Poetry

Where any of us is going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is the elemental mystery: despite instructions he left behind, Houdin- i, who could outwit ropes and chains, padlocks and steam- er trunks, could extricate himself from underwater metal crates, could send forth, he was certain, a message from the other side, never cracked the curtain…

The souls we carry hunger for our light. They who feel unfortunate, close in on the fields, convene around happiness. They hear the sound of it like laughter, on roads, through rain-blurred trees, the smell of it boiled through bones and cartilage, the taste of earth deep and darkly rooted. Drawn to those sleeping skin…

In my little museum of erotica I would place your feet. I would place your feet sandwiching my feet. Their softness. Their heat. And I would place your arms as you do mornings, beneath my neck. around my waist, tugging me towards you, my back to your chest. This well-beingness I would set on a…

translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes   No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ   Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…

Arturo stomps the heel of his boot and tells me: Every pinche minute I mess up a red ant. That’s no good, I tell him, me the young man in the next row, The shadow of my hoe cutting weeds in Boswell’s beet field. Arturo says: every super pinche half-hour I see this squirrel spin…

Well we did our best in deracinated weather. Daughters were wedding daughters, suddenly. They’d registered at Bed Bath & Beyond. Rain-hurled catalpa flowers bruised the yard. The dual-mothered bride procured a dress, to her surprise. Pert cannabis jungled up. One wandered under oaks, umbrella’d to the hilt, like some female in a lyric or a…

The powerlessness of sleep to transport two men along a sand-blown road. The shrapnel keeps popping out of their bodies and the Humvee keeps crashing into the guardrail. The escarpment fills in with blood. The lieutenant rides shotgun, fallow with the land. He notices the flamingo thin stems of the frangipani, shredded in wind, unstitchable….

What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox on the Blvd. Raspail and negotiate my post at Morlais, then Toulouse, then come back in a riveted trunk with Henry Millers sewn into my lining, Frank Sinatra to greet me in the mile square city, Dutch ships everywhere my father and mother in from Pittsburgh…

It’s really cold in here now, easily forty below something, and half the class is asleep. Snow dazzles in the windows, makes a cake of each desk. It’s really cold in here now. I’ve been lecturing on the same poem for twenty-six hours and half the class is asleep. I want them to get it….