Series: Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

you have not swung so far yet under
the heavy sky: even the trees float,
viridian, speckled; seemingly un-
anchored, in my field of vision.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Outside, the crickets’ evening chorus abates; the day’s
terrible appetites recede to the hum of almost distant traffic.

What muscled hate reaches out across the years and finds
blind targets against which to fling its poisoned arsenal?

One surface in every kitchen is nicked with marks: as though
the scene of regular practice for some circus impalement act.

The goal: to trace the body’s outline as it holds still; to throw
without shredding the air, to mark by merely a hair’s breadth.

A roll of the dice, a flick of the cards on the green velvet table.
Hands pass across stacked tiles, dividing the fauna and the seasons.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The shadow of a tiger swallowtail crosses my legs; I’m in the sunroom, reading,
when the phone rings. It’s 1 pm. There’s a man on the other end asking for Pomona.

His voice isn’t urgent or pleading, just a little gravelly, and matter-of-fact.
I tell him there is no one here by that name. But he simply insists, Pomona.

For a minute I consider asking him if he knows that is the name of the goddess
of fruitful abundance; in tapestries she presides over a cornucopia: Pomona.

But I hang up after saying Sorry, wrong number, and think no more of it. Until
the very next day at 1 pm, the phone rings again and it’s him, asking for Pomona.

And it goes on for weeks after this. I’m convinced even on days when I’m not home,
the yellow phone in the sunroom rings at 1 pm: it’s the caller looking for Pomona.

I’ve tried to tell him to stop calling, that no other woman lives here but me. I
write poems. I grade papers. I don’t make enough money. My name is not Pomona.

The teakettle whistles on the stove in alarm. I butter my toast and spoon
some apricot jam, wondering if they’re friends or lovers, this man and Pomona.

I’ll stop sometimes when I’m out in the city: that dark-haired woman running
in the rain, into the arms of a man at the stop— is that him, is that Pomona?

I water orchids in the sunroom, straighten books on shelves; dust photographs
of my daughters when they were younger. Do any of them resemble Pomona?

She married Vertumnus (the goddess, I mean; not this mystery girl): he tricked her,
disguised as an old woman. I wonder what she’d look like in drag, this Pomona?

Call the police, my friends say; call missing persons. But I’m hesitant. Did she
want to be found, did she want to disappear? Ah this man, this caller. And Pomona.

~ with thanks to Tammy Ho Lai-ming for the germ of the story

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Speak no ill of the dead we say…
We are saying, speak no ill of us, either.”

Corpse of my own soul, from what tree have you flown to enchant me with a noose braided of anger and habitual sorrow?

For thirty years you are the idol I have carried on my back, and you have whispered story after story, seeded doubt after doubt in my ear.

Oh you have known how to goad with all things I most fear, I most desire—

And each time I stooped to admire the first purple irises opening along the rock wall, or the marvel of leaves shrinking back from touch, or the simplest form that grace might take, which is silence— you pulled on a string I could not see and made me start over, from the beginning.

You courted me with your amorous breath, your dank velvet robes, language to diffuse all bits of radiance and sink them into the mud so they find it difficult to rise.

But tonight I stand on the threshold of dusk and smell the odor of lavender in the window, the green of reviving herbs—

For all the times I have kissed you full on the mouth, my mouth is yet unburnt.

And I remember the richness of my inheritance, the ransomed cache of memories, the rituals for shedding scales and changing skins—

In response to Morning Porch and cold mountain (50).

Even in silence, amid the leaves,
there is speaking: moist tongues,
clawed and feathered missives.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“…the song of my dark hour.” ~ Carlos Bulosan

Something knocks twice against the dark to make her sit up
with a start: what sound? what presence? what flicker?

There’s a pile of laundry, stacks of books on the floor.
Blinds still drawn: against them, what is that flicker?

One of the neighbors smokes Cuban cigars. She smells
the whiff of smoky leaf, but never sees a match flicker.

She dreams in disconsolate cycles: in one, winged ants gather gossamer,
a dress about to drop over her head. Then they’re gone, in a flicker.

In another, nothing but white cotton sheets stretched out like
clouds. Her feet don’t touch them. She floats, light as a flicker.

That was from long ago: now that door, that dream, seems closed—
Wistful in that dark hour, she mouths a name, longing for its flicker.

As ever, the sun labors across the steep slope of hours; then
quickly descends with what it’s gathered, faster than a flicker.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Rain all week, off and on, and road construction— orange cones and men in hard hats holding SLOW signs remind me that that is really what I’d like to do— As if on cue, downpour diminishes into drizzle— Droplets tremble on hydrangeas. And from behind the windshield, water is fractals, multiplying; is the moment’s architecture repeated, scaled, sheerer than paint spatter.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ~ Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Clamor, raucous clamor, of cicadas amid the trees— Who has not
heard those notes before? Uncanny, insistent, especially in return.

How would you feel if you had only one brief window to leave your
mark, to wed your fate, then fade? I’d do it over too, upon return.

And it’s all good, is what it seems to say: not just the joys but all wrong turns,
chances missed, errors, hurts. But to repeat them all, to have them all return?

Not merely bear the necessary, Nietzsche says: still less to conceal it.
Most days I try but fail to completely understand how fate is love, returned.

One summer we walked along the seawall at dusk. The waters roiled
with humid vapors. A cyclone cloud of gnats circled above, then returned.

The wings of insects shimmer, their bodies hard like minerals in the dusky
light. You can’t pick out only the heart of dark obsidian for return.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I wanted so much to be the girl in a red dress bending to pick a blossom in the middle of a field of poppies; or the woman in a blue dress carrying a parasol through it, with a little girl at her side. Any one of them, actually: girl, woman, child. Each one vivid with color, flushed from the noonday heat, coming or going in the benign countryside. I wanted to be the chipping sparrow emerging from the lilac, wings brushed just faintly with scent. But I confess sometimes I do not want the bird to answer the high-pitched cries of nestlings. Not immediately, at least. You think that’s a terrible thing to say? Well, I feel it sometimes. Their cries pursue her asleep, awake. Each tufted button’s a homing device; rows of them, like lights lining the field in an airstrip. I wanted a house of my own leaning against a hillside. I wanted simple wood floors, wide ledges for sills. I wanted air, a light more generous than milk, spilling through every window. Even wild things know about caution. Even wild creatures need to preserve what’s left of the husks they have, for the coming months lean with cold, lined with the twigs of their brittle age.

In response to Morning Porch and Morning Porch.