Short poem

Leave it to the street vendors
of NYC to improvise a shrine
from whatever they find,

setting a place at their table
for animal and divine nature
symbolically joined with
color-coded floral candelabras.

All writing around the sides the persons a galaxy all writing resounds a hot history. All writing is in fact cut-ups history will decide games heated and heated economic behavior. To rise up scene all sounds of Tahrir and inside supply side threatened. A long delineation. Longer than I would be counting. This, a whisper, this the end of whisper time. Rise up and wiser this the streets of the world. Commission overheard in spin a soldiering one. What streets of the world to spin rubric’ s yes yes commerce, no, a no, no. Tanks of the blown-off world.

1

The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity.

2

Bubblegum lip gloss kissed, Our lifelines, our mirrors,

I was never a singkil princess These are Luminous Mysteries —

Knuckle cracking, polished toes, Our notebooks, our language,

I was never a Santacruzan queen To witness, to make way,

Black eyeliner, push up bra Our thirst and our wedding bands —

I was never a curtsying debutante To fill stone jars with water, to wed,

1.

Book of Splendor

2. family ways

Oh family ways, ah family ways

I always thought reality
was something you became
when you grew up.

In the square stands Fata Morgana
looking tired, shouting
Morning paper — morning paper.

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.
Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,
That time may find its sound again, and cleanse
Whatever it is that a wound remembers
After the healing ends.

Originally appeared in the October 1947 issue of Poetry magazine.

Night was and they swayed into it:
a pair of scissors, of sails
turning only into themselves
more other than become.

It is often five o’ clock.
Her husband has contracted not
to speak of her and she has forgotten
where to go. Where does everyone go?