Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.
Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.
The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’ s doubled
My father knows the proper way
The nation should be run;
He tells us children every day
Just what should now be done.
He knows the way to fix the trusts,
He has a simple plan;
But if the furnace needs repairs,
We have to hire a man.
Saved two children last night.
They lay under thin black ice
one gone blue, the other grey.
I laid them out on grass
that snapped under my step
wrung their bodies warm and dry
gave them the gust of my breath.
Then I looked out at the morning
that lay lukewarm on the water
put on a tank top
arranged some grasses in a vase
fished two children out of sleep.
I wish I knew the contents and I wish the contents
Japanese —
like hairpins made of tortoiseshell or bone
though my braid was lopped off long ago,
like an overpowering pine incense
or a talisman from a Kyoto shrine,
like a Hello Kitty diary-lock-and-key,
Hello Kitty stickers or candies,
a netsuke in the shape of an octopus,
ticket stubs from the Bunraku —
or am I wishing for Mother? searching for Sister?
just hoping to give something Japanese to my daughters?
then again, people can read anything into dreams
At a small monastery — or what had been
a monastery — outside Obrégon, we stopped;
you were suffering the hollow nausea of your first
pregnancy, sleeping as best you could
through the thousand miles of pines
and rocky fields of northern Mexico, so I went ahead
through the saddle-colored rooms, past
the broken church and the row of empty sheds,
where Indian women, according to a sign,
The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts
is understandable. The divorced father does not cook
confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner.
The entire weekend is supposed to be fun. Kids love
pizza. For some reason involving soft warmth and malleability
kids approve of melted cheese on pizza
years before they will tolerate cheese in other situations.
So the divorced father takes the kid and the kid's friend
out for pizza. The kids eat much faster than the dad.
Before the dad has finished his second slice,
For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house
after my mother’ s death; she died the year before;
she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments
of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute
to weed the garden or to walk just a little way
along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now
almost now she’ d be coming back, we’ d hear the screen door,
Bev would be back and saying something casual about —
Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing.
In Leland’ s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor.
The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story?
Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping
softly away while Sam’ s sneakers made the wood stairs creak.
The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store.
The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went.
Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet.
Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen
with the medicinal poppies of June
nor with Celan’ s bloom-fest of dredged stone,
not with history’ s choo-choo train of corpses,
not with Nottingham’ s Robin Hood
nor Antwerp’ s Diamondland.
