Poetry & Poets

You told me the son of Acton’ s town nurse
would never cross the border
into Concord, where the Revolution
left great houses standing on Main Street.
Yet we crossed into Concord, walking
through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
to greet Thoreau, his stone
stamped with the word Henry
jutting like a gray thumbnail

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not

for my love, Charles (1938-2000)

Say: 言

Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.

I won’ t promise
you’ ll never go hungry
or that you won’ t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe

but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

Aulder than mammoth or than mastodon
Deep i’ the herts o’ a’ men lurk scaut-heid
Skrymmorie monsters few daur look upon.
Brides sometimes catch their wild een, scansin’ reid,
Beekin’ abune the herts they thocht to lo’ e
And horror-stricken ken that i’ themselves
A like beast stan’ s, and lookin’ love thro’ and thro’

Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing.
This was America, after all, where everyone’ s at liberty
To remake her person, her place, or her poetry,

And I lived in a town a long way from everything —
Where discussions of “diversity”
Centered mainly on sexuality.

My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race
And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents,
Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents,

Because the silence of the dead,
that blue expanse of sky about
to ashen here above my head,
is easily ignored, our tears
are blamed on flowers whitening limbs
of trees, the very air, with hymns
of summer pollen no one hears
except for women — old, devout.

The political contributions of whatever he creates are coincidental
and, in any event, irrelevant. The musician may not be relying on
mathematical acoustics in his calculations. He may be performing
for auditoriums; thus, his physical realities change as he travels. Music
seems inevitable. Every question entails some notion of what is being asked.
The motley nature is not alien. Certain sounds guide the vulgar mind
to notions not anticipated by those creating the sounds. A bartender

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