Poetry

my ears go underwater as i speak, just one, & then another wood floors surround w/ boxes & sound, systems of voices & trajectories the mouth of the river & the left coast, montreal to twelve months of vancouver imagine, i said, doing everything it is you do, except in the shower even thunderstorms erupt…

The house gathers dust and rushes. (Unreadable.) And the girl’s body arches. See the unbecoming angle. I lie down now. Open-mouthed-bird. And trust they’re all singing. These our only taboos: Her folded notion of water and clear voice. Her hand unwrapped. Climb in closer. Without line these your limbs, gills, wrist a small cut on…

All summer and fall the couple floats hand in hand from work at the shelter workshop. Hand in hand in their secondhand sleeveless oxford shirts. With target tattoos on their deltoids. Even in the winter, the same way, hand in hand, although bundled up in secondhand wool coats. One snowy evening, right after they pass…

Is it a vanishing point or is it      Brooklyn into which the cables run      Brooklyn over which these two      these shadowy walkers come      against the shaded rails against      the future in the arcades in the bridge      the parallels above them in midair                                     § Under a clatter of fire…

Regard a tree. Who would have better seized light’s longing? Longing a labor is first, is first. First the cold path of it. (Bring water.) Egregious                          is a few steps over wet stones                          hai ailala                          or you might miss it   Shirred up, wet against the grain silica might call out                         …

for my son, Klemente Gilbert-Espada In 1898, with the infantry from Illinois, the boy who would become the poet Sandburg rowed his captain’s Saint Bernard ashore at Guánica, and watched as the captain lobbed cubes of steak at the canine snout. The troops speared mangos with bayonets like many suns thudding with shredded yellow flesh…

Turned from the camera’s eye, hovering, between river & bridge, the hung woman looks downstream, & snagged in the air beside her, the body of her young son. They are tassels on a drawn curtain; they are the closed eyes of the black boy who will find them while leading his cow to the riverbank;…

freedom is what you can buy with a song. after the song has been soldered into your lungs. after the song has beaten its way inside your dreams. after the song has snuck its way into your bed. after the song has knuckled you under. after the song has festered and blossomed and festered again….