Poetry

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…

When hope forms a bud of prayer, who picks it? Words in all languages yearn toward the stars, confessing and beseeching. I talk to a masculine higher power half god, half human. When he sits calm and golden, spine straight as the Buddha’s, my own spine yearns upward toward the clean sky of his face….

Love not the rider but the old rider, the ghost in the saddle: Obey that ghost. A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip. But we are not good horses. We bolt. We stand still in bad weather. We rely on things we know are unreliable, it feels so good just to…

Retinal snowfall, anything that slips, where children kick a snowman in the dim winter increment, the gray of 3 p.m. Two red cars, one blue. White wing that dips and opens softly in the eyes’ ellipse, an n dimension furling at the rim— a down is paling—shyer motions limn, shyest motions adumbrate the tips— the…

In the B movie of our lives, there are no panoramas; our limitations have perfected the close-up. Pain is confined to what is visible: slump of the left shoulder, elbow on the table. There’s only room for subplot this side of the proverbial tracks. Sound of vengeance like a passing train, sweet and noble journey…