Poetry

One day as I awoke I asked myself
Is this the future

Standing knee-deep
in a marsh, I fish.
I wait for fish

I knew a cabby whose honest-to-God
Name was Finally, the first word
His mother uttered when he came out

  Like any foreigner, he thinks first of the song, the pudgy rodeo clown, lewd confetti vomited on the mall roof. The Apgujeong store fronts flash diamond teeth, neon kaleidoscope. The Supreme Leader of North Korea is a ferris wheel, drunk with light and rage. What they have let happen. The Supreme Leader buys a

My body is an entire ____________________ wrangled into a jar.
[body of water]

I was raised by wolves and I learned
to eat earth. I was raised by a bottle
I found washed up by my hut,

A choking terror detonates the psych ward:
drug-blank faces of fellow patients who mind
their minds, who converse with shadows, won’t eat

Since the Bible never says Adam & Eve ate an apple,
why must we be so specific? I would enjoy a love scene

No thing erases. Myth’s wind cannot blot
out the name in alabaster. Atlantis lives

  With its black strokes, singing, it smears me, lavish. I’m the night’s white canvas turbulent and stiff. I can grab the stars in my hand. They burn but I can’t let them loose.    

A bitch senses under her padded
paws, the earth
as it fattens

Inside my catfish body you will find
two additional fish—blue & washed
in wet light through the translucent

With each handful you dead
breathe in, nourished by dirt
by these leaves half stone

In a house of beams and mirrored
images of the struggle with space.

La noche es viento solitario y estrellas calladas.
Un perro ladra.

On the Plaza de la Independencia – Bronwyn
warm air has filled our lungs

to be selected among the chosen
that permeated with the odor of hissing sheep

On days that suffer,
my true stature is about two and a half feet tall,

You’re right, you’re right,
the fertilizer’s good—

Call it sloth; call it sleaze;
call it bummery if you please;
I’ll call it patience;

The music maker is heavy. The music maker is so heavy and you have to carry it.
You have to keep it strapped to yourself forever.

Who knows god as well as lovers in the park? Everyone
listens. Everyone whispers. Even the rabbi pulls his beard.

From the breadbasket passed for years
around your table, your wife asked us each

Run away, or Stolen, one very likely new Virginia-born, imported from Gambia, Mundingo or Ibo country,

The whole neighbourhood aghast—to find the tour

bus of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys

If she sits on a green chair,
black camel on red background
pillow stitched with sun & moon

According to these bones, they say, this
was all water.

It starts out dream-like, setting up the card tables
as the sun burns the sidewalks dry, as summer comes

He was really her favorite
student, dark and just
back from the army with…

Street corner morning,
sidewalk littered:
plastic soda bottles, candy wrappers, aluminum cans—

My gym, all gussied up
with streamers, balloons

Huge and unembarrassed, my friendfloated like a Buddha in the small pool.I drank iced tea, gradedchlorine-splashed paperson The Mayor of Casterbridge. When she had her babyon a bed covered with a shower curtain,I did what I was told, sealedthe placenta in a plastic bag,stashed it in the freezer. Life was breathless in its daringor boring

A charcoal shadow accompanies my husband down the stairs.
He is to steady the ladder so I can change the bulb that’s set

Death, by which I mean the sudden death
of snuff bottles and weeping willow trees,

Mrs. Caro Hu says Hello,I know I have never met you,but my mind instincts me todo this. I believe everythinghappens for a reason. Peoplechange so you can learn to let go.Things go wrong so you canappreciate them when they’re right. I am a dying womanwho has decided to donatewhat I have to you.For charitable goals.

Discussing death is not high on our list,
not after a year of not talking at all,

Shuffling and cutting the deck, he fumbles,his fingers laggards, each follow-througha synaptic aberration, his hit you? morelike hoodoo, his I raise like whoosh,his call like auk, consonants not beingnegotiable, vowels as soft as snowflakes.Despite the drool worming its waydown the right side of his chinand the upper lip tugging his mouth upto a crooked smile,

1972–2012 Irony the enemy unto death of truth,history his unflinching gaze, the lyricalfrontal assault his arsenal: not the bird,not the song of the bird, but the beak,talons, feathers and wings of the bird.And wouldn’t you know, today I heardof his passing, today with my headburied in the slender body of his poems,those little fickle songbirds

It begins with something small:a virus hitches a rideon a copter or a few germsfling themselves into the eyesof the nurse tending the princewho drank too deeplyfrom the fouled water of the pond;or a flea bites a ratwho scurries into the holdwhere his brothers and sisterscram into the spaces between casksof wine and the barrels

They called me Maggot-the-unborn-fly
and Lanny Millman shot me with a BB gun—

Records topple,

the Midwest melts, rippling through a scrim of heat

as though it were an illusion

and not reality.

With Prohibition on the horizon
and the demand for rum about to take off
no one could convince the supervisor

We know so little but the little we know
we place beside a neighboring bit or byte
of information, thereby shaping knowledge
as fields of knowledge, finding correspondence

To those transfixed in the tunnel of colored lights,
to those frozen on the escalators
below constellations of candles
wreathed in the cascade of didgeridoo vibrations
and the wet clicking of tree frogs.

Shook foil—that’s what a river is. Catfish hauled like bars
of iron

from a mid-town bridge,
the wire that holds them

…then seizure again, that
blue clot, level

of the larynx,
can’t breathe, can’t

Here in Pittsburgh, March,
rain, days-long, relentless as sin.
Ash Wednesday
but I only have beard stubble

One-by-one the trees undress in carcasses
of seed, scatter in cascade, in flimsy under-orange,
a negligee of red. The colors lost, caught with vine between
the tines of rile and wind. What dread in bleeding?

Praise you for that blanket.

Praise you for the stranger

who draped it over my mother,

twisted of two

strands

that pulled us

through gardens and ditches

out of caves

The trees unravel,
plowed by a bright prow.
What’s light enough

New snow’s made our yard a white slate,

a Winter tale written out in shorthand.

When the new kitten chooses my lap for her nest,
when miraculously I’ve earned her trust,
I feel the way the sky might feel
to learn we see it as vastly blue.

In an Updike story, we feel deep trust

as the young hero dozes beside his buddy

who drives them precariously through the dark.

Do not wax sentimental on the first “good night”.

Never mind confessing how you feel.

Fight, fight the urge and keep it light.

The message came by the carriers of doom
with books, pamphlets, primers.

They said he was seated on his throne. The wounded got up from the ground. He made them whole and it happened before our eyes. We had not seen this before though the missionaries said he would. He is a God who robs his people of what they are and want to be and makes

They come at night—
the old ones from those agency prisons and boarding schools.
They walk the sky carrying northern lights.

I found a turtle in the road,
happily sunning beside the median strip.

The fire swept our narrow house.
How can I wash away the stink?
Why do I have to keep recovering,
hoarding zero like a gem?

We open six beers and by the second
we can watch ourselves interrogate.
We cull whispers, endless criss-crossings
of a vast onyx desert, but no confession.

The storm surged and we worked in the mess
serving the survivors; four to six wax beans,
one curled half-circle of Spam, a dinner roll.

In July, our time together was impeccable: a walk
around the Common discussing After the Rains,

a film with Shakespearean twists in plot and theme;
salmon and swordfish dinners that I made for you,

Marble bunks
With cotton blankets

Walk with me for a while until fire burns the last angel and wings wither until it is almost impossible to remember, then we must remember with flowers and stones and talk as if it were possible to be heard by others besides oneself.

I was the offspring
of Sister Frederick,
the feather in her barren cap.

Her hands, still fair,
are question marks
in her wheelchair lap.

Once I was a quick chickadee
hiding above you, peeping
through a dense cluster of red

maple leaves. Your sparse
hair tufted from
the bulge of your skull,

Some things are better off lost,
some people best not found, like the girl I met,
just 19, sitting by a pond in Ohio,
whose hands fit perfectly into mine.

He called his older sister Mama
but the photo in his hallway
was the same as on my grandma’s shelf
of their mother, killed in Birkenau.

“Ageless Skin”
the full-color ad ink is still moist:

Dead Sea complexion cream
erases wrinkles

smoothes out image and misperception,
intercepts inconvenient

Matchstick thin a girl
with a jug too burning hot to hold

stumbles
and the field of berries holds its blue breath
as she and the jug
fall soundless
on the shoulderwide path of matted-down
footsteps.

My life

on the road.

A bus, a train

A red Volvo wagon

110 miles one way

220 miles another

Connecticut flying by

Today the moon
reappeared

as a ghost:
now slivered,

white, the self
we all carry with us

It is time for another bowl, my stomach says,
and my eyes agree in low baritone, whispering
to Godfather, who says we must wait patiently.

In my old neighborhood
the cucaracha cart
came twice daily
proclaiming what I already knew

morning wash went gray come afternoon

sun went pale and sort of sick.

here they lie and lying exaggerate the catch

though they’ve caught nothing

We cannot say you had a heart attack,

the doctor said, for he had done his part.

Not every broken heart is cardiac.

I was walking toward the kitchen window

when I heard it—Sunny, Summer Breeze,

Greensleeves

A wheelbarrow rotted through Winter,

now filled with soil and sun,

will soon be bearing blossoms—

daisies, blue bonnets and snapdragons—