Earth tones—a term
no recent migrant from the tropics
would understand,
how a dormant earth
can come in moss-green, bark-gray
and a thousand browns—
umber, ochre, sienna—
and spring still a hollow gurgling
somewhere below.
The Buddha walks a mile
in her shoes at the local community college
for Women’s History Month. With the other men
who signed up for the event, he rummages through boxes
of women’s shoes looking for a pair that will fit.
You want socks with those, bro? asks the office
assistant, as he gingerly slips on a pair of open-toe
leopard print wedge platforms. He wiggles his foot around
a couple of times before he can slip it in; his bunion
always gives him trouble. They’re getting ready to walk
around the quad, past the student dorms and down
to the plaza in the middle of the mall, where a SAFE
counselor will hand out pamphlets with statistics
on how many women on college campuses get raped,
assaulted, victimized in domestic relationships.
The Buddha is disturbed by these stories. He cannot
fathom the hatred and the violence, the displaced
self-loathing that seeks its target in female
bodies, the suffering. He recalls the brothels
along the coast, the sad eyes of women in the windows;
the way, in his own hometown, there are still fathers
who think daughters don’t need to go to school,
households where girls are made to take their sleeping
pallet outside to the porch or behind the kitchen
when they have their period. He hitches his robe
a little higher around his ankles; he adjusts
his stride, determined not to wobble or fall.
Tintype
First phoebe of spring.
He flutters in front of me,
drawn by a slow fly.
In my email, a copy
of a tintype portrait
I sat for last August—
that still moment
five seconds long,
that black box.
Here’s a scan of the portrait, and here’s Rachel’s portrait. Alastair Cook was the photographer — here’s his website. I blogged about the experience: “Ancestral photography.”
You seem to be carrying a lot of guilt,
the therapist says to the Buddha ten minutes
into her first session. She sighs, tentatively
massaging the sides of the stress ball she has been given.
Is it that obvious? she asks, even if she knows
the answer. She thought she was doing a pretty good job
sitting still, holding her fears and anxieties in her mind
without judging, without undue attachment, without blame
(well, ok, trying). It is so difficult for the heart
to be in more than one place at any given time, more
if you are a mother: every hurt hurts, every flutter
ravages the surface on which the days must progress
with their sometimes terrible banality, with their small
and therefore acute reprieves of joy. Meanwhile, the hours
spread like a cowl, like the shadow of a cobra sitting
just a handspan away, its breath the breath of the eternal
that all these years passed mistakenly as merely a nagging
voice: parent hovering in the doorway of the impatient
child, gardener bent over a tray of new seeds; bird
nudging the fledgling closer to the end of the branch.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
The People’s Front
At the office all the morning, dined at home and Mr. Creed and Mr. Shepley with me, and after dinner we did a good deal of business in my study about my Lord’s accounts to be made up and presented to our office. That done to White Hall to Mr. Coventry, where I did some business with him, and so with Sir W. Pen (who I found with Mr. Coventry teaching of him upon the map to understand Jamaica). By water in the dark home, and so to my Lady Batten’s where my wife was, and there we sat and eat and drank till very late, and so home to bed.
The great talk of the town is the strange election that the City of London made yesterday for Parliament-men; viz. Fowke, Love, Jones, and … , men that are so far from being episcopall that they are thought to be Anabaptists; and chosen with a great deal of zeal, in spite of the other party that thought themselves very strong, calling out in the Hall, “No Bishops! no Lord Bishops!” It do make people to fear it may come to worse, by being an example to the country to do the same. And indeed the Bishops are so high, that very few do love them.
I made up a map
to understand water
in the dark home
where we drank—
a strange parliament
so far from thought,
calling people to fear
a worse country.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 20 March 1660/61.
Waiting to launch
The first greens
out of the ground are rockets:
dame’s-rocket, garlic mustard,
winter cress where it’s wet.
Then come the wild onions
up at the wood’s edge—
but not yet. I stand watching
a dark spot in the field that fails
to turn into a bear.
Sadhu
We met at the office this morning about some particular business, and then I to Whitehall, and there dined with my Lord, and after dinner Mr. Creed and I to White-Fryars, where we saw “The Bondman” acted most excellently, and though I have seen it often, yet I am every time more and more pleased with Betterton’s action. From thence with him and young Mr. Jones to Penell’s in Fleet Street, and there we drank and talked a good while, and so I home and to bed.
We part, I and my cell.
And though I have seen it often,
I am more and more pleased
with the street—
a rank home and bed.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 19 March 1660/61.
Spruce grove
A brown-striped breast feather
floats down from a high bough
in the spruce grove
where some hawk or owl
plucked a grouse. The outermost
trees rock in the wind.
I step carefully as a bridegroom
over each raised
threshold of root.
The Buddha thinks of his trust fund
“In my father’s dwelling three lotus ponds were made purposely for me. Blue lotuses bloomed in one, red in another, and white in the third. I used no sandalwood that was not of Kaasi. …Night and day a white parasol was held over me so that I might not be touched by heat or cold, dust, leaves or dew.”
Does it make it easier to renounce a thing
when you know you could always come back to it?
Does it salve the conscience to throw away a gift
when you tell yourself there’s always more
where that came from? Does it make you braver
to say you are burning that bridge, walking
away from the stays of family and kin, the arms
of a lover; the leaf-shaded neighborhood where you
played with friends in childhood, the village
that knew you and everyone else by name?
Is your body more comforted by thin garments
worn alike in sun and rain and winter chill?
Does it satisfy your hunger to eat a meal
begged for plating on a leaf instead of on china
laid on a linen-covered table? And is a small
mound of rice sprinkled with salt more filling
a repast than a rich stew flavored with cardamom
and butter? Do you recall, in college not so long ago,
your literature teacher describing the tragic hero
as someone whose eventual fall from grace is made
more trenchant because he has something to lose?
Isn’t it true that everything spurned with such
careful intention turns into a more industrious
ambassador for the republic of unfulfilled desire?
~ for Karen An-hwei Lee
In response to Via Negativa: Homeless.
Homeless
This morning early Sir W. Batten went to Rochester, where he expects to be chosen Parliament man.
At the office all the morning, dined at home and with my wife to Westminster, where I had business with the Commissioner for paying the seamen about my Lord’s pay, and my wife at Mrs. Hunt’s.
I called her home, and made inquiry at Greatorex’s and in other places to hear of Mr. Barlow (thinking to hear that he is dead), but I cannot find it so, but the contrary. Home and called at my Lady Batten’s, and supped there, and so home.
This day an ambassador from Florence was brought into the town in state.
Good hopes given me to-day that Mrs. Davis is going away from us, her husband going shortly to Ireland. Yesterday it was said was to be the day that the Princess Henrietta was to marry the Duke d’Anjou in France.
This day I found in the newes-booke that Roger Pepys is chosen at Cambridge for the town, the first place that we hear of to have made their choice yet.
To bed with my head and mind full of business, which do a little put me out of order, and I do find myself to become more and more thoughtful about getting of money than ever heretofore.
I miss the sea in other places
I cannot find a home.
Call me an ambassador to
the first place that put me
out of myself.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 18 March 1660/61.