38 Loss poems

The jade slipped from my wrist with the smoothness of water leaving the mountains, silk falling from a shoulder, melon slices sliding across the tongue, the fish returning. The bracelet worn since my first birthday cracked into thousand-year-old eggshells. The sound could be heard ringing across the water where my mother woke in her sleep crying thief. Her nightgown slapped in the wind as he howled clutching his hoard. The cultured pearls. The bone flutes. The peppermint disks of jade. The clean hole in the center, Heaven: the spaces we left empty.

the thief has made me a gift of his night’s booty somewhere, a daughter discovers her mother’s coral brooch missing, somewhere, a man recoils at the absence of his gambling stash. somewhere, a miser rifles over a vanished ransom in newly minted silver all this to buy a hotbed of memories to feed the children fresh-killed lies to open all the locks on love forever is a moment we hold in our stomachs as he brushes the smudge of his kiss across my lips, i smell the cologne of his fear a robust and smoky aroma mingled with the woody musk of courtrooms and the stench of pain-paved alleyways i take these things and promise to say mum

The wreck is a fact. The worst has happened. The salvage trucks back in and the salvage men begin to sort and stack, whistling as they work. Thanks be to god—again— for extractable elements which are not carriers of pain, for this periodic table at which the self-taught salvagers disassemble the unthinkable to the unthought.

Yes, thou art gone and never more Thy sunny smile shall gladden me; But I may pass the old church door And pace the floor that covers thee; May stand upon the cold, damp stone, And think that frozen lies below The lightest heart that I have known, The kindest I shall ever know. Yet, though I cannot see thee more 'Tis still a comfort to have seen, And though thy transient life is o'er 'Tis sweet to think that thou hast been; To think a soul so near divine, Within a form so angel fair United to a heart like thine Has gladdened once our humble sphere.

Despite that you wrote your name and number on its fuselage in magic marker neither your quiet hours at the kitchen table assembling it with glue nor your choice of paint and lacquer nor your seemingly equally perfect choice of a seemingly breezeless day for the launch of your ambition nor the thrill of its swift ignition nor the heights it streaks nor the dancing way you chase beneath its dot across that seemingly endless childhood field will ever be restored to you by the people in the topmost branches of whose trees unseen it may yet from its plastic chute on thin white string still swing.

There were no alarms, no sentries: how could there have been? The doors were even standing open, and if we could do it again we wouldn't have it any other way. Defenseless—isn't that better? Unarmed? Now we follow these strangers, who lead us along without loving us, without curiosity or comprehension, merely sufficiently convinced of our value, and perhaps intent on profiting from us. We will be passed from hand to hand in the markets of the great prairie. We will grow ever quieter, ever more condemned to wrap ourselves in the blind solitude of objects. Beneath the touch of countless rags, we will let the slightest traces of our origin be erased.

For Etan Patz The parents whose boy went off to school that morning — the police may have found someone who saw their son, alive, after they saw him for the last time.Step away! Someone who saw that elfin face change, at the word “soda.”Step back! And change again, and change. And down the basement steps, down into the earth, the stairs down into the underworld. Don’t go there. Close your eyes. Someone may know the unbearable — someone in custody. O, “custody.” A wall of dirt, a wall of stone, a bare bulb, like the uterus upside down. No Kaddish, no washing of the dead, no linen shroud, no company through the long night. Whatever honor can be kept for him — his pure and whole honor is kept by his parents, for the rest of the hard labor of their lives. All this time, they could not die, so they’d be here, in case he came back.Unspeakable. And now, the one taken in for questioning cries out, “I don’t know why, I don’t know why.” He will not tell. Is he holding that hour to himself. Did he hold that child in his hands, 39 years ago. Vanished. The spirit mattered away. And the dear matter —don’t. The bag, the truck. The landfill or the barge, the burial at sea — the dispersal, the containment within the bounds of the oceans, crested on top and cragged at the floor where the innards of the planet pour up, molten, through fissures — contained in the air bound by the atmosphere, the clouds of mourning pressing against the inner surface of the casing.Shut your mouth. Put down your pen. Drop your weapon! Stop! In the name of the law and the prophets.

If they would only just beat or shoot me, but they wanted soul substance, to harbor that like that, so I could never move from this place. So they reach crackled hands inside and hold it open for raking ... We in a shit rustle, the way in ramble and camaraderie, brown hand of whose mother makes its smooth noise over my mouth? The burden of saying some thing, a head- nodding, and I want to be in- side of your knowing. Who laid their head on the disappeared’s pillow? One minute a person licks your ear, the next, you cannot see your own white breath. We gotta head on over to the party way out in Bushwick because we’re lost, and our flesh is on fire. There’s a man walking behind us. And growing. This is what I tell him: I am not a boy in anyone’s body. I am not a black in a black body. I will not kowtow inside your opposites. How the world blisters you. How hunger left you statued. • One falls past the lip of some black unknown, where time, they say, ends. We got us a sugar- mouth, a bit feeding, walk in circles in circular rooms built so precisely for our shapes, hold the figure that is the body that is, of course, me. I stroke the feather that feeds me, that lines my cage floor with minor luxuries, I say “mama” in its wanting sugary mouth. What is the difference between ash and coal, between dark and darkened, between love and addiction on Dekalb at 2 am, and I fall drunk from a ruinous taxi, already ruined from before before, the absent weight screams into your breath,you are no good, no good... The space between I and It. Lolling. The Ibibio man was not born in his cowboy hat. Even his throat must ache like tired teeth. • Look what I am holding! Not desire, but infinite multiplicity, the mouth of existence. To sing the blue song of longing, its webbed feet along jungle floor. What of our mechanical arm, our off-melody? Purpose in the gathering, I know, dear self. It rains and we think, God, or we think Universe. I say, portent across the wind. When wind is wrought, whole song fallen from its lip, some black unknown, where they say, time ends. What speech into hard God breath just as night park is godless? What of a silver cube in the mouth?This is our wandering.

after Lisel Mueller on her profile i see she has 2 kids, now 1 she had in high school, now none at all. she unaborts 1. she is unpregnant in 8th grade. she unresembles her favorite pop singer Pink. she uncuts her hair, it pulls into her scalp from clumps on the floor. her new boyfriend forgets the weight of her. she leaves her new boyfriend. he's forgetting her phone number. she becomes my girlfriend she picks up the phone & i am on the line ungiving a goodbye. her best friend trades letters between us. we each open lettters from ourselves with hearts on the outside. she transfers to our magnet school. she moves to a neighborhood close by. we separate at the lips. we have never kissed behind the school. she unchecks the yes box on the note & i take away my middle school love letter. i unmeet her cop father & her Chicano moms. we walk backwards into Baskin-Robbins throwing up gold medal ribbon ice cream into cups. it rounds into scoops, flattens into gallon drums of sugar & cream & coldness. we are six years old. maybe we can go back to then. i unlearn her name, the way it is spelled the same backward. how it flips on a page, or in my mouth. i never knew words could do that until 5 minutes from now.

I Queer are the ways of a man I know: He comes and stands In a careworn craze, And looks at the sands And the seaward haze With moveless hands And face and gaze, Then turns to go... And what does he see when he gazes so? II They say he sees as an instant thing More clear than to-day, A sweet soft scene That once was in play By that briny green; Yes, notes alway Warm, real, and keen, What his back years bring— A phantom of his own figuring. III Of this vision of his they might say more: Not only there Does he see this sight, But everywhere In his brain–day, night, As if on the air It were drawn rose bright– Yea, far from that shore Does he carry this vision of heretofore: IV A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried, He withers daily, Time touches her not, But she still rides gaily In his rapt thought On that shagged and shaly Atlantic spot, And as when first eyed Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.