English Poems

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows
pasted with colored squares, past the man
who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past
crates of doves and roosters veiled

until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets
with sulphur as people exchange gold
and silver foil, money to appease ghosts
who linger, needy even in death. I am

almost invisible. Hands could pass through me
effortlessly. This is how it is
to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows
untranslatable as the shop signs,

In those days I thought their endless thrum
was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.
In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells
enameled hard as the sky before the rain.
All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe
through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever
parceled between luggage and sample goods.

That which installs itself in the mind embraces sound

Rebounding,
rounding the fecund earth

Birth, as in what is not, as in one makes one,
is a mighty absence to understand

(and there are those who fail to get their lessons done)

Dun is the color of submission

Unfledged, she leafs through what has been nothing never
Never to be what she is/ or could /or hope to be
Bewitched by dictions (fictions) on the surface —

Face naming that which she must save, polished like an apple —

... some days ago I saw the picture of an Angel who, in making the Annunciation, seemed to be trying to chase Mary out of her room with movements showing the sort of attack one might make on some hated enemy; and Mary, as if desperate, seemed to be trying to throw herself out of the window. Do not fall into errors like these.

— Leonardo da Vinci
It is time to speak of the lies
of images, omissions, insertions —

imitations of reality,

but whose reality, Leonardo?

For you she’s in nature —

It was a green barn coat from L. L. Bean
That he had ordered, thinking of her
Walking the snowy hillside of his dream
Though she detested the style and color.

That it arrived two days after he died
Did not dispose her to detest it less
Though she may have wished she did,
The way she wished she’d kept house

More neatly or baked instead of fried,
For every coronary’s a latent homicide —
If not what we did, what we did not do.
If not what we said, what we did not say.

I was just getting to that.
But first, old age.
If you could just let me finish.

Once it was I who rudely
interrupted proceedings: the chair rapped
& called to order, but I seized from pending

approval the minutes & ran
off with the handsome mustachioed
night watch. Matching wits we wound up
jangling on a motel
bureau in simultaneous
alarm & ran down
together to silence,

The mockingbird says, hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus pocus passion
flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird,
such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world
is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies,
breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow,
take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat,

Clamber out of the morning river with water beads like fish eggs clung
to your pubis the calluses on your buttocks from sitting, writing
on flat rocks, your goose-pimpled thighs — the bumpy tongues of two dogs licking
each other — and river-slather and slather at the edge of my mouth.

You are smiling, straining out your hair, flicking your hands, and then
see me watching you with the cloth and pots I was taking to wash.
Before I have time to be embarrassed, the smile lifts into your eyes.

made it to Florida
and then I went for a walk.
The frog pond is half-iced over.
I chucked a stick at it —
still thin. On the white side,
the wind twirled a leaf around
like a prepubescent figure skater
who’s given up her childhood
to get here. Of course, the leaf
was wearing its practice costume
of browns, the whole world
offed of spangles as I am
offed of you. Why
mail snow? Just to show
I could keep it cold
in so much heat.

Come, O come, my life’s delight,
Let me not in languor pine!
Love loves no delay; thy sight,
The more enjoyed, the more divine:
O come, and take from me
The pain of being deprived of thee!

Thou all sweetness dost enclose,
Like a little world of bliss.
Beauty guards thy looks: the rose
In them pure and eternal is.
Come, then, and make thy flight
As swift to me, as heavenly light.