translated by Andrés Alfaro

DUST

My voice seems not to come from me but rather from another throat
buried within the depths of my own.
I am like a collection of walls surrounding what I am.
Someone must have built this great wall.
If there are men who fly like feathers, why can I not
move when I move? I smell of stone and dust,
I wear the traces of those who touch me.
I am dust, stone. I do not know who my father is.

* *

FEAST ON MY SNOW

I whisper to the birds: leave my poems, feast on my snow.
I whisper to the snow: get out of my poems,
dig in, taste the birds’ eggs.
Birds’ eggs take wing.
Do not let the shell of stillness devour you.

* *

THE SPRING OF BALTHUS

Balthus’ desire was never realized. The white of the
girl’s underwear brought back … Read More »

THE HUNT




A SERENE NIGHT / AT FIVE / SERENE SKY / AT SIX / OR AT 3 // JUST THE LIGHT / THE HOUR RISES THE SUN // SILENCE / WALKS AT ITS DISCRETION / AS DISCOVERER

For every appetite there is a world.
—Bachelard

You starred in the movie with Maud Gonne and Socrates and Juliet and a flock of sparrows that were a fixed point like the spire of a cathedral but made of feathers. You were naked and clothed and wearing nothing visible except when you sat or stood or began to speak, and then the words were made of black yarn and your fingers held them as in an outline of reverie. You were there and not there and when I partially held you, the idea of you faded into a hint of light tinged by a window in the westernmost sky. And under the window, your face was not intimate as those of persons one loves but vaguer and therefore more intimate in its shadowed complexity. If water … Read More »

BOTTOM LINE

As when my father goes back under
and the doctor comes out to tell us he’s put a window in my father’s heart.

At last! The inscrutable years are over. I’ll look right in
before the glass gets smudged, before he has a chance to buy drapes or slatted blinds.

It will be a picture window; I’ll be a peeping Tom.
Imagine the balcony of secrets, the longings: our future a window box of heart-to-hearts.

Then he’s awake, calling for morphine,
his pain greater than from the first surgery.

On the next rounds the doctor clarifies:
the window’s really more like a gutter so built-up fluids can drain.

And I remember my father on a ladder
pulling down leaves and rot, each year saying, Do I need this kind of trouble?

Saying, A new roof? You think I’m made of money?
Draw the shades. Let him rest. Let me sit … Read More »

CATHAY

Wrongheaded and obsequious
on vacation, unnerved
by new surroundings, I miss
the bright feeling of belonging
and the familiar patterns of my country—
its virginity and schizophrenia,
my several stolen bicycles.

 * *

CROMWELL OR THE KING

In the European fog, one startled
while another rests and resting waits
for heavy closure. Philosophy, the lion’s
dark maw, changes seasons. The nation’s

ring of war regains renown—crowns,
new necks, and talent for violating
weakness. You want to paint the world
you were born into, but when you try

you’re only able to portray this one
that will kill you. You can’t get the oils
to impasto right, and the dried-blood red
you desire doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

 * *

TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE

Under the watchful eyes of the tigers
____I work all day long.
At night I dream of tigers fighting,
____procreating, eating,
smiling, breaking each other’s hearts,
____sobbing. On my days off,
when I can no longer bear the oppressive
____tigers or … Read More »

translated by John Oliver Simon

SHADE SAILS

Not poppy, nor mandragora,
nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owed’st yesterday
Othello III.iii

When night falls I’m another woman.
Because day is something else and falls into night.
Day and night. Given and withheld.

But I might have said: when day falls,
Worn out from being day all day long,
Night comes and transforms day
Into a bitch, a beast, a ferocious rising
And day’s no longer day, it’s night.

We call that process half-shadow.
Plants no longer release oxygen and begin to emit CO2
the half-shadow attacks
like a beast in a cape, under shade sails.
I’m a chicken spider, a tarantula making webs from darkness.
Weaving all day night’s inevitability.
I stop breathing — at twilight nobody breathes — like a spider.
Give her what she wants, and there, seduced, she stops breathing.

Nervous system … Read More »

THE HEAT

At night as the heat’s
warble strummed to
a ticking silence,
and the crabgrass
turned blue then green
then black, the branches
above would relax
and gently pluck my
window-screen, like
the dark-haired woman
who, years later, would
scratch to be let in.

**

UNKNOWING

Your father was born after the earthquake & fire.
Began work at four, buried his mother at six.
Summers he picked prunes in the valley,
the sun searing spots onto his narrow shoulders.
He lost an eye. Blew out his left ear-drum
in a packing plant accident. These things
were what one expected.

He never made friends. They were a luxury,
he could not afford. He smoked for a decade,
through college, when he worked full-time as a
teacher. Nights he dedicated to numbers. Found
pleasure in the orderly arrangement of the known
world. You were a gift, born at the end of the
depression, to his German wife—unaware of
the rubble from which you emerged.

You were a … Read More »