Expatriate Triolet

Of course I think about return: the many ways a path
might stretch or hold, mountain and valley, across a map.
Edges don’t circumscribe or surpass: this kind of math
merely arrives at the same sum— How many ways a path
leafed out, but tracked itself back to a source. No trap’s
more cunning than the one that never shut you in or out—
Of course I think about return: the many ways a path
can stretch and hold, mountain and valley, across a map.

I asked to be curled as a blade of jade-green fern,

to be smooth as a fig leaf sunning in the yard.

I asked to be light as a circus of speckled motes,
to have the dignity of lanterns on a passing train.

I asked to open like a secret peeling from the bark of a tree,
to close like the hinge of a music box after it has been played.

I asked to bear in my hands the heart hidden in the hills,
for the string to guide me into the labyrinth.

The poem behind the poem

says I am not a copy: most of the time
you don’t even know I’m here.
The poem

behind the poem is not your evil twin,
and not your doppelgänger either. You came
into the room thinking Oh what nice

contemporary furniture, what pleasant ambience,
and you were ready to surrender your keys, your purse,
your not-yet-born firstborn to the handsome valet

attendant. But the poem behind the poem doesn’t care
what kind of suit or trench coat you’re wearing,
what kind of cummerbund. The poem behind the poem

is a thin tasseled cord to one side
of the printed drape or the dumbwaiter.
The poem behind the poem is the trapdoor

you don’t notice until the floor falls away
beneath your shiny, pointy, oxfords; and you
are falling into a story that doesn’t seem

to make sense, and so you wave your arms
and yell I’ll sue! except the ancient clerk
yawning at the counter has seen it all before.

 

In response to Via Negativa: An inquiry concerning the poetics of like, whatever.

Interpellated

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.

Accrual

“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.

Empty Orchestra

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.

Visitor

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.” ~ T.S. Eliot

One by one, the lost or forgotten return:
bulbs erupt from their winter envelopes;
seeds sprout in the yard, following
the scything arc of the careless

hand that must have scattered them.
And the ache in my heart I thought
I’d buried deep in the teeming soil
of everyday ferment skims

lightly again to the surface, asking
to be taken in my palms, asking to be
examined. And I don’t know now
just as I didn’t know before,

what to believe if suddenly it lifts
two dusty brown wings hinged to its soft
moth body, though its breathing is the only
prayer I can remember in the room.

Flayed

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.

Instructions for Waldorf Salad

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.

Emblems

Who turns to the window, points
at a line of feathered bodies
ranged like an aria on a stave?

Who wants to know which one
carries in its beak the missing
charm to complete her life,

which one will fly
into the trees to sing a song
of greatest enchantment?

The price of listening
is either the song itself,
or a heart transformed

to granite. A mountain stands
in the pockmarked background,
littered with burial caves

and dreamlike vegetation—
Who has ever returned un-
changed from those heights?

 

In response to Via Negativa: Birds on a Wire.