Month: May 2013

bright and hot like molten silver, splashed citrus
on tiles of the Turkish café where women in black
aprons bear trays with samovars and cups of tea

and coffee under the trees, glasses of clinking ice—
And though I might have said so a few anguished times
in the past, I do not want to die tomorrow: I know
I have to sometime, but hold on, not just yet:

for there is a sliver of fragrance
I cannot place— or are those ripe mangos
on the counter? But really, I cannot die today
or tomorrow unless I know what it is exactly,

if not approximately; what has turned my head
just now, away from any of the mercurial
self-absorptions of the moment, away
from minor aches and pains and worries

that must pale when reckoned against the vast,
incomprehensible mystery of the universe—
This light alone, this sky, almost enough
by itself, as if bombs did not explode

in cities daily, turning what they touch
to fire, to ashes, skin grafts and phantom
limbs— What’s death if all is change?
What’s life if not mercurial change?

In response to Via Negativa: Shore Leave.

On every street, news of a death: often a child, often a girl, but even the old; even animals, stray or feathered or penned. It was the middle of the war; or several wars. No one can really remember now. All we know is that the angel of dark omens, whose name is interchangeable with others we can’t even speak, returns in the night to mark each door of the unfaithful with a sign. What sign? Some say the blood of an animal, some say a crescent nicked sharp into posts with the point of a curved fingernail. Plague and boils. Golf ball-sized hail that bends the good wheat and the crops of yellow corn. Waves of ice the winds push ashore, splintering with the sound of onrushing trains. But what does it mean to be unfaithful? The children go out to hunt for frogs or locusts in irrigation ditches. If their hunger is wrong, then are the well-fed merchants saints? Who are those men who fold their gold-ringed fingers and watch from their offices in the sky as buildings collapse? The waters turn red with blood or oil, the fish are dying or have died. Smoke and rubble from the factory, bones and garments of the dead. The flash of a hummingbird’s wings in a patch of herbed green is rare as the miracle of the Dark Madonna; she used to visit the poor in their hovels, bring her cool touch to their fevered aid. Night cloaks what comes, or returns. Who can explain the mud-smeared grass on the carved hems of the statue, buckled to its plinth? But we’ve lost count of the plagues. Remind me of stars. Every day, the cities shimmer with dust and heat. What falls, falls to the earth. Birds tumble out of the sky, still vaguely warm— as if they’d flown through a torch, as if a red welt flared out of their throats at the moment they perished.

In response to Morning Porch and Via Negativa: In the Hague (tanka).

Oh first hour of the work-day week after I turn on the office
computer, oh absurd overflow of phone messages and accumulated mail—
Somehow I feel underdressed and unprepared for this combined assault
on my senses, not quite awake, not having quite recovered
from the exquisite joys of weekend laundry (three loads),
mesh baskets flocked with lint in shapes resembling miniature maps
of lost worlds— Oh joy of a thousand and one deadlines, of papers
that need to be labeled and filed, and texts that must be read
and underlined: my mother always told me, at the first sign
of despair, Chin up, chin up; bend your head to the winds,
plod along, plod along as best as you can. Was that ever set
to music, sung like a round? Row the boat, row the boat round
and round, till the lake has rippled with the radiance
of repeating shapes. The sun dapples to a lovely color there—
you can see the choir of leaves, blowing kisses
or waving like a throng of miniature hands.

In response to thus: Rhapsodically.