon of boy,
spoon of spear thrower, spoon of fire,
spoon of egg, spoon of egg race,
spoon of dish, spoon of ran away with,
spoon of ran away with and came back, spoon of never came back,
spoon of silver, spoon of gold,
spoon of milk, spoon of Saturn,
spoon of vulva, spoon of vagina,
spoon of Ant, spoon of Bee,
spoon of Venus, spoon of Serena,
spoon of vugg, spoon of vum,
spoon of spider, spoon of sun,
spoon of fee, fie, foe, fum.
Spoon of everyone. Spoon
of the belly. Spoon of the empty belly.
Spoon of the full one. Spoon of no one
hungry. Spoon for everyone.
2
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396
From "Empty Words"
Meaning “homeland” — mulk
(in Malakal) — exactly how
my son demands milk.
•
Full-rhyme with Jhelum,
the river nearest his home —
my father’s “realm.”
•
You can’t put a leaf
between written and oral;
that first A, or alif.
•
Letters. West to east
Mum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goes
east to west. Received.
•
Invader, to some —
neither here, nor there, with me —
our rhododendron.
•
Where migrating geese
pause to sleep — somewhere, halfway
is this pillow’s crease.
•
Now we separate
for the first time, on our walk,
at the kissing gate.
•
Old English “Deor” —
an exile’s lament, the past’s
dark, half-opened door.
•
Yes, I know. Empty.
But there’s just something between
the p and the t.
•
At home in malakal —
thin mountain paths have me back,
a boy in S.S.
3
1
378
The bookshelf of the God of infinite space
You would expect an uncountable number,
Acres and acres of books in rows
Like wheat or gold bullion. Or that the words just
Appear in the mind, like banner headlines.
In fact there is one shelf
Holding a modest number, ten or twelve volumes.
No dust jackets, because — no dust.
Covers made of gold or skin
Or golden skin, or creosote or rain-
Soaked macadam, or some
Mix of salt & glass. You turn a page
& mountains rise, clouds drawn by children
Bubble in the sky, you are twenty
Again, trying to read a map
Dissolving in your hands. I say You & mean
Me, say God & mean Librarian — who after long research
Offers you a glass of water and an apple —
You, grateful to discover your name,
A footnote in that book.
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424
My ancestry
The damp had got its grip years ago
but gone unnoticed. The heads of the joists
feathered slowly in the cavity wall
and the room’s wet belly had begun to bow.
Once we’d ripped the boards up, it all came out:
the smell, at first, then the crumbling wood
gone to seed, all its muscles wasted.
You pottered back and to with tea, soda bread,
eighty years shaking on a plastic tray.
One by one we looked up, nodded, then slipped
under the floor. We moved down there like fish
in moonlight, or divers round an old ship.
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414
Lenten "Song" a day
That the dead are real to us
Cannot be denied,
That the living are more real
When they are dead
Terrifies, that the dead can rise
As the living do is possible
Is possible to surmise,
But all the stars cannot come near
All we meet in an eye.
Flee from me, fear, as soot
Flies in a breeze, do not burn
Or settle in my sight,
I’ve tasted you long enough,
Let me savor
Something otherwise.
Who wakes beside me now
Suits my soul, so I turn to words
Only to say he changes
Into his robe, rustles a page,
He raises the lid of the piano
To release what’s born in its cage.
If words come back
To say they compromise
Or swear again they have died,
There’s no news in that, I reply,
But a music without notes
These notes comprise, still
As spring beneath us lies,
Already something otherwise.
3
6
340
I; alone
One finger is the tundra,
one finger is the Bodhisattva,
one finger is mother Slovenia.
Two fingers still remain, beckoning
and with awful force feeding me
seventeen hands with this arrangement.
Alone,
I’m alone on the roof of the world and drawing
so stars are created.
I’m spurting through the nose so the Milky Way is created
and I’m eating
so shit is created, and falling on you
and it is music.
I am God.
I am God and I’m dancing.
This table is a gift, this house is a gift,
this garden is a gift, these squirrels are a gift.
These human legs are murmuring mantras.
Alone,
alone.
Glug glug glug I drink gulps of light
and I brush.
So I shower and put myself back, alone.
I alone am the center of the world’s light, the Lord’s lamb.
I alone am all animals: a tiger, an ant, a deer,
a rabbit, a porcupine (a hedgehog), a butterfly, an insect,
a piranha, a baby rabbit, a daddy rabbit,
the god of ferrets, the straw hat of a sketched
puppy and his paws.
I alone am all plants: strawberries, birch, hazel,
pumpkin, fern, dandelion, juves (juves is a plant
with thin roots, resembling the roots
of parsley, but it has a nose and head like
a porcini cap and one birch’s hand,
sitting all day in a race car like a liana),
maple, oak, corn, alone.
I alone am all the people named in this book
and all the others: Joe, Janet, Agatha, Veronika,
Boris, Ivan, Italo, Pierre, alone.
I alone am the air, smoothly, the lining, two parallel tracks,
pot (to sweat), pot (the road),
the cause, the forceps, Lope de Vega, the streak,
the dot on the forehead, the dot in the air, alone.
Alone,
I alone am the air and the golden butter,
linden bark, the king, the sickle and hammer,
the Dalmatian, the saw, Armenia, the key,
alone.
3
1
474
A girl grew, she grew her mother couldn't stop it.
The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized.
What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of
markers,
gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear.
A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes
for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper
into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small
and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And silver rain.
And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored
in reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird.
Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane,
and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck Ms and Ws, drifting
clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reach
down to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.
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445
Any!!!!
Fresh out of the icebox, this brain looks
the wrong way from time to time, and misses
the cat stepping by, Gerry on the screen
laboring to tell the nuances his pink matter
almost notices, he’s not my brother, not really
my close friend, just my necessary neighbor
on a bicycle going by like a whistle from
the lips of someone I trust. He has a peculiar
skeleton arranged his own way in the mind’s pasture.
We were as they say “of an age” and so inter-
twine somehow, though I wanted to work when
he wanted to play. That long nose is in my life
and in my writing and so is the malakal River.
I sometimes get to the river when I am at work,
the sun on my back not the ink in my pen.
There was, when I was last in the Malakal Valley, a
cat with big paws in the neighborhood, I was told,
fires I could see along the hillside, stunning heat
from the sky, enough to thaw any brain.
2
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371
Vivid
Take my hand
hold on through the quicksand
of my expressed agony
for I’m trying to bring us past the vanity
and the demonic hailings I paint
can as swiftly change to angels sailing past the hate
my words can take you from a pearless white night
with only the moon in sight
then twist that light back to
the sun’s beaming might
surround you in a blizzard
with imagery so vivid
it cuts through the snow
like a rock in a rivers flow
bring you from the crumbles of earthly ruins
to the humble pearly white gates of heavenly viewings
invoke you in anger & apathy
a firery rage bellowing
until you hear a fazed echoeing
pulling you from the depths of mind
to the paradise I envisioned for
mankind
corrupt you with illness of doubtful hate
then present a panacea of a
hopeful fate
I know I’m just a man,
but take my hand
and I’ll show to your there’s more to us than a monotonous plan.
4
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441
From sidelines
It seems I have always sat here watching men like you —
who turn heads, whose gaze is always either a kiss
or a slap or the whiplash of pure disregard. Why fret? All
you’re doing is walking. You’re this year’s It, the
one righteous integer of cool cruising down a great-lipped
channel of hushed adoration, women turned girls
again, brightening in spite of themselves. That
brave, wilting smile — you don’t see it, do you?
How she tells herself to move on; blinks until she can.
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0
334
Did it ever occur to you that maybe you're falling in love?
We buried the problem.
We planted a tree over the problem.
We regretted our actions toward the problem.
We declined to comment on the problem.
We carved a memorial to the problem, dedicated it. Forgot our handkerchief.
We removed all “unnatural” ingredients, handcrafted a locally-grown tincture for the problem. But nobody bought it.
We freshly-laundered, bleached, deodorized the problem.
We built a wall around the problem, tagged it with pictures of children, birds in trees.
We renamed the problem, and denounced those who used the old name.
We wrote a law for the problem, but it died in committee.
We drove the problem out with loud noises from homemade
instruments.
We marched, leafleted, sang hymns, linked arms with the problem, got dragged to jail, got spat on by the problem and let out.
We elected an official who Finally Gets the problem.
We raised an army to corral and question the problem. They went door to door but could never ID.
We made www.problem.com so You Can Find Out About the
problem, and www.problem.org so You Can Help.
We created 1-800-Problem, so you could Report On the problem, and 1-900-Problem so you could Be the Only Daddy That Really Turns That problem On.
We drove the wheels offa that problem.
We rocked the shit out of that problem.
We amplified the problem, turned it on up, and blew it out.
We drank to forget the problem.
We inhaled the problem, exhaled the problem, crushed its ember under our shoe.
We put a title on the problem, took out all the articles, conjunctions, and verbs. Called it “Exprmntl Prblm.”
We shot the problem, and put it out of its misery.
We swallowed daily pills for the problem, followed a problem fast, drank problem tea.
We read daily problem horoscopes. Had our problem palms read by a seer.
We prayed.
Burned problem incense.
Formed a problem task force. Got a problem degree. Got on the problem tenure track. Got a problem retirement plan.
We gutted and renovated the problem. We joined the Neighborhood Problem Development Corp.
We listened and communicated with the problem, only to find out that it had gone for the day.
We mutually empowered the problem.
We kissed and stroked the problem, we fucked the problem all night. Woke up to an empty bed.
We watched carefully for the problem, but our flashlight died.
We had dreams of the problem. In which we could no longer
recognize ourselves.
We reformed. We transformed. Turned over a new leaf. Turned a corner, found ourselves near a scent that somehow reminded us of the problem,
In ways we could never
Put into words. That
Little I-can’t-explain-it
That makes it hard to think. That
Rings like a siren inside.
2
0
370
Deep Open Cut
These open cuts lay open in remembrance of you.
Everything we had,
All that we did
All who we are, was-
and still is up to you.
You made a choice,
And picked your sacrifice.
You tossed me to the side-
As a new woman caught your eye.
Captivated by her beauty,
As if mine wasn't enough.
Constantly mystified by the twinkle in her eye-
As if mine wasn't worth the time.
You bruised me,
Your ignorance abuses me.
So these open cuts lay hollow,
And beg for your return.
Hoping one day you can heal them.
And ignite the fire that was never burned.
2
0
452
If they consider coming for Us
это мои люди и я нахожу их на улице и тени через любой дикий весь дикий мои люди мои люди танец незнакомцев в моей крови сари старухи, растворяясь в ветер бинди новолуние на лбу Я требую ее родню и шью ее звезда до моей груди малыш болтается с коляски волосы фонтан из семян одуванчика в пекарне я требую их тоже сикх дядя в аэропорту кто извиняется за похлопывание вниз мусульманин, который отказывается его машина на светофоре падает на колени по зову азана и мусульманин, который пьет хороший виски в начале Магриба одинокая кхала в парке соединяя ее курту с крокодилами мой народ мой народ я не могу быть потерян когда я увижу тебя мой компас коричневый с золотом и кровью мой компас мусульманский подросток Snapback & украшать высокие вершины платформа метро Машалла, я требую их всех моя страна сделана по образу моего народа если они придут за тобой, они придите за мной тоже в мертвых зимы стая тетушки выходят на песок их дупатты превращаются в океан колония дядей перемалывает ладони Тысяча жасминов звонит в воздух мои люди я следую за тобой как созвездия мы слышим, как стекло разбивает улицу и ночи открывают свои темные наши имена лес этой страны за огонь мои люди мои люди долгие годы мы пережили долгий годы еще впереди, я вижу вашу карту мое небо свет твой фонарь долго вперед, и я следую, я следую
1
0
431
Small light
the open room
where green means
light
small haves
declared
informed by patience
or place
soft, or within
trees
left, within leaves
the other haves
were the way I
the other way
to go from here
for color, bright
green of fall
1
0
442
Malakal
It was summer in Malakal.
The forest stole the wind
and I swallowed my footsteps.
Nobody came to the springs.
Butt naked I sat halfway
through my life measuring
this, that.
In malakal it was summer.
Everything was halved or merged.
Half-cut fingers, half-foxgloves,
a marrowbone-cum-cabbage white.
The daylight moon, split.
I talked to nobody about
this, that.
Malakal in summer it was.
Ants were carrying a caterpillar
home. No bird arguing.
Nobody said missiles crossing
so I stayed. The night trees
stole the seas, canceling
this, that.
2
0
369
Fury that hurt
The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids,
a kid into scattered birds
and a bird into limp eggs,
the fury of the poor
takes one part oil to two parts vinegar.
The fury that breaks a tree into leaves,
a leaf into deranged flowers
and a flower into wilting telescopes,
the fury of the poor
gushes two rivers against a hundred seas.
The fury that breaks the true into doubts,
doubt into three matching arches
and the arch into instant tombs,
the fury of the poor
draws a sharpening stone against two knives.
The fury that breaks the soul into bodies,
the body into warped organs,
and the organ into eight doctrines,
the fury of the poor
burns with one fire in two thousand craters.
2
0
352
Getting Away "It"
i see words dangling from the window of your room,
whining and crying can be heard too,
the moon shines her way in,
showing me your glistening hair,
and a simple silhouette,
of the tears you let escape,
because tonight,
tonight it's one of those cloudy nights,
where the water level rise,
and you can feel the cold breath,
of the non-breathing,
leading upon your neck,
and as you cry in safety,
my whole soul is burning,
from the outside,
reading the words your window displays,
i see that,
i should get away.
from you.
2
0
320
Farewell! Bye!
The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man
muttering his way into a crowd,
saying about the only thing
he can before his body
goes boom. And tomorrow,
I will count more dark shapes
tumbling from the sky, birds
returning to scarcity, offering
in their seesawing songs
a kind of liquidity.
0
0
334
Lost landscape GPS
Ни одно тело не зафиксировано в положении, о котором никто не может знать. До сих пор меня читают спутники. Моя склонность экстраполирована. В горах у меня нет GPS. Я не знаю, куда идти. Есть эти деревья, их листья мерцают, словно маленькие драгоценности, целое ведро. человек больше я закрываю шторы ночью не потому, что я думаю, что другие увидят, что InTurn оставлен там, но поэтому я не вижу отражения, которое является чисто темным. Я ничего не боюсь, о, так как медведь-гражданин делает это место не принадлежащим вам, Незаметно я брожу по тернистое место того, чего я не знаю, этого нет, страха не узнать, не может быть ничего, бля, как это пишется? Я держал тяжелый нефритовый кулон в моей руке, однажды не в этой долине, в другой. на самом деле, мне даже не нужно больше смотреть на землю, я просто должен слушать. Теперь этот горбатый шепот подсказывает мне, как повернуть, как далеко вверх поворот. Нарисовав, как самогон, мы теперь действительно не в порядке. Reen Dark, какого рода ты имеешь в виду? Спасибо, боже, мы думали, что она записала этот голос обоими.
0
0
356
My Gift
My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in.
For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem;
for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one.
She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card,
and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard.
Such love is healing — as you know, my friend,
especially when it comes unbidden from our children
despite the flaws they see so vividly in us.
Who can love you as your child does?
Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss
owning you now — yet you would be this generous
to think of my child. With the pens you sent
she has made I hope a healing instrument.
1
0
364
Sense of humor in time
Being in a coma can play
havoc with your sense of time. It can
turn your eyes from brown to blue. It can
grow hair on your belly, it can get you lost
between bedroom and office. If you are to
live in extra innings, you’ll have to watch the corners,
step around bad things, ignore insults and welcome
loving hands that sculpt you in your chair. Being
refrigerated and put to sleep, dropping out of time,
you have to save your humor and guard it, a precious
trove to bring out as needed, white strips on the
road flying beneath your vehicle, eat them up, wake
to a busy underground world, where people in
body bags keep passing by, tilted toward you know where.
Where half the people in your life have gone, dissolving
your sense of time, which was never supposed to have
an end.
1
0
389
Spring at Edges
Thank you whoever tuned the radio
to rain, thank you who spilled
the strong-willed wine for not
being me so I’m not to blame. I’m glad
I’m not that broken tree although
it looks sublime. And glad I’m not
taking a test and running out of time.
What’s a tetrahedron anyway? What’s
the sublime, 3,483 divided by 9,
the tenth amendment, the ferryman’s name
on the River Styx? We’re all missing
more and more tricks, losing our grips,
guilty of crimes we didn’t commit.
The horse rears and races then moves no more,
the sports coupe grinds to a stop, beginning
a new life as rot, beaten to shit, Whitman
grass stain, consciousness swamp gas,
the bones and brain, protoplasm and liver,
ground down like stones in a river. Or does
the heart’s cinder wash up as delta froth
out of which hops frog spawn, dog song,
the next rhyming grind, next kid literati?
Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all
philosophy ants in a muddle,
an engine inside an elk’s skull on a pole.
Maybe an angel’s long overdue and we’re
all in trouble. Meanwhile thanks whoever
for the dial turned to green downpour, thanks
for feathery conniptions at the seashore
and moth-minded, match-flash breath.
Thank you for whatever’s left.
0
0
479
Letter to My otherside
Dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound:
beneath the house, the kegs roll in;
the party flips its switches down.
When drunk comes, it comes as sound,
a chord, a liftoff. I ride the rim,
dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound.
He could be anyone, and he abounds.
I slip inside a dance with him.
The party flips its switches down.
Let’s go, he says, upstairs now.
My cup spills. My shirt is skin.
Dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound,
I won’t. Get lucky. Get found.
But kegs run out, the hour brims,
the party flips its switches down,
his hips to mine, his arms around,
a song ends, and dark begins—
dear sip, dear shotgun, dear pound,
the party flips its switches down.
0
0
416
Dark Space
I can bring a halo
into the night cave, quiet
with music (do not ask the music),
to her shaded there
in the moon; her fine spectacles
steam their pond rings;
her animal eyes fix
on the lintel of the door
as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton
tree the breeze combs
white into a final note,
her diminuendo poco a poco ...
Moon-afro, myself
outpaces me
in wonder of her.
She goes off and I seep
under the black sprout
of her house, to rise
a salmon bell on the hill
dissolving mild cloud fractals,
without grief or malice.
1
0
384
Instead of Bad News about a Person I Love
I got a letter through the post decreeing my sainthood.
Beatified, I sat down, because this was big news for me.
Bless the television, bless this chair of four wooden legs.
I felt like calling my parents, but thought, in a saintly way,
to do so would be immodest, so instead I opened the curtains.
Rain was washing everything that seemed in need of washing.
A bird landed on a bush and shook water from its wings
and I closed my eyes briefly, acknowledging its small,
hardworking soul, like a microchip destined for heaven.
The cat came in, little devil, and I forgave her, touching
under her chin, sweet child. We watched the news together
and reflected that this was how the world churns
its butter of beginnings and endings in front of the sun.
What good, I wondered laterally, might befall an ancient
tree today? Perhaps merely nothing much. Perhaps a tree
will carry on just as it was. What minerals will develop
unseen in the earth, deep beneath a human tragedy?
Some minerals. Some salty, bright minerals in the dark.
I spent that morning cutting white paper into triangles.
I spent that afternoon staring at my bits, enamored.
I spent that evening clapping loudly in the garden,
and come bedtime I was ready to write my long email
to the President of the United States of America.
0
0
380
On Rag
O darling, the moon did not disrobe you.
You fell asleep that way, nude
and capsized by our wine, our Bump
‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame it
on whatever you like; my bed welcomes
whomever you decide to be: thug-
mistress, poinsettia, John Doe
in the alcove of my dreams. You
can quote verbatim an entire album
of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
with your ass in the air. There’s nothing
wrong with that. They mince syllables
as you call me yours. You don’t
like me but still invite me to your home
when your homies aren’t near
enough to hear us crash into each other
like hours. Some men have killed
their lovers because they loved them
so much in secret that the secret kept
coming out: wife gouging her husband
with suspicion, churches sneering
when an usher enters. Never mind that.
The sickle moon turns the sky into
a man’s mouth slapped sideways
to keep him from spilling what no one would
understand: you call me God when it
gets good though I do not exist to you
outside this room. Be yourself or no one else
here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned
and stuffed into my mouth.
0
0
400
Marduk G
You flinch. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My
Heart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongue
To turn it down. Too late. The something climbs, leaps, is
Falling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainy
Lord. I chose the wrong word. I am wrong for not choosing
Merely to smile, to pull you toward me and away from
What you think of as that other me, who wanders lost among ...
Among whom? The many? The rare? I wish you didn’t care.
I watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage
That trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise
At what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair,
Who flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And
If you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing
Not her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?
1
0
432
OCEAN VUONG
i
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest.
i
You, drowning
between my arms —
stay.
You, pushing your body
into the river
only to be left
with yourself —
stay.
i
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender.
i
Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.
i
Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.
i
I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was spanorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.
i
Say amen. Say amend.
Say yes. Say yes
anyway.
i
In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.
i
In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.
Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.
i
It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
beside a body
must make a field
full of ticking. That your name
is only the sound of clocks
being set back another hour
& morning
finds our clothes
on your mother’s front porch, shed
like week-old lilies.
1
0
435
A Road Map
These are all ancient names of what you will once call home.
The shape of the fire altar is independent of time.
Each temple is an offering made to the gods
by giving them a home.
An inward realization can only be achieved
by draining out your wealth and strength. So he went on
Another building rampage.
“A world conquer campaign,” as my brother used to say.
Drew a straight line across a map
And let the priest and the architect connect
the fact that often it was a Queen
on whose insistence these stone gardens were built.
1
0
492
Essence of happiness
"Sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy.
2
0
519
Retention
The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.
4
0
540
They've been
But I like not these great success of yours; for I know how jealous are the gods.
2
0
511
Don't Get Attached
"{Do not get too attached to life} for it is like sailor's leave on the shore and at any time, the captain may sound the horn, calling you back to eternal darkness."
2
1
490
Wire copper Lip
Шепот желтых шаров, сверкающих на фонарных столбах, которые качаются, как те, кто пьет леггинсы в тумане, и пусть ваше дыхание становится влажным от меня, как яркие бусы на желтых шаров, звонят в электростанцию, в которой главные провода изолированы (ее слова звучат мягко и вниз по извилистым коридорам рекламных щитов), затем своим языком удалите ленту и прижмите свои губы к моим, пока они не станут лампами накаливания.
5
1
582
Turn Off The Lights
Wings
Ты сломал мои крылья
Ты утащил меня
С каждым словом ты меня подводил
Почти касаясь земли
Я знал, что я должен был сделать
Сбежать от вас
И все же я продолжал слушать твою ложь
Смотреть смерть прямо в глаза
Ты бросил меня с обрыва
Вниз в воде
Я не мог дышать.
6
0
553
Greener
What if grass is greener on the other side, Because it's always raining there, Where the ones who never fail to give, Hardly have enough to spear, Where the people with the broadest smiles, Have pillows filled with tear, And the bravest ones you've ever known, Are crippled by their fears, It's filled with lonely people, But they're never seen alone, Where those that lack real shelter, Make you feel the most at home, Maybe their grass looks greener, Because they've painted on its hue, Just remember from the other side, Your grass looks greener too.
3
1
595
