Month: May 2018

“They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows…”
~ Edward Lear

Who doesn’t leave fingerprints on everything
they touch? Mini fridge, sliding door, desk,

shower stall; then, lumber like water buffalo
into the mud that’s settled in the brain,

in search of some cool relief. Languishing
with a headache in the sudden heat, I drink

ice water and prowl through fashion sites
wondering why everything is suddenly pink,

frothy— blouses, linen jumpsuits, printed
kimonos, lilac-dyed hair taking over the woolly

scarves of a winter that sometimes seemed
would never end. And wedding dresses,

just because it’s almost June. A change
in the season does strange things, not only

to the weather. Even stranger, because
of climate change. Someone goes for a run

and when he returns there’s hail the size
of ping-pong balls bouncing off deck furniture

and cabanas. In that poem about The Owl
and the Pussycat I learned in third grade

and still know most parts by heart, one of them
sings to the stars on a small guitar; or is it

a ukulele, or maybe a violin? And one presents
the other with a ring, supposedly filched

from a pig— I wonder, is that literal
or metaphorical? How much did it cost and

is it real, the diamond I mean; or was it cubic
zirconia? Oh let us be married, says the one

to the other. No one, not even the giant squid
in the poem’s magic waters, comes out hollering

Wait, you don’t have to say anything, you don’t
have to say yes right this minute! Or, Why

don’t you sleep on it at least, and decide
in the morning? Some things are harder to un-

do than others. A lock has a key until the key
is lost or thrown away; the envelope with

the deed signed and sealed is put into the mail.
And there on the sand they danced by the light

of the moon— Until the beach was overrun by all-
new construction. Now it’s a real tourist trap: with mini

golf, theatres, tanning salons, indoor skydiving silos;
all you can eat Chinese buffet and pizza. On the strip,

bars lit with neon and tiki torches: from which, every so
often, there’ll be an ambulance or fire truck speeding away.

“I want to look at my hands. I want to say something in the language of the ocean, the language of the rain.” ~ Kazim Ali

Ask me about anything else: how the night is a quiet carpet of stars, how the memory of water is preceded by a chorus of frogs. Don’t keep asking where I earned my degree, where I went to school, how I learned to speak such good English, if I’ve published anything. The moths make a swish around a pool of light, and it doesn’t matter. We love what we love, at noon or in the darkness. We can’t help who we are. Don’t correct my grammar just so you can find something to say. Don’t tell me about your stint abroad and how you had a live-in maid; or the unbelievably low rent for your apartment. In the country, past dusk, we learn to drive so as not to startle deer into leaping straight into the headlights. There is one time when the animal is mortally wounded. On our part, a twisted side mirror as casualty. There are many names for a woman who calls a spade a spade, a scoundrel what he deserves. And I’m broken about how today, in Manila, the Chief Justice is ousted from the Supreme Court. At a party someone turns to me and asks me to check her neck and arms for ticks. There’s nothing there on her creamy skin. You walk through a field and think wildflowers. You walk through a street that isn’t packed with bodies, that isn’t surrounded by riot police. How many countries can you name, where movie stars become congressmen or senators? Erect statues for the ones who have the most number of mistresses, the most number of children from different partners. Name the last country in the world in which divorce is still illegal. I want to deliver the mail where the language of bribes is always trying without success to impersonate the rain.

You may be older now, but you still don’t seem to know
how deep the roots of anything are, nor how far back

they really go under loam and rock, under clumps
of grass that sheep nibble on as they leap nimbly

from ledge to ledge— themselves blithely unaware
that underneath the banquet table, the bones of untold

generations lie cocooned in spiderwebs and hurricane
debris. On Easter Island, archeologists have finally

figured out why those Moai monoliths purse their lips
as if to tsk in disappointment, like grandmothers

and aunts on both sides of your family: Look deeper,
there’s more to us than meets the eye. Unearthed torsos,

truncated waists, broad as the oily aprons that once
sheathed them. Laps on which you laid your head to cry

after countless bad breakups, and the way they’d scold:
That’s what you get for using your heart, your itchy

cactus, your hat of rousable quills and not your brain.
You wonder why you’ve never found a four-leaf clover;

if buying a lucky money tree from a plant store would be
like bribing fate, and if so, what is the penalty? From afar,

the beam of a lighthouse lasers intermittently through fog,
so in the butter-yellow light of its returning scan, you might

catch sight of a limp blowfish on the beach among brittle
shells, a rusted oil can long abandoned by its genie.

It’s still too cold to walk on the sand clad in a skimpy bikini.
The only ones about, hermit crabs; gulls with an ear cocked

for the stray tourist, hoping to snag crumbs from a burger
or a donut wrapper. It’s said those giant heads are from

around year 1,500 CE or Common Era: which means a year
in our time, or not so anciently long ago, when the earth

must have gone through some upheaval as the fate soon
predicted for us. Heating or cooling, the plug pulled on

existence as we know it, if we don’t quit littering the world
with the excesses of our consumption. No more backpacking

across the Pyrenees or twirling off to Argentina to learn
the tango. No more jetting to Japan, no more fatty tuna

to melt as sashimi on the tongue. In “Interstellar”
it was all corn, corn, corn. You’d be sick of it,

miss your merlot, your scotch on the rocks;
chamomile tea with honey, the bite of sriracha,

the plain salty curl of a thin pretzel. Then, it was all
dust storms, burning heat; a scourge that for sure

wiped out any trace of unicorns or ants, angel fish
or honeybees. Let me tell you something. You can’t climb

a rock face without kicking stones loose from under
your boot. You can move, but you can’t hide. The only

anchor that’s dropping here goes by the name of time.
Ask the roosters in their cages why they crow.

In the English 391-01 Prose Poems and Hybrid Forms Workshop I am teaching (as the Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence) for the 4-week Spring Term 2018 at Washington and Lee University, we have been reading and discussing a variety of texts that engage the notion of “the hybrid.”

We also do a lot of writing in our intensive sessions— After all, each class meeting is three hours!

Today, we spent a little time on Emoji Poems— the kind that Carina Finn and Stephanie Berger have been writing and translating and collaborating on since around 2013 (resulting in a chapbook called The Grey Bird from Coconut Books in 2014); and that The Paris Review even ran a contest on in fall 2017.

I brought in the Emoji poem (see picture here) which I wrote before class this morning – and instructed everyone to translate the lines into poetry. Often, when I bring in an in-class exercise, I write along with my students. So here is my “translation” poem:

05.09.2018: Earth view (An Emoji Poem)

I’m not strong enough to stop a rain
of meteors from falling on the earth
and obliterating all of us in fire, sending us
back as if to prediluvian times, before the apes
who would also surely cover their eyes in horror—
Before Noah, who took two of each creature into
his ark as the waves rose and rose and rose,
just so you and I could have waiting at home
a pet frog or a little brown and white dog trotting
blissfully under the azaleas. Here, in the country,
it’s almost idyllic to hear the cheep-cheep of a bird
in the hedge, or see the occasional gold tangle
of stalks in the hills as one drives by. Who
even seems to care yet about the effects of pulling
out of the Iran nuclear deal, even as lawmakers
shout Death to America! while burning a US flag
in Tehran. Planes sketch expensive contrails
across the powder blue sky, and gas stations
prepare to change the prices at the pump.
We could just walk, not ride anywhere anymore—
but tell that to the farmers driving their John
Deeres through dry fields, worrying about next
season’s harvest. There are bombs detonating
somewhere all the time, some just not as loud
as others. In the cities, it’s so beautiful
even at night when the lights come on, and the ones
like necklaces strung over suspension bridges. Travel
and collect experiences, not things! says a credit
card ad on a billboard. That’s probably why my father-
in-law bought lottery tickets almost every day of his
life, until the weekend he fell down in the living room
and never woke up again. Roll the dice, poise the stick,
aim for the 8 ball. If you’re lucky, you get to go away
to a tropical island, where you’ll do nothing but read
and sip slushy drinks decorated with paper parasols,
bask in the sun and idly watch birds fly across
the horizon: somewhere like Hawaii— But then,
precipitation’s expected there, which could turn
all the volcano emissions and sulfur dioxide jets
into a widespread umbrella of acid rain,
though the sunsets will probably be gorgeous.

Source texts:
Leah Naomi Green, “Venison”
Deborah Miranda, “Advice from La Llorona”
Suzanne Parker Keen, “This quarter hour”
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart
Lesley Wheeler, “Inland Song”
Deborah Miranda, “Old Territory. New Maps.”
Lesley Wheeler, “Heterotopia”
Julie Phillips Brown, “Fantomina: A Fantasia in Verse”

Through a clearing in the woods
we walked to a house where a polished
floor had been laid and the windows

looked out into a well of trees.
Flags of orange, yellow, and green
fluttered like prayers detonating

in the wind. I was offered and took
a cloth-bound mallet in my hand,
and struck at the rim of the gong.

It released a full, deep note
like a ring, like an eddy
that rose and branded the air

with its widest name. What should I
have answered when it asked which is
the better teacher, desire or suffering?