(she opens the door)
(he is twelve inches
away) her fingers
still splayed across the
battened-down brass latch
of his sternum (she
closes the door) (he
is eight feet away)
her palm skids down the
banister clings to
the fluted globe of
the finial (he
is twenty-eight feet
away) (she opens
the door) the black air
is fast flowing and
cold (she closes the
door) she clutches her
thin intimacy
tight under her chin
and trips down the steps
If you stand on the corner
of Mabini Street and Legazpi Avenue,
wait for an orchid colored mini-bus
with seven oblong doors,
open the fourth door —
an oscillating electric fan
will be driving, tell her to proceed
to the Escolta diamond district —
you will pass Maneng Viray's Bar,
La Isla de los Ladrones book shop,
the Frederick Funston fish sauce factory,
and as you turn left into Calle de Recuerdos,
you will see Breton, Bataille, and Camus
seated around a card table playing
abecedarian dominoes —
If you come to Mojacar
and peel open an orange full of worms,
count how many there are because
those are the days it will take for your body
to decompose after you are buried.
If you come to Mojacar
and find a small green snake with its back
broken, don't step on it or you'll cause
an earthquake that will catch up to you
while you sleep in a continent far, far away.
I must admit to this outright theft.
Before the crickets could impede me,
I reached outside my window
to grab as much of Andalusia as
I could in the palm of my hand.
I took the evening's silver
from the olive trees, the yellow slumber
from the lemons, the recipe for gazpacho.
I made a small incision in my heart
and slipped in as much as my left
and right ventricles could hold.
I reached for a pen and a piece of paper
to ease-out the land into this poem.
I closed the small incision in my heart
The snow voids the distance of the road
and the first breath comes from the early morning
ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes
glisten in the difficult light. They preen
their feathers and chirp. It’ s as though they were one
voice talking to God.
Mornings are a sustained hymn
without the precision of faith. You’ ve turned the bag
filled with molding bread inside out and watch
the old crusts fall to the ice. What’ s left
The wind shakes the chimes
into the siding, and the dog shakes too
though he doesn’ t wake you
as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth
sipping breath, you are fish-strange,
bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’ s
nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb
I make your form in my arms a dark weight
but you are no anchor. Together
we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet.
In the dark it’ s hard to navigate the furniture
so I count distance — five paces
from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa,
Bangkok
Caught in a slip of particulars,
say, between the dirt road
and the brand-new
Seven-Eleven, a bucket
of lotus, three shades of red
in the mudbank giving way to
I can tell you, sweeping the several jigsaw lizards
away from your casket, away from their expert
invasions, kneeling by the order of our births
alongside the mother-of-pearl mosaics,
the family at your death keeps to form,
having to act out that love of endings.
There's a structure for idiocy — lamplight —
all over the nation; it's an illumination
with such sheer creative force it is misrecognized genius.
I have misunderstood people's duplicitous ways — their lightbulbs —
as righteous forms of complexity;
not calculated obfuscations.
Much like the voice in a poem that insists it sing
the most important seer of light.
Am I providing this luxury as well?
Or is this my radical assertion in order to
call into question what an aesthetic authority looks like?
And I didn't see that now you were here on the page
