Category: Poetry

i. The Artist

 

Agrees blood doesn’t make for the best paint,

but humans will use worse through history,

whelk dye and highly toxic cinnabar,

the mollusks mourning their mass murder,

the painters’ lungs shriveled with poison for eternity.

The artist immortalizes sunsets and war-zones.

They name each stone canvas imperial purple,

vermilion, carmine, . . .

I saw the moon come down.

I was driving that old stretch

Between home and late night,

Not another car on the road,

The moon the only real light

In a sky pitted with enough clouds

To chase off most stars. The moon

Made enough of a hole to lick

The dark itself. But then

The moon started to come down.

As if inch by inch, though

That seemed but an optical illusion

Given my angle . . .

I understand you don’t like talking sex and indoor games

when the Sun is high and the winds take on

the warmth of a kiss. Everything takes the extreme nowadays;

it’s no longer the luxury of race, religion, and politics.

But I’m bored because there’s nothing else to talk about

when the heat is high and my lips crave yours.

 

Our kids are in school learning new ways . . .

Someone has left the building. The building is now

a rubble of bones. Butterflies are sometimes kisses,

but mostly larvae. Language: a cocoon to emerge into.

 

To come down from the tree means breaking

a bough. Rocking to wake. The world is a nursery

and rhymes are waves. To be a person describing

 

is to be a rat scavenging at the crumbs of language

for . . .

after the storm

there is a dryad on my roof

and the river is licking the porch

like it can taste freedom in the foundation

got news for you, bayou baby,

there’s only things to hold you back in there

best look elsewhere for escape.

I splash out to take a better look

and the tree tells me to be careful of fire ants

floating spheres of pain

surrounding the precious queen in . . .

My hometown was already a wreck by the

time I arrived. Nimishillen Creek ran

 

motor oil and sewer slops behind the

high school, and downtown disappeared in

 

smoke the day fathers lit their coal furnaces.

Deer and bluebirds were as rare as the

 

people who worried about the deer and

the bluebirds, and we hurled beer cans

 

onto the roadside . . .

oh to be breathing

in a strange

land of strangulation

shown from different

angles where extreme degrees

of difficulty make it harder

to draw anything other

than a gun

 

oh to be one

with the lung of the universe

expanding . . . inhaling the charred

steak of dead stars, kicking up red

dust on Mars in the pale faces

of fear and dread . . .

To those who can’t stand

the rain:

 

let it flow

and move mountains.

 

cry me a spout

for watered mustard seeds

to sprout from well-tended

gardens of grief,

eroding rocks, making hard

places bend to the will

of irrigated tear ducts.

 

cry me a mountain range

so i can measure variations

in river steepness and rainfall

and calculate the pain

carved . . .

They called us resilient.

 

They think it only means strong.

They say the Filipino Spirit is all positivity,

is smiling when the storm hits,

is finding the light in the darkness,

no matter what.

They don’t know that daybreak finds us

shadowed and shaking,

breaking and almost broken,

caked in dirt and the debris of someone else’s

irresponsibility.

Because . . .

I am writing to tell you

that the apple blossoms have opened

and, for a moment, made clouds

out of the trees. rain has swept

the cherry’s petals 

into great muddy drifts

where they will linger, for now,

in a deficit of brooms—or rather

of hands and arms to sweep them.

 

we are become molluscs, in a way,

curled up soft and moist

within our shells. sound

reverberates . . .