872 Life poems

I. Black swollen fruit dangling on a limb Red forgotten flesh sprayed across the prairie Parched brown vines creeping over the wall Yellow winged pollen, invisible enemies Boluses without homesteads, grubs without a voice Burrowed deeply into this land’s dark, dark heart Someday, our pods and pupae shall turn in the earth And burgeon into our motherlode’s bold beauty II. We’re a seed on the manure, on the sole of your shoe We’re the louse trapped in your hank of golden hair We’re the sliver that haunts beneath your thumbnail We the church mouse you scorched with a match but lived We’re the package wrapped, return address unknown We’re the arm lowered again, again, a bloodied reverie We’ve arrived shoeless, crutchless, tousle-haired, swollen-bellied We shall inherit this earth’s meek glory, as foretold II. (For Leah, my niece) They gave you a title, but you were too proud to wear it They gave you the paterland, but you were too lazy to farm it Your condo is leaking, but you’re too angry to repair it Your dress has moth holes, but you’re too sentimental to toss it You’re too bored to play the lute, it hangs on the wall like an ornament The piano bites you, it’s an eight-legged unfaithful dog Love grows in the garden, but you’re too impudent to tend it A nice Hakka boy from Ogden, so hardworking, so kind The prayer mat is for prayer, not for catamite nipple-piercing The Goddess wags her finger at your beautiful wasteland A dream deferred, well, is a dream deferred IV. (Janie’s retort, on her fortieth birthday) The same stars come around and around and around The same sun pecks her heat at the horizon The same housing tract, the same shopping center The same blunt haircut: Chinese, Parisian, Babylonion The same lipstick: red and it comes off on your coffeecup The same stars come around and around and around The same sun tarries in the late noon sky The same word for mom:Ah ma, madre, mere, majka The same birthbabe: bald, purplish, you slap to make cry The same stench: mother’s milk, shit and vomit The same argument between a man and a woman The same dog, hit by a car, the same escaped canary The same turkey for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year The same three-tiered freeway: Istanbul, Tokyo, San Diego The same hill, the same shanty town, the same lean-to The same skyscraper: Hong Kong, Singapore, Toledo The same soup: chicken, though the veggies may vary The same rice for supper: white, brown or wild The same stars come around and around and around The same sun dips her head into the ocean The same tree in the same poem by the same poet The same old husband: saggy breasts, baggy thighs The same blackness whether we sleep or die V. Whoever abandoned her grandmother at the bus stop Whoever ran in and out the door like a blind wind spinning the upside-down prosperity sign right side up again Whoever lost her virtue    in darkly paneled rooms    with white boys Whoever prayed for round eyes and taped her eyelids in waiting Whoever wore platform shoes blustering taller than her own kind Whoever sold her yellow gold for Jehovah Whoever discarded her jade Buddha for Christ VI. Why are you proud, father, entombed with the other woman? Why are you proud, mother, knitting my shroud in heaven? Why are you proud, fish, you feed the greedy mourners? Why are you proud, peonies, your heads are bowed and weighty? Why are you proud, millennium, the dialect will die with you? Why are you proud, psalm, hammering yourself into light?

For Francisco X. Alarcón, RIP It considers those men that ambled & Flushed their swords & cut off the neck Of the blue horses & scraped off death Dust from the carcass — rape of women Tresses in boilers — the tin-colored animals On the viridian grasses in particular the Howler Monkey let the word shoot up To the spheres — later we charged our Blood with these accounts we hid the arms Unforgiving texts & designs sewn into Our tiny alabaster lockets. We visited The last ridge where Victor Jara Denounced the paramilitary — from La Obrera in the heights of  Tijuana we Sketched the reddish moon & scratched Poems those things that could carry The letters we hauled on our backs. We were separated from something we Could not describe yet we were in The totality in the long winding turquoise That broke us & put us back together Again. What was that totality? It could Not be written —Green moon, green blood— We wrote. We marched to the ends of Lacanjá Chansayab & the heights Of El Colorín Central México. We were too Late — the waters in which people bathed Were cloudy & malignant — bellies Bloated children leaned on the twig House women stood up some sat cross- Legged under the fire rays of noon — We knew they knew the rubble land Was not theirs or ours it was stuffed into The cigarette packs of the Ladino Hacendados who kicked up their short Boots in the City of Bones below. With our faces in new faces we rolled Back to LA. Do you change it? Do you Leave it the same? Words — what are they? A new cognition was required — then With the ecstasy of the unleashed Other things pulled us apart. Other things Reassembled us. Now we are here.

The mind is a hotel with a thousand rooms. When I tilt my head a certain way, I think about certain things. When I tilt my head another way, I think about other things. If I sleep on the right side of my face, for example, I’d dream of a pale rose, the future, or a continental diner in Passaic, New Jersey. When I sleep on the left side of my face, I’d dream that a hand is squeezing my heart, that I’m in prison, or that I’m watching hockey at an airport bar, about to miss a flight.

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood memory. I was cycling with a male friend, through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again, a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign, hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels. My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way stop!” The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled, “You fucking niggers!” And sped off. My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads. We remounted our bikes and headed out of town. We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon between two fields of almost-ripened wheat bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking. We stopped, closed ranks, made fists. It was the same truck. It pulled over. A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out: greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful of martial arts techniques. “What did you say back there!” he shouted. My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way stop. You went through it.” “And what did I say?” the white guy asked. “You said: ‘You fucking niggers.’” The afternoon froze. “Well,” said the white guy, shoving his hands into his pockets and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot, “I just want to say I’m sorry.” He climbed back into his truck and drove away.

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it, and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection that could contain, like a microchip, an epic treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld. And at the base of our glass there’s nothing so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text so short it consists only of the author’s signature, which has to stand, like the future, for what might have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life. Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!

Miser time grows profligate near the end: unpinching and unplanning, abandoning the whole idea of savings. It’s hard to understand but time apparently expands with its diminishing. The door thrown wide on sliding hills of high- denomination bills and nothing much to buy.

When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills— The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. Nature’s dark side is heeded now— (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

1 The subject will claim that she has been taken to the wrong place. That the room she is brought back to is not the room she left. That these comings and goings are happening to someone else, are gathering momentum controlled by a secret mechanism. That she needs to tell someone. 2 I walk out the door to the stone bench without meaning to (without meaning it?), each step jarring my frame as it would anyone’s

At the moment of my mother’s death I am rinsing frozen chicken. No vision, no rending of the temple curtain, only the soft give of meat. I had not seen her in four days. I thought her better, and the hospital did not call, so I am fresh from an office Christmas party, scotch on my breath as I answer the phone. And in one moment all my past acts become irrevocable.

The clouds had made a crimson crown Above the mountains high. The stormy sun was going down In a stormy sky. Why did you let your eyes so rest on me, And hold your breath between? In all the ages this can never be As if it had not been.