A pedal-pusher said to me
No braykaiser
No sterfput
A-stepping and a-stoumping cretin-wise
Could drive a man to madness
Just as no thousand Orphas all draped in damp peignoirs
Doing their great kochera
With the prima donna
Of Iquzegdamoda
It sweats into the tongue and groove
of redwood decks with a Tahoe view.
It slides under the truck where some knuckles
are getting banged up on a stuck nut.
It whirls in the egg whites. Among blacks
and whites spread evenly. Inside the chicken
factory, the Falcon 7x, and under the bridge.
There’ s death by taxi, by blood clot, by slippery rug.
Death by oops and flood, by drone and gun.
Death with honor derides death without.
Realpolitik and offshore accounts
are erased like a thumb drive lost in a fire.
For an hour I forgot my fat self,
my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.
For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.
For an hour I was a salamander
shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,
and under his fingers the notes slid loose
from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs
that took root in the mud. And what
would hatch, I did not know —
a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass.
For an hour I stood on two legs
and ran. For an hour I panted and galloped.
Back from Istanbul, she gives to me
the photograph she took inside
the Archaeological Museum’ s
blue tiled hush, of a tablet
carved in terra cotta from Nippur,
written in Sumerian.
So this is aging: the bare sun, skinned,
palely bucking the dark wind,
slides through the glass, crawls on the carpet,
climbs the footboard, lies crosswise on the blanket,
a spoiled dog waiting to be fed.
Not now, dear warmth. The kindling’ s in the shed,
too far to fetch. Those two great logs that close
together to make fire, repose
apart, an old couple reminiscing
on conflagrations they’ re now missing:
how every sunny Saturday afternoon,
Hey, diddle-diddle, the dish ran away with the spoon.
The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
It burned part of the sky
Which stayed black in that corner
For years,
As if it were night there
Even in the daytime,
A piece of the sky burnt
And which then
Could not be counted on
Even by the birds.
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
Ancients threw the masks down the cenote —
the faces smashed first in little ways before
the long drop, an eye or an ear broken, a mouth snapped
in half. Then, lifted from the well, two thousand years
later, still grinning and golden. The loose spooling of two
people fast unravels — how we let go of time spent,
how heat fades, how a body forgets fully what it knew.
I have learned your face as you will never.
The third day we met you gave me all your secrets
until I held an ocean in a cradle. Now all I ask for is more.
It was there, the elemental center,
All the time. Eternally present, repeating itself
Like seasons, where the times and dates
For swallows and household fires are written down,
Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself,
ferment being constant — constant as carnival sweat
(a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada,
a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).
And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled
sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff
in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?)
in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers.
