(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
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
So much sky
Because we canbecause we can
a new kind, our new people
this is us now
we didn't know we were here
we don't know how it happened
we flew out of their arms.
In the lull, the afternoon sun warms
the linseed field. The flowers are quiet,
their bright subdued in the green
while the mind wanders
to the emerald mosque upon the hill,
built around a flowing spring,
the easy absolutions and ablutions
in that mosque where the spring water
has been let loose to meander
over marble courtyards and inner chambers,
across the geometric, green-tiled floor that
cools the heels of the faithful.
Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon are in a boxing ring in the middle of a football field. They are both wearing white boxer shorts, no gloves, and about to perform a dance routine. I am standing next to them, looking at Brad Pitt’ s hair flop down over his face. He smiles at me before the music starts. From everywhere, broken glass bottles hurl at their bodies, and they are splashed with gasoline. We are also in a dark alley lit by fire. The two are still standing, looking over at me, though I can’ t tell who is smiling.
tend their yard every weekend,
when they paint or straighten
the purple fencepickets canting
each other at the edge of their lot,
hammering them down into soil
to stand. How long will they stay
put? My neighbors mend their gate,
hinges rusted to blood-colored dust,
then weave gold party-lights with
orange lobster-nets & blue buoys
along the planks. So much to see
& not see again, each chore undone
before they know it. I love how
faithfully they work their garden
Last night I found my face below
the water in my cupped hands.
The mask made of copper and bone
criss-crossing to make a smirk,
a false glamour, a plated glaze.
I unwound myself from the heavy
machinery of my body's burden.
The lute, the light, chime.
I'll get up and partner myself
with music, the purple moon
peeling itself like a plum.
Men stand in a circle and
they will ask and ask again.
I want to pick the thick bud,
to lose myself in the body's posture
bending in or away, to let
This is not really myth or secret.
This murmur in the mouth
of the mountain where the sound
of rain is born. This surging
past pilgrim town and village well.
This coin-thin vagina
and acid stain of bone.
This doctor with his rusty tools,
this street cleaner, this mother
laying down the bloody offerings
of birth. This is not the cry
of a beginning, or a river
buried in the bowels of the earth.
This is the sound of ten million girls
singing of a time in the universe
when they were born with tigers
They didn't find it in me until months later —
just like Vallejo who died on a rainy
day far from the heat rising over a garden
in silvers and reds — far away from the din
of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran
the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface
of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored
against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still
from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn.
The fever should have churned my blood into tight
I want to reach you —
in that city where the snow
only shimmers silver
for a few hours. It has taken
seventeen years. This trip,
these characters patterned
in black ink, curves catching
on the page like hinges,
this weave of letters fraying
like the lines on my palm,
all broken paths. Outside,
no snow. Just the slow pull
of brown on the hills, umber
dulling to a bruise until the city
is just a memory of stained teeth,
the burn of white marble
