I only recognized your hair: short,
neatly combed. Our mother
would’ ve been proud.
In the Sonoran desert
your body became a slaughter-
house where faith and want were stunned,
hung upside down, gutted. We
were taught
to bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?
You tried to pork
a girl’ s armpit. In Border Patrol
jargon, the word
....................... hello hello hello ... Weiwei ... where have you been? ... I see you in dreams ... bleeding ... in the darkness of the sun ... 81 spots in the flame ... each a nightmare one cannot wake up from ... Weiwei ... the last son ... you told me as we said goodbye ... your last night on the Lower East Side ... 未未 ... the last child of your Mother and Father ... born in the labor camp ... exiled from Beijing to the far desert ... watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’ t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.
I’ ve come to this one grassy hill
in Ramallah, off Tokyo Street,
to place a few red anemones
& a sheaf of wheat on Darwish’ s grave.
A borrowed line transported me beneath
a Babylonian moon & I found myself
lucky to have the shadow of a coat
as warmth, listening to a poet’ s song
of Jerusalem, the hum of a red string
Caesar stole off Gilgamesh’ s lute.
I know a prison of sunlight on the skin.
The land I come from they also dreamt
before they arrived in towering ships
Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice
blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,
the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.
After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,
the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,
rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried
up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone
Exuberance sips bootleg gin from a garter flask
with a ruby monogram “E.”
She wears a red dress one size too small,
eyes wide, she flirts with everyone, dares
Lincoln Beachey to fly until he runs out of gas,
rides a dead engine all the way down.
She watches Ormer Locklear climb
out of the cockpit two hundred feet up,
tap dance on his upper wing
as the houses of honest families
with their square-fenced yards
slide below his shuffle. An oval pond
winks in the sun, like a zero.
Exuberance challenges pilots
Tightened jaw, I did not love.
Flashback of myself jerked about,
legs high above my head, men
laughing, I came to sea drifts,
movement and crashing. I found I am
not so far from God exploding.
Gifting, a friend once said, is why we live.
Seven storks still and white on a gold lake.
My lazy eye glances back to that original
split, myself high above myself.
Whiplashed into forgetting, I didn’ t know
hours from minutes. I was hypervigilant for
catastrophes. My head raging then numb.
The woman is daft.
Invented her own sect.
Has upside-down sex.
With alternate species.
You see her on the street.
Corner of Sansome and Pine:
Morning rev up of sf financial types.
Instead, there she is, beneath a gigantic hat.
Hair wild, in coils, like a rattle-
Snake. Smiles like she’ s got the shakes.
Every cell in her seems to vibrate.
Psst! Could you turn that to low?
O little-know facts — how Robinson attracts them!
Pilgrims rocked ashore here, before Plymouth Rock.
The word scrimshaw is of unknown origin.
The stock name of the archaic two-lane main road? Route 6A. Really
it’ s Old King’ s Highway.
Some facts are useless: the paper bag was invented in Dennis.
Some facts are not: Wellfleet’ s town clock sings out ship’ s time.
19th century Americans observed only three holidays. The Fourth of
July was one.
O witty aperçus — how Robinson accrues them!
Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.
From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio
Was playing There’ s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.
