Year: 2014

We sit in the grass having come nearly late.
We’ve made our way under the trees, rough

ground cover prickling at our sandaled heels.
The moon is a wafer split exactly in half.

Someone asks, If only one part of the balance
is visible, should we assume the other unseen

is properly accounted for? If you haven’t
been where we’ve been, it’s difficult

to understand what it’s really like.
Sure, the streets are spotless and the hedges

are well-manicured. In this part of town,
the doors of townhouses all have beautiful,

ornate knockers, polished to such a high shine.
But who told you the trees bear only fruits

of gold? I and my kind walk beneath endless
rows of them, stretching our shirts and aprons

to catch what careless afterthought the unseen gods
might lob out their windows. We hold up our heads

and smile at those we meet. We carry laminated plastic
cards with which we provision time, our little dignities.

“The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting….” ~ Pablo Neruda

Sunlight stretches a braided rope across the yard from which strands fall, every shred made useful over time. The sky’s tarp sags slightly in the middle. Somewhere inside the kitchen, a radio dial is turned and the noise of its scratchy seeking makes a brief aluminum corona in the air. The heated flagstones smell almost like coffee, but the woman hanging laundry on the line doesn’t have time. She would like to linger— even the rivulets of water wrung out of shirts and trousers have their small luxury: they follow lines that snake across the paving; they digress, branch out, before evaporating. Did you know even the merest gash of water on the nape, on the insides of the elbows and the knees, is enough to cool the body on the hottest day? Even extravagance can be meted out, tempered. And later in the evening, when the body gives itself permission to sink at last into a pool of water, sometimes what comes flooding back is both painful and sweet beyond measure.

Sometimes when I run my fingers
along the table’s edge, when I
slowly crease a napkin fold
or trace circles on the surface
with a fingernail or the tip
of a coffee spoon— I remember
my mother’s thin soprano practicing
an old kundiman: “Huling Awit,”
Last Song, the pleading supplicant
at the window of unmoved, oblivious
love. And always I wondered why he
never showed his face, never reciprocated
the one-sided serenade in moonlight,
why the woman in the narrative sang
her heart out in such an empty room
that all the sadness in the world
came and gathered like orphans,
like fledglings, at her feet.

 

In response to Via Negativa Conch Shell.

My gold tooth in my hand, the space it left behind
an indentation chalked with paste and sand—

My garment made of skin, held out at arm’s
length for the anatomist to see within—

My paper window shade, accordion drawn against
this faltering light: its outline parsed by fire.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Walking Dead.

Astoria: middle class and commercial neighborhood in the northwestern corner of New York City. Borough: Queens. Astoria is bounded by the East River. Nearest are three other Queens neighborhoods: Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside. Astoria is patrolled by the New York City Police Department’s 114th Precinct. Astoria was first settled by the Dutch and Germans. Then the Irish came in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Now there are other ethnic settlers: Italians, Jews, Cypriots, Arabs. There is a street there called “Little Egypt.” When I go into Arab shops I think of dates, figs, pistachios; I do not think of walnuts. Oscar at the Waldorf did not put them into his original salad recipe. Someone else did, years and years later, in California. Then grapes followed. Own it, goes a slogan heard often on the lips of the young. He was Swiss. As for epicure: the word appears in all the stubs on his biography. The word comes from the late 14th century, meaning “follower of Epicurus,” after the Athenian philosopher who taught that pleasure is the highest good and virtue is the greatest pleasure. The first lesson, therefore, is apples. Apples and honey, celery slices thinned to the shape of commas. The juice and zest of a lemon. Zest licks the fingers on which the sweet dressing has spilled, as the tray is borne from kitchen to dining plaza in that famous hotel.