Year: 2014

(October is Fil-Am History Month)

6

Before Allos, before
the orchards and
the canneries, there was
the dog. There was always
the dog they took pleasure
kicking in the ribs,
baiting its snarl, testing
its fangs. No dogs and none
of your kind, read the hand-
lettered signs, before they
chased us out into the streets.

7

But before the voyage,
before the shiploads of young
men seduced by promises of new
worlds beyond, there were
the other dogs of war
and treachery, bodies pawned
for twenty million bits
of currency no one
has seen.

8

You who cannot fathom
the cost of being flung
or set adrift or having
to learn how to live
in the in-between:
not everything we’ve done
is out of choice.

9

Dog without pedigree
Dog without chains
Dog sniffing in the wilderness
Dog rooting for the prize
Dog roaming the alleyways
Dog dark as night
There are other forms of love
if you can look beyond
its register of names

10

But you don’t.

You see only
this face,
the canvas
of my skin,

the history
of lies you’ve
perpetuated.

(October is Fil-Am History Month)

1

They take up a collection
for the students newly arrived
from the islands: cutlery,
Melamine dishes, two
good box mattresses to lay,
futon-style, on the floor.
A bag of groceries, a list
of phone numbers. They tell them:
next weekend, we can take you
coat-shopping. Winter
will soon be here.

2

In the lunch room
at the end of the hall,
the Chinese resident comes
every Wednesday to lunch
with the nurses and lab
technicians. Sometimes
the pathologist joins them
when he smells the curries
and the steamed dumplings
heating the air. Once,
someone accidentally poured
iced tea into a beaker.

3

One evening after choir
practice, the tenor
who is a mechanic runs away
with the accompanist.
Her husband goes from house
to house, weeping and brandishing
a gun. No one knows where
the pair have gone.

4

The grandmother wants
to teach a song she half-
remembers to her son’s
only child. But this boy
spends half the afternoon
practicing the rhythms
of his body on a skate-
board, listening to
percussion in his ears.

5

The woman touches
the taut outline
of her belly, fingers
the bruise on her neck,
watches her husband sleep
on the sofa. She does not know
where he hid her passport,
somewhere in this house.

In response to Via Negativa: Homily.

In response to Via Negativa: Cure for melancholy.

“Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…” ~ John Keats

Make me a sweet to taste slow,
a honey with the aftertaste of meadow
in the hiatus after war.

Even before the tanks have rolled away,
take me like the winged congregation
storms rafters holding up the broken roofs,

like the ones who break from the ranks
to salvage makeshift nests in eye-sockets
of dictators’ blasted monuments.

Do not make of me an afterthought
that flickers before fire’s consuming,
and do not lay me in a frozen crypt

to arrest the worms’ furious
decoding. Because we’ll soon
in the river’s current follow,

tell me the tears we’ve shed have turned
into clean stones to lay in pairs on the faces
of all our dead; that there are sacraments we

can still burn in these dwindling days:
santalum reed and balsam, camphored breath
fluting through these hollow bones.

In response to Via Negativa: Time capsule.

older than the streets through which our dreams
go daily in search of sustenance, and nightly
return in search of what we used to be—

And in its hidden springs are crystals
with origins in the stars, their glimmer fraught
with effort of remembering— So then, in the distance

between thirst and its unintended forsaking,
the hinged collarbone becomes a cleft, a well—
When was the last time I felt

the imprint of your lips there, or traced
with fingertips the hidden moisture in your eyes
after our bodies kissed and we had parted ways?

In response to Via Negativa: Old Water.