Nobody has time for work anymore, we just commute — four hours each way in our air-conditioned sex machines. Real objects have been given painted shadows so we remember what we’re here for: to know our place. The ayatollahs of sacred architecture instruct us to watch our feet as we walk & keep count of all our steps in a spiral-bound notebook. The forests may have gone away, but we can still plant flags in the cracked & peeling earth. I stop to admire a crowd of feathered dinosaurs bobbing their heads, closing in on that lady with the walker who’s scattering crumbs.
Proclamation 1021: A Ghazal
“…even a Bodhisattva’s career is oriented within emptiness”
It was the summer after the fall, after the First Couple fled to Hawaii. We joined
the crowds lined up to see her museum of shoes: each pair embellished with emptiness.
We’d just come from a trip north to visit old churches. We gaped at such audacity—
their likenesses painted on a basilica wall: as angels ascending through the emptiness.
Who remembers those days, those nights, or the period called martial?
The soldier who raided the arsenal dined with us the week before he disappeared.
And countless others stormed a bridge, raised a banner, painted slogans,
took to the hills. They warned: the countryside is not a vast emptiness.
We housed the daughter of one of my father’s friends. One night, maybe two, as she
fled from agents of the state. Blacklists grew as our houses feigned emptiness.
Memory’s faulty, memory’s short. History’s long, or really, just repeats itself. The widow
and her son are back in power. The poor watch politicos squabble in the emptiness.
Who remembers those days, those nights? Rallies and explosions in the square, our poets
and intellectuals jailed. A people’s anthem of a captive bird, singing in the emptiness.
In response to miscellany (living hagiography 9.20.2012).
Wingnut
Keep it together, brother.
Don’t fret the empty head,
the female thread.
Don’t let them call you
a dumb thumbscrew.
Stand tough over your stuff
with your spatulate antlers,
your battle rattle
ready to let fly.
—Or is that, in fact, a pair
of tin ears?
A Thumbnail Taxonomy of Rivets
The rivet family is generally divided into six genuses: fully tubular, semi-tubular, self-piercing, split, tapped & compression rivets. Depending on their niche & matrix, they may be made up of copper, brass, aluminum, stainless steel or carbon steel, and their heads may be flat, oval-shaped, counter-sunk or trussed. Fully tubular rivets are mostly hollow, with a hole depth equal to or greater than 112 percent of the diameter of the body, while semi-tubular rivets, the most commonly encountered genus, have a hole depth less than 112 percent of the diameter of the body. It’s unclear, however, to what extent this classification reflects a meaningful cladistic distinction. Self-piercing rivets, despite their name, do not pierce themselves, but simply pierce sheet metal or aluminum by themselves, without needing to fit into pre-existing holes. Split rivets have evolved to inhabit soft materials—wood, light metals, leather & fibers—which they grip in two ways, the body piercing the material & the sharp prong ends folding back and biting in. Tapped rivets are found in materials too thin to accept their own tapping—a mutualistic arrangement. Compression or cutlery rivets, with their solid bodies & chamfered shanks, have adapted to the extreme environments found in the handles of knives.
Fire Drill
The alarms go off at ten, lights flashing
on each floor. And dutifully we file down
the stairs to the courtyard, where fall’s
first sharp wind is blowing. The sky
is full of rain clouds dark as the underside
of vultures’ wings. And you know, where there
are vultures, there is always death
waiting for its cue: even in those old
Looney Tunes cartoons, they watch with interest
from the canyon’s rim as the wild-eyed hare
or speeding roadrunner miscalculate the road,
then skid, and plunge— All is practice
for the real thing. But not today, not yet
today— Shrill bells cease their jangling.
The elevator lights blink green. The bunny
with the overbite and the long-legged bird
spring up, intact. The chase is on again.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Pearl
A god-shaped hole
filled with suffering.
Go ahead,
wear it around your neck
as if you’re entitled
to the gleam of others’ tears,
as if your own
microscopic irritations
could so entomb the light.
Tell yourself the oysters
sleep easy in their beds,
that no pea could keep
such plebians from
a sound sleep,
& that it’s absurd
to see a world of pain
in a grain of sand.
Letter to Convergence
Dear one, here I am again, still always addressing
you; and here’s the season’s changing light, the juncture
at which the past and future are once more equinoctial.
When were they not so? Meaning to say, there is no need
to make it harder on ourselves, no need to agonize unduly
over those who walk past in such cold, glittering beauty—
oblivious to the soul perched on the farthest twig, brown
and insignificant, damp and trembling slightly in the wind.
You won’t believe me if I say it will get easier; I can’t
blame you. Yet I know wet tinder catches fire, eventually,
burns no less brightly for its numerous delays. Now, gray light
and rain; but blow, wind; scatter your auguries for change.
In response to small stone (151).
Oak Apple Gall
Incidental planet, Biblical
metonym for bitterness,
a green anti-fruit filled with air
in citrus-like sections
& harboring a larva at its core.
The oak’s response to a bit
of foreign matter is not
unlike the oyster’s: wall it off
inside a solid tear-drop.
Come fall, it turns red
but doesn’t rot, lapsing instead
into tough brown paper,
a manuscript in the round
that whelps a wasp.
September 1972
This is how it was settled: my father’s first cousin, who was some minister or deputy of tourism or other, would help him get a room at the Hilton by the bay. Failing that, his other cousin the congressman had one of his half-dozen apartments in Bel-Air. We could stay in the guest room, which was really his home office. The only caveats: his maid might come in at odd hours to retrieve from one drawer in the filing cabinet, bottles of black label Johnnie Walker, Courvoisier, bourbon; also: his Korean mistress might be in town. He borrowed a government car which came with an assigned driver; after all, it was his oath-taking ceremony at the palace.
My mother took special care, ironing his barong between sheets of dressmaking paper. Feeling generous, he told my mother she could bring a friend, but she didn’t want to invite any of the women in her various clubs. So I invited Rhonda instead. We listened to the adults gossip through the six hour trip and drowsed or threw up in paper bags from motion sickness. There was a new and explosive biography about the First Lady, telling of her origins in the south. How she lived in the garage, illegitimate child of the man in whose household her mother served. A few surreptitious copies were making the rounds; the writer had gone into hiding.
Of course it was hot. Even a butterfly pod would shrivel in the shade, split a sleeve open before its time. But still, we fished out our swimsuits as soon as we got there, and went to bake in the sun by the pool, armed with cheap plastic sunglasses. To hell with heatstroke. We were too young for anything but pineapple juice on the rocks, but the waiters brought them with paper parasols. Rhonda tried to teach me how to affect what she called an air of worldly ennui, but I was working through a library copy of Anna Karenina. She gave up on me and flopped face-down, on her untanned belly.
The next day, the swearing in itself was a blur; but mostly because someone decided at the last minute that we (women) might not have the protocol clearances. The cousin-congressman and cousin-deputy went with him. As for us, we returned to the pool and ordered sandwiches and Coke. My mother cooled her bunioned feet in the water and filed her nails. After lunch, my father came back and said we had to hustle. Rumors, he said. Best to travel back north before nightfall. When I think about it now, I realize he was what his contemporaries might have thought a lightweight, not a big stakes player. Too conscientious for his own good, never took a bribe.
That evening, after we got back, more rumors. Then radio and TV blackouts, and sirens at six and at nine. Not the clarion of the Angelus, but signals for the first of many curfews and the squall ahead. Our sunburned skin peeled for weeks afterward, but nothing of that sort mattered anymore. At home, in the streets where people cast furtive glances at each other, we learned bits of new vocabulary: martial law, suspension, writ of habeas corpus; rally, molotov cocktail, salvage, subversive, detain.
In response to Morning Porch and small stone (150).
No mas
‘Laughter was our only wealth.’ ~ Carlos Bulosan, “My Father Goes to Court”
All these years, paisano, and it’s la misma
mierda de siempre: same old, same old,
and I don’t mean creative recycling. You’d think
by now we’d get a little more respect, a little more
credit, a little more of that bankable dream
for things we’ve actually done— My kumpadre
next door gets it. He’s not from the islands, but
like us, he knows (this is the way he puts it)
the trials of people of a certain pigmentation…
I might not be able to identify the birds that call
from inside the woods, that open their mouths all
at once from the inside of a dream; but I can see,
most vividly, how the purple asters slowly unclench
beneath overcast skies. The signs have been appearing
for a good long while. Just as Carlos wrote,
the cities are burning. The faithful are marching
with schoolchildren in the streets. The women
marrying women and the men marrying men
drink wine on the hillside. The citizens have pitched
their tents in the park to steal back the laughter
the rich tried to take while they thought they slept.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.