En Cuba tuve —
I’ m tired of hearing your complaints.
All that whining about el exilio, the tragedy of loss,
In Cuba I had —
the catalogue of things, the status, the riches,
the opulence of it all.
I had a mate. We were a pair. Our mistress was young. We
were young. We would dangle on her ear
Concentrate on what you have.
Forget the past.
and go out on the town. Mojitos at La Floridita,
dancing at the Tropicana and later
No, don’ t tell me about later.
Lots of contemporaries —
but “me” is not my contemporary.
My birth without “me”
was a blemished offering on the collection plate.
A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh.
And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh
some word comes, it kills itself.
If saved from killing itself,
it descends to the paper, where a murder happens.
Gunshot —
if it strikes me in Hanoi
it strikes again in Prague.
A little smoke floats up,
and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child.
Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?
Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat.
A turn of the key will expel the world.
Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life.
In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood.
A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore.
The deer racing across a field
of the same clay and tallow
color they are — if they are:
or are they tricks of the light? —
must feel themselves being poured
and pouring through life. We’ re not built
but become: trembling columns
of apprehension that ripple
and pass those ripples to and fro
with the world that shakes around us —
it too is something poured
and ceaselessly pouring itself.
February shakes the fields
and trembles in each yellow willow.
It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’ s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.
1
In every life there’ s a moment or two
when the self disappears, the cruel wound
takes over, and then again
at times we are filled with sky
or with birds or
simply with the sugary tea on the table
said the old woman
I know what you mean said the tulip
about epiphanies
for instance a cloudless April sky
the approach of a butterfly
but as to the disappearing self
no
I have not yet experienced that
This exclusive shit I don’ t share with the world.
50 Cent
I, Herman, made medicinal — concocted potions in ways my former’ s was hearsay;
Turned palomas christened Zora on to formulas husbands roll over n mitzvah.
I, a black lad, proud Virginian, selling out Liberty Hall n pinched w/ stickpins
in Woodlawn, do bequeath my next-to-last oratory:
Knock me or nothing, the things of this world
ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish,
clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
Let them. Let the fans whirr.
All the similar virgins must have emptied
their flimsy pockets, and I
was empty enough,
sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn,
dumb as the frost-pink tongues
of the unpruned roses.
When you put your arms around me in that moment,
when you pulled me to you and leaned
back, when you lifted me
just a few inches, when you shook me
