Mudman in earth cafeteria,
I eat aardwolf. I eat ant bear.
I eat mimosa, platypus, ermine.
“White meat is tasteless, dark meat stinks.”
(The other white meat is pork, triple X.)
Rice people vs. bread people.
White bread vs. wheat bread.
White rice vs. brown rice.
Manhattan vs. New England.
Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob.
“What is patriotism but love of the foods one had as a child?”*
To eat stinky food
is a sign of savagery, humility,
identification with the earth.
Where was it that we went that night?
That long, low building: floodlights
rimmed in lavender, the moon ringed
in rose. I would rather, then, have stayed
outside, where spiderwebs glowed
like jellyfish in the damp yew hedges,
where the paths were chalky pebbles
set with giant stepping stones.
But the film was starting. In the air-
conditioned dark, a crowd of strangers,
strange families (not from our church)
in rows of metal folding chairs to see
The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug
say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.
The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.
The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.
Here is the door he will paint on the rock.
Here is the glass floor of the cliff.
Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.
There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.
She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.
She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.
The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.
She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.
(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 —
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
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
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
