"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Beside your longing,
someone takes the minutes
in a peculiar shorthand
:oughts & shouldn’ts & wouldn’t wes.
A leader then a congregation
—everyone familiar with the verse.
They ask,
What purpose is there in being
disagreeable? Unamenable?
<Inquiries about the earnestness of your desire>
Someone produces a mirror, proper shoes
Temper, temper, little drums
Time to go out walking
See—she has unoccupied herself
Now she is persuadable
Their word They say,
What to do when we are full of lead?
When a waxiness has formed the medium of our
hands?
She must join in! Participate!
Your conscience is nothing but a little red tape.
Enter: the forest of the mind
where, lo, you are heavy and bereft.
She has become
an obstacle
an irritant
a salt
And she desires
nothing
And I desire nothing
She thinks that there is
nothing
But what if there is nothing
So what if there is nothing
But what if there is nothing but
this accumulation of aches?
Say we sent out rabbits—dozens into field and
forest—
and a low fox running—as if through fire
Which does she try first to retrieve?
Does she take the hunter with the gun?
Do I use myself against?
Play for her the plaintive cry
The great horned owl’s six-throated call
Does she want to see the danger overtake?
In the vulnerability of daybreak
your hands are full of rabbits
Her mouth is full of salt
Do not wait for the field to form a clearing.
Show us an animal in the absence.
Show me an animal that is without its violence.
Abstract
I feel I should come out blazing/ dead hounds bayingfrom beyond/ if memory serves/ each became unwell when addressed by an incorrect name/ (in a hunt, you know, they are not dogs they are hounds and they don’t bark, they bay/ Alexander even sat exquisitely at the piano forte upon his haunches/ glistening/ the horses stabled/ their anatomies secured in ink/ I became totally obsessed with down-to-earth catastrophes/ the mayor in a ditch/ the parson upside-down/ from a cantering stallion he’d only just met/ I was riding my horse through a flash flood/ her coat/ lightning fresh/ the electricity shatters an otherwise pastoral sky/ and is now a club kid’s neural pathway/ apace with sunrise/ much Venetian crystal is broken inside the box marked FRAGILE/ Dad made fire/ Mom slept at the hotel/ the rest of the party was drawing pictures of childhood/ clumsily with charcoal and vitriol/ down by the raging creek/ we had come to a point that had no home/ beyond rippled sinew/ I knew things you didn’t/ I didn’t know things too/ my sense of direction is lights out/ horses sleep standing/ I only sleep when I fly/ at the gong of midnight/ the bridal party monopolizes the elevator/ but my fox mask and riding silks throw them/ their gowns/ in gutters/ the gowns/ the gowns/ how they hang red/ exquisite as bloodbaths/ it’s not my wedding/ but the hunt belongs to me
Huddle
a reverie on antecovidum soirees
Mix it up
make it count
delight folks
be delighted
steer phrases
be steered
in the swirl
roust about
seek a huddle
spot a huddle
slink in
stick out
seek gaps
shoot them
spot walls
crash them
step back
make space
watch huddle
sidebar one
slip a shiny
receive well
what rebounds
pocket insight
pocket wit
move on
in the swirl
seek a huddle
spot a huddle
slink in
say nothing
nod a bit
make it count
seek a signal
spot a signal
drop a shiny
kick it once
kick it twice
kick it thrice
scoop it up
toss it
receive well
what rebounds
step back
make space
watch huddle
empty pockets
show empty
share empty
fill empty
with shinies
kicked around
from nowhere
to somewhere
"Awake in light and without hurry, I wrote"
Awake in light and without hurry, I wrote
while my students wrote of mornings. A rose
before the light, a perfumed chamber, alone.
Arose in cold darkness. How I wanted to look out
from a high place. Wanted the view, warm,
a hammock, a stack of books, no others,
my children (tight knot
in the rope) with me, in my sight,
playing, or maybe sleeping, out of harm,
not needing me.
"Jewel-glow fruit gummies, sugar the body needs"
Jewel-glow fruit gummies, sugar the body needs
too much, not enough, sleep, pain, shoulder blades
all ache from sitting up to see snow-swarmed
streets, maelstrom of ice pellets blown
by the car’s draft, not fall, but swirl, surround.
Each night, changes in pressure explode
the slate in bursts, like some unknown animal
knocking loud against the roof of this house,
last winter filled with grand pianos
kept warmer than we permit ourselves.
"Six months of winter make season"
Six months of winter make season
a lie snow buries in evidence. A preponderance
of icy wind. We walk uphill
clutching another’s arm,
past harmless flakes, shards slick as luck.
Talk flickers, raw with it, she winces.
Clouds shift, light floods the room,
warmer voices tender a way to speak
without hearing my own voice
an instrument I still play badly.
FUN METER
1.
Mark today I learn his name
is Mark fastened to his apron
a button that says
FUN METER arrow turned to “high” I like your fun
meter it goes up a little each time someone says
that he suggests sipping this stout room
temp with my feet up by the fire this market is a mountain
outpost an aisle of hot sauce and greeting cards ah clear vision
Mark here I am my left foot by the blue
reconcile my life spent guarding against surprise
attack leave the gun / take the cannoli I ratted on
my family a gay falcon C. reading Duncan
saying I AM DUNCAN and that is my sad knowing who among
us belongs to a failed
mission do not read on read Parra a dose of ANTI
Dunparra!
in the blood boil of high romance where H.D. is a little bony
but all to the mustard lads they shred his flawed logic I say
it’s like going to a holy place and seeing a reliquary of crutches
cheers to the poet who told me never to read another Whitman poem
“read Auden” but it turns out that old crab has more tenderness
in one wrinkle
W. wonders if the classroom is an extension of the state
come to room 210
research every name that comes out of my mouth
2.
if you
are still
reading this
the truth is
my lover
turned my
glasses into
dust drank
cords of me and
built our house
broke the bed fucking
I’m going to show you
upper limit fucking
what I learned when next we
swank for fucking
which will be
I assume
before dawn
die fucking
die fucking
can’t tonight
rooster goat cat bunny bunny cat
whippet at the crook rooster train whistle
finding her by decibel desert red bat
3.
I prime a crew
once upon a page
words are sacred
don’t edit
scrapit another one primes a crew
devotes herself to rightly
place their every word
CHRIST
4.
somewhere in Brooklyn there is
a storage space of all of my likes and dislikes
and the uncertainty of “the Boss” cock
in a blue suitcase with a painting
I should like better
today I could not remember
myself in the early aughts
check her records
upon a golden cushion
of a Danish modern chair
I am often invited to hear told the decline
of the grandmothers my prophets of conflict
one of them hides her own teeth
though in a moment of lucidity tries to teach
Sheepshead to someone in a fugue state
alert of government issued weather report
from the financial capital my closest bank
branch is in Idaho last week when I couldn’t
sleep I tried to predict the market cardinal
with a fat check we ate eggs in Tucson
and later that night she put a litany
in my ear lit row after row of tapers
my fist was a bell and her back a tower I bawled
Spira, spera mingled
into one angel
green leaves over
a heart in ruins
GOTH
HUGO it is
true … my crow Pluto
a psychic home
for our coffee has clear glass windows
5.
P. dreams Ozzy Osborne is
my real father I love you all; I love you more than life itself
but you’re all fucking mad!
A. says tell her I say thank you
for rescuing Stacy A. has sat with all of our corpses
and said Buddhist things buckle let go
6.
stirred for birds
+
love
prove
move + buckle
high there
no wonder of it
the priest has a watch
tells the 12 stations of the cross
Bishop lost her mother’s watch
the priestess has no watch
E. recites Prufrock in a trance with she/her pronouns
the Ladies of Night Prosody laugh
Cocteau Twins first US TV appearance
Liz took great liberties with her voice on “Bluebeard”
making it even more inaccessible
and wore a monastic garment!
+ we have always known you wanted us
7.
each of my steps boot chains to ice echoic foot
the walk home from prosody we can all agree on ode
to even silly things we love
but can we make amends in dreams?
a tall glass of wool in a western town
eastward loved imperfectly
mountain
ain’t got no
rhymes for me
give me your morning hand for hand
word for word
wet for life
tender band
Baroque
Buddhist
noisy nothing
capitulate! at last no more to do
airy
devilship
removed
8.
pulled a long shot
like an Americano
Prince Bestie and I
relieved to exchange
a platitude over the phone me and my Bialetti snowing sideways
never walk and drink the dirt at the same time
I’m fine
mother is still my mother description of a gruesome
murder of a half-Italian as I steeped with my lover’s soap
ask who gave me the note? they don’t wonder
whose heart was lost for me to take heart
everyone who decided against their heart
You will often tell the story. If you do that you/will be able to marry those you love…
you are going to have so much fun… YES it goes up a little
each time you say… in NYC the tundra the desert … we perceive a form
a householder
of actual meaning no they don’t wonder who fastened it there
at the same time
in the inference of their care
a sweet burn
we learn slowly (gnostic)
less stoic bed rolls
record a word for a word a regional Baltimore
clean ears for Alidio
stirred in the lower belly
I rest my butch head
A One Won
In it I found that the political discourse would love its ethical moon.
A wonderment. A one sum.
Bewitching affinities built upon antinomies.
Abstract, an expression, a wool cap
of ornament for the sake of weather.
Loving him helpless anew helped. Loving her helplessly anew helped.
Leaving it all behind helplessly helped.
Building around the moribund became a kind of blessing.
I left constituents around the number one, and I won,
and I felt simple or glad,
or finally, incandescent, and comfortably large in my honesty, a kind of hanging of the rituals,
the clothes, the sense of living in them upright.
I felt trouble pinging from my thumb muscles but I ignored the throb.
I looked out and out into a dense and driven fog and said goodbye to its flavor.
I said goodbye to more than ten years of saying Will you please love me?
I wanted to birth a kind of abstract expressionism of the merely objective
and the racialized lover of things.
Onement or ornament or I won an ornament or I loved an ornament
and the onement of myself resolved. I resolved and thus I became into myself a one
that I thought would never be allowed.
And I moved outside of the fog into a place that signified art.
Friendship and Racial Furniture: An Address
"It’s not an accident that at any given institution, the “diversity advocates” are often those white liberals who enjoy a certain missionary or white-savior relationship to minorities …The fundamental power structures and relations remain the same: the subordination of the faculty or staff person or student of color to their white colleagues is kept firmly in place." — Dorothy Wang
1.
There had been no intimacy left between us
and I have felt freer to say what I couldn’t say before.
You would like it if I constructed a mirror of conformity
that gazed only back at you with a crony admiration.
I don’t miss redolent flowers that stink with a vainglorious scarcity.
I don’t miss anyone who wants this scarcity as their life.
Dotted eyes blink in an ivory tower vase.
Your white fragility made me a handmaid to your
every whim, even as you witnessed the racism I endured.
In your white world you disparaged me,
crossing the boundaries I thought were sacred:
gossiping about my dead husband’s fidelity,
bemoaning all over town your imagined losses,
regretting that you were a witness to discriminations
against me when you thought you lost power.
You revealed a specious self and pelted this quality at me.
I decided not to look away. I decided to see you clearly
and allow didactic language to make a case for itself in poetry,
to write about the personal, to tease out the articulation
of power systems, of what this room displays or disposes.
2.
At first I thought you were nice. Nice is benign,
a marker, a thing: a decorative blue leather of sense-making.
You had me fooled: I bought the chair
but not the comfort. I am now seeking comfort.
I will behold truth but not congeniality.
You didn’t appreciate my sometimes lack of conformity
nor what informed it, my racial upbringing because
maybe I didn’t look refined. But I might have looked
refined in my own culture, with my own.
I struggled as a child to conform to my white
friends’ standards, and even as I child I knew this.
As an adult I fretted in the valence of this,
and thought about this compromise every time
I experienced shame in your presence. And how
this shame multiples in the presence of people like you,
of which there are just so many. So many in high positions:
cabinets, chairs, selections and boards.
I ache in my reclining chair with the hard-won consolation
I now possess from effort to hope in the goodness of others.
But not in those who are “self-otherseeing.”
People in Bloom’s world. Literature in high-up spaces.
You spoke in your truth about me—not sharply or astutely—
and I experienced every single intonation of its racism.
How excoriating is your specialty and you churn it like butter.
How it mines good intentions, slanders, then you slather it on.
3.
What of bullying? What many of us went through in childhood, chockfull—
a meanness I have seen among girls, and now women who don’t like women.
A misogyny that builds its discourse on elitism requiring distinctions
and arcane order plus a facile beauty to cajole.
I saw you first as a guiding, obsequious charm, the kind in a bewitching chandelier,
that which is white-washed around its candle-edges quietly scribbling names
on a neoliberal clipboard, a twinkling of lit-armor above the coffee table.
These are my direct statements of which I have evaded until now.
I am building words now with their own architectural highlights:
of the pallor of the windowpane, the dismal portrait, and in particular,
what I think about demolished friendships that have been painstakingly nurtured,
and who in them has the privilege and who does not.
I thought to mark their endedness with the boundaries they crossed.
To say: you are not me.
4.
You have not experienced any discrimination that changed
your pointed machine—white as the daylight lily gun.
How sharp a clean boundary is. One person is a grandiosity mashed-up in acres
of domestic fabric whose life never gives in to equity,
believes they need not be driven to compassion
or understanding or equanimity or concession.
I thought of the obsolescence in mismatched ambition
and how it’s pleasant to skirt around these systems of takeover,
staying far away and aching for a surrealist touch.
I’d rather be a useless nightlight to a peacock than to be the peacock,
at least my light will brighten a dreamlike shadow.
Why do you think you deserve everything there is for a body
or a mind to seize from desire? Are desires the opposite of impasse?
And that if we experience loss as it opens us wide open to life giving us up?
Living does run in and out of the fleeting like a wind dead
to a wooden door but forever moving its course of action.
Nothing is unchecked by vanity or a limp charity and when you grace me
with such unbecoming intention so underhandedly mounted in unkindness.
5.
I see it squarely as I have seen brows furrow at my offending existence.
It’s easy to see through it when you aren’t white and have felt sodden eyes
of disdain in a forever mode. Happening when you want only acceptance (not even currency!)
in a room with your own innocence nobody has liked for many years.
I was loyal to your ever-needing wishes, like my parents to employers,
like I was to employers. This is the sense of race relations
and their crossing over to power with white women
who always meant to misguide you to their boot.
Beliefs can collapse race into gender and feminism
is friendship with ethics. I wrote this to freedom.
I wrote this to unburden myself from niceties toward those, like you,
for whom people are disposable, are handmaids, stuffed chairs,
mouths stuffed just the way you like it.
I Hope to Be an Unsettler
No land has ever claimed me,
no person, no people, no place.
I am always standing between burials
and the nearest tree
holds all I can know.
At the spring words bubble up
and trickle down in banderoles.
At first I had to read them
till the grass smelled sweet
and the bugs bit home.
Getting old means reading them
while the hill of my choices
grows. At the end of the field
a deer measures the meadow.
She is so small today.
What words can you possibly wear.
What can I bring you, I
so without kin
I have no hands,
no apparatus,
thus offer my persona
as medium,
a wager: assuming
there’s something past myself
or perhaps a way the particular dead
with whom I’ve walked
have shaped me in some unlit land.
What land. I cannot even say it lies
beneath the creek
because the creek can never be mine.
No creek can ever be mine.
I take what I should carry.
There is a clicking sound when I stay still
like a gas stove failing.
I defined by misfire.
I defined by naked love,
love without relation, I
have piled miswords
on your desire. Now
I’m asking for forgiveness. Not
the ordinary kind,
puckered with regret.
I am asking for a kind
of eternal endurance,
like a child who jumps across a chasm
and does not want to jump back.
Keep me clicking, please.
Skimming while the bubbles break my feet.
In the field the deer finds grass
at just her height.
But not because she wants to disappear.
Something’s breathing to make those holes
while the woodpecker strikes a pose.
I have to believe the right world follows.
I shout each time it comes
like the sun shouts a highway
over open water,
hoarse and bright and wrong.
Let's Mean the Universe
what do the stars write all day while the sun
keeps us from reciprocating
I imagine
let’s imagine
they’re sirens
of an emergency that’s time
and though they have taken the solemn
aspect of mute
facts interrupted
at best by dust
it is possible to shift into a faith
that they are blaring
that there is something to be said
intermittently as best
to fuck with mandatory forward
and be ourselves
and by us let’s mean the universe
If So, Winter
one night vortex cold
a tree under streetlight
turned to brass tips
like stars
pointed out on an astrolabe
o Aristotle
or my love
the pain is a crown
can’t you feel
every resemblance on earth as intended
and therefore vagabond?
Hercules Furentes
It was actually before
Hercules went mad that he
needed to get past Atlas
Mountain to get the Geryon
cattle (of the sun) so he
tore Atlas apart so the
water burst from Ocean
and became the inland sea
aka Mediterranean
that was
all procedural
When I look down on the Chicago River
or the quarries beside it
toward O’Hare
it’s easier to see a monster tear
the land and water down
than think of decisions
and wages (garbage)
just as
if on a nondestroyed Earth the future
entities are astronauts they’ll
imagine myth on a mono/cosmic scale
unless it flips and a swarm
of lights appears and children think
the stars are workers every
light a thousand
workers each
swirl a common concert
I
blame Hercules the entity
the literal historical Hercules
We are crazy • we are dangerous
Isolation Song XVII
(for Marie-Lydie Cabanis Bonfils)
Sheet glass backed by mercury and tin, Murano mirrors
Calibrate the weather accelerating altostratus until cloud-
Free, pollution-free I pause languid in solarium among
Potted palms. Afternoons glamoured by dash of gold
Dash of bronze. Cut fabric to pattern: mouth 1 and 2
Cheek 1 and 2, face 1 and 2, masked and following sister
To Sidon where she'll save from burning the sacrificial
Bull. I pose on Al Qualaa hotel's terrace kohl-eyed, lilies
Braided in my hair. Stolen from over-growing at the pond
They witness the hydra budding and biologically immune.
Isolation Song XVIII
(for Emmy Noether)
Proof of tree's limit: blossoms undergo prior to fragrance
Senescence and abstracted to the lab without shell and nest
Sparrow embryos appear indistinguishable from geckos.
I cannot be reached regardless of names etched on ceramic
Shards, my afternoons devoted to the intricately woven
Xiuyan jade mask, perfect square beads drowning out the
Dead. If the mathematician's world at each instant dies
And is reborn why can't I rebirth the blue and wind-blue
Sprawl of solar plexus radiating out to posture? Pressure
Applied to forehead releases kings traversed by nudes.
Isolation Song XX
(for Ravanalona III)
Sun-struck by the Mad Prince I pace in white from port
To citadel, citadel to port my body made of machine-
Tumbled amber strung on fishing line. Glistening among
Oil tankers nobody knows I've ingested factory formulated
Bridal dye rendering me defenseless against string quartet
And bouquet toss. Antlers wrapped with roses I quarantine
With Ranavalona III's tender cuttings of Madagascar vanilla
Struck dormant by Strait of Gibraltar and Northern sun.
Greenhouse containers confine Bismarck Palm and Octopus
Tree as you place scissors in my hand, suggesting release.
Rocks
There used to be rocks
big and wild
along the path
to the mountain
the rocks are so hard
they don’t need skin
although water leaves its mark
a soft skin
and the wind
a kind of chicken skin
in the shade they’re cold
and they’re warm in the sun
there’s one the shape of a shoe
or a dog’s head
and another the shape of a frog
which is one of the most common shapes
among the rocks
a tree grew over a rock
it attached itself to her
and took her exact form
the root couldn’t enter
like it could the earth
a tree that lived off the rain
or the air
or love for its rock.
Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida
Clouds
The scene:
a field
between two mountains
in which you see:
just that
and the sky
a perfect blue
and voluptuous
clouds
well-formed
they make you want to jump
and roll around inside them
but you can’t
because they’re made of smoke
a body passes through them
now they go in clumps
and hide
behind the mountain
where they get dressed up
fluff their feathers
one appears
as the protagonist
lilting
lyrical
full of herself
behind the others
like a group of young dancers
in love with making the rounds
a gathering of clouds
begin to appear
the wind pushes an enormous one
that from the side enters the scene
it’s a love story
lovers approaching each other
ominously
lovingly
they perch themselves
one on top of the next
just like I dreamed
a gathering of clouds approaching each other
at full speed.
Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida
The Hairdo
I thought it was a butterfly
but it was actually
a small blue bat
it came out at night
while I was sleeping
so as not to disturb me
with it’s flapping wings
I trapped it
put it under my pillow
and kept sleeping
and when I got up
Flor, who had been dressing me said
don’t be scared
but there’s a little blue bat
in your hair
it was what I feared
what I most wanted to avoid
but there it was
gripping my hair
like a glowing clip
Translated from the Spanish by Alexis Almeida
We answered their questions every day for sixteen months
Most days, we did not have a fever. We had not observed
a man wearing an old-fashioned ski-mask carrying
in his bare arms what appeared to be scorched blankets
swaddling thawed meat. We had not seen him walking
slowly down the sidewalk, but nonetheless refusing to pause
at intersections for traffic. We did have headaches,
but the headaches were normal for us. Or the headaches
were, now, normal for us. We had not encountered
any variety of wasp. Or, so we thought, until imagining it
a fine pendant slipped from the chain, we unthinkingly
plucked it up and felt, a second later heard, the crackle
of whatever remained inside. Its antennae curled as finely
as any two iron gateposts. And though we wished we were
no longer holding the wasp we had mistaken for a pendant,
it was wrong to throw it away, or even to burn it, so we put it
in the box with two coyote teeth, a dried aster, a pheasant’s foot,
and a nineteenth century syringe. We rarely had a sore throat.
We knew absolutely no one who’d rented a moving van
for the sole purpose of transporting supermarket refuse
to dump on the lawns of the city council members who voted no.
Our dreams had not been more intense than usual, actually. We always
had intense dreams, and could quote from them the long conversations
we’d conducted with ourselves therein, though sometimes we simply dreamed
we were shouting fuck you to death or spooning enormous quantities
of granulated sugar from a laundry basket into our mouths, then into
the mouth of a boy named spat’, which we could recall was the Russian verb
to sleep, and that when spiders appeared in the sugar basket, we said nothing.
We had water enough for four people to last one week. We had seen
apricot trees, bracken, blackberries, branches, and all the lovely things
from later in the alphabet, and that was why we were reading their names
so regularly, testing to see if they appeared as we called them.
We had no interest in paying off the interest.