Category: Poems & poem-like things

“The purpose of life is to be defeated
by greater and greater things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Zirconia, the jeweler says, not even blinking.
You get the feeling most of the heirloom jewelry you’ve brought,
xanthic in its drab velvet pouch, has mostly sentimental
worth. You slip them back into your purse, a little shame-faced.
Vacancy signs flap in the wind as you exit into the street,
unease following; as if it’s you and your life that’s been appraised, not
the assortment of gold chains, brooches, earrings and rings, pearls
set in triads: your mother’s gifts when last you parted from her.
Remembering what Rilke said in the clutch of letters he wrote,
quelling that young poet’s anxieties— oh what you’d give for antidote to
panic— Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you….
Otherwise, you start to look accusingly (that is, morally) upon your past.
No one you know speaks openly of their difficulties, or if they have the same
morbid fears as you: and yet, how could they never have been in such throes?
Luck as elusive as light, as exceptional as faith. Meanwhile, I’ve
kept believing in the wages of hard work: that I’ve not been forgotten,
just unintentionally overlooked— pawn on the checkered board,
inching my way through obstacles, pausing often to weep and reflect.
Haven’t I done all I could to ensure not just my own happiness?
Guilt is exquisite— every mother’s secret, priceless raiment.
From year to year as I’ve drawn up figures on my ledger,
each accrual comes with its corresponding page of more rapid
disbursals. Is this what you mean when you speak of being over-
come by larger and larger things? But I am so tired tonight;
benighted, belittled by what comes to me and tells me is my fate.
All I want is sometimes to not have to plead or struggle so much.

“Inaudible language of the secret…” ~ Edmund Jabès

What I cannot say, weather sometimes makes explicit. I wish
for language to make myself vivid as a wing, magnetic as a current.

On the London Bridge road, still flooded a day after the hurricane: pumpkins
float from a nearby farm, lit by the surreal glow of distant headlights.

In the night, rivers heave themselves up through audible silences made
by rain. Everything says Shh, shh, everything a restlessness spilled open.

The tools I hold feel useless in my hands. I cannot chisel nor buff,
I cannot join. My heart jangles in time with the tilting winds.

Or a flame. I chip away in secret, embroider in silence.
Easier to sing when the light is like sweetness, not dark.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Creature.

and the priest is on foot, the indio
should get down off the horse.

In these suits whoever wins loses his shirt.
Every snot-nose goes to Europe.

He unleashed curses against the century,
the lack of respect, the nascent irreligiosity.

Before he died he spoke in Latin.
A cow was tied to the rope, a nest of birds between its horns.

She spied a doorway with a sentry and tried to get inside.
They say that one appeared with her habit soaking wet, all in tatters.

What is that supposed to mean, he whispered.
That was a dream, and in this world you don’t live in a dream.

My dear little one, the strongest spirit I know is ammonia.
Come to me and I will help you avenge your ancestors.

How many women left their embroidered chinelas in the mud?
A cow was tied to the rope, a nest of birds between its horns.

From here one moves into the arena, which is called the ring.
The hour of danger has arrived.

What should I say to those who sent me?
What else can I say but yes?

What drew his attention most was dried seeds of the amor seco
stuck to the shirt collar. You who will see it, welcome it for me.

*

~ a found poem, based on readings of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, trans. Harold Augenbraum; Penguin Classics, 2006

“Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, from anywhere
Familiar.” ~ Mary Oliver, “Magellan”

When we do expire— far
from the islands we can hardly
claim now except by blood—

will there be songs for those
who raised the masts and sailed
seasick months in the hold,

imagining the vessel turned
eastward, as if with the sun?
And who will string with laurels

the nameless, risk’s own
sons and daughters, even those
who never left their inlet

by the sea? They woke one morning
to hear bells tolling, smelled
the countryside turned into

a burning wilderness. Cartographers
drew archipelagoes in the shape
of bare-breasted sirens, mermaids,

monsters of the deep. Possessively
outlined in sepia, in violent hues
of midnight and vermillion,

an isthmus curves like an arm.
Once I read: not a day goes by
that we don’t find an unfound

body to bemoan.* Perhaps
its parts, if not the whole—
hands twitching among sleek

particles on the cutting floor,
a rosary of knots on the backs
of migrants moving down

rows of asparagus or corn.
You know such stories: the letter
never delivered, the body crumpling

to the pavement. Ayah or maid, exile
in the desert. The blur and waver, ripple
in the air before she falls to earth.

* Larissa Szporluk, “Death of Magellan”

In the all-night grocery store            between the local

farmer’s market produce table      and rows of greens

prewashed and packaged         in plastic a few shelves

with fruit from those other          worlds: gold skinned

red-bristled and starred                     sheathed in husks

or pinched and bruised—                 Once I saw a small

strip of cane, its drying                          sugars and high-

priced geometry tagged for               some compost bin

Who hungers for you                                I wanted to ask

Sometimes small birds                  fly in through sliding

doors and careen                                          in the rafters

uncertain of how                                         they got there