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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.