Series: Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

Late afternoon, coming back from the store and planting three-dollar solar lights along the walk, we hear the night heron again from its nest in the tree: harsh, high-pitched squawks, yips almost like a feisty puppy’s at the end. We’ve seen four of them: skulking around our trash bin, or hanging around the fish pond in the neighbor’s yard. They bend their heads to the water, fluff out their wings, ripple them. And the river’s close— so we know they must forage for snails, small fish, fiddler crabs, along the shallows. Directly underneath where they roost, the pavement’s splattered grey and white like a Jackson Pollock. One of them comes so close, so suddenly, to the fence by the kitchen window— You look up and at first, there’s nothing there but the overgrown ivy; then one dark eye, glittering like a thieved ruby.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

After my first child was born, my mothers came to the hospital with a pot of clam broth.
Drink, drink, they urged; to let down the milk: so the child will suck of your nectar.

I didn’t know what it would feel like for my waters to break— Toward dawn, I dreamt
salt-smells from the sea. The sheets were soaked. Not mild, light hidden in night’s nectar.

Sometimes, one craves fish and rice, green mangoes, fermented shrimp. Other times,
nothing except yogurt: only what’s bland, nothing wild. Until the tongue misses nectar.

To this day it isn’t known who wrote that poison pen letter. Familiar diction; details
that couldn’t have been known, dredged up to revile— Clearly, someone denied nectar.

Most days I prefer savory to sweet: laurel or bay leaf, pink peppercorns, zest of ginger;
blend of cardamom and anise, piquant over mild. But it depends on who offers the nectar.

I pressed my forehead to glass to feel its cool aloofness; then against the weave of your
coat, the warmer folds of your nape. Don’t say memory denies the thickening of nectar.

Half my life is over, or only just begun. I’ve wished so long for a home of my own:
honeysuckle vines in the shade, stone patio tile; hummingbirds come to drink nectar.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Let us dispense with.
Have you receipts
for my ripened figs?
You took my pleasure,
you skimmed the trees
without so much
as touching down.
I took you for
abundance, unasked-
for sugar, fat in
a time of drought;
in return you pressed
my substance, absently,
into a distant fold—
slip of paper shedding
its metaphors.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Here it is, then: another message to you, sent from this wrought iron table under the dogwood where I sit writing. The birds are masters of solitude or concentration, or ninjas in disguise. They hurtle past, one after the other, intent on one thing at a time. What else would you like to know? I’ve told you about the secret name I was given in childhood to confuse the gods, so liberal with their gifts of illness and malaise; I’ve told you about the black sow my grandfather brought from his farm, a gift on my fifth birthday. I had just been discharged from nearly a month in the hospital— for what, I don’t really know, and cannot remember. They penned it up for the night in the unfinished bathroom, next to the also unfinished kitchen (I think it was being expanded). It kicked at the plywood slats all night and squealed, or bleated. Is that what you call the sound of an animal that knows it is going to be sacrificed in the morning? I didn’t see, but I could hear the men sharpening knives and starting a fire by the guava trees. I shut my ears and burrowed into the bedclothes. They were so happy I had been returned, that time had wrought its little miracles. What did I know, and who was I to say that such a feast was not in fact the payment required? I no longer burned with fevers. The purple eruptions on my lips were gone. The animal’s shirt of hair would be singed, its insides bled, its sacs of bile and pulsing liver hung up in the trees— dark garnets glinting among the leaves.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Some words lisp before you can
even say them: say thistle.

Say chant. Say tuft
lit up by the sun. Fields

spread with a wealth
of accidental sound.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

This horse chafes at the bit: it wants
no rider, only its own hard will astride

the saddle, urging the road to go faster,
the encroaching landscape to spin into a blur

greener than hummingbirds at the feeder.
Do you wonder why it always seems faster

coming back? Speeds clipped by cobblestones,
by stops and starts, false obstacles— why

does it take so long to get there?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Pulling away from the parking lot and crossing
the boulevard into 45th, I’m not necessarily
thinking of this morning’s early rain, nor of how
the sidewalks are stained with clumps of fallen
crepe myrtle blossoms. And while I have some vague
awareness of how, despite the way they stipple
the pavement like dots in an impressionist painting,
there are still such generous mounds of them massed
on the trees— I’m not necessarily preoccupied with
the idea that this might almost (if I forced it) work
as some kind of metaphor for the way there never
seems to be any permanent fix for our problems: two
solved, and five more pop out of nowhere like some
many-headed monster resolved to take the prize
for tenacity away from you… For instance,
having just recently figured out how to pay for
a used car, insurance, and sundry other items for
a daughter who wants to move out of state to go
to school, I feel sideswiped by the four hundred
dollar bill that comes in the mail for the stress
test the doctor ordered at my last physical. Out
of the corner of my eye I see the owner
of the corner coffee shop come out with a hand-
lettered sign listing the day’s specials; he ducks
as the boughs overhead spatter his head with leftover
rain, and just as I’m wondering When does it stop?
a cop comes up behind me and is signaling for me
to pull up on the side. Oh crap, I think,
as I roll down my window, and he tells me
I’ve failed to notice the four-way stop.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

We were confused by sudden
spring: by warmth that forced
blooms open ahead of their
flowering—

And we were taken
aback by storms
that pelted pavements
with fistfuls of hail—

And in the east, a pall
descended on the city
in the aftermath
of flood—

In some places,
people clung to cross-
beams on telephone
poles—

And even the birds
held deathly still,
merely swiveling
their heads—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

A shimmer of rain, now almost like kindness. In a news photo, a man
bites down on a plastic bag filled with a few belongings. His neighbors

clamber to the roof of the corner pharmacy; others like him, more
daring, brave murky waters to get to the other side of the bridge.

Emergency teams in schools and town halls have hit upon wrapping,
furoshiki-style, relief goods in T-shirts and towels— not plastic bags.

Garbage rising from the sewers with mud and muck: proof disasters
have not so much been authored by providence as human carelessness.

Is there any pocket of the city left untouched? Dams overflow,
jettison everything in the wake of their furious surplus.

Kedges would not keep small craft steady. What else might
loom on the horizon, considering this is only the beginning of

monsoon season? Without power, without drinking water; and
no access through submerged highways. Nights like damp

obis wound around our waists: where is that life
preserver? No dignity for hundreds crowded in close

quarters. My friend says, looking on the internet at pop-up
rooms (hamper-like) in post-earthquake Japan, We should be

so lucky. Where do refugees go when they can’t go anywhere?
The Filipino is Waterproof! We will survive, reads an

upbeat slogan now making the rounds. While that may
very well be true, there’s still the difficult

work of mourning, of cleaning up, of starting over; trusting
xanthic, sickened skins to the sun again, upon its return—

You fish among the tangled lilies and apocalyptic vines,
zeroing in on what possessions water has not erased.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Scree of some wild creature overhead, wing like a stroke of graphite that flickers just out of sight. On the way back, we drive through soybean fields yellowing from the heat; and whole stands of trees bent like saplings from the last passing storm. A sky the color of beaten copper. Everywhere, some reminder of the fragile. But also what persists; surprises. For miles and miles, not a house or rest stop. And then— Where did those droves of tiny moths come from, riding tiny bits of prayer flags into the wind? Bodies of soft brown. Velvet fuzz of cattails and rushes. Perhaps, this time, the boatman will let us through. We cross the Chowan River just as crickets drill tin can holes into the evening.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.