Series: Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2013

meaning lovingly, as in
the slow caress of music gathered
by hand, breath that suspends
above the strings— unresolved
quarrel, tension in the phrase:
pause prickling with heat
before capitulation—

If you asked me,
I would not compare it
to the chittering of birds,
their sudden flight from underneath
the canopy, but to the silence
that follows in their wake
as the light decants to sweet,
rich, dark like sherry—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

These are the words used by a woman in my yoga class
to describe intensity of feeling: the kind that is
untempered and so always burns too much, too fast,
too hot; the kind that does not seem to understand

you can’t just drive a fist into the nearest wall,
scream I quit (or just scream and scream) in the middle
of a crowded restaurant as silverware and chairs
clatter to the floor, then run off sobbing into the darkness

without any sense of where to go— But it is important to know
that this same flaming heart is not exactly the opposite of balance,
or more precisely that balance is not indifference nor the negation
of any feeling at all. I think I know what she might be trying to say:

which is perhaps the recognition that rage and joy, despair
and soaring hope, are faces of the same goddess dancing
on a bed of burning coals, her naked feet not flinching,
her million golden arms circling and lifting, then lowering

and still. Everything in between, I don’t need to be told,
is suffering. And I think, didn’t I cut myself open in just
the same way when I was young, didn’t I find the world
unbearable, didn’t I want to run away or throw myself

on some pyre of oblivion for the sake of wearing
the reddest, most radiant welt on my sleeve— my anger,
my helplessness and pain, my tenderness and loneliness
for the world to acknowledge? One afternoon

in college, I remember telling my philosophy teacher
(whose mind I greatly admired) as he shared an umbrella
and we walked to class in a downpour how I couldn’t
stand people in general. I no longer know what prompted that,

but now I flush, realizing that he looked at me with genuine
kindness and not the pity or contempt I thought was surely
the only thing his open face could signify. Miserable
after class, I suffered in silence from that unguarded

disclosure and sat with others in the damp courtyard,
only half listening as my peers tossed back their Breck-
shampooed hair, volleyed phrases like dialectical
materialism in between puffs from clove cigarettes

then launched into their usual rants against society,
the sham government and its puppets, the whole petty-bourgeois-
bureaucratic-capitalist machinery. Who was it started poking
randomly at a wasp’s nest in the hedge, among the kalachuchi?

I wanted to walk away, wanted to yell at them to stop,
but also I wanted to watch for the inevitable— for the insects
stung to high aggression to emerge in a fist-shaped cloud:
wildly pulsing like a heart, unmistakeable in their raw anger.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Rumors descend

That cloud
like dirty milk

or mist on glass

Under the stairs
fold in

Be still

The quiet
in our ears

grown much

too loud
Wasps & hornets

lie down

on the porch
Every tendril

quivering

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Something in the hollow
of the ear, some rift
deep in the bone—

and you tip, lightweight:
one ant trying to balance
a load, small bird caught

in a net of rain.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Mine is the wooden bowl
and the drink drawn by the hand-pump
from the spring; and the slippers left
by the kitchen door for entry into the house—

So when I come in from the heat,
I do not argue with the darkening
pages of the day when this body
wants nothing more than to sink

into the folds of a sheet,
an envelope of water, a book
held open at the mark as quietly
as a wood satyr’s wings.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Mind the way the wind
knifes through a grove of slender growth,

whistling through the lattices they form—
How the lips press

lightly against the tongue of the bamboo blade,
how a finger pulls back on the lever—

Mouth open, teeth held
back and kept from biting—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

*Kubing

4

For snow, at Christmastime, we thinned
sheets of gauze and cotton to wrap
around arrangements of dry twigs
in oversized vases— We took

our sweaters to don inside the mall
where we could pose for photos
against the chilled slab
of an indoor rink, cutout

backgrounds of iced over
cottages and stenciled sleighs
foreign to our tropical clime.
When I first walked into the bone-

chill of a real winter, new
friends warned: my hair, damp
from the shower, would turn into
a breakable tiara of icicles.

I looked at all the stunned
glittering in the trees, each limb
sheathed as if for a long keeping: as if
the heart keeps best, numbed and on ice.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.