Watermelons

Green Buddhas

On the fruit stand.

We eat the smile

And spit out the teeth.

Hide in the hollow trunk

of the willow tree,

its listening familiar,

until, as usual, they

cuckoo your name

across the elds.

You can hear them

draw the poles of stiles

as they approach

calling you out:

small mouth and ear

in a woody cleft,

lobe and larynx

of the mossy places.

I had gotten a nasty bite at the petting

zoo earlier that day. On the bus home I sat

next to a little old lady, tiny and stooped,

her head bobbing up and down. I don’t know why

I did this, but I showed her the bite on my hand.

She stared at it for a long time. Then she

reached out and took my hand in her papery

blue-veined hands. She brought my hand closer

to her eyes. Her mouth was open just a little

and my heart started to race. I jerked my

hand out of her grip just in time. She smiled

and showed me her teeth. “They’re beautiful,”

I said. “Brand new,” she replied.

DEATH

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.

They will place my hands like this.

It will look as though I am ying into myself.

We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had

we used our words we used what words we had

to weld, what words we had we wielded, kneeled,

we knelt. & wept we wrung the wet the sweat

we wracked our lips we rang for words to ward

o sleep to warn to want ourselves. to want

the earth we mouthed it wound our vowels until

it t, in ts the earth we mounted roused

& rocked we harped we yawned & tried to yawp

& tried to x, axed, we facted, felt.

we fattened fanfared anthemed hammered, felt

the words’ worth stagnate, snap in half in heat

the wane the melt what words we’d hoarded halved

& holey, porous. meanwhile tide still tide.

& we: still washed for sounds to mark. & marked.

This pine tree by the rock

must have its memories too:

after a thousand years,

see how its branches

lean towards the ground.

Now my letter is with the censor. He lights his lamp.

In its glare my words leap like monkeys at a wire mesh,

clattering it, stopping to bare their teeth.

III

Read between the lines. We will meet in two hundred years

when the microphones in the hotel walls are forgotten—

when they can sleep at last, sleep at last, become ammonites.

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm

That ies in the night

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The Rules

There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we can agree

we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now realizing

they are dead, so let's stop talking about it. The skies of this poem

are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.

You're welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing whatever

they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—forgive me,

I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you'll nd the occasional

pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking

as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take place

at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing moment

of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and everyone in it is still

at work. This poem has no children; it is trying

to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or fairy tales,

no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers, no mothers—God,

no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit

it's relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no body

referred to as the body, no one

dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty

okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists

calling a thing what it is. So what

if I'd like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the rst time

in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I mean. Oh hell, before

something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them all.

THE ROAD IN THE CLOUDS

Your undergarments and mine,

Sent ying around the room

Like a storm of white feathers

Striking the window and ceiling.

Something like repressed laughter

Is in the air

As we lie in sweet content

Drifting o to sleep

With the treetops in purple light

And the sudden memory

Of riding a bicycle

Using no hands

Down a steep winding road

To the blue sea.

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So innitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

and when we lie down in a eld or on a couch,

drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

THE bustle in a house

The morning after death

Is solemnest of industries

Enacted upon earth,—

The sweeping up the heart,

And putting love away

We shall not want to use again

Until eternity.

REVERSE SUICIDE

The guy Dad sold your car to

comes back to get his money,

leaves the car. With lthy rags

we rub it down until it doesn’t shine

and wipe your blood into

the seams of the seat.

Each snowake stirs before

lifting into the sky as I

learn you won’t be dead.

The unsuering ends

when the mess of your head

pulls together around

a bullet in your mouth.

You spit it into Dad’s gun

before arriving in the driveway

while the evening brightens

and we pour bag after bag

of leaves on the lawn,

waiting for them to leap

onto the bare branches.

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley -

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp -

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people, hardly marching - on the hike -

We found new tactics happening each day:

We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike

And stampede cattle into infantry,

Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until, on Vinegar Hill, the nal conclave.

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or con

And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann’d:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

As when someone

You haven’t noticed before

Gets up in an empty theater

And projects his shadow

Among the fabulous horsemen

On the screen

And you shudder

As you realize it’s only you

On your way

To the blinding sunlight

Of the street.

Because You Asked About the Line

Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned to pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly ew instead of fell.

I am glad I resisted the temptation,

if it was a temptation when I was young,

to write a poem about an old man

eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant.

I would have gotten it all wrong

thinking: the poor bastard, not a friend in the world

and with only a book for a companion.

He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.

So glad I waited all these decades

to record how hot and sour the hot and sour

soup is here at Chang’s this afternoon

and how cold the Chinese beer in a frosted glass.

And my book—José Saramago’s Blindness

as it turns out—is so absorbing that I look up

from its escalating horrors only

when I am stunned by one of his gleaming sentences.

And I should mention the light

that falls through the big windows this time of day

italicizing everything it touches—

the plates and teapots, the immaculate tablecloths,

as well as the soft brown hair of the waitress

in the white blouse and short black skirt,

the one who is smiling now as she bears a cup of rice

and shredded beef with garlic to my favorite table in the corner.

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

Here’s a ne mess we got ourselves into,

My angel, my darling, true love of my heart

Etcetera. Must stop it but I can’t begin to.

Here’s a ne mess we got ourselves into –

Both in a spin with nowhere to spin to,

Bound by the old rules in life and in art.

Here’s a ne mess we got ourselves into,

(I’ll curse every rule in the book as we part)

My angel, my darling, true love of my heart.

NAME US A KING

Name us a king

who shall live forever—

a peanut king, a potato king,

a gasket king, a brass-tack king,

a wall-paper king with a wall-paper crown

and a wall-paper queen with wall-paper jewels.

Name us a king

so keen, so fast, so hard,

he shall last forever—

and all the yes-men square shooters

telling the king, “Okay Boss, you shall

last forever! and then some!”

telling it to an onion king, a pecan king,

a zipper king or a chewing gum king,

any consolidated amalgamated syndicate king—

listening to the yes-men telling him

he shall live forever, he is so keen,

so fast, so hard,

an okay Boss who shall never bite the dust,

never go down and be a sandwich for the worms

like us—the customers,

like us—the customers.

My body tells me that she’s ling for divorce

I try to understand

how much of us is sick. I want to know

what they can do to put us right. She,

whose soft shape I have lain with every night,

who’s roamed with me in rooky woods, round

rocky heads. She, who’s witnessed the rain

pattering on the reedbed, the cut-glass chitter

of long-tailed tits, the woodpecker rehearsing

her single, high syllable. How have we become

this bitter pill whose name I can’t pronounce?

Soon, she’ll sleep in a bed that isn’t mine.

That’s why, these nights, we perform our trial

separations. She, buried in blankets, eyelids

ickering fast. Me, up there on, no — wait —

through the ceiling, attic, roof. I’m ying, crying,

looking down. Too soon, I whisper to her warm

and sleeping form. Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.

ASK THE LION

Ask the lion who has eaten a bullock

how to crawl stealthily upon the earth.

Ask the bat what hell is like this time of year.

Or let me ap from out the darkness

into your hair. Some beast

has raked its claws across my naked back.

I bought a big bone and bunny food.

And I got to pet the bunny.

Matthew You’re Leaving Again So Soon

please take these pens I have all these pens

for you all with caps on them and pen holders

I have all these pen holders large and plastic

I know they won’t t in your bag I’ll mail them

take this umbrella this sweater these socks

they’re ankle length like you like them

and soup take this soup I froze four batches

in Tupperware four batches of broth and chicken

and carrots and celery frozen in the freezer

they will keep you healthy my son

my liver take my liver to help clean your blood

I’ll y to you I’ll come to you tomorrow

you used to cling to my ankle and I would

drag you across the oor please

pack me in your suitcase take me with you

Your face more than others' faces

Maps the half-remembered places

I have come to while I slept

—Continents a dream had kept

Secret from all waking folk

Till to your face I awoke

And remembered then the shore,

And the dark interior.

We have gone hand in hand

Through joys and distress,

Now we rest from our wanderings

High above the quiet land.

Around us the valleys slope down,

The skies have begun to darken,

Only two larks, recalling a dream,

Soar up into the haze.

Come, and leave them to y,

Soon it will be time to sleep,

We must not lose our way

In this solitude.

O vast and silent peace!

So deep in sunset glow,

How weary we are with wandering –

Could this perhaps be death?

What I'm listening for, Venetian blue,

you infer from my upturned eyes, my mind

through which the mind of God is passing.

If you are still alive when you read this,

close your eyes. I am

under their lids, growing black.

The truth is this:

My love for you is the only empire

I will ever build.

When it falls,

as all empires do,

my career in empire building will be over.

I will disappear

Into the sea and not be

Heard from: by moonlight

Rise up galloping upon

A blue horse born in my blood.

Evidence

‘A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong.’

– scientic researcher, Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2012

Centuries of English verse

Suggest the selfsame thing:

A negative response is rare

When birds are heard to sing.

What’s the use of poetry?

You ask. Well, here’s a start:

It’s anecdotal evidence

About the human heart.

Each evening I call home and my brother answers.

Each evening my rote patter, his unfailing cheer—

until he swivels; leans in, louder:

“It’s your daughter, Mom! Want to say

hello to Rita?” My surprise each time

that he still asks, believes in asking.

“Hello, Rita.” A good day, then;

the voice as fresh as I remember.

I close my eyes to savor it

but don’t need the dark to see her

younger than my daughter now,

wasp-waisted in her home-sewn coral satin

with all of Bebop yet to boogie through.

No wonder Orpheus, when he heard

the voice he’d played his lyre for

in the only season of his life that mattered,

could not believe she was anything

but who she’d always been to him, for him. . . .

Silence, open air. I know what’s coming,

wait for my brother’s “OK, now say

goodbye, Mom”—and her parroted reply:

“Goodbye, Mom.”

That lucid, ghastly singing.

I put myself back into a trance

and keep talking: weather, gossip, news.

Durer: Innsbruck, 1495

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to nd it real,

As I knew it would be, the colourful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,

All reversed in the quiet reecting waters –

Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.

Now I nd that once more I have shrunk

To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Now in the blessed days of more and less

when the news about time is that each day

there is less of it I know none of that

as I walk out through the early garden

only the day and I are here with no

before or after and the dew looks up

without a number or a present age

DAWN

I woke up in the dark. The house was quiet. The cat yawned and stretched, curled up again. It was very early or

very very late. I wasn’t clear on how the day reset. When is now? I lifted my stued dog out of the bed and hugged

her with both arms. I walked through the house. I had never been in these rooms at night alone. The moonlight

cast blue shadows on the ground outside the windows. Dust on the furniture in the extra bedroom: I sat on the

bed. White shag carpet in the living room and a textured ceiling: I lay on my back and raised my legs, pretending

to walk on the moon. In the kitchen, I couldn’t reach the sink. I stood on a chair and drank from the tap. It ran fast

and cold. In the family room I turned on the television. Static. It was nothing but it moved and made a noise. I

watched it for a while. I watched it for a long time. There was something sad about it. It didn’t have a story.

Everything had run its course or hadn’t started yet. An active emptiness. A background radiation. I opened the

curtains and looked out the windows, facing east. The house was on a hill. The driveway sloped down to the

street. In the distance there were mountains. I stood there, waiting it for it to start. I stood there for a long time.

so heavy with fruit

they nearly touched the ground.

We went out to the meadow; our steps

made black holes in the grass;

I do not know how much longer I’ll be

alive in this world, Mom is telling us

while rubbing behind her knees, while pressing

her temples. When making eggs for us, she

spoons hot oil across the yolks, passes plates

of rice, minced onion, stfuls of salt then

glances to her clutch of pills, tracks

the color of her veins. She winces. She

carries. She wishes for everyone she

loves to swim together before the end.

I remember asking which language her

dreams are in. I remember: her hair like

a hall of smoke, tape unspooled from cassettes;

pollen on the keys of an untuned piano—

Walking through the forest at night

deer in a clearing startle me

the deer run against the black forest trees

their tails bob lightly

the tips dipping into the moon for ink.

White Congee

The rice grains returning, wearing only a thin garment,

Must be washed with spring water to cleanse away the wind and dust of this journey,

To reveal your cool, delicate ice-like skin and jade-like bones.

The water boils, white mist vast and hazy.

You and I both become the yearned-for gures by the water’s edge.

Low ame, slow cooking,

like a modest, rened scholar writing small seal script of plum blossoms on plain paper.

And I am still the slightly cool ngers,

slowly stirring,

boiling a scoop of moonlight until it turns white.

Your mountains and rivers faintly appear,

gradually—a skin like congealed fat, a face like those peach blossoms.

My kitchen moors in the bell sounds outside Soochow,

moors by the waterside of ten miles of lotus owers.

Several men were not my father. Some I avoided, some I wanted to impress. In high school, I tried to grow up at a

friend's house. We studied the periodic table and listened to records. Sometimes they bought pizza or fried

chicken and everyone was encouraged to eat at the table together. His stepfather always watched me closely. He

saw the wariness one learns from being neglected—eating too fast, being overly grateful, always knowing who

was in the house: their motivations, moods, and locations. With his stepson he was attentive. With me, on the

occasions when our paths crossed privately, he spoke with the gentle unavailability one reserves for creatures that

are wounded and backed into a corner. I radiated an inappropriate heat that I did my best to hide. Graciously, he

ignored it. He was generous, vain, tall and almost handsome, beamed a certain nonchalance and didn't slouch in

chairs. It registered. On Christmas morning, early, when I knocked on the glass of the kitchen window, he looked

up and shook his head, mouthed Not today. I appreciated the clarity. It was his family, not mine.

Not long beneath the whelming brine

The whirlwind fe-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass

Often a man's life is such

that he seldom sees his friends,

like the constellations Shen and Shang

which never share the same sky.

WHETHER

YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU

LOVE

OR LIVE IN

DIVIDED

CEASELESS

REVOLT

AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU

LOVE IS

YOUR FATE

At fteen I joined the army on expedition,

Only at eighty did I nally return.

On the way I met a villager:

"Who is left in my home?"

"See there in the distance is your home,

Among the pine, cypress, and graves piled high."

Rabbits enter through the dog hole,

Pheasants y from the rafters.

In the parlour grows wild grain,

Upon the well grows wild vegetables.

I grind the grain for a meal,

I pick the vegetables for the broth.

Meal and broth are ready in an instant,

But I know not whom to serve.

As I step out and look east,

Falling tears soak my clothes.

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen

to the wind, how to nd meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took

questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets

that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep

without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe

the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing

how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts

are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that _I am_

is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation

look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking

for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

They say that, from space

the Earth looks like a

small, blue ball, but how

did it look to you Laika?

A TREE

And when I go,

I close the door of the earth

behind me.

THE PANTHER 

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris 

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. 

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. 

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

To be a wet road in the dark

Deep as the sea pine

was my love for a dear girl

we parted like creeping vines.

But hello kitty lived in heaven

And my mother and I were not in heaven

We were in the san fernando valley

The porn capital

And on the way to mass every sunday

We would drive by houses with swimming pools

Where money shots were being made

The Stu I Want to Put in My Backpack Right Before I Die (Just In Case I Can, In Fact, “Take It With Me”)

I want the smell of the rubber factory

by Krispy Kreme, of lakebrine,

of algae blooms, of alfalfa feed

for big fat cows in Qinghai province.

I want sunsets, tinted gold like egg yolks,

from chickens raised on daodil seed.

I want nimbus clouds on Virginia Beach and

my guitar’s Cmaj7 chord, the water in

my Pothos stems. I want ice, in a glass of Tang,

my sister’s hands, sticky from mango ice cream,

my mom’s lungs humming Friday, I’m in Love.

I want to whistle through my buckteeth. I want

everyone to know I’ve lied, and I want them

to forgive me. I want more, so much more.

I want to say I wanted less.

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:

My father, twenty-ve, in the same suit

Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack

Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress

Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,

Has spread the sti white cloth over the grass.

Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight

From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw

Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out

The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.

My mother shades her eyes and looks my way

Over the drifted stream. My father spins

A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.

I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!

Crossing is not as hard as you might think.'

I had not thought that it would be like this.

Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the sti procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.