Two orange sections left on a plate—
Thank you for remembering my need
for something resembling that bright
shimmer on the ceiling, centipede
with too many legs carrying
the morning away.
Nacre
How can I sign cards now with The world
is your oyster or The future is yours
when by all accounts the world is daily going
and gone to the dogs, i.e. the one per cent
who own most of it all anyway but are bent
on squeezing every last resource into their vaults?
We got a catalog in the mail once, addressed
to the former resident: glossy page spreads
of smoked fish, pearls of black caviar. Who
eats this way? For whom are such price tags
a trifle, nothing? The grit lining the shell
grows lustrous. We dredge the bottom swells.
In response to Via Negativa: Response to Descartes.
Storm Evening: Encounter
We’re at a fundraiser for the preschool
our daughter attended fifteen years ago,
when flash flood and tornado warnings
come up. As we prepare to leave it’s pouring
sheets of rain, and through the waxy air
we hear dark rips of thunder and lightning.
In the vestibule, a woman tells two
blond-plaited children to wait, get ready
to bolt when she brings the car around;
then sprints through the wet parking lot.
My husband does the same thing. As we peer
through the blur of rain and headlights,
an older man I don’t know comes up from behind;
silver-haired, laughing, he gestures toward me,
shaking his keys slightly: Do you want to bring
my car around? And all of a sudden I’m not certain
how to respond; don’t know if it’s another one
of those moments brought on by the color of my hair
or my skin; don’t know if it’s harmless, nothing.
But if it’s really nothing then why am I thinking
there could be something behind that odd way he holds
the keys aloft, the way the question could be dismissed
as a joke if it weren’t also familiar as command? The most
I muster is a bravura Sure, but only if you bring mine
around first. But by then the lights are swerving closer
so we have to push ourselves forward, out into the open.
In response to Via Negativa: Silence lover.
Mirlitons
I was much like you then, wanting
a life beyond streets roofed in old foil,
beyond splints that bowed under the pear-
shaped weight of homely green fruit. I knew
how to peel them close to the flesh, run
my hands under water to rinse off their sap.
My heart sighed as I worked to fold them
in sheets of pastry that did not cloy
despite their bruising in sugar; or carve
them into islands of jade suspended
in steam. For all dreams are frugal
until they cleave through topsoil,
until their tight-coiled spirals
stretch to the last breaking point.
Sightline
Water from the taps tastes like chlorine.
There is a fine sifting of green and yellow
on patio chairs, on every car down the block.
Filmy on the surface of swimming pools.
I never learned to swim though I have
dreams of slicing through clear water:
my arms a slow windmill pulling me
closer to the edge. I keep the fine
white tufts of Queen Anne’s Lace
in my sights. They bob in sympathy
with my efforts. Only a wading bird
keeps perfectly still, not judging.
Manifest Destiny
Because my father’s brother-in-law was a captain,
it happened that I was born at an army hospital named
after the 25th president of the United States, the one
who dropped down on his knees when he realized
that the Philippines had dropped into [their] laps, some gift
apparently from a higher force that gives nations and people
like us wholesale to the ones who hold the reins of power.
Two summers ago when I returned to that city, even at midnight
the heat was oppressive. The taxi drove past the camp enclosure,
past row after row of billboards and ragged palms, the outline
of the city’s new high rises crowding out the shanties and back
alleys the poor inhabit, where they sleep and eat and try
to ply their various tinkers’ trades, where they die almost nightly
now in the streets, targets of random vigilante killings. O manifest,
O destiny. McKinley said he slept soundly: …and the next
morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department
(our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines
on the map of the United States (pointing to a large map
on the wall of his office), and there they are, and there
they will stay while I am President! I too dropped
into the world, though not quite in the same way: my origins
a murky destiny that passed through bodies annexed
in furtive and unexpected ways. Was there joy,
was there defeat in surrender? There was nothing left…
to do but to take them all, …educate [them], and uplift
and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s
grace do the very best we could by them.
In response to Via Negativa: Talking head.
Milk Fish
A body undulates in the shallows,
glass hive prosperous with bones.
This is the way debts multiply:
one branch growing into a tree.
I too want to break with the past
without choking on its filaments.
But the throat is a white-lit tunnel,
silvery measure that drops into the bay.
What does a line etch beyond two
points? Blue beginning. Blue end.
In response to Via Negativa: Oligarch.
Holding
You go out and sit in the crucible
that isn’t dark yet but precedes it,
where the bee whirs suspended
in a white thread of its own making.
You think of how maybe it’s possible
to turn back the small waves of brooding
that touched everything all morning,
how with effort you might find
some footing as this vehicle lurches
ever onward through something
difficult called the future.
And while it’s true we’re creatures
of appetite, never completely appeased,
the sweetgum continues to drop
its everlasting arsenal of brittle
brown pods— they can puncture your skin,
send a sepsis raging through the veins
and into your brain or heart. What
will you do then when you’re truly
paralyzed, unable to hoist your voice
or a hand to signal in the air? Better
to learn how the smallest stones divide
the onrushing current; how the eddies swell
with sorrows that break then eventually recede.
Spring cleaning
The yard guys who it seemed
went into hibernation all winter
show up promptly on the first
day of spring with their noisy
leaf blowers, their headphones,
their hedge trimmers. They nuke
the weeds in the backyard, cart
away all the dead limbs and
a season’s worth of brittle
gumballs on the ground. As if
influenced by all this activity,
our youngest daughter attacks
all the drawers and closets
in her room, piling outgrown
knick-knacks and clothing
in brown grocery bags: itchy
plaid shirts that no longer
button easily across the chest,
graphic tees and sweatshirts
she describes as being from
those “emo 7th grade days.”
And I, inspired now too
by the desire to make things
clean and airy, drag the grey
area rug to the deck and hose
it down with soap and water.
While I pick bits of hair
(all our shedding) off the pile,
I notice the falling-down shed
and its worn wood surface,
the dull greenish hue creeping
across the fence… Touch one thing
and it leads to another: soon the seeds
flower and the bud swirls to leaf;
blackbirds come to raid
the reddening fruit, and you
stand blinking in the sunshine,
trying to recall everything you told
yourself you were going to do next.
End of the line
For years, a train made the twice-daily journey
to and from remote Kami-Shirataki station in Hokkaido
until its only passenger finally graduated from high school.
Imagine miles and miles of white in winter, the cloudy
yellow beam approaching, muffled soughing and sighing
of wheels on the tracks. Imagine ochre and stippled
countryside, sheets unrolling with the thaw of spring.
Where is she now, the last ticket tendered?
In response to Via Negativa: Foggy.