I know I have to rise from the small low chair
whose seat bears my grief print
Seven days of sitting with all that quickened love
sickness
Still so opened; still the quivering shell
of darkness
That I ever shrugged, jaded at a distant killing
Gentleness will be harder than every
out-of-body emotion
Walk me back slowly; I want to sing praise
Walk me around the block, sing me slowly
I am sheltered on the second floor,
the house, when lit, is a fishbowl.
Helicopters never quit whirling over Providence.
They clip the air, giant locust wings, clip
and clip and clip, over gardens, greens,
sewers; when they quit, the silence of grief.
In and out of the buzz of numbness.
We live it viscerally but our experience,
not yet cold, is already cliché.
Swat teams and ambulances,
camera lights flash and rant on glass.
A horror film that replicates.
Our 19th century streets outlined
for the children’s bodies.
What a corrupted reality.
The poem I’m wrestling with
wrestled with me all week.
My dreamlife gave me these ideas:
That pungent vinaigrette in the little dish:
pour the rest over the poem.
It will taste delicious.
Push that boulder which is also a word
over the poem’s hillside.
See how much moss, grass and other worlds it gathers.
Read this dream article on your subject.
We offer you your essential point, in dream
language. Use it.
That shovel. On the blackish background.
In the center. Here, you. Dreamer, poet, person.
Start digging.
Thanksgiving Travel
You used to see the Bay; now on the way to SFO
a bevy of clashing billboards, all blood-bright graphics
and codes incomprehensible to the AI-dumb among us.
Dumb and dumber.
Look at the airline staff: all yawns, blank, demoted
to rote smiles as they correct operating intelligence.
Job description: To Oversee the Blundering
Machine. But as any parent knows, kids grow
competent; they turn 30, don’t need reminders
to pack and get going. The message is bright and bold:
they are replacing us. But AI ain’t flesh and blood,
the workers’ smiles tell you that in one second.
Imagine, at this age, to have brought beginner’s mind to California. Where have I been? In the land of the skeptic, in France. But what luck to have had California before me. Full-on sensory discovery.
Enthusiasm has a way of being boundless. (Forgive me for walking naively into known mythologies.)
Rocky cliffs and water that rolls with a steady rhythm that gathers, then completely releases with an assured swagger, somehow embarrassing the Atlantic.
Painting after painting in a grand sfumato that no matter how many times you clean your glasses, is real and before you.
Sad lady of the lake and her plangent guitar at a hillside café.
Looking, looking, I became entranced by planes and screens. Modern buildings of glass walls, the Pacific floating off the right and left screens. The Bay Bridge with its cables marking, but not separating the rolling fog of the bay. These planes evoked canvas of time: Because Rachel was turning 30, we were bathing in retrospection –images appearing, fresh, flush with color and scent. Parts of the whole, reflected, refracted, overlapping. The past like a sliding door that crosses into the present. Reflections of sunset ricochet with the same intensity as her baby face, the nurses suggesting I dress her in doll clothes (she was premature); bars of music we’d hear as we rounded the bend each day driving to maternelle.
Even riding in the backseat of the car as the kids, now adults drove, I began to act up just like the children they were.
As poet Rick Barot wrote, “Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body from one end of time to another.”
Be here now, and everything in between.
Rachel is ecstatic, sparks of static electricity traveling
to, from and between her and us
She may have rubbed her back on a charged shag rug
Yesterday her last sunset in her 20s
5:04, only the sun’s orange cap, 5:05, cap sinks into purple haze,
Sky smolders
In French, the anesthesiologist and I critiqued the Deer Hunter
since I grew up in Pittsburgh
and there was no time for pain killers
The other doctor caught her
Her perfectly etched rose lips
in minuscule
A child who droops at crepuscule. The
partial darkness, the haunted transition.
A child attuned to melancholy.
Though she could stand in a blue wooden door
and shout at the wind: Va-t’en, va-t’en!
Born under the sign of empathy
She went to neo-natal
I went back to my bed, sighed;
picked up Crime and Punishment
She’s always opened me up
Simultaneity: that brown baby gaze pouring itself
into its beloved (at three months), again, now,
those soft defenseless gazing eyes
Haze is creeping on one side, as if everything we are seeing
is through memory
Are we getting sentimental
Trees wear their fur-lined glove inside out
Eternity parallels the horizon like orange crush
No beginning or end at either end
And all the dusk netting, then night netting
The sister weavers do their work by feel
Drunken shafts of light filtering through the weave
of cypress
Monterey, to be exact
As she paints her burger with an exactitude of ketchup,
she wipes each plate as a fresh daily canvas.
I was curious about the guard when she came over.
There was a gap between her teeth, coffee-skinned,
in museum guard clothes.
Around us the monstrosities of race, freestanding
caricatures of the enslaved with robotic nerves –
a man strives after a severed limb; a girl whispers to a doll.
The guard asked if my shoes were Mary Janes.
They were cute, she said, the shiny black texture,
the heel thick as a potato. Retro, updated.
And look at the platform, I said. For all the floors
she stands on – wood, marble, slate – a thick sole
provides resistance. The man without his arms
was still grinding.
The artist said she wants to create a better world.
I rolled a scene where I gave her my shoes; only I
was the hero. Instead, I smiled; she smiled.
Survival of the human face. Maybe
she’ll come across the store in her travels.
The frenzy of fall
after ceding all
to the sun
we walk into the pause
rapt, the minus,
not the slightest jangle
of cicada
silence
sucking down
into earth’s own navel
I’m becoming a real fan of poetry read aloud. I love to hear words animated. Silence falls, and the voice, with its hypnotic or musical or walking tones, steps in. Now that I’ve had the chance to read several times from “Diaspora of Things,” I’m fascinated. Self-conscious at the start, I was careful to put emphasis here, pause between stanzas where I penciled in “pause.” Then I slid into a rhythm. The words took over, released from the page. I hoped those words, riding on the point of a vibrating arrow, attached to wings, knew how to do what they do.
Homer called it, “winged words,” how poetry is in flight and comes alive, like airborne birds, like carrier pigeons, conveying meaning and power. In Hebrew, words and things are conveyed by the same word – devar. In “Diaspora,” things become released “from the gaze of possession” – so why not words? If they pierce the reader, go directly from one inner self to another, I ask for nothing more.
Thank you to Kimberly at Symposium Books, and moderator Christina Bevilaqua.
Along comes the poet
in her own lane,
seeing a pale moon disk
tickled by fall grasses.
So much wrestling,
keep beauty and truth
tattooed on the forehead,
as one’s own headlights,
a third eye.
Tremble. To be so vulnerable,
yet so powerful.
