Category: Poems & poem-like things

“Memory and forgetting,
two versions of the same story.”
~ Eugene Gloria

If you think you have surely come to the bottom of the bowl and nothing else
could ever fill it again, why does the silverware gleam so kindly?

If night is a mattress filled with buckwheat and sheeted in linen,
why does the body perch on the narrow ledge of the warm radiator?

If you had two of the same thing,
would you give the other away?

If two of the same thing really make only one thing,
would giving it away mean you get to keep its shadow?

If one thing shone in your mind like a beautiful bird flying into a clearing,
would you desire to approach it with a leash?

If the intellect is a muscle, is the heart the arrow
that whistles quietly until it finds its mark?

In response to Via Negativa: Downer and thus: Savor.

Where is he now, the boy
in our fourth grade class
whose mother went missing

for days until they traced
a stench to a shipping
carton shoved underneath

the bed? Her body, hacked
to bits by a disgruntled
client: found wrapped

in old newspapers and stuffed
into a box that might have once
transported milk and dairy

products— I’ve forgotten
the specifics, but after
the funeral, we saw

how he went on, came
to school and met what each
day required with no small

dignity. And I remember
the collection taken up
in church for the family:

how, as the baskets
went around, all of us
wanted to empty our pockets

of change— still stunned,
as they filled, at how a body
could be so rashly divided

into parts and tucked, ear
by finger or hip by joint, bones
loosed from the purse that held them.

In response to Via Negativa: Changeless.

(after Patrick Rosal)

My kundiman is no swan song,
not yet. It has spoken, and decided:
this will be the year of the mother

and child reunion. I woke at dawn
just after the new year and thought,
no savings be damned: ten, fourteen

years and two continents make too long
a separation. And that song playing in my ear
goaded me on, pitched itself higher: Why not?

after all, you can’t take any of it with you when you go.
And so my kundiman took it apart for me, syllable
by syllable: Kung:: if di:: not man:: n/ever.

My kundiman asks: Do you get it yet? We don’t leave anyone
behind. It knows what any real lover knows: that No is never
an acceptable answer; that as long as the beloved hungers

or thirsts, the heart is a ghost moon above fields
of unharvested grain, is the lit end of a cigar
burning its prayer into the roof of the mouth.

In response to Via Negativa: The day the music died.

So long ago I crossed the threshold,
stepped through the gate and felt
unsure of what I’d chosen—

The neighbor’s wife had given me
a spray of white cattleya:
I could not see nor hear

the speckled warnings
crimsoning their throats
(like sex, unfurling)—

As with all things, it takes
a passing through to come
to any understanding; now

it seems possible that fear
can be undone, when finally it
turns into a kind of discerning—

In response to Via Negativa: Under the gun.