Series: Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

Even the eye can forget its tears,
the mouth its fondest lamentations.
Face pressed, attentive, to the glass,
the world’s a wheel, a shadow box,
a zoetrope with slits through which
we glimpse a strip of paper where
horses and birds are drawn. The wind
spins it around, or waves of air rising
warm from the lamp on which it rests:
cunningly, limbs leap from frame to
frame, crest obstacles, fluoresce.
But there’s no other word for this
wobbly apparatus of our discontent.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Wistful as a note, or a scent, or a thin stroke sharp as a paper cut, that leaves a ruby mark on the hand trailing idly through green. Here we are again on the brink of meeting or parting. Your hand cradles the porcelain cup as you drink. You tell me how the afternoons pass, what the hour is when the grey clouds begin to turn pink, how the veils of Spanish moss look tinged with frost. I know a story has to change, something needs to shift. Deck parasols fold down against a spate of oncoming weather: a squall, perhaps. This is simply preparation. Sometimes the unexpected never comes. Yesterday, as we drove by the river in clear-edged sunshine, a sudden gust scattered the thin ribbons of remaining ice beneath the windshield wipers. And it’s true one must be generally careful to note the uses of description as analogy, or in science. But when I point out a wading bird, a perch, the slant of vines on the shed, most times I’m really just talking to you.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

after Rumi

If the fruit’s russet-red in the tree

If the birds make tedium into song

If the mob of crows is an ode

If the longed-for reveals itself as it does

If the ephemeral flowers out of sorrow

If tomorrow points its chisel at the world

If all that is ours is beloved, today.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In the hive, the honey drowses
in the same cell as the bee;

and on the shelf the weathered book
clasps the spine of each page equally.

When the face looks back at itself
from the mirror, what does it see?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“God gave a loaf to every bird…” ~ Emily Dickinson

When the fever is a dark flower
and the flower will not break, herbalists
come in the night with a bowl of warm water.

On its limpid face, they’ll throw grains
of rice, the white of an egg. O spirits
and your furtive dictation: clouds form,

lines run. I cannot read the language
you harvest, the serifs spiraled into secret
hexes. Who cast the spell I’ve labored under

all this time? My hot pulse beats under
the collarbone. I sleep under the reeling
stars. The sheen of skin blazons the pan.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

She texts, mid-month, to ask if she could have
a little more money for food, her cupboards
nearly bare, the floating exchange rate

up again— or down, depending on how you look
at it; but in her case, more applicably, down.
A twenty year old gas range that doesn’t work

anymore, and in its place a little hot plate
toaster oven. But how could you properly boil
water or soup in that, much less fry an egg

or a strip of meat? Crackers, bread, instant
coffee: she says a friend brings her these
every few days. The ceiling leaks in a house

that’s fallen into disrepair. One brother-
in-law made bitter by drink, one niece, a nephew
with a gambling habit, live rent-free under

her roof, largely neglectful of her
circumstance— who in her heyday shared
so freely of her larder, day to day.

Too far away, farther than any train’s distant,
watery whistle, I read her brief bulletins at night
as I lower the blinds; or, mornings when I raise them

to see blue sky felted between the arms
of trees. This is my daily trial, grave
failure through omission: how do I sip water

or coffee or broth, pass fruit or bread sweetened
with butter through my mouth, without tasting
the salt of her hunger’s quiet reprimand?

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

All night rain rattles soft against
the windows, forms pellets bordering
on frost; they fall like asterisks

upon the sill, language dissolving
as soon as spoken. Even the oboe
of a distant loon, the stream’s

purling clarinet, cannot prevent
this imminent slide toward silence—
The bell quieting toward the damper,

the mouth withdrawn from the reed;
the instrument returned to its velvet-
lined case, the tongue curled back

into its underground cave. So rich
and fragile, so little understood.
Maligned silence, milky as the swirl

at the bottom of a cup, toward which
the face bends to drink, wanting more.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

A man wakes in a city between
the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.
He feels like a stranger in the sleeping

house. He wakes before first light,
before the first bird leaves the nest,
before the silence is broken by a rustle

in the leaves. His feet are cold
on the floor of this room, someone
else’s room. He wears his clothes

as if they were someone else’s.
Where has the bird flown? The man
dreams of being a swallow who can fly

to the roof of the world,
to its balconies tiled in warm
terra cotta. Does he also dream

that his daughters are swallows
with green bead eyes, that their wings
cut out of silver paper and strung

with flowers, ring the walls with their
bright cries? In the grey stillness of dawn,
shut your eyes in the room like a man

without sight: tell me if this way,
you hear more acutely the signal of wings,
the small lift of air underneath each stroke.

 
(for Jim Pascual Agustin)

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Two bright ceramic pots beneath the window: purple for starbursts
that haven’t seeded, orange for lavender. In other words, they’re empty.

Waiting at the doctor’s, a feathered strip glimpsed beneath
the awning. Blue wing, black bars, then the space emptied.

Geckos call on the fringes of the factory where young migrant workers
cobble computer tablet parts together. The suicide nets tonight are empty.

There are days I want to move boxes out of cold storage, not
knowing what’s inside: take them to the curb; purge, empty.

Cleaning my drawers, I find a small stack of unused journals.
The leather-covered one you gave me, my favorite, is still empty.

I dream of choosing a rich Japanese ink to fill my pens, with names
like Dew on Pine Tree (Syo-Ro) or Old Man Winter (Fuyu-syogun).

How much a flourish on cream stock gathers: scroll of morning glory,
blush of persimmon. Wildness of horses’ manes, the horizon empty.

Loosely held, the brush gathers the line as it goes. Uncertain at
first, it stumbles on the trail, then speeds: moving away from empty.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

are pressed into crevices of limestone.

Their limbs, their bones, are smaller now,
pebbled or smoothly pleated. Their shrouds

have attained the quality of paper.
Tresses? Eyelash hair? These have become

slight as wind, but brittle. Removed from
village life, they do not care if animals

inquire into their secrets, hoard seeds
or feathers in the louvres of their ribs.

Nights dark as ink, then dawns
splayed through blue fingers of pine.

If it were here and whole, the heart
would think this was a nest.

             “Let heaven and earth be my coffins…” ~ Chuang-tzu

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.