Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
tell me the hour isn’t late,
that the all-day, all-night
diner still serves what I crave.
The sky’s cloudy, marbled, shot through
with bits of emerald: the color of expensive
granite countertops, or the supple skin
of certain fish. Pebbly in places, like
day-old bread. This might be the hour
for some old-time miracle: say,
fish and loaves; or wine and water.
Birds twisting free from fire. This time,
console me. My losses, reconstitute.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The old man wants to know which of his daughters loves him the most.
Like robes of silk? like crackling fat? like sheets of hammered gold with garnet crusts?
Like steel vaults, like a suit of mail, like a dome’s marble pillars and carved doors?
Woe to the stammering one who cannot summon her parade of woodpeckers, her retinue of tumbling clowns.
Be careful: bottom-dwellers lurk in the mud, jealous of every bright bubble of original thought.
They’ll want to pull her down, cast her out, call her traitor, demoness, ingrate, stupid bitch.
They won’t remember it was her who lit the fire in the morning, put the pots to bed at night, filled the glass with water that the indifferent hand reached for and drank.
She fashions a gown out of discarded plastic. She gathers water in a sieve.
Her heart fills and fills with salt— fractals like quivering ribs in magicians’ parasols, each more beautiful than the last.
I won’t tell her that she’ll have her day.
But I watch for signs glimpsed from the high window: how the planets align, how trees cast their shadows along the broken boundary; how the wolves howl as they press closer to their prey.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
When the hero of a thousand journeys is born, part of her soul spirals into a plant that her mother has made to take root in the soil. A sunflower, perhaps. Or a sapling that grows rapidly into a tree, leaning and breaking into blossom against the wind. Between every journey is a threshold. Birds bring news of what comes next, flashing their breasts like pennants rouged with coral or smoke. The stalk bends and straightens. The flower follows the sun’s ascent. The child climbs trees, runs across the grass, hair flying behind her like a sheet of night. Milk in the glass still has the sheen of alabaster. She does not stand in the light of the refrigerator, shifting weight from one foot to the other, mouth sleepless with frustration or ache or hunger. In old stories, the elders speak of warriors with heart: nakem; of growing wiser as growing in heart. Perhaps, what they mean is that capacity not only to survive what gusts in to level us all— Admit we’ve traced the fragile vein in the leaf, in the flower; seen it pulsing at the base of each other’s throats.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
the crooner breathed from the vinyl record,
besame mucho; and a few more lines
in Spanish that I can’t remember, this song
that floated like a veil over the sound
of clinked highball glasses, musky
murmur from a living room packed
with couples in the days my parents
entertained— while I lay in bed
listening, and rain striped the window
behind the crocheted curtains. Getting up
to tiptoe to the bathroom, who did I see
pressed in the shadow of the potted plant,
against the lawyer’s breast? And that
plaint, that pleading: I know its color
now— the lilac shade of longing
that looks to slide into the arms
of evening, the way I want to feel
your lips linger, your tongue
shape itself to the ache of my mouth.
The way the syllable opens in mucho,
before trailing off into the night.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Across the chopping block, a scallion
becomes a filigree of green.
High overhead, you mostly hear
(not see) a ragged flock of geese—
but they are there, stubborn,
writing against the wind.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
are pressed into crevices of limestone.
Their limbs, their bones, are smaller now,
pebbled or smoothly pleated. Their shrouds
have attained the quality of paper.
Tresses? Eyelash hair? These have become
slight as wind, but brittle. Removed from
village life, they do not care if animals
inquire into their secrets, hoard seeds
or feathers in the louvres of their ribs.
Nights dark as ink, then dawns
splayed through blue fingers of pine.
If it were here and whole, the heart
would think this was a nest.
“Let heaven and earth be my coffins…” ~ Chuang-tzu
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Two bright ceramic pots beneath the window: purple for starbursts
that haven’t seeded, orange for lavender. In other words, they’re empty.
Waiting at the doctor’s, a feathered strip glimpsed beneath
the awning. Blue wing, black bars, then the space emptied.
Geckos call on the fringes of the factory where young migrant workers
cobble computer tablet parts together. The suicide nets tonight are empty.
There are days I want to move boxes out of cold storage, not
knowing what’s inside: take them to the curb; purge, empty.
Cleaning my drawers, I find a small stack of unused journals.
The leather-covered one you gave me, my favorite, is still empty.
I dream of choosing a rich Japanese ink to fill my pens, with names
like Dew on Pine Tree (Syo-Ro) or Old Man Winter (Fuyu-syogun).
How much a flourish on cream stock gathers: scroll of morning glory,
blush of persimmon. Wildness of horses’ manes, the horizon empty.
Loosely held, the brush gathers the line as it goes. Uncertain at
first, it stumbles on the trail, then speeds: moving away from empty.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
All night rain rattles soft against
the windows, forms pellets bordering
on frost; they fall like asterisks
upon the sill, language dissolving
as soon as spoken. Even the oboe
of a distant loon, the stream’s
purling clarinet, cannot prevent
this imminent slide toward silence—
The bell quieting toward the damper,
the mouth withdrawn from the reed;
the instrument returned to its velvet-
lined case, the tongue curled back
into its underground cave. So rich
and fragile, so little understood.
Maligned silence, milky as the swirl
at the bottom of a cup, toward which
the face bends to drink, wanting more.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
A man wakes in a city between
the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.
He feels like a stranger in the sleeping
house. He wakes before first light,
before the first bird leaves the nest,
before the silence is broken by a rustle
in the leaves. His feet are cold
on the floor of this room, someone
else’s room. He wears his clothes
as if they were someone else’s.
Where has the bird flown? The man
dreams of being a swallow who can fly
to the roof of the world,
to its balconies tiled in warm
terra cotta. Does he also dream
that his daughters are swallows
with green bead eyes, that their wings
cut out of silver paper and strung
with flowers, ring the walls with their
bright cries? In the grey stillness of dawn,
shut your eyes in the room like a man
without sight: tell me if this way,
you hear more acutely the signal of wings,
the small lift of air underneath each stroke.
(for Jim Pascual Agustin)
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
“My knuckles are raw in the wash-water, my hips ache with a thousand unbirthed hopes.” ~ Seon Joon
You dream that your father, long dead, walks out of the bathroom like he used to do.
He’s clad in his terry-cloth robe the color of light ochre, the color of pollen shaken from the stamen of a common flower whose name you have forgotten.
It’s barely morning, the sky just shading into a faint silvery blue. Like periwinkles washed by rain, the fragile garment of their petals thin as breath.
Why are you here, you want to ask, what is the meaning of your visit? But he has gone to sit by the window in his favorite chair; he closes his eyes, begins fingering his rosary. You do not think it is proper to disturb. You let him be.
In the middle of a dream like this you know you’re watching your heart move through a landscape it has mostly hidden from view.
You know you’ve been the snail, rolling the evidence of everywhere you’ve been into a narrow ribbon. Would you call this economy, or efficiency? So much, crammed into such a miserably small space.
Everything fit into this spiral shell of echoes, plus some. You heard the water in the dishwasher. Tremulous sounds coming over the trees. Cars slowing down on the cobblestones, the high-pitched whistle of a train approaching. Two women quarreling, always quarreling, in the same house. The neighbor taking his dog in from a walk.
It’s time to go, children; pack up your work, your notebooks, your things. There are thumbprints on the edge of the wooden desk. The drawer is full of pencil shavings. Soon the trees will thicken with leaves, or birds.
You want to empty the blue plastic buckets standing under the rain spout. You want to feel their round, palpable heft as you tip them over the stones and the cool water floods the empty garden plots.
You want to feel the weights released from each hand, the pulley-ropes gone slack. A line almost of sweetness, the shock rippling from your wrists to your hips.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.