English Poems

tend their yard every weekend,
when they paint or straighten
the purple fencepickets canting
each other at the edge of their lot,
hammering them down into soil
to stand. How long will they stay
put? My neighbors mend their gate,
hinges rusted to blood-colored dust,
then weave gold party-lights with
orange lobster-nets & blue buoys
along the planks. So much to see
& not see again, each chore undone
before they know it. I love how
faithfully they work their garden

Slowing down your body enough to feel.

Thought you were at a standstill
but you were only slowing down enough

to feel the pain. There are worse things

than running to catch the train, twisting
your ankle, the afternoon fucked.

Running to get to or away from?

the stranger who helps you up
wants to know, you who are so used to

anything scribbled on a prescription blank.

Just want the pain to go away, you say,
surprised to find yourself

reaching for someone else's hand.

She took the spareribs out of the oven
and set them steaming on a plate
before leaving her apartment.
I didn't know how long to wait,
tore into cold meat when I decided

my mother wasn't coming back.

*

No one knew about the gun she kept
in her purse until the authorities
called — a.38 caliber pistol
with a pearl handle and a trigger
even she could easily pull —
her car still waiting to be towed
from a roadside ditch

when they arrived on the scene.

*

Last night I found my face below
the water in my cupped hands.

The mask made of copper and bone
criss-crossing to make a smirk,

a false glamour, a plated glaze.
I unwound myself from the heavy

machinery of my body's burden.
The lute, the light, chime.

I'll get up and partner myself
with music, the purple moon

peeling itself like a plum.
Men stand in a circle and

they will ask and ask again.
I want to pick the thick bud,

to lose myself in the body's posture
bending in or away, to let

Powder rises
from a compact, platters full of peppermints,
a bowl of sour pudding.
A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds.

It is the story of the eve of my beginning. Gifts for me:

boxes of poppies, pocket knife,
an elaborate necklace
made of ladybugs.

My skirt rushing north

There is something round and toothless
about my dolls.

They have no faith. Their mouths, young muscle
to cut me down.
Their pupils, miniature bruises.

I hear the cries of horses, long faces famished,

It wasn't holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.

Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on the farm.

In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
that is beginning. She will work
the earth, bounty in the vault

of cosmos above her, heat
lightning that lassoes in its manic
current. Man never existed

This is not really myth or secret.
This murmur in the mouth
of the mountain where the sound
of rain is born. This surging
past pilgrim town and village well.
This coin-thin vagina
and acid stain of bone.
This doctor with his rusty tools,
this street cleaner, this mother
laying down the bloody offerings
of birth. This is not the cry
of a beginning, or a river
buried in the bowels of the earth.
This is the sound of ten million girls
singing of a time in the universe
when they were born with tigers

A hundred and one butter lamps are offered to my uncle who
is no more.

Distraction proves fatal in death. A curtain of butter imprints
in air.

After the burning of bones, ashes are sent on pilgrimage. You are
dead, go into life, we pray. My uncle was a man given to giggles
in solemn moments.

Memory springs like crocuses in bloom. Self conscious and
precise.

Without blurring the cornea, details are resuscitated. Dried yak
meat between teeth. Semblance of what is.

Do not be distracted, Uncle who is no more.

They didn't find it in me until months later —
just like Vallejo who died on a rainy
day far from the heat rising over a garden
in silvers and reds — far away from the din
of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran
the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface
of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored
against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still
from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn.
The fever should have churned my blood into tight