How to describe the colorof a pond gone fuguein autumn windsurface tinctured blue,sky-stained and deeper watertea-stained from steeping in peatthat netted entanglementthat took a thousand yearsto form. How far the landcan go in tellinga story, waterdark as obsidian nighttoward which I progressevery day feelingendless longing to hold on.
Translated from the Braj Bhasha by Chloe Martinez Listen, his gorgeous face is all I can see. I’m living and breathing him; he stays rent-free in my mind— what I’m saying is, I keep seeing my beloved. Wherever his feet have touched the ground, I start dancing. I’m telling you: his face. Mine. Transfixed. Mira’s…
Dear Dactinomycin, I have a question: How do yousave a body from the body itself? Your job: stop cells dividing, freeze growth.The proof: hair coming out in clumps, disappeared eyelashes, platelets drained solow they called for a transfusion. A mother’s job: grow a small body, then grow it up.Even volunteer to disappear, like mitosis, after…
— after C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade “Beech is Anglo-Saxon boc: book, document, orcharter,” she (C. D.) writes. “The shoots grow fasterin the dark,” she writes in her 250-some page diaryof obsession. Here, now, at the smallpox cemeterynear where I live, the shin-high marble grave markers,corners softened, stand canted, like awkward lumber.Bone-white, chiseled only No. 1, 2, 14, they are…
In an old story, the Almighty shaped claywith His hands to fashion the first man.In this story, enslaved hands shaped clay to make bricks to build storied big housesthat will stand in this land. Both storieslead on to sagas of births—natal tales filled with first wails and nations of folkand feats of nation-building. Birthinga nation…
from the Arabic al-jabr, “the reunion of broken parts” I must have been fiveor six years old when a dragonfly landedon my forearm, at the end of our long driveway,near the mailbox, on a two-lane rural highway.The dragonfly’s body reached from my elbow to my wrist,blue and black, with four imposing wings.The globes of its…
I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least—Frank O’Hara (Lunch Poems) I have been to Italy and the tundra too,but it’s not terrible. Frank, you don’t knowthe smell in the dry fall of picking berriesand I might be unable to find an Olivetti,but even up on Murphy Dome…
On the eve of the Nuremberg Trials, the doctors found the nailsof Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, theconsequences of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic ofwhich he took more than a hundred pills a day. When Göring was captured, he had a suitcasewith over twenty thousand doses, pretty much all that…
All these ideas, worries, feelings.They seem large.Immoveable, untouchable as the past is. Yet how light they are also, how portable. Even the future—my days still to be spent,my death yet to be greeted. Walking around inside me,wherever I go.
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