Poems

Dear Sara

& if you follow these ants

they’ll lead you back to

stone tablets

an older desert

where black bones

once buried are

now words whereI wave to you

at 2:34 am they survived

Duras (Poverty)

“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.

I As In

    i as in sow a muskrat tooth back into jaw
i as in dented pumpkin memory
i as in deflated basketball consciousness
i as in anaphoric internet parrot projection loop
i as in holding uterine lining above a toilet bowl

On My Tongue

Bismillah is my first memory.

I became a bird in the Qur’an

at hardly eight years old.

I opened the dark green cover

and revealed the slippery

Civility

Civility–died on June 24, 2009, at the

age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose

paintings were recently featured in a

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

I Am

l am

gap tooth black girl

back corner of class

scribbling left-handed

poetry on blank paper

save the school's

curriculum for later

I am

overflowing tales by moonlight

The Cactus

You sit in the forgotten bone-dry hills

surrounded by sand and sagebrush

above Buffalo Pound Lake.

A day and a night, and then

three more days and nights.

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself 

through the tongues of whispering mountains 

the re-arrangement of the universe 

How Not to Spill

Dad has creases on his hands so thick they could split with a

poke. He gestures for me to try so I do. His skin bends on a

hinge and out spills every good and bad thing: cattails from our

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

You knock on the door

You knock on the door but nobody answers. Cupping your hands around your face you peer through the side-panel of frosted glass. A kettle is whistling, a woman singing as she sets the table. This is a familiar house. You knock again.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

Skins

what a glory feeling it is to sit in the sun by the oceanside

as tulugait and naujait sing circling above

and scrape skins with centuries of arnait guiding my ulu

The Poet

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

the ghosts of women once girls

somewhere a little girl is reading aloud

in the middle of a dirt road. she smiles

at the sound of her own voice escaping

the spine of a book. she feeds on her hunger

to know herself. she has not yet been taught

To the Ladies

Wife and servant are the same,

But only differ in the name:

For when that fatal knot is tied,

Finis

Give me a few more hours to pass 

With the mellow flower ofthe elm-bough falling,

And then no more than the lonely grass

And the birds calling.

Give me a few more days to keep

Mama

When the horse picked Mama up by the hair

that time, was she scared? 

There is a photograph of her with this horse

in the brown family album. She stands

beside him, thin in the chilly wind

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading — treading — till it seemed

Fast Commute

The meteorologists are pleading with us

to keep checking back through the storm,

ice pellets making a carpet two, three inches thick,

this pale beach we walk on, this wind that passed

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

Praying Herd: For Safe Journey

Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror

the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:

Nocturne

It turns out there wasn't a door, so she stood looking at the wall, and then

at the ground, and then again at the wall, and then up at the sky. The sky

was doorless, which was comforting, especially at night, when she could

forgiving my father

it is friday. we have come

to the paying of the bills.

all week you have stood in my dreams

like a ghost, asking for more time

but today is payday, payday old man;

my mother’s hand opens in her early grave

One Perfect Rose

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.

All tenderly his messenger he chose;

Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

Dear Updike

No, nothing much has changed.

A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —

no winged cars to clog the air,

Sun Bear

yesterday at the Oakland zoo

I was walking alone for a moment

past the enclosure holding the sun bear

Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

They are hostile nations

1

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears   

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid…

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

i am graffiti

i am writing to tell you

that yes, indeed,

we have noticed

If —

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

“Breathe dust…”

Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face

little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling

against a dust-storm…