Sunday, November 16, 2014

Poem for Saturday, November 15, 2014


Straggler

The day after she buried him, a layer of ice
had formed, covering his plot and creeping
up the granite to preserve the epitaph:

                        No Blood on His Hands.

Fifty years earlier, they were sweating on their
South Pacific honeymoon. She remembered
lying on the shore. He fed her June plums
picked from the vine.

But now, the cruelty of winter was apparent:
too cold for fruit, flowers, or birds except
a single flock-shunned goose, flailing
through a merciless gray sky

                       in fear and disbelief.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Poem for Friday, October 17, 2014


Spilling Wine in Your Kitchen

When the wine leapt from the bottle
into the air, your shriek became
a quartet of violins.

A hurricane of red had smashed against
the side of the refrigerator, the kitchen
wall, our newly washed skin.

Confronted with this aftermath, we began
our work, scrubbing each blemish
with paper towels and water.

But somewhere, a single drop remains
inconspicuous, embedded like history
in white gypsum, reminding us

that time is not meant to erase
                                                everything,
                                                anything.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Poem for Saturday, September 27, 2014


Deluge

I.

A white car struggles forward with sweet
caution, then a red, like infant herring testing
the Atlantic currents. Where are you
going in this weather, I want to ask them all.
A deluge like this has been known to drown
lesser things; even the highest trees are
only so high

II.

when the wind is this vicious, ready to strip
us of our skin, do not go outside except
for bread or for love. Do you need anything
else to keep you alive, I want to ask
them

III.

the advantage that rain has over us is simple:
we cannot detect from where exactly it is
falling. All clouds converge into a new concept:
gray. A histrionic pause, then thunder is born,
then the drops speed up, then we are struck
with daggers

IV.

when we were children, we played in puddles
that collected where the earth sloped down,
where the contours of its surface gave in to our
weight. This is how we learned our world is
askew

V.

the cars slice through the post-storm thinness.
Somewhere in the night, a man is pulling up to a
house and turning off the headlights that kept him
alive. Somewhere in the night, a new river has
emerged; that which it takes was never ours
to decide.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Poem for Sunday, August 24, 2014


The Consequences of a Falling Sky

I.

The oceans reflect nothing; everything will shrink in the cold.

All the ships drift towards Lethe; everyone will grow thirsty.

II.

Molecules scatter like frightened sheep; our blood will turn thin.

The sun is not as bright as we thought; the wind will not relent.

III.

Language becomes paralanguage; we will kiss our words goodbye.

Poetry becomes our last concern; we will kiss our words goodbye.

IV.

The storms inundate the fields; all the earth will be a single field.

Our bodies are drenched; we will droop like naked stalks of wheat.

V.

When everything succumbs to darkness, my reaction will be to

extend my hand in your direction, to wait for the slightest brush

of your fingers.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Poem for Sunday, August 17, 2014


The Inventor

One night in August, I retreated inside from the thin summer air
and encountered an old man already three or four drinks deep.
We secured a table for a friendly game of eight-ball. The dim
bar light above betrayed the scratches on the green felt, and I
don't remember who broke or who hit what first, and I don't
remember much about physics and not enough about geometry,
and that's really all the game is.

A couple games later, and I don't remember who won. We cut
through the lobby and went outside for a reprieve from the
ruckus, the mangled music, the dead skin floating everywhere in
the air. There was enough light to see the streets and the people,
engrossed in dozens of conversations, trickling by. But the
silhouette of the mountains had long been veiled behind the still
darkness to which this town is accustomed.

The old man knelt on the sidewalk and began to roll a cigarette.
He mentioned that he lived down the canyon, that he was
designing some jet pack and had been a small-time inventor
for several years. He mentioned that he'd been an alcoholic for
even longer and had fought in a war. He lit the cigarette. His
weary lungs accepted the first trace of smoke before it plumed
upward towards the indifferent sky.

Which war, I asked.

He said it didn't matter. He said life itself is the greatest war
any of us has ever fought.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Poem for Monday, August 4, 2014


The Monsoons, Reluctant to Fall

By late July, it is brazenly summer here, and everyone takes some
heat with them, unknowingly hiding it beneath their skin. The rest
seeps into the sun-punished land, beige like unbleached wool,
cut by yucca and cacti madder than hell, and there is a dead raven
lying on the side of the road, desiccating while the world spins,
and its beak is beautiful and curves like a sickle.

And then, some respite: rain. They say monsoons here, the gravity
of the term lessened compared to when it emerges in the drawled
speech of the lush, vine-tangled south. The monsoons, then, are
reluctant to fall, but they must fall. You smell them, the freshness
of newly split atoms mingling with the pines. You watch them
pound against the orange Chinese boxcars until they glow.

Think of it this way: a memory is inevitable. It may be some other
rain-covered moment in your past; yes, you were playing in some
puddles that had collected on the slope of your driveway. Your
hands were much smaller. You cut one of them somehow, and the
blood sprang from its own well dug in the wound, and you had to
stop it quickly, very quickly, because it is so hard to get back
what is lost.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Poem for Tuesday, July 29, 2014


The Fire Gods Are Always Hungry

This is not the first thing you will learn there, but when you do
learn, the iron will make you sweat, the blood-heavy organs
will make homes beneath your fingernails like parasites in their
hosts. Someone beside you will be kneeling down; this is
for certain. They will pick up a knife, cradle it in their large hand.
They will thumb the blade into a piece of the stomach and toss it
in the stove where the flames are dancing.

You will begin to learn the hierarchy of the land. You will
deconstruct the grass on which you stand, first by the patch, next
by the blade, next by the cells inside each blade. You will never
forget how things once living grazed there under countless suns,
under countless moons, before they made it into the fire.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Poem for Thursday, July 24, 2014


These Things Are Gone

At the slope of the mountain is knee-high vetch,
violet like a storm, fields of it.

You stand there among it all,
coffee on your breath, feeling finite below
the aspen, clenching a rock in your hand.

Before you carve anything in that trunk, think
how these things are gone:

        letters we once saved in drawers,

        our footprints parallel in the snow,

        the flowers that sat on your desk

        over the years, how they all wilted

        in the same surrender.

God, there must have been thousands
of flowers.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Poem for Thursday, July 17, 2014


A Rooftop in Kentish Town

                   From such places,
                   we finally confirm
                   all our suspicions:

yes, the light dies more slowly
farther north, spilling cobalt
instead of black around
the moon;

yes, things get lost in the thickets,
a lap dog yelping from one
of the nameless gardens
below;

yes, when sitting alone on a bench,
implications vary according to
how close to the center
you are;

yes, for reasons lost in the ineffable,
this breeze-sliced night is not
meant to be reduced to a
photograph.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Poem for Wednesday, June 25, 2014


Pine View in June

I.

A woman walks her dog on the sidewalk that passes
in front of my porch. She is wearing cutoff denim shorts
and a black feathered hat that Victorian women likely
wore during periods of mourning. Try as I might, I cannot
recall how her dog looked.

II.

The children play softball and soccer in the little league
diamond behind my apartment. After a practice concludes,
the coach says to his team of Hispanic girls, "Let's not forget
the number one rule: you pick up the equipment, not us."

III.

In the same little league diamond, some drunken youth
shout from the dugout at night while I try to sleep. The
words of Naomi Shihab Nye come to mind: we were
all born like empty fields. What we are now shows
what has been planted.

IV.

In the pine outside my window, the songbirds pause
from their communication to swallow whatever is
clenched in their beaks. How similarly all creatures
live, I think, lifting my sandwich towards my mouth.

V.

A man is sealing up cracks in the weathered asphalt.
They are unpredictable in depth, in length, in pattern.
He is outmatched, but he remains dogged, convinced
that he is solely responsible for saving us all from
melting in the earth's core.

Friday, June 13, 2014

Poem for Thursday, June 12, 2014


Esto Incluye a las Estrellas

On this evening, I turn to what I cannot
see or reach.

This includes the stars.
The longest veil of cloud has tangled itself
around their throats.

Being cosmic is so thankless, you said
another evening long ago:

           a glass of Cabernet in your crescent
           moon hand, eyes bluer than Neptune
           ice, remnants of another galaxy rolling
           off your tongue.

How could I believe you then, now, or
at any point in infinite time?

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Poem for Sunday, April 27, 2014


Nature's Hierarchy

There is something about the pine branches
weighed down with snow,

the lone bluebird underneath, incredulous,
questioning her springtime instincts.

On a different street, a man in pajama pants
and boots impales his yard with a shovel,
not expecting to work on a Saturday

in April. He pauses from his labor, glances
upward for some kind of reprieve and is met
by a maelstrom of rushing flakes.

Nature's hierarchy is no different from ours,
stretching vertically from ground to sky.

The trick is to move sideways, to create
your own power, to live with and not
up or down.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Poem for Friday, April 18, 2014


Spring in Flag

Raga music the evening before, tea
with lemon to my immediate left.
Outside from my porch,
the overcast sky;

just below, a light blue Chevy
Nova slugs along until it disappears
outside the edge of some
photograph.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Poem for Friday, March 28, 2014


Till the autumn tempests come to scatter the
flowers

    --So brief your thoughts of her.

                                  --from The Tale of Genji


So Brief Your Thoughts of Her

It is the time of the year
for our rituals: hanging up our coats, giving up smoking,

remarking on the fickleness of the sky. How strangely
we behaved. How often

we took for granted the
intricate signals sent from brain to mouth, the thoughts

forever tangled in our synaptic thickets. Sometimes, I
manage to think of you

perpetually dressed for
that first winter, telling me your name under the snow-

pregnant clouds. How wonderful your name, you lying
on the frost, lighting up

your menthol, pausing
between puffs to tell me this is your last one, you swear.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Poem for Thursday, March 20, 2014


Life Observation

The contents of my trashcan: rotten
lettuce, shredded pieces of paper and--
    wait for it--
two strips of scissor-cut
    denim.


Saturday, March 1, 2014

Poem for Saturday, March 1, 2014 (2)


Improvising

When she said she longed for Venice,
I quietly stepped out and returned
minutes later, hands burdened with two
paper bags: one containing discount pasta
and tomato sauce, one containing boxed
wine and a single taper candle.

I brought her to the table, set a plate
in front of her and lit the candle off the
oven burner. Anyway, I said, it's
probably raining hard over there. And
who can walk around Piazza San Marco
without stepping on the pigeons?

Poem for Saturday, March 1, 2014


Harbinger

The latest form fate has assumed:

the branches of the trembling
aspen, helplessly
tangled in the wind, scraping
the claws of the low-flying
crow.

Still,
he is undeterred: a harbinger, lonely
in his blackness,
wings kissed with rain as he soars
through clueless vapors that we call
sky.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Poem for Thursday, February 13, 2014


Make Sure

"And whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders."
                                                                               - Federico Garcia Lorca

Minutes before her heart stopped, she
was telling me not to forget to
feed the dog, how often to water
her potted tomato plants. Make sure,
she reminded, to angle them away
from the sun at its brightest.
She used her last bit of strength
to clench my finger, explaining her love
through curved skin.

                                                     (homage paid to Jack Gilbert's "Married")


Saturday, January 18, 2014

Poem for Saturday, January 18, 2014 (2)


In Passing

When they buried her, they could not
understand it all: the aroma in that room
born from hot lead and lavender, the
shrill cries of the newborn rising from
the crib down the hall. Years afterward,
they maintained their habits: kissing her
framed photograph before leaving
the house, stacking the dishes after meals
in the same manner she had done.
When her birthdays came, they always
mentioned how beautiful she was,
how her hair was brighter than a
thousand suns.

Poem for Saturday, January 18, 2014


To Explain Venus to a Mongolian

I remember the night the three of us walked through
the dust back from a small shop hollowed out in
battered Soviet concrete. Little Orgil, pig-tailed and
smiling, cupped an apple that seemed far too
large for his hands. That bright star, I told
his father pointing northward, is not a star at all.
At this, we stopped. The sky was a black sheet.
What do you mean, he asked. To explain
Venus to a Mongolian, it is best if your words
are like our own planet--a bit broken, spinning
in circumlocution, simple in the grand scheme.
Tell them that we live in the third world from
the sun. Then tell them that what they believed
was a star for their whole life is the second world
from the sun. Wait for them to ask Really? 
as per their custom. What I remember most was
his amazement, the moment of his comprehension.
How he gazed down at his son, face sticky
with fruit, and felt the need to take his tiny hand
in the dark.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Poem for Sunday, January 5, 2014


Dreamcatcher

What guards you, then, is a willow hoop:


inches in diameter, webbed with blood-red
yarn, adorned with feathers and beads, first
tied together by Ojibwe hands, brown and

splintered, a stone's shot north of the Great
Lakes. The stretched quadrilaterals, those
subconscious gatekeepers, filter out that

which longs to haunt you. Someday, one will
break tradition and seep through. Worry not;
simply wake up next to me. Feel it shrivel,


like so many things, in the heat of our sun.