A CLOUD OF DECISIONS TRANSLATES

We own the horizon, so draw it out

in one giant breath full with a rolling green

oxygen tank and some horses

underneath it     It is a landscape

we can walk into a nursing home

eventually     I feel the way

you and everybody must, after all

these long delays like ice cubes melting

The most meaningful things never wind up

in a window, but sometimes they do

in the belly of a buzzard or a girlfriend

I’m so tired of walking into this house

and knowing that it’s not my house

and won’t be my house for several more days

I need a place to wrest this motorcycle

from chance, which is art, so lay down

my pillow on the head of a pin,

crushing all the winged things

to powder for the baby pigs

I think this is what it means to amplify,

but it just as well might mean

I don’t know where I live and should

make amends with the sky

and all my friends who ever

rummaged through my backpack

looking for a hangover or some

fog to rub against themselves

I’ve got plenty of fog      You don’t

even really need to ask for it but

probably should as a matter of empathy

and forgiveness for all the times

I’ve stolen everything,

from your heart to your headstone,

then lost all of it trying not to

in the couch or the forecaster’s

high in the 50s and rain all day

I always take the weather

around me so personally,

when, mostly, nothing’s such a big deal

that we couldn’t just go to a diner

and slam some scrambled eggs,

then look up at the night sky

and wonder

BRICKS SINKING IN DEEP WATER

At what depth does their dull orange disappear?

I rowed out to where I know the water’s deep,

and in my rowboat: a cargo

of bricks, fifty balanced

across the stern, just so.

At the bottom of this reservoir

was a town. Two towns, in truth.

Its people were paid an honest price

to leave, but no question: they had to move.

I anchor my boat forty feet above

what was once a pasture.

I take a brick from port first

and hold it by its upper-right corner

and dip its lower-left corner into the water

before I let it slip my fingers.

The next one I take from starboard,

but drop from port, and so forth and on.

It’s the sinistra hand that does the work.

I never counted two seconds before one was gone

from touch, and sound, and sight. They sink until they stop

on now drowned and grassless land.

Why do I want to leave a small scattering

of man-made triangular stones

at the bottom of this no-bones

(the cemetery relocated)

body of water? In darkness, who does not love

the faint, hard, orange glow

of building bricks?

HONEY THE GUARD

honey a river

most perfect

dammed in the centrifuge

until the spout

opens for honey the river

to pour sparkle

gleam in jars

on the kitchen

counter a lone

bee here a light

bulb there the table

puzzles out the scene

honey the hive

the mother the

sisters the lost

honey the bee

the bee that followed

honey the lost

BLACK GIRL

                       (Ousmane Sembene, 1966)

 

I listened to the palavering: birds with car horns

as the sun went down. Once I began

 

to understand their conversations, I started my days

by eavesdropping like a citizen of privilege

 

and apathy. Antibes reminds me

of Dakar the way a new lover brings

 

to mind the mistakes I made with the one before.

As I pass other women in the marketplace,

 

home is soon clouded in memory

by the air of authority festering

 

behind sunglasses, amid cigarette smoke.

All faces look alike and no face reminds me

 

of anyone I knew from another life.

Yesterday, I was introduced as “our girl,”

 

a possessive I’ve never felt in my country.

The gift I offer now is a face behind a mask,

 

a mask of a face to haunt them

long after mine fades away behind it.

 

Dear young couple, you

who hired me to look after your young,

 

give up on the roman à clef in which you

 

imagined me as a nameless character.

 

Give up on subterfuge to control

the woman you imagined me to embody.

 

My body, lifeless, politically still,

still has a chance to rustle a few trees

 

inside your aristocratic heads.

PATHER PANCHALI

                                       (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

 

When a child dies before you do, remember:

forget this pain. But keep her laugh, a totem to remember.

 

It’s spring. The rain pelts the forest leaves like tears falling

down a mother’s face; she tries not to remember.

 

In the Jatra, the brother protects his sister from the cold.

The actors on stage sing their story, so you’ll remember.

 

Why steal a banana or jackfruit? Even the Devil’s Apple

      couldn’t

cure her fever. Fruit belongs to all, but too few remember.

 

In Kaash fields, we ran for the train, laughing, out of breath,

Kans grass whipping our ankles . . . Do you remember?

 

The path winds long, and the path to love often brings strain;

endurance calls for more than shoes for your journey, do

      remember.

Sustained on the road, prepared for any storm ahead,

 

the path is a line in your palm, little Apu. Remember.

EXPLODED VIEW

While he slept, I read my father’s books,

brought home from the furnace,

traced the diagrams—channels, ladles of iron,

 

oxygen lances—trying to follow

the metal’s path, to follow the work

that took him each night into the dark,

 

flame to the coal’s dark, the dark

gone bright while the rest of us slept.

The door closed like a storybook . . .

 

While he worked, the furnace flamed

in dream, and I tried to follow

through the swarm of yellowjackets,

 

hot wings of iron, but they were just

outlines in my dream, dream,

not iron, not fire in the dark—just spray

 

from one rare story I tried to follow.

I tried to follow, but even he

didn’t want to go, not even

 

in story, the blanks in the books’

diagrams all ash, all flame. All silence,

he seemed to say. But silence

 

is a furnace, too, where work

disappears, where breath is turned

to iron. And night is a furnace, too,

 

where sleep, where dark are burned away

like words until the books are blank,

and there’s nothing left to follow.

 

I tried, listening as he eased the stairs,

clicked the door, then drove away,

his engine lost in the trains’ low drone,

 

strained to hear him turning,

ten miles away, pages in the book of iron,

the story he told by not telling,

 

the dark in which the furnace always rests.

So, the furnace is a father, too,

whose story you cannot follow,

 

a shadow sitting loud in the dark,

while the quiet hardens in his lungs,

 

and the father is a story, too,

you cannot follow,

a book fed slowly to the fire,

 

a fire, worked, at last,

to two black tongues of iron.

MAYFLOWER

—For John Earl Reese, a 16-year-old, shot by Klansmen

through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas,

where he was dancing, October 22, 1955.

 

                       Before the bird’s song

                       you hear its quiet

 

                       which becomes part of the song

                       and lives on after,

 

                       struck notes bright

                       in silence

 

                       as the room’s damp—

                       wallpaper and wall

 

                       muffling the high cicadas’

                       whine, mumbling

 

                       talk from another room—

                       hangs like the thought

 

                       of a roof in the midst of rain

                       long after the joists

 

                       have been brought down.

                       So the quiet

 

                       syllables crowded

                       full-throats once the talkers

 

                       have gone away,

                       and a young man’s voice

 

                       becomes a young man’s

                       silence, all

 

                       he did not say,

                       which nothing keeps

 

                       saying in the empty room

                       between the pines

 

                       that hold the quiet

                       of the song he cannot sing,

 

                       the sound of a room

                       without sound

 

                       in the middle of what

                       anyone can hear.

DUSTY FIELD, DOG BARKING

When I try to see my mother in this world,

standing in a dusty field, confused

and taking tentative steps like a child—

 

when I try to see her there, after

she’s climbed out of the car she’d driven

over the shallow ditch miles from home—

 

when I try to see her there, wondering

why she’s not at the store or home,

maybe wondering where her son is—

 

when I try to see her there,

I can hear nothing

but small birds in high branches

 

and the distant barking of a dog

at the edge of an unseen fence.

He’s heard the wheels’ thump, creak

 

of old shocks, maybe the horn. He’s barking

at what he can’t see. When I try to see

my mother there, I hear the barks

 

becoming fainter, more intermittent

as the dog begins to understand

that nothing’s happened, no one’s coming.

The Amon Liner Poetry Award Poem NOVEMBER

The pumpkin face sags

like a chemo patient’s,

 

spots down the temples,

weighted, sloping cheeks.

 

Pockets in long black coats

fill with elegies. Everything

 

that was is entropied and organized;

Mother is dead and the world

 

travels its tethered arc.

The farmers carve new rectangles

 

in the soil, each plot

a blank face in the earth’s geometry.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem ALASKAN CHARTER

Fishing the Kachemak takes

more than a hook in a mouth.

 

When the first catch, weighing

twice a grown man, fights back,

 

the gang of local fishermen

circle up to stop the thrashing.

 

After a club thunk to the head,

gaff to the side, the five men resort

 

to a curb stomp, a filleting knife

to the gill, then someone’s .410.

 

With bloodied shins, you wait

your turn. And then the young fish

 

they assign you suddenly squirms

in your hands like a newborn

 

from the womb, slick and risen

and held. You brace yourself

 

over the gunwale before the fishermen

form a crescent around you,

 

your back to the warm constant

of the gold sun. They hand you a club

 

and say, Don’t be a cunt.

With a fifth strike, the spinal cord

 

snaps, slips through your fist

like the string of a wind-swiped kite—

 

and it’ll be years before you know,

dipped in black waders, you were

 

half in your dark grave already.