Mute Ode

When I saw you coming I walked away

stopping myself from saying your name

then realizing, all this time, that it had been

as it was: me refusing to say a word. I went

on pretending so I could keep this world

from ending. Since I've been forgotten, 

I've often returned to this thought, 

that holding back the truth cannot comfort 

the distraught. Even as you vanished, 

inside me you were wrought. The unsaid

can never be lost; a hand on your chest,

wristbands, a static screen, the path made by

a river drying, proof of burnt homes in a storm,

your favorite book, me one day returning it.

After Dean Young

The Life We’ve Made

                                         
                                            See things do come around,

                                            and make sense eventually,

                                            Things do come around,

                                            but some things trouble me

                                                           -Ghost, Kid Cudi

Because tears are a sign of weakness:
we fawn at the sea turtle for shedding
her tears as she buries her eggs to hatch.

How brave, we say, as she drags her body
 across the sand. How lovely
to show warmth in a cold, sad world

 full of death, full of violence.
But the body knows when its about to die.
The body acknowledges when it is the end

and death circles you in small amounts of coziness
until you accept your fate. In a story about passing:
 I found myself standing on the edge of a grave –

 the stale smell of orchids, the metallic scent
of crushed grass, and the sight of a body
encased in a refined wooden box.

 Here, I tell myself
 grief is an ocean we must return to.


--Dominique C. Santos

Life on Loop

Armed with the knowledge that we knew nothing,

we braved the world hopeful; lost but not yet unhappy.

After a midnight drive, we’d have a bottle or six,

with two or three doses or more. We’d sit on the hood

of the truck and whistle until the sun finally rose,

celebrating thoughtless daze—O what I’d give

to relive them again. Like a warning, one day

Jericho said: “Alienation, the point where a human

bonds with anything to make existence bearable—

man’s failure to connect.” He was studying Psychology

in college and was torn between taking medicine or law.

I heard he’s a doctor now specializing in neurology,

and married somewhere in Baltimore. He did alright,

I thought, and I’ll probably never get out of here.

The truth is I go up the hill often. You see, it’s difficult

to want to come down when you’re high up there

all the time. Like an endless loop, in my mind Jericho

is still speeding and I am about to disappear into light.

In my hands I hold the only solace that pacifies

my listless days. I hear nothing. All the rest is noise.

Nocturnes III

To the aimlessness of speeding
on roads bereft of light
An ode to every morning
I woke to find you've gone

My mind emptying
in the failure to recall
How my eyes looked away
on the day of your death

Back when I'd pretend
not to hear your voice
So I write to the Future
and you fade from every thought

What is the consequence of being
severed from another soul?
All our losses caught
in the remainder of our days:

All this time, where does it go?
All my love, where does it go?


04/30/2011

The trouble with water, and other possibilities for human evolution

The first time burning hives appeared all over her body,
Alex and her parents assumed she had a severe allergic reaction
To toxic substances in the water. It happened after an entire
Day of swimming in the lake, an activity she looked forward to

Every summer in Hobble Creek Canyon. When she took
A long look at herself, she cried and said “This is definitely
Worse than acne!” as the family physician prescribed
Massive doses of antihistamine to relieve her pain.

All the doctor could say was “I’m afraid you’re having
An anaphylactic shock.” “Is that super bad?” she asked,
To which he answered “Yes, it’s fatal—” “O what
A stupid way to die!” Alex thought, without knowing

What in the world was causing the skin lesions and sores
In her throat. Luckily, she survived the night and all
The other days, weeks, and months when specialists
Could not find a cure for her illness.

She endured three years of awkward stares and annoying
Comments from school mates before finding
An online article about a woman who was allergic
To water. The realization was instant, and doctors

Finally confirmed she suffered from the same disease.
But how could something so vital make her miserable?
Isn’t the human body made up of sixty percent water?
She felt her tears flow like acid against her cheeks.

From then on, she never left the house without an umbrella.
She stopped doing the dishes, exercised in the cold to control
Her sweat, and gave up her dream of becoming a marine
Biologist and wildlife photographer. She could only manage

Two-minute baths once a week. Through it all, she never
Stopped asking, “Why?” Alex couldn’t help but think
She could be the victim of a lab experiment by a secret society.
If so, why create humans that reject the nourishment

Of water? It was even stranger to think her disease
Naturally occurred in one person out of 230 million people
All over the planet (at least that’s what the internet said).
Hers could be a case of genetic mutation. Tired of feeling

Like a mistake in the larger scheme of things,
Alex began to reimagine herself as a critical link
To the slow and gradual process of human evolution:
When the Earth wastes away, her children will be among

The first humans to survive in other planets without water.
Since then, she’s been fascinated with space exploration,
Astrophysics, and chemistry. The future seemed brighter
That way, with reasons, not questions.

This poem appears in Tremble, the 2016 anthology for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize.

*Image from Janelle Schmidt's Pinterest page

Scary Movies

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,  
and I keep expecting some enormous  
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops  
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean  
and drag me from my kitchen  
to the deep cave that flickered  
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless  
between my older brothers, pumped up  
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,  
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This  
is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is  
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.  
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—
Hi, I’m not here—
the morning of her funeral,  
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies  
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead  
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air  
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me  
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older  
I would know better, and now  
they’re dead, and I’m older,  
and I know better.


--Kim Addonizio

Crossroads

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young–

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised–

My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.


-- Louise Glück

Boy Breaking Glass

To Marc Crawford
from whom the commission


Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.
Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.
Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.

Each one other
is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.


-- Gwendolyn Brooks

Continuum

I closed my eyes
to escape today, and I dream
of a hopeful village
claimed by the ocean

I closed my palms
to form a fist, and a sparrow
stretched its wings
for another flight

I closed myself
to all my lovers, and a country
decides to relinquish
its death sentence

I closed my ears
to useless secrets, and a man
longs to speak
with a lost friend

I closed my father’s closet,
and I see his eyes
when I stare in the mirror

I closed my future
to the construction
of a new home, and families
move to different cities daily

I closed the door
to my room, and a starving cat
finds its way
through my window

I closed the curtain
to help the night, and the dawn
breaks in the other
end of the world


After Suimei Kawai

Ash Ode

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.

--Dean Young

Description

A bird with a cry like a cell phone says something
to a bird that sounds like a manual typewriter.

 Out of sight in the woods, the creek trickles
 its ongoing sentence; from treble to baritone,

 from dependent clause to interrogative.

The trees rustle over the house: they are excited
to be entering the poem

in the late afternoon, when the clouds are creamy and massive
as if to illustrate contentment.

And maybe a wind will pluck pff the last dead leaves;
and a cold rain will splash

dainty white petals from the crab apple tree
down to the ground,

the pink and the ground mingled there,
like two different messages scribbled over each other.

In all of this place must be
reserved for human suffering:

the sick and unloved, the chemically confused
the ones who believed desperately in insight;
the ones addicted to change.

How our thoughts clawed and pummeled the walls.
How we tried but could not find our way out.

In the wake of our effort, how we rested.
How description was the sign of our acceptance.


 -- Tony Hoagland

Parable

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.


 -- Louise Glück

Back To the Places Where It All Began

Spaces


1.

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.

2.

Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.

3.

Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.

4.

In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.

5.

Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.

6.

Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.

Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.

7.

I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.

I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.

8.

Memory is brutal because precise.

9.

She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?

I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.

10.

I have only one purpose: to live intensely.

11.

I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.

You taste like a river in June.

12.

I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.

The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:

“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.”

13.

In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.

14.

Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.

They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.

Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.

Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.

15.

Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.

16.

How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?

17.

My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu.

Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.

He said: “I am dying.”

I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.”

18.

And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybody’s leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.

19.

A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?

20.

In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.

21.

I believe in love only when it rains.

22.

To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.

In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.

23.

Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.

~

You came to suffer/survive.

24.

How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?

25.

Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.

Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.

26.

Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.

27.

Memory is incomplete–lost.
The world is incomplete–vanishing.

Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.

Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.

28.

In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.

29.

When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.

Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.

30.

In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.

31.

Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.

32.

She said: give me more space.


-- Arkaye Kierulf

Quiet Evening

You take my hand; then we’re alone
in the life-threatening forest. Almost immediately

we’re in a house; Noah’s
grown and moved away; the clematis after ten years
suddenly flowers white.

More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we’re together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.

So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace on his memory:

from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.


-- Louise Glück

The Snowmass Cycle

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown


1.   RETREAT

The sailor dreamt of loss,
but it was I who dreamt the sailor.
I was landlocked, sea-poor.
The sailor dreamt of a woman
who stared at the sea, then tired
of it, advertised her freedom.
She said to her friend: I want
all the fire one can have
without being consumed by it.
Clearly, I dreamt the woman too.
I was surrounded by mountains
suddenly green after a long winter,
a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up,
every day a lesson about the vastness
between ecstasy and repose.
I drank coffee called Black Forest
at the local cafe. I took long walks
and tried to love the earth
and hate its desecrations.
All the Golden Retrievers wore red
bandannas on those muttless streets.
All the birches, I think, were aspens.
I do not often remember my dreams,
or dream of dreamers in them.
To be without some of the things
you want, a wise man said,
is an indispensable part of happiness.



2.   MOUNTAIN, SKY

I’ve been paying attention
to the sky again.
I’ve seen a ravine up there,
and a narrow, black gorge.
Not to worry, I tell myself,
about tricks the mind plays,
as long as you know they’re tricks.

If the rich are casually cruel
perhaps it’s because
they can stare at the sky
and never see an indictment
in the shape of clouds.

The frown, for example,
in a thunderhead. The fist.

That big mountain
I’ve been looking at—
I love how it borrows purple
from the filtered light,
sometimes red.

Like any of us
it’s all of its appearances.

It’s good that the rich
have to die,
a peasant saying goes,
otherwise they’d live forever.

Here in this rented house,
high up, I understand.
I’m one of the rich
for a while. The earth feels
mine and the air I breathe
is rarefied, if thin.

Dusk now is making its last claim.
I love the confluence
of dark mountain, dark sky.
Soon I won’t know the beginning
from the end.



3.   HIM

Those empty celebrations of the half-believer
along for the ride.
Those secret words repeated in mirrors—
someone’s personal fog.
A man’s heart ransomed for comfort
or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags.

I have been him and him and him.

Was it nobility or senility
when my old grandmother tried to drown
artificial flowers in the bathtub?

Can only saints carry the load
without talking about the burden?

I want to lean into life,
catch the faintest perfume.

In every boy child an old man is dying.
By middle age
he begins to stink, complain.

I want to have gifts for him
when we finally meet.
I want him to go out like an ancient
Egyptian, surrounded
by what is his, desiring nothing.



4.   DELINEATION AT DUSK

A lost hour, and that animal lassitude
after a vanished afternoon.
Outside: joggers, cyclists.
Motion, the great purifier, is theirs.
If this were Europe someone in a tower
might be ringing a bell.
People hearing it would know
similar truths, might even know
exactly who they are.
It’s getting near drinking time.
It’s getting near getting near;
a person alone conjures rules
or can liquefy, fall apart.
That woman with the bouffant—
chewing gum, waiting for the bus—
someone thinks she’s beautiful.
It’s beautiful someone does.
The sky’s murmuring, the storm
that calls you up,
makes promises, never comes.
Somewhere else, no doubt,
a happy man slicing a tomato,
a woman with a measuring cup.
Somewhere else: the foreclosure
of a feeling or a promise,
followed by silence or shouts.
Here, the slow dance of contingency,
an afternoon connected to an evening
by a slender wish. Sometimes absence
makes the heart grow sluggish
and desire only one person, or one thing.
I am closing the curtains.
I am helping the night.



5.   SOLITUDE

A few days ago I stopped looking
at the photographs
clustered on the wall, nudes,
which had become dull to me,
like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks.

I turned away from the view
and conjured a plague of starlings.
Oh how they darkened the landscape.

Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy.
I felt like crushing a rhododendron.

Now and again I feel the astonishment
of being alive like this, in this body,
the ventricles and the small bones
in the hand, the intricacies of digestion ....

When the radio said parents in California
gave birth to another child
so that their older child might have
a bone-marrow transplant and live,

I found myself weeping
for such complicated beauty.
How wonderful the radio
and its distant, human voices.

The rain now is quite without consequence
coming down.

I suppose I’ve come to the limits
of my paltry resources, this hankering
for people and for massive disturbance,
then high pressure,
the sequence that’s been promised for days.

I will long to be alone
when my friends arrive.



6.   THE BODY WIDENS

The body widens, and people are welcomed
into it, many at a time. This must be
what happens when we learn to be generous
when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed.
I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited
my own candleless altar. Little by little,
the old selfish parts of me are loosening.
I have a plan for becoming lean: to use
all my fat in service of expansion. Have women
always known this? Loveliness and fear
when they open and let in and give away?
The mountains here pierce the sky,
and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them.



7.   A NEW MOUTH

Give me a new mouth; I want to talk.
I’ve been watching the spider mend its web.
I think I’ve learned something
about architecture from a swallow.
Excuse me while I separate the nettles
from the flowers, while I put my nose
to the black moist smell of earth
and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world
is the secret name
for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable.
             There’s a speakable grace
in the fields and even in the cities.
The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become
a machine. And yet I want to talk
about the worn-out husks of men and women
returning from the factories,
the venereal streets, the bruise history
passes down to its forlorn children.
    I need a new mouth to acknowledge
that piety will keep us small, imprisoned,
that it’s all right to be ridiculous
and sway first to the left, then to the right,
in order to find our balance.
                                  I’ve been watching
an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying
to identify the word before its utterance.
Give me a new mouth and I’ll be
a guardian against forgetfulness.
I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate
between sycamore and cypress.
I want to find the cool, precise language
for how passion gives rise to passion.



8.   STRANGER

The wind gone. I can hear my breathing.
I can hear the lateness of the hour
by what isn’t moving.

Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village.
These are winter names, and it’s summer.
The water from the mountains
rushes down man-made gullies.

Serious phantoms with their black tears
are out tonight.
I’m close—my other delusion goes—
to the heart of things.

A young man with a young man’s itch
would rise and go out prowling.

Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain
that’s a hill, take the slowest horse
at the Lazy-7, slow and old,
sure to know its trail.

I knew a man who said he could dominate
solitude. In other ways, too,
he was a fool.

Once I wanted to be
one of those fabulous strangers
who appear and disappear.
Now I arrive only by invitation,
stay long enough to earn my fare.

Outside my window, clouds from the west
erasing the stars.
A coyote howling its singular news.

At whatever pace,
isn’t there an imperative to live?

Before a person dies he should experience
the double fire,
of what he wants and shouldn’t have.


-- Stephen Dunn

Against Drowning

2013

*Quoted lyrics from Lykke Li, “Love out of Lust” 
2011 album "Wounded Rhymes" Atlantic Records

To the Dead

What I hope (when I hope) is that we'll

see each other again,--

. . . and again reach the VEIN

in which we loved each other . .
It existed. It existed.

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

. . . for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers)
in The Gorilla,

once we'd been battered by the gorilla

we searched the walls, the intricately carved
impenetrable paneling

for a button, lever, latch

that unlocks a secret door that
reveals at last the secret chambers,

CORRIDORS within WALLS,

(the disenthralling, necessary, dreamed structure
beneath the structure we see,)

that is the HOUSE within the HOUSE . . .

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

. . . there were (for example) months when I seemed only
to displease, frustrate,

disappoint you--; then, something triggered

a drunk lasting for days, and as you
slowly and shakily sobered up,

sick, throbbing with remorse and self-loathing,

insight like ashes: clung
to; useless; hated . . .

This was the viewing of the power of the waters

while the waters were asleep:--
secrets, histories of loves, betrayals, double-binds

not fit (you thought) for the light of day . . .

There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,--

. . . for, there at times at night, still we
inhabit the secret place together . . .

Is this wisdom, or self-pity?--

The love I've known is the love of
two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.

-- Frank Bidart

Déjà vu

Kristine tells me she talks to Jesus

on bus rides to Antipolo; she thinks

she understands him now, acknowledges

his existence. I thought, good for her,

she believes in something. She began

writing letters to a man named Elvis;

receives a couple of his records,

asks to meet her at a diner in Memphis.

I said, “Great, are you dating John, Paul,

Ringo, and George too?” But I cut her

some slack. People make up things

all the time. She’s the kind of girl

who takes off her clothes in the car

while waiting in the parking lot,

devotes time for hunger strikes

thinking all her protests were

for a greater cause. I secretly

envied her, I wanted to see and feel

everything she imagined. She was

my best friend: I put up with her

and she put up with me. I was just

as crazy though I tried to care for her.

She’d hold my hand when she got

nervous. Not long after, Kristine

disappeared. She took off without

a word to any of her friends. I hated her

for as long as I could remember.

Life moved on, everyone got older;

I’m not wiser, just more forgiving

and happier with my cat on weekends.

I hang-out with Jen and Ann now, I dated

Daniel but we’re just friends. Years passed

and one day I was caught in the eye

of a Midwest storm, driving in zero visibility.

I saw a woman with a suitcase and umbrella

hitching a ride on the road. I pulled over

but another truck had picked her up.

I could’ve sworn it was Kristine. Now I take

a second look whenever I pass that spot,

with Round Here by Counting Crows

always singing in my head.

“Remember Kristine?  You won’t believe it,

but I think she’s in town,” I said to Jen.

She asked, “Kristine, who? What

are you talking about?” I tried

to make her remember, but no luck.

I showed her a photo. “There, that’s us

in college.” She gave it back

deeply perplexed, “There’s no one there,”

she said. I had no proof, except how it felt

when I held her hand. Always slipping,

I held her hand. 

Shot at the Night

It feels weird, but do check out the UP DECL Shorthand tumblr.
Save for this obscure blog, I'm glad some of my work can now be read.

      Valencia in May, 2013

Effort at Speech Between Two People

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?

   I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing.

   When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit

   who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    :

   a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle

   burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

:  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open:

   Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,

   like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.

   There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

:  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now?

   When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,

   fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin,

   and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.

   I want now to be close to you.        I would

   link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

:  I am not happy.          I will be open.

   I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.

   There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate

   On what a tragedy his life was, really.

:  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?

   When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

   and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   :

   if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,

   if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

   I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me.

:  I will be open.          I think he never loved me:

   He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam

   that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:

   he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me.

:  What are you now?          If we could touch one another,

   if these our separate entities could come to grips,

   clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday

   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

   Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.


-- Muriel Rukeyser