I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize,
believed in the third and fourth eyes, the eyes in
the undersides of leaves, the polar bears a thousand miles north,
and sprouts of grass under the snow. They knew their poems
99.
From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a
wall-mounted monitor:
Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff
into the earth, and the earth opened—
it wasn’t a wound, it was joy—joy!—!
Out of this opening leaped earth’s most radical bloom: our people—
we blossoms from the original body: water,
flowering and flowing until it became itself, and we, us:
River. Body.
Let Us Be Fireflies
All day we
practice morse code signals
telegraphing ghosts
of intent.
Between us
unsayable things
heavy as bone.
For any hope of plain
speech we must do away
with skin suit propriety &
upon contact / head first / baptismal
i once shoved my foot through glass
getting to know my own anger
its patches of stupid
bloody love
stress is just a socially acceptable
word for fear
i’m ashamed of feeling too much
river edges like a cut
of laughter
left too long in the sun, a bloated
syringe of time between our kneecaps
i know you want
the piece of the story
that is clandestine
but i won’t give it to you
When my mother died,
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.
On my forty-first birthday
I chipped it out,
a rectangular resurrection,
hefted the dead weight in my palm.
Before it thawed,
I sawed, with serrated knife,
the thinnest of slices —
Jewish Eucharist.
The amber squares
1
Men prefer an island
With its beginning ended:
Undertones of waves
Trees overbended.
Men prefer a road
Circling, shell-like
Convex and fossiled
Forever winding inward.
Men prefer a woman
Limpid in sunlight
Held as a shell
On a sheltering island…
Men prefer an island.
2
But I am mainland
O I range
From upper country to inner core:
From sageland, brushland, marshland
All the weapons we marshal to confront the day
You ask to be left by the door before entering.
The sword in its sheath must lie on the grass,
the quiver and bow hung off a branch.
Daily mind, that dons the armour of thought,
does not shed the weaponry easily; too many are the tasks
that require its particularity – its thrust-and-jab conquest
of the hour, the arsenal of muscle and aim,
to kill one after another, disappointment,
discouragement, or to dent the thick underbelly of despair.
My grandmother puts her feet in the sink
of the bathroom at Sears
to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,
wudu,
because she has to pray in the store or miss
the mandatory prayer time for Muslims
She does it with great poise, balancing
herself with one plump matronly arm
against the automated hot-air hand dryer,
after having removed her support knee-highs
and laid them aside, folded in thirds,
and given me her purse and her packages to hold