79. Quetch (Old Country II)

The first time I got drunk
was at this table,
drinking little fistfuls of
the young, white wine with my aunt and uncle,
waiting for a cousin’s delayed train
to deliver her.
In the morning
my father and I drove
to the old village
and in the graveyard
he told me the stories
written in his language on the tombstones.
We passed orchards of the small,
bruised-purplish fruit my aunt kept
in a bowl on the foyer table.
My father filled his pockets
with quetch and walnuts
from the family house,
empty now, in Schengen.
We sat on the car and threw the pits
and shells in the river.
We want to stay
what we are.
And don’t we:
now forever later here’s
my uncle pulling out the bottle of quetch
my great-grandfather distilled
and measuring it into
little decanted glasses;
it’s mellow after all these years
he says, but you can still taste it
the sweet small fruit
strong language in the mouth.

65. Closing the Summer House (2)

The window screen are stacked
like so many black dishes on the back
patio, sunning themselves.
Soon they join other seasonal
ornaments and fascinations
in the garage (the boat, swim fins,
biycles, sail cloth).
My father pulls all of these
into a clockwork storage pile
and shuts the door.
Done–
and early enough
for one last swim,
one last accidental gulp of seawater
and the sight of the house
from 30 yards offshore.

I had a dream the tide rose
over the dunes and up to the
highest level while I waited
inside, unconcerned.
The captain goes down with
his ship, but I trust
the water. In my dream the waves
come right up against the
house but it neither moves
nor makes a sound.

63. On Salvador Dali’s “Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening” (2)

Every girl makes a good fisherman
when dreaming on the edge of the earth.
What have you caught
exceptionally?
Shunning the common fictitious rockfish
of contemporary waters
you net felines and looks
from sailors on passing
elephantine watercraft.
They thought you were a mermaid,
but no–
with your exposed breast and pomegranate heart
you merely affect the casual demeanor
of an aquatic native.
You make it look so easy
as to seem threatening,
so they sail on,
leaving you the contents of your illusory nightmares,
your conjuration of beasts,
ice-floes, and tusked aerials
in the light of the moon.

54. Closest Shore (2)

A vacation house on the edge
of the Atlantic Ocean stands erect
in the near-darkness after sunset.
Even in early August the season
has started to shift,
passing the apex of temperatures and visitors
brought to this seaside town.
A young man at the kitchen counter
chops mushrooms for a late dinner and,
hearing his mother make an off-hand comment
about the stove, pauses
knife hanging over the cuttingboard
while he is suddenly moved by a deep
and elegant tide of sadness
because his childhood home no longer exists.
Outside the blackness condenses
and the waves become the same void color
as the air.
A moon breaks the horizon
and the man goes back to chopping,
cutting the mushrooms finer and finer.
Dear heart, when did the darkness fall
on our salt-whitened shores?
When did the waves stop
keeping us up at night?

44. Hiroshima (Sestina)

It’s raining in a city of bells.
The A-bomb dome no longer keeps out rain
but forms a skeleton chime’s note
to call to ground a thousand cranes.
The paper soaks up water,
slowly turns to ash.

The burial mound is full of ash
in a dome shaped like a bell
sustained by what water,
what terrible gray rain
do the wings of cranes
wing through cloud and steam to note?

I heard in the air a fugue note;
who is the we that rained ash
on this ground? I crane
my neck to see the memorial’s bell.
From here what rain
do I inherit, what water?

The heat of July turns air to water
the phoenix trees take note,
grow greener in the rain
fertilize with bone & ash
and blossom to the music of bells
hung about the city by cranes.

The domes of paper cranes
bow with the certainty of water.
I have been my whole life a bell
and never seen to note
the undone dust of ash
in a sweet-smelling rain.

Today in Hiroshima it rains
and I bend like a folded crane
to witness the turning of ash to ash;
I don’t know what to do with all the water
the sound it makes on the pavement, the notes
of tiny shattered bells.

Dark storm of ash, let loose the rain
and on the bell strike the wish of cranes:
peace, and water’s noun, a long, low note.

remix Friday #6

37. Lightning over Changsha (2)

The light is full tonight,
the sky mumbling to itself
but sometimes sparking to anger,
understandably.
Times like this
when the world begins to look poetic
I am filled with a vast sympathy
for its visceral and brimming noises.
The sky bursts like the schizophrenic
I saw screaming “shut up!”
at the two Cantonese ladies
beside him in front of a store’s plate glass windows.
But I no longer wait for moments to unfold
like a map of the present.
The light is arrhythmic and inchoate
but its frustation is genuine;
I am sympathetic to its righteousness.
I write it all down.
I am a jealous hoarder, now,
of occasions and lines,
but still the sky comes thunderhead
and the line of taillights
on the street below doesn’t stop
for even an upward glance.
I am not the good witness.
I am the poet only,
weatherbell and watcher,
observing two motorcycles colliding
on the sidewalk,
two men getting up to walk away.

remix friday #5

31. Hiroshima (2)

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” — Annie Dillard

It’s raining in a city of bells.
The A-bomb dome is a skeleton chime,
a hollow bell in a hesitant field.
The instrument below the children’s peace monument
has its clapper gagged in plastic
but the burial mound beyond it
strikes a hollow note in the steam
with its grass-covered curves.
I think about the “we” that filled
the ground with ashes.
My grandfather was a radio engineer in the war,
equipment made by Bell,
what notes do I inherit?
It’s raining today in Hiroshima
and I don’t know what to do with all the water.
In the museum the hibakusha simply say
“I met with the A-bomb.”
A hundred thousand souls and every one a bell.

remix Friday #4

18. Gulf

How much?
XX barrels,
a millionth of an ounce in a bathrub,
an oceanliner every four days.
We don’t know.
A tar ball in a jar on the
county sheriff’s desk.
I dropped my glass and it
made a four-inch whole in the floor,
out of it came XX barrels
a newscycle.
It isn’t the first time.
What do you do?
Pick up the shards and glue
them together again, a junk shot,
relief?
Some say disperse,
some say,
“nothing.”
Let leave,
let the sea take back
its own.

remix Friday #2

10. Swallow

They could be flies over the corpse
of Siena, if not for their
movements: hyperbolic
grace of black bodies in
motion. From the height of
the Museo dell’Opera they
appear as small dark ghosts
in the sunlight,
sweeping closer, further, then
closer in arcs of controlled
joyous abandonment.
One of them could be you,
moving between proximities
as we stand on this city’s peak.
Wings keep the body aloft
in one parabola but a swallow’s
tail splits in two,
two points back to the Duomo,
or Batisterio, or Il Campo
as the tail turns a body
in flight. Those two indicators
might be your fingers pointing
out one sight or the next
but all I see are swallows.
When we enter the church I
still catch their unreal figures
boyne among the rafters
and cathedral ceiling’s stars.

remix Friday #1

9. Sienese Swallows

Arclight
& dashing
strength in numbers:
quiet little voices
on the border of the seen.
The elegant tail two lanes
diverging on the highways of Tuscany.
The parabolic wings flex and sing
to keep the body aloft.
And every one part of the teem:
small ghosts around the duomo’s roof
and sky’s rafters.