Baited it-that’s what we did. One big
mess. Slick fat of a leopard seal, a mermaid
curse in inky waters, places we’ll never
return to. I’m as part of the anchored
ship as any. I’m as reddened by hands
and murderously known. The songs
stars play clear out in the crystalline
heavens. Some lasting mention of the end
repeated each day we feast. When the seal
was hacked open, it thrashed first
like a bear, opened its jaw to show fangs
whiter than snow We heaved it up. Suspended, it
looked priest-solemn, frozen in wondrous
content we’ll never have. My saints
above me forgave nothing. We dread things.
We met the greater without cause or care.
(Source: versedaily.org)
‘There,’ points Grandma.
She had a tent that was a home.
She had a goat and a camel.
She had a rake and a fork and a trowel.
She had a machete and a watering can.
She had a grove and two hundred plants.
She had a child and another one and another one.
***
‘There,’ she insists.
I could not see
Because of the wall.
I could not hear
Because of the noise.
I could not smell
Because of the powder.
***
But I can always tell,
I am sure of Grandma
Who always was
And is still
And will always be.
She smells like soil.
And smiles like soil.
And blinks like soil
When touched by rain.
***
She has a house that is a tent
She has a key
And a memory.
She has a hope
And two hundred offspring.
***
Grandma is here
But lives there.
(Source: mondoweiss.net)
We crawl through the tall grass and idle light,
our chests against the earth so we can hear the river
underground. Our backs carry rotting wood and books
that hold no stories of damnation or miracles.
One day as we listen for water, we find a beekeeper—
one eye pearled by a cataract, the other cut out by his own hand
so he might know both types of blindness. When we stand
in front of him, he says we are prisms breaking light into color—
our right shoulders red, our left hips a wavering indigo.
His apiaries are empty except for dead queens, and he sits
on his quiet boxes humming as he licks honey from the bodies
of drones. He tells me he smelled my southern skin for miles,
says the graveyard is full of dead prophets. To you, he presents
his arms, tattooed with songs slave catchers whistle
as they unleash the dogs. He lets you see the burns on his chest
from the time he set fire to boats and pushed them out to sea.
You ask why no one believes in madness anymore,
and he tells you stars need a darkness to see themselves by.
When you ask about resurrection, he says, How can you doubt?
and shows you a deer licking salt from a lynched man’s palm.
(Source: poets.org)
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
i give myself five days to forget you.
on the first day i rust.
on the second i wilt.
on the third day i sit with friends but i think about your tongue.
i clean my room on the fourth day. i clean my body on the fourth day.
i try to replace your scent on the fourth day.
the fifth day, i adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate.
a wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold.
the midas of cheap metal.
tinsel in the middle of summer.
crevice glitter, two days after the party.
i glow the way unwanted things do,
a neon sign that reads;
come, i still taste like someones else’s mouth.
I.
There is something about how we love each other.
The different ways. I read about it.
My hand turned into you means this, or doesn’t.
Like chilies there is a secret to the heat.
How I can only stomach them
when they are still green and new.None of my love is old enough for history.
II.
I suppose to truly understand it all,
we need to go back.How did we grow into this?
I get down on my knees in the earth
the earth of my childhood.
I smear my face with it. My face dust.I interview your mother.
If we were some myth
you’d be the potter,
I’d be the heat that warps
all the clay in your hands.
III.
If we are talking about it,
I was not taught the usual ways of love.
I want to trust you
but as much as I love a body it betrays me.
Your arms. Your thick waist.
The way your legs root to the spot
like something for me to climb
that will eventually crumble.
IV.
I have to ask: what do we do with this love? This love in conflict.
This love that wanders off
like an unleashed dog.
Make plans. Make maps, make blueprints. In a house a thousand rooms
to be alone together.
And there is something to be said for hard work.
We fall asleep in silence,
but I sleep.
V.
I talk to a friend about repetition.
The comfort there is in it.
I tell every man about the size of my hands.
When we met, yours opening and closing on them
until they disappeared.
VI.
I don’t know how to touch someone
without trying to see through them.
I will always be bold in this way.
VII.I think of all the ways we talk about love.
I lay down belly up
in an attempt to hand myself over to you.
I roll over and get up and walk away.
VIII.
I try to explain our differences to my psychiatrist.
She says, Close your eyes and picture all of your problems
sailing down a stream.
You are standing in the water barefoot. You are plucking smooth pebbles from the bed.
You get in the way of my calm.
IX.At first when we begin to falter,
I will walk you through the days.
See this wall? Remember the beginning?
Where you held me roughly and took me.
Bring your hand to my cheek. This is where it burns.
On our skin, the scent of mud and fire.
The dampness that makes me ache. If you have to leave me
at least leave me your body.
X.
My hunger is always desperate.
I know how to starve and I know how to feed.
XI.This nose I inherited
surely makes me a liar. To speak to you,
I put my mouth to every sad place
I can possibly think of.
XII.
There is meaning in the silence when we don’t talk.
The sound of our bodies hammering out of themselves
and into each other. If we were wild
we would be wearing each others’ skins.What does language mean anyway? I can’t speak
sometimes, and I can’t speak another.
XIII.I feel like I don’t ask for much.
For every moment I am painted a monster
In therapy, once you are gone I will say again,
If only they knew
what I was trying to tell them.
There is another when I am learning how to be tender.
XIV.In your absence
I wear only the clothes that you have touched.
When the horses ride
they ride west away from us.
I am sure it means something
that there are deserts out there.
Chandelier too full of brilliance to be indolent.
Your prisms enunciate the light
and don’t need rain to break it into rainbows.
Snow with six crutches in each crystal.
Your livery your glitter, your purring
made visible. Only inanimate things can sparkle
without sweat. My spinet, the threat of music
in its depths and miniature busts of men composers
carved of time on top. The hollow bench
held sheet music. Sing me
Charm Gets In Your Eyes. I hear you best
when undistracted by your body. In headspace
technology, where flowers are living
in glass globes, their fragrance vivisected.
Anything that blooms that long
will seem inanimate. Heaven. Grief
like the sea. Keeps going. Over the same wrought
ground. The whole spent moan. Praise dies
in my throat or in the spooky rift
between itself and its intended. Like a wish-
bone breaking. The little crutch inside
is not a toy. There is no night asylum.
A restless bed, a haunt preserve,
a blanket rough as sailcloth. But sing me, was it kind
snow sometimes? With true divided lights and nothing
flawed about it? If song goes wrong,
be dancerly. Dance me, at what point
does west turn to east as it spins?
I’ve never understood. Perspective.
How charm gets to yes. Dance me Exile
and the Queendom, by request.
It is a ferocious thing
to have your body as your instrument.
Glove over glove, let your dance express
what I’ve been creeping like a vein of sweat
through a vastness of.
This tune with mountains tied inside
and many silent letters
can be read as trackers scan the spaces
between toes and birders read the rustle
left by birds. As any mammal
in its private purr hole knows,
the little crutch inside
is not a crutch. More a sort of
steeple. Neither silver to be chased
nor gold to be beaten.
You were==you are
more than ever like that too.
Noon upon noon,
you customize this solitude
with spires
that want nothing from me
and rise with no objective
as everything does when happy.
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
The voice of the Dharma
the voice
now
A shimmering bell
through all.
Every hill, still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes flow.
old woods, new seedlings,
tall grasses plumes.
Dark hollows; peaks of light.
wind stirs the cool side
Each leaf living.
All the hills.
The Voice
is a wife
to
him still.
(Source: wenaus.com)
Dan said, My life is a nine with the hammer cocked,
chuckled, told of standing on a browned lawn
naked, three hundred pounds of pure Mick-Spic:
shooting at a Chevelle, tire marks on concrete.
Told how, inside, you heat a sharpened Bic
and a guy carves DannyBoy or Norteaño on your neck.
Prince pictured of faint patterns on ceiling tiles
in his dreams and a pot with a ten in it when he finds
where color begins. He brought a picture: he’s thirteen,
Liberia, wide smile, fatigues, kalishnikov
hugging his shoulder. Told of barefoot soccer,
running on bricks, the grace of a clean pass.
I’m worth more than someone I meet, Rich said,
then described his daughter, his girl, and ladies
here, there. He explained what it means to be
a baldhead, why, if he sees a Sudeaño on Third,
he can’t be held responsible for what’ll happen.
Told us which old school Cutlass’ is hella tight.
Larry kept saying, High as an Oaktown sky,
that’s all he said, aside from seeing vines
or brush or poison oak we cut and pulled
were a J with a hit so big he’d vanish. Never
told us what we knew: clapboard house,
cracked talk, brothers to keep in shoes.
And I went home and wrote a lover, told
how far hills were no matter where I drove,
how I didn’t know what it was to be a tatted
baldhead, raise kids, play barefoot in the street,
one eye on the hammer, one ear to the barrel,
hearing a seashell inside the chamber.
(Source: versedaily.org)
Every fourteen days,
a language dies.
Does it count
to fourteen
until it expires,
or do others
do the counting?
Every fourteen days,
a language dies.
No more rocks
for it, no more skies;
no more love in it,
no more time.
The world
becomes unconstricted
from it, untied
from sound.
How many
Adams had to point
to how many things
and say how many
names and smile
at how many aptnesses?
Every fourteen days,
a language dies;
can one imagine
the night
before it does?
To say:
“This is the last tear,
this is the last sigh, this,
the last of the last.”
Every fourteen days,
a language dies.
This, even a Scheherazade
cannot stop.
you are only readable through a magnifying glass,
we play silly wars with focused sunlight
(the sun is trying to get at my shadow by burning me through)
we light a danger candle and fill the room with throbbing shadow,
you are its messenger; a conduit
i speak in thunderous Morse code
and superspeed collisions
there is nothing ‘inside’ a word
translated from the Turkish by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad May 1, 2012
I woke to find myself filled with sound
My face my eyes my mouth my nose my hands
It was the sound of a sea-door opening
The sound of the sun-hen shaking dust from her feathers
The sound of a tooth-colored hawser creaking
Of a trumpet in the shape of a tree
Of tomorrow’s wheat, of a moving bone
It was the sound of an historical wrist, of resistance
Of capering cars, of embracing horses.
I watched it, as blue as a carnation cooling in the sun
As beautiful as the pencil behind a construction worker’s ear
As intense as a wet barrel in the rain
As ecstatic as a clothesline brushed by the wing of a sparrow
Like pigeons strolling through a schoolyard
Like a lip kissed on the coast, a lip kissed in the rain
Like faceless minutes nuzzling up to shadows
Like celestial toys.
(Source: guernicamag.com)
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
(Source: sharingpoetry)
Have you lost your mind, are you wingstruck,
is there a piece of you gone, why can’t
that fire fall out of your chest or are
you completely unstrung with the stripping
him down to the hot quick of you and
too lamentably eyesick, voicesick, breastsick
to understand there’s no hope for you—
you must be lightdead, you must be socket
blown, heartshot, blinded by doves
and he will not know you ever
he will not think suddenly of you, or one day
say, touch, look; anything outside of your
intoxicated shine to yourself, such a maddening
monkey, are you out of your head, are you
off your nut, have you taken leave
of your senses, are you not all there,
is something loose, gone soft—
are you beyond mercy, is he
a scent with no source in the house,
is he kind to you in dreams, is his throat a place
for you to die, unpardonable, ludicrous, bedazzled,
do you hear voices, do you see benevolent
forms, do you think you’ve been stabbed
and now you’re standing over the body
not yours - not his- but the body
drunk, drunk up again, have you entirely
lost touch, do you have roses for brains,
do you live on the moon
that his oblivion waxes you, easy pearl,
are you all balled up, have you come
unhinged, woman,
is anyone home?
