Followers

Monday, April 20, 2015

Fire Company

Fire Company

The creosote caught
as if kerosene-soaked.

Up went the brittlebush,
the mesquite quick as

kettle steam. God-gone
the ironwood while cattle

ranchers stood rapping
their wedding rings

on the white rail.
Holy shit, holy shit!

they sing
to the angelic jet

spreading its red
retardant around

the housing tract
like a loved one’s

ashes. Dust and
lightning, gold

smoke scrolling
like a calendar

into the sky
until the sky

is choked
with time, with years,

which torch-touched
under the bursage

burn for days,
catch flight as if

no flesh had

ever lived them.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Sewol


No news             now                         no shift in cargo
            to capsize             what the captain left

before the kids                        kids             he said            
            head back to your rooms             to text            

from inside a stone                        I love you—
            we waited for you for days             by the shore

we hold up signs            backlit by candles           
            return to us our friends                        we wrote

return to us                        this paper boat            released
            with a message                        we love you—

divers saw                         three bodies floating
            through the window             of a passenger cabin

but were unable             to retrieve them

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Book of Desserts

pages for the privileged 

sugared stacks of white

on white, the cane

ground down into paper

lives follow the curve of that glass case

counter, inflection, chocolate cake, 

shelf to the cooling machine, plastic front,

marble floor


petits fours and doberge, apple stack and fritter

layer, layer, layer


You cut into this cake like colonists did Africa,

with joy


the sinking tines of a fork in frosting

the downward drive of a stake in soil

yield pleasure 

I imagine

the lagniappe after need has been negotiated


my mother observed

the refusal of a homemade brownie,

a slant eye at key lime

does nothing to further trust


this is the tyranny of the mille-feuille, 

in exile become Napoleon

subject of history 

and emperor still hungry

Monday, April 6, 2015

Creative Nonfiction

The materials are the artifacts
and the art of fact,

the matter of truth
and the truth of matter.

It plays the language
within (or is it against?)

the memory of the event
or the event of memory,

the way the little cushion

still cups like two open hands
in the stern of the boat

where years ago he laid
his drowsy head.

It speaks the no to fiction
and the fiction of no,

the way we all make
believe our renunciations.

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Towns

I’ve seen children baptized by force
roped and dragged down
to the water's edge
and across to the other side.

Some exit this life in a similar way
each door frame
the place they have turned their backs.

No one can step in the same river twice
Soul says the twisted body Open

a rim bone
a market
a mecca
a page

The world is high places and low places
seascapes
tabernacles
childhood chants
skulls in the grasp of great tree roots
smoke on the mountain
steam from skin.

Wisdom says go back another way
I’ve seen rivers change course, shocked.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

The Tilting





The windows become the floor             the door the ceiling—           
            in life jackets                 we rise to the top

like a hatch now             we climb through it—            
            waddle down the wall                         of the hallway

toward             what light remains : the water                         ever
            our only light                         only hope by the stairs

cascading—             how many times have we tilted                       
            from our most fervent                         intentions?



Tuesday, May 1, 2012

So, are we all continuing this thing for May, post poetry-month? This has been a lot of fun, and it has been a great motivator - to light a fire under my Asian non-ass - and I hope we can continue this forum, if even intermittently. What say you?

Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Road to Franklin




Why not begin
with the saw mill, which never angers

the air its addiction to light,
the light its mimcry

of sound, how it happens
all over, always

on the mountain road
you pass the tree farm—

fir, spruce—so many
ladies in waiting

in the painting of it
the artist forgets

to give them faces
nevertheless they greet you

with the difficult heft and hipswish
of their hoopskirts

some hope might gather there.
or is it

a hidden binge of winter air?

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Hunger


— the kind
that would stab you
in the eye, keep moving

a bird-shaped hole
in the back of your head
for hunger-released in the rubble:

a cigarette the color
of bread, a candy wrapper —
the cold morning.

*

Shadow you thought
was your soul, flew in
through the fifth

floor window, across
the classroom
and down the hall.

But about the soul:
it doesn't mean, necessarily,
The Lord's un-clutched hand invisible gift . . .

nor omen,
nor flap-gift emissary
while you were teaching.

*


On the sidewalk, your way
to lunch, 
a good writing desk:

dark wood, with
a drawer out like a tongue.
Would it speak, it would say

My hunger, my thirst for someone
to come, dip his finger in ink,
touch my lips,

feel around my mouth toward
the throat, dead desert of 
unutterable words . . .

*

A crow
in the drawer, or
a squirrel

when you return
in half an hour. None of it,
really, requires the soul.




Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Dinner (this is a poem of Joel's I'm posting for him)

So you sat next to Peter Orszag at an East Village restaurant?
What do you know about the CBO,
or the vermicelli he lifted with dexterous financial fingers
via a stainless steel fork?
The only thing you know for sure
is that Orszag is not a chopstick man,
and this knowledge is a tugboat
pushing the great barge of commerce
down the widening mouth of foreign policy.
I once ate there with friends and was silent
watching the senator perch atop his chair
like Franklin's bald eagle.
After coffee and dessert,
there was the car ride through this city of forests.
There is usually a car ride.

Taken from chair to chair I saw in the window
the diaphanous shadow of your phone's shallow face.
It fixed with tenacious reason on the shatter resistant passenger side
as if it were a giant night insect attracted to the darkness.
I saw the rows of text, the sublime back-lit miracle of liquid crystal
digalized before my eyes, and could see nothing else.
Not the trees, or the sky, or the ghosts of the great burning.
I only saw it:

The ephermeral rectangle; the small glass doorway;
The place where we make sense of what we do not know.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Arbus


Not hunted really, but trapped—
the light made it difficult to look.

Her first eye, through a second eye,
captured her subjects' eyes.

The subjects' eyes, when captured,
saw her second eye first. 

Later she fixed them in solutions,
neither knowing any better nor any worse.




Friday, April 20, 2012

Nothing's Easy

Yes, my dear, nothing's easy.
Most things are hard, the rest
we make hard for ourselves.

                     *

Sometimes
the best we can hope
to bear is to open
ourselves to light,

to  r e f r a c t
                          our suffering . . .

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Walking the Dog


Pulling her now, by the throat, from whatever

may distract her — squirrels, runners, a ball

bouncing, birds in the grass — a clean jerk

of the leather loop, buckle and chain,

tethered shortly to his side,

if that's anything like

what we need from each other — loyalty, or

the right kind of focus — to anchor the leash

in his left, the other to grip more gently

for slack, should she need it,

to nose in the dirt,

or to yank her from another, more fierce, who

would end her — to know a jump or the faintest

growl means another quick snap — Hey, that's not

how you say hello . . . him saying, as if she were a child.




High School Diaries

Some people post pictures of themselves on the internet

posing over the speckled carcass of a kudu

they’ve killed in Tanzania.

It’s usual to dig the uncocked rifle butt

into the ground and grip the spiral horns

like ski poles, for people love a virile huntsman with a viral smile.

Fathers and sons

bond by hunting. Husbands and wives bond by holding

opposite ends of a gun.


Hunting game, if you are gay, probably bores and horrifies you. Write this

down in your diary: What a sad, proud lion lying there in the dust

between the khaki musculature, jugular-struck, mane-pulled

like a passed-out frat boy

having his hair held back. What a miserable zebra with a hole in its throat.

What a wildebeest running

red from nostril and ear.

And, oh,

the cape buffalo crumpled next to a folding chair, a bottle of grey goose

under the fuzzy groin of the thorn acacia,

under the jackalberry tree, under the baobab, under

the jarrah tree, the candelabra

pulling all its shade back into itself.


No quarter given, no quarter sought. We are most ourselves


forgiving what we’ve written of the human heart, though most Americans

report they’d rather post pornographic pictures of themselves

than excerpts from their high school diaries.