Poetry

for Chris I’m a penny fallen from heaven’s corner pocket, anybody’s overcoat, pick me up and I’ll bring you all kinds of luck. I’m a fence burning down, love locked in a box, I’m a map of hand-me-down tomorrows, the last but one, or anywhere you never wanted to go, but now. I’m a clock…

Because we cannot be together we live in six notes of Vietnamese where no one can understand us except those who speak in tongues and the language of birds Because we cannot be together we boil the root of the telephone cords torn from the black soils of sleep hold negatives up to the light…

Don’t think that being a left-handed nightingale was all legerdemain or that I am that small angry bastard who hates whores, only I disguised it by laughing; or that it’s easy leaving a restaurant by yourself and holding your other hand against the bricks to keep from falling; or anybody can play the harp, or…

I am the blue woman stroking a beaded earring searching for the right song at the red light blue woman, 107 degrees, mesquite trees fingering the winds skirts of dust blown back like Marilyn Monroe I am the blue woman wanting a new lipstick some comprehension of Rwanda an hour of silence so cool and…

The difference between my house in Pennsylvania and my house in Massachusetts is the difference between fish stinking in one place and birds in the other. The dead and bygone locusts in both places attest to this, and the salt water bringing the sea back into my inland river. Suffering being equal, I am happy…

     apprenticeship The difference is always road and you can measure it with rocks or spiders. The street signs are blue, the poor lie naked in the parks. The work of fire never ends and angels build cities of grass. Someone will follow a bird to a forest where child twins are slain. No king…

translated by Martha Collins and the author Are they Julio and Carmen? Or José and Magreta? Are they from Ethiopia, or Tanzania? From the Congo, or somewhere else? On the beach under the moonlight They lie side by side Like two exhausted seals Thrown from the sea by storm waves. Their black skin glistens in…

in spring revises bright calligraphies of grass. Small revisions. Not like winter’s chop- logic. For you who seek in nature resurrections: each green shoot corkscrews a rotten leaf, and though our DNA’s the same, my twin’s not me. Wind’s a death wish rumor hissed from green to yellow head all summer. I wish I’d gotten…

The ocean all day turning its pages, as if the swelling would come, finally, to an end; as if the ending this time would be a different story. It’s that the gulls cried or laughed when I passed them. And the gritty itch of sand in every corner, every crevice,     every fold. The air…