Semaphore

Transcendent

2012-01-20T22:25:00.001-05:00

after Kotaro Takamura

You fix your eyes on someone who isn’t there,
Tilt ear to voices I cannot hear.

You flee. Ravines and cliffsides beckon,
While you stretch your arms, as if to fly.

I cry out, you turn. But I am invisible,
You step through me, embrace my shadow.

Was your suffering in this world so much,
You had to throw off its yoke,

Make your escape into your vast, transcendent
Fukushima sky? Now and again

I hear my name, from someone, somewhere
Else. Not you, not here. Anymore.

Bearings

2012-01-09T00:44:00.011-05:00

after Kotaro Takamura

A bird starts from underfoot.
My love has come unhinged;
A camouflage in shreds.

Gunsight at 3000 meters;
Ah, this long-barrelled rifle –
Far too long.

David

2012-01-08T19:27:00.005-05:00

Davitte colla fromba
e io coll'arco
- Michelangelo

Back again in the Valley of Elah,
surrounded by this scaffolding of light,
Mediterranean oak and terebinth.

You and I, we have been in single combat
forty days and forty nights, your shadow
looming over penitence like a wrath.

You’ve savaged my dreams, a lion stalking
among the grasses, a black bear tearing
at flesh; and I a ruddy boy, alone.

Now I stand, unarmoured, unadorned, stone
in one fist, conviction in the other.
I watch your face, try to find it in your eyes,

dark furrowed in that contemptuous glare.
There: fear, flickering like a borrowed wick.
It comes to this: rock against blade, marble

against faith, this armoury of heaven
vengefully clenched, a coiled-up serpent tongue.
Rise up then, unquarried colossus, rise:

And I will sling defiance into your
disdain, chisel deep into your brow
the tetragrammaton of my God.

Artist's Studio, New Year's Eve

2011-12-31T13:02:00.006-05:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Let’s not leave the moist clay, earthenware to freeze,
My love.

Tonight the kitchen larder will be empty – no matter.
Let’s warm the fire.

In the bedroom, the blankets may thin out
And you may clutch a pillow,

Shivering, in early light – no matter.
Let’s not leave the moist clay, earthenware to freeze.

I will be your sentinel, sleepless in midwinter,
Letting loose the mercury’s

Thin column, a brigade against the gale.
Though we may find the world has left

The two of us alone – no matter. New Year’s day.
My love, let’s warm the fire.

Renaissant Carol

2011-12-25T00:57:00.003-05:00

1465

Madre non mi far monaca che non mi voglio far.
Non mi tagliar la tonaca che non la vuo' portar.
Tutt'il dì in coro, al vespre'et all messa,
E la madr'abadessa
Non fa se non gridar, che possela creppar,
Che possela creppar.

1557

Une jeune pucelle de noble coeur priant en sa chambrette.
Son Créateur, l'Ange du Ciel, descendit sur la terre.
Lui conta le mystère
De notre Salvateur,
Ce Dieu si redoutable est homme comme toi,
Ce Dieu est homme comme toi.

1643

Estennialon de tsonoue, Iesous ahatonnia
Onnaouateoua dóki nónouandaskouaentak
Ennonchien skouatrihotat
Nónouandilonrachatha
Iesous ahatonnia, ahatonnia
Iesous ahatonnia.

1926

'Twas in the moon of wintertime, when all the birds had fled,
That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead.
Before their light the stars grew dim
And wondering hunters heard the hymn:
Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born,
In excelsis gloria.

Salt Gathering

2011-11-13T22:27:00.000-05:00

after Fujiwara no Teika

Dusk falls in Matsuo, late.
As the charred salt, wrung
From simmered seaweed, burns –
So smolder the ashes of this heart,
As I wait for you, as I wait.

Wu Ling Spring

2011-10-30T21:38:00.006-04:00

after Li Qingzhao
to 'Springtime at Wu Ling'

The wind has calmed, and in the air,
A powdered fragrance lingers. Dusk,
And I am weary, weary. All undone

I clutch these remnants of our life,
Our years. But you are lost - my words
Like salt, catch in my throat, through tears.

Shuanxi is beautiful in spring, they say;
And there I would set sail, but laden under
This my grief, this fragile vessel fails.

Moves Like Jagger

2011-10-24T21:16:00.008-04:00

Sauntering down to the Chelsea drugstore,
How you were preening in the mirrored door.

I caught you pulled up to the curb outside,
And I slowed down my steps to match your stride,

Invisible thus, I traversed the bend.
There in your car, the spouse of a close friend.

Inside, you fingered a box from its shelf,
Ego propped with a magnum, pack of twelve.

Straight into your coat with your prescription,
You let slip that smirk of satisfaction,

Then a start when you finally saw me.
Savoir faire scattered like clouds in coffee.

So? You think I’ll be nothing without you?
You probably think this sonnet’s about you.

When You Wake

2011-08-21T01:00:00.014-04:00

Tonight, when you are finally
sleeping, I will let myself out

by the eastern gate,
wade river, and the moon,

make my way to Luoyang,
where birds have come into bloom.

There, I will set down my baskets
and gather them all up for you,

so you find, when you wake,
by your bedside in sprays,

all the peonies of Chang’an.

Life Spring

2011-05-28T21:29:00.003-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

This earth is spring-green
Again, rain falls, blue as sky,
Its lush splatter stirring
A rumor of life.

Anxious, the heart trembles;
The spirit flickers, spreads
Trenchant wings for flight.
Returned to inception,
From dying to rebirth, time’s hands
Ellipsed past two, past three, like fragile
Leaflets verdant on a branch. This day,
As before, the spirit quickens
From its cocooned silence –

And suddenly joy consumes me in tears,
My heart holds you as if
In embrace.

You are the half that completes me.
You cup the grail of my faith.
You bear my cross of sufferings.
You are to me everything,
Everything.

My tongue had tasted
The salt of loneliness.
My heart had plumbed
The abyss of desolation.
But you, you were the one
Who fathomed my life.
You were the one.

I had charted my labyrinth, through
Testaments of grasses and trees.
But you, you were the one
Who compassed me like the ocean.
You are everything, this smile, this dimpled life,
This life variegate with richness,
Banished of all emptiness.

Traversing this world,
I’d unwound my own path,
With no one to take my hand
Save those who understood
Of me only a pittance.

But I no longer lament that loneliness,
In this natural, inevitable solitude, finding
Contentment.

But without you –

No, inconceivable, impossible
To even begin to imagine it.
You are to me everything,
Everything.

In you springs love’s immensity.
If no one else existed in this world,
Through you I would still breathe life’s
Fervent breath, embrace it, celebrate it,
Casting all aside to immerse myself
In that deep spring of life, in you.

Spring then, reborn, to me.
You are, you will be for me
Everything, everything.

Sussuration

2011-04-29T20:31:00.000-04:00

With what words to answer,
with what voice?
The sleight of wings,

whirring above your face,
the rise and fall of your breath,
the shadows slanted like blinds

across your eyelids -
You sit upright, cold, breathing,
awake, undreaming.

A secret, hidden in the
hesitation of sleep,
suddenly revealed.

Hill's Crest

2011-04-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

Wind stirs the branches.
Across the hill’s crest, the wings
Of a thousand cranes.

Solstice

2011-04-27T22:28:00.003-04:00

1

The hand loses its hold upon the reins.

Across the veins of sky the sun courses,
sweating the glistening sweat of horses
mouthing the wind.
About the surging manes
the muscles arch, flinging the feeble strain
of arms around the rebel neck away.

Incarnadine the waters of the bay,
shrouding the ashen soul that tried to tame
this sun, to twist the whip across the skies.

2

Turn away the eyes that look up and drown
in the roar of the edging night. Slower

than a falling feather, the evening dies,
a shudder eclipsing the sun.
Lower
O Icarus, O Icarus come down.

La Conversation Galante

2011-04-26T21:57:00.003-04:00

Things return to their places, settle
where they used to be: umbrellas, overcoats,
lamps, your books. The silence overwhelms.
Weekends my sister visits, and we talk.
Nights I read your letters, when they come.

Spring’s come as it always has, like an immense
wind from the north. We'll have clear weather,
from now on. Or should I add, I hope.
This morning I counted four sparrows
in the trees - not a flock, but there it is.

I have heard them, hushed, hiding in the eaves,
trembling; then rising at the slightest gust,
whirling like a rush of leaves out, up, into the air.
If it should rain tonight, thunder and lightning,
I should lie in bed all night, listening.

Perhaps it was the summer that led us so,
giddy with the season, the sunlight
and the garden encircling our wandering
like an arm around the shoulder,
meandering all the way into the wood.

Sometimes that evening comes back, flaring
apart from all the rest, like an ember blown back
from ash. How strange summers can be!
Umbrellas, books and lamps, the rain: one seems
not to speak about anything else, afterwards -

Only perhaps the weather, dear friend, if then.
When shall we see each other at last?

Wind-Filled

2011-04-25T20:44:00.001-04:00

North wind,
you make my soul
flicker like sunlight
on water,
whirl like the night's
weathervane of stars.

Epitaph for a Sailor

2011-04-24T21:27:00.007-04:00

Content? You never were. You dared
Even the edge of the ocean:
A moment unmoving and exultant where
The cliffside rose into the air,
And down you would plunge

Then, suddenly -
As though the waters could not hold you pent -
Burst out triumphantly in arm,
White sails mounting the wind spent
From having wrestled with a god. Content?
One cannot even trust you, lying there.

Finnegans Chirp

2011-04-23T12:10:00.003-04:00

Book I. riverrun,
stream done. Joyce would be bitter.
Life's tough on Twitter.

Sonnet XVIII Flavors

2011-04-22T08:53:00.011-04:00

Shall I compare thee to a peach sundae?
Thy lips do make the most parfait parfait.
Thy smile’s far sweeter still than strawberry,
Thine eyes so very cherries jubilee.

Thou art my chocolate, my rocky road,
My raspberry kiss, my mango tango.
Outside daiquiri ice, mint winds may blow,
Inside our hearts fare warm as cookie dough.

So shall we toast our troth with raisin rum
And pledge our promise with pink bubblegum.
Jamoca love like ours shall never budge,
Only endure like almond roca fudge.

Until time crumbles, cookies into cream,
So lives this praline hope, vanilla dream.

The Bridge at Sakanoye

2011-04-21T23:10:00.000-04:00

Perhaps one year the river rose
and never fell, or else the storm
had been so furious
the current on either side
tore out the steps and the rail
and carried way the beams.

Pushed back by the river,
on one side Hitomaro,
on the other Basho.

The bridge remained;
but now we stoop
to roll our pantlegs up
above our knees, where once
its two sides met
the opposite banks.

Your shoulder baskets full of
dried fish and shrimp,
you hurry on to the other side.

For a moment I stand
where I touch
neither earth nor sky.

Postcards from Kings Place, London

2011-04-20T23:26:00.001-04:00

1
Martians browse caxtons,
angle the Saxons, and roam.
Send their postcards home.

2
Girls in summer dress.
I must confess: I'm gawking.
I'm no Steve Hawking.

3
Bacon at the Tate's
no breakfast plate. Nor Hockney
Lennon-McCartney.

4
Like sugar'n Equal,
the Phantom sequel. But shucks!
Should pull in the bucks.

5
Shakespeare is tragic,
Copperfield magic. Tickets?
Empty your pockets.

6
Blue pinkie wasted,
Arnold's face pasted. Rotter!
When's the next Potter?

In the Pines

2011-04-19T18:48:00.000-04:00

The mosses have taken the steps now.
Rimmed with silence,
The ancient walls yield themselves up
Like a breakstone to the rain
Tilted into the night,
Dividing the fall.

In the wave of the pines
Only the shadows of the castle are unchanging.
Even now they are cast by the moon.

Nagasu-ji

2011-04-17T18:36:00.000-04:00

I saw you first at Daitoku-sen,
Lost in the stream, an unstemmed petal
Tossed between the currents of the afternoon.
You waved - before I could say a word!

Since yesterday I have been here at Mishima.
The wind blows across my face.
The rain is due to fall.

I will always remember you,
The way you were, last summer,
At Nagasu-ji.

Winter Comes

2011-04-16T22:12:00.009-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Winter comes,
An icy dagger, crystalline,
Intense.

A crack pierces
The distance, like a rifle’s sharp
Report.

Muffled sobs,
Shaking the frosted heart
Of morning.

Suddenly, life,
Unfathomable, is upended,
A bitter fool.

Encumbered,
We call this by any other name
But love.

Despot winter,
Armed with treachery and lies.
Winter comes.

Stranded

2011-04-15T19:36:00.001-04:00

Beached into gloaming,
the moon splinters
through the darkness

like an arched rib
thrashed across the
ocean's breadth,

ambergris and bone,
stranded on this vagrant,
heaving shore.

Tides

2011-04-14T21:53:00.002-04:00

The wind rising, the rigging tight with salt,
we drew ourselves into the gathered spray -
and suddenly we saw it all before us
across each crest of wave, sunlight glinting
on the shattered water leaping from the beams
like coral fragments broken from a reef
and spun out by the stream, away, away -

And the grey cry of seabirds stealing,
stealing over the waters like a stranger
whose voice calls lost in a foreign country,
whirled by the crowd; and the soundless breaking
of waves white against the grey lines of cliffs;
and the last shimmer of lights on the coast
falling into a darkness vast as the depths
rising from the waters and the silence -

Far behind us the thin line of the shore
gave way, broke, and scattered into the sea.

Backwash

2011-04-13T21:48:00.002-04:00

Broken,
like the deepened
earth turned back
on either side of a
furrowed trail,
traced across the
solitary fervor
of an oblivious
planet's shakings,
from ripple and dream,
soundless and secret,
the waters turn
from the oars.

All the past is
shattered now,
all remembrance lost.

The current shores
against the rim of this
vague depth, fractured
by this passing,
aching into silence,
swirling, sinking,
lost in the water's
rise and fall.

Fountainhead

2011-04-12T21:43:00.001-04:00

At the water's edge,
the same veined leaf returns,
back and forth

across the whirlpool
and its stone rim.
Across the fountain's

cathedral of rain
it startles, sinks,
and then rises,

like a planet scaling its
orbit around the sun, a galleon
from the edge of the world.

Winter Awakening

2011-04-11T20:57:00.005-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Winter morning.
Even the River Jordan must be skimmed with ice.
Inside, covered in my own white blanket, I lie
Wondering about last night’s play, how it might have felt
To be John the Baptist, guiding Christ into the river,
Or Salome, holding in her hands la tête coupée.

Winter morning.
From the street echoes the clatter of wooden clogs.
Inside, I feel nature’s immensity turning in me,
Silent, like the orbit of constellations.

The sweet aroma of mocha
Spirits itself into the room; eyes suddenly open,
It all comes to me, like a precise equation,
Those harmonies and patterns that run
Through the lives we make ourselves.

Awake, my love!

Winter morning,
And outside your house, the chirrup of birds.

By now you will have opened your dark eyes,
Arms stretching out like a child, smiling,
Dappled, beautiful, by sunlight.
And I am seized to tap out
With my fingers, on my
White blanket, love’s
Warbled song.

Winter morning,
And my heart and voice overflow with this sweet life.
The sky’s morning haze is gold-flecked, amber and blue.
And, from afar, the howl of an English pointer
Awakens something in me, a deep-seated
Animal hunger, a yearning
For my beloved, you.

Winter morning,
And on the River Jordan, my spirit gnaws at the ice,
Exultant, breaking through.

To a Woman in Her Home

2011-04-10T02:53:00.004-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

The compass of my heart’s monsoon aligns itself
With you, my love.
And the night’s cold slips beneath its
Aquamarine shell.
While you, love, sleep peacefully there in your home.

You sleep with the trust of a child asleep, a truth
Transparent and pure,
That banishes the heart of darkness.

Virtue, baseness, all are unveiled before you.
Surely, to one whose transcendent judgement,
Child-like clarity, discerned
A worthiness in this, my unworthy life.
How to fathom what you saw in me?
All I know is that your certainty
Transfigured me to joy,
Engendered faith that what you saw,
That unknown me, could be
Real, here in the flesh.

Winter.
The leaves from the zelkova elms have fallen.
The night is hushed.

And now my heart’s monsoon begins its course
To you, my love,
Like an extravagant, artesian spring
Gently swelling from its subterranean lair
To drench you, every inch of you, your skin.

And as you stir, this vasculation
Surges, swirls, revels,
And encompasses you,
My love, my font of life.

While you, love, sleep;
Sleep through the night’s cold trespass;
Sleep peacefully there in your home;
With the trust of a child,
You sleep.

Owls

2011-04-07T21:32:00.008-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Listen, do you hear it?
The sound of owls.

An insensate murmuring.
Voices dyed with poison – with a color
Black as winged creatures in the arboreal depths –
These voices surround us, from every tree
And on every path, growing, unbearable,
Engulfing the ears, throbbing as in darkness
Your image mirrors this heart’s pain.
Sinister, in shadow,
Insensate murmuring.

Listen, do you hear it?
The sound of owls.

Revelling in their own voices, passing rumor,
Aspersion, innuendo with each bass note:
A sinister parliament.

Our resolve starts strong,
But they are unrelenting, with their swift
Flicker of eye, their cacophony of overtone and
Insinuation. And so my anguish grows
Against that murmuring,
That vulgar music that
Asphyxiates the heart,
Blurring the line between
The licentious and the insane.

Accursed creatures,
Parliament of owls,
Drowning this absurdity, this anguish,
In a sea of inhuman voices, again, again.

Do you hear it? Listen.
The sound of owls.

Waste Land Haiku

2011-04-07T00:01:00.004-04:00

April is cruel.
Stetson's the Fool. I'm coping.
Damyata shantihng.

Red Sky

2011-04-06T00:07:00.001-04:00

The sun's artery
beats through red sky
like the light
convulsing from an
ambulance roof.

The stained, dark
hemmorhage of noon.

Verge

2011-04-04T00:01:00.002-04:00

Sad ocean, verged against
this faded sky, you breathe
a quiet reproach of clouds.

The vast night shivers,
bone cold, deep, and
blue as the universe’s ghost.

This Evening

2011-04-03T07:42:00.002-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

On the hearth, the gas fire warms
Oolong tea, wind wanes this evening moon.

Outside, the world
Would have us
Regimented, in uniform,
Contriving innocence,
Snapping to attention.
Lost in the world’s maelstrom,
Knowing hearts, once
Artless and free.

You understand. It’s clear
That’s how the world is,
A cruel and callous circle,
Clutching to itself a harsh conceit.
So those true to themselves –
Yesterday, today, or tomorrow –
Are cursed as insincere,
Tormented, as you’ve been.

Wretches!
Never trust them;
As if in horror, they
Spread idle rumors,
Uncaring of who
They injure.

They, it is they who should be shunned.
Turn your back on them, they are
Insignificant, nothing, less than nothing.
Instead, let us follow our own hearts,
Take the path we were meant to take.
Let our spirits seek harmony
In our thoughts, beauty in nature,
Power in our own spirit, indomitable.
Let us transform this grotesque
Toad of hurt into nobility.

And let us love’s sweetness savor,
Let us unravel every tangled strand
Of this our life together, as we are, free
As the wind blowing, as the clouds streaming,
True to the universe, to ourselves, to our soul’s
Compass, nature’s bright sagesse.

Come then – banish these doubts,
Worth scarcely half a thought –
And let us together sup, you and I,
Openly, this evening, outside,
In Ginza.

Dawn

2011-04-02T22:59:00.000-04:00

Fuji, Mount Fuji!
I kiss the kiss of your lips
And the brim alights!

Ripple

2011-04-01T22:22:00.001-04:00

Shivers in the stream:
A ripple breaks the moonlight
And the heron's dream.

Disquiet

2011-03-26T16:59:00.009-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

No, let us not stir the calm
Of these waters, nor fling in any stone.
Even one drop, trembling,
Disperses a thousand ripples.
Cherish this quiet,
This peace.

No, let us not speak a word,
Not one more word.
Even one whisper, trembling,
Unleashes a quiver of treachery,
Fissured lightning,
A wildfire.

Woman, ambitious, independent; still, woman:
You are this moon, sultrous in an indigo sky,
A moon that ushers wakefulness into dream,
That renders this moment, as it must be, timeless.
Suffer this dream to remain, this moment to stay.

More than that, no, never
Ripple these luminous waters.

This peace is precious,
Blood-ransomed. Unimaginable,
The measure of that barter.
This peace breathes life, divinity,
That may stir into indignation
At a summer night’s pang.
Do we dare disturb the universe?

No, never. Cherish this quiet
Or be ourselves resolved
When ripples, stone-swept,
Hasten into waves, overwhelm us,
Whirling us in the undertow.

Woman, to endure this, how far into
The heart should we reach?
And could we?
No answer.

But – see that oil-stained railway station,
wrapped in yellow smoke? How moonlight
Transforms it, into a shimmering,
Jewelled pavilion. Signal lamps
Slow down trains and send them off,
In hues of ruby and jade.

Thus your moonlight fills me
Wondrous, suffuses me
In a mysterious cascade.
Balanced on this precipice,
My soul reaches further, further,
All essence visible and infinitely

Quiet.
Embrace, then, vastness;
Render me speechless

Leave this peace unruffled,
These waters unstirred,
This stone unflung.

Ablution

2011-03-11T22:18:00.077-05:00

1

Had it all been by chance? Business
completed early, over café-au-lait
at Aux Deux Marie, so a foray down

Rue Saint-Denis, past the old-world
embellishments, shoehorned among
the bustling crowds in Plateau Mont-Royal.

And there it was, unassuming, an old
curiosity shop out of Dickens, window displays
enticing pause, bars protecting militaria

bric-à-brac – ribbons of war, medals,
daggers. A portentous fascination
took hold, opened the door, drew him in.

2

February 19, 1946. On the morning
of the 62nd day of the proceedings at

Nuremberg, Counsellor Smirnov rose
to the Tribunal, resuming his evidence:

'I have already pointed out that the
principal method used to cover up

their crimes was to burn the remains;
but the same base, rational SS

technical minds, which created gas
chambers and murder vans, began

devising other methods for complete
annihilation of human bodies,

which would not only conceal
evidence, but serve other purpose.'

3

Foraging among the emblems, batons, pistols,
he was aware of someone watching quietly,
from the shadows; and as he hesitated

in front of a simple walnut box, that someone
cleared a throat. The Proprietor approached,
and with a "Je vous attendais,"

lifted the box onto the counter. A flick
of the wrist, and the lid was open.
Inside it, on a flat, wooden pedestal –

a yellowish ochre bar, imprinted with the
angular swirl of a swastika. Beside it, a card,
with the inscription "Pologne 1944".

4

'Such as the manufacture of certain
products. I submit to the Tribunal

Exhibit Number USSR-197, the testimony
of one of the direct participants,

Sigmund Mazur, who was a laboratory assistant
at the Danzig Anatomic Institute.'

'Q: Tell us how it was made.'
'A: In the courtyard of the Anatomic Institute

a one-story stone building of three rooms
was built during the summer of 1943.

This building was erected for the utilization
of human bodies. During the winter of 1944

Professor Spanner ordered us to collect,
and not to throw away, certain human material.'

5

"Cet artefact," the Proprietor said.
"It has been here since I started this
boutique du collectionneur after the War."

He leaned forward. "People should understand,
people need to understand. Especially
this." A gesture around the ephemera

of another age, ranged oppressively around
them. "Bien, Monsieur, you see how it appears.
The question is this: Do you know

what it is you hold there, exactly?"
In the visitor's hands, the Proprietor
had placed the object. Soap.

6

'It was in February 1944, Professor Spanner
first gave me the recipe for the preparation

of soap. According to this recipe 5 kilos
of human fat are mixed with 10 liters

of water and 500 or 1,000 grams of caustic soda.
All this is boiled 2 or 3 hours and then cooled.

The soap floats to the surface while the water
and other sediment remain at the bottom.

A bit of salt and soda is added to this mixture.
Then fresh water is added, and the mixture

again boiled 2 or 3 hours. After having cooled
the soap is poured into molds. The soap

has an unpleasant odor, and in order to destroy
this odor, benzolaldehyde is added.'

7

The Proprietor turned it over. "Verso,
had it been inscribed R.I.F.," he said,
"the initials for the Reichsstelle für

Industrielle Fettversorgung, in charge
of wartime production of washing products,
it would likely have no suspect material.

But with unmarked artifacts from a Danzig
institute, one laboratory undertook analysis,
and forged that final evidentiary chain

missing from the trials, the human link."
Here, in Montreal, on the object he held,
there were – as in Nuremberg – no initials.

8

'I boiled this compund from the bodies of both
women and men. The process of boiling alone

took several days - from 3 to 7.
Over 2 manufacturing cycles more than

25 kilograms of soap were produced.
The amount of human fat necessary

for these 2 cycles was 70 to 80
kilograms collected from some 40 bodies.

The finished soap went to Professor Spanner,
and to Reichert, Borkmann, Von Bargen.

Spanner personally used this soap.
For myself I took 4 kilograms

of this soap. For my personal needs,
I also used this soap.'

9

"Les Catholiques, they have a word,"
said the Proprietor. "Transubstantiation.
The changing of the essence of bread and wine

into the body and blood of their redeemer."
In the light the brown was splotched
with white. "What this is, Monsieur,

is the transubstantiation of the essence of –
not divinity – but humanity, into a form as
unextraordinary as bread or wine,

but which contains in its substance,
in its essence, the distillation of
l'âme humaine, the human soul."

10

'Exhibit Number USSR-272,
submitted to the Tribunal, the written

testimony of a British citizen,
William Anderson Neely,

a corporal of the Royal Signals.'
'The corpses arrived at an average rate of

2 to 3 per day. Most of them had been
beheaded. A machine for the manufacture

of soap was completed sometime in March
or April 1944. It consisted

of an electrically heated tank in which
bones of the corpses were mixed

with some acid and melted down. This
process of melting down took about 24 hours.'

11

"And yet in many ways," the Proprietor continued,
this mystery surpasses even transubstantiation."
The Proprietor turned the soap back to the

arrogant crucifix of the swastika. "You understand,
Monsieur, they would have you believe
that the words spoken at la dernière cène –

This is my body, this is my blood –
were statements of fact, to be accepted on Faith.
But this artifact, it makes itself accessible

to chemical reagent and spectrometer, the way
the bread and wine cannot. What place is there,
then, for Faith, when you can test for Truth?"

12

'Some acid was also used in this process.
I think it was caustic soda. When boiling

had been completed, the mixture
was allowed to cool and then cut into blocks

for microscopic examination. I cannot
estimate the quantity produced, but I saw it

used by Danzigers in cleaning tables
in the dissecting rooms. They all told me

it was excellent soap for this purpose.'
The Counsellor rose. 'I submit

some unfinished and finished materials,
which from the exterior, seem like nothing

more than ordinary household soap. I submit
this to the Tribunal as Exhibit USSR-393.'

13

The Proprietor returned the bar to its casque,
turned it around; on the rear, just below the rim
of the lid, a small square of paper, a label.

"Voici, mon ami," the Proprietor said,
and offered up the box, so that the white tag's
numbers burned level with the visitor's eyes.

"Is this not a fair price for a human soul?"
For a breath, as after a consecration bell,
the abyss held him in its gaze - Kaliningrad,

Bydgoszcz, Stutthof - for but a breath.
Then he fled, the door hinging against darkness,
against darkness, immeasurable and deep.

Drowning

2011-03-05T12:39:00.010-05:00

Dear Mister-I'm-Too-
Good-To-Write-Or-Call,
this'll be the last
time I harass y’all.
I'm in the car now, 90
on the sprawl.

Radio crankin’ out the
soundtrack to the drive.
You know the song by
Collins? About that guy
who coulda saved that
other from a dive.

That's kinda how this is.
Yeah it's too late –
I'm on downers mixed
with vodka mixed with hate.
And all I tried was
to communicate.

We coulda been
forever, never doubt it.
Now you can't sleep
and dream about it.
Instead I hope you
kick and scream about it.

Keep bangin’ at that trunk
back there, go on and try.
We’re almost at the bridge
and we gonn fly.
At least we’ll be together;
Stan, good-bye –

And I can feel it
coming in the air
tonight oh Lord
I’ve been waiting for
this moment for all
my life oh Lord
oh Lord oh Lord

Helium

2011-02-14T02:13:00.011-05:00

Outside, the winter frieze has banished all
except the shadows from the streets. Beneath

it all, a final subway train engraves
a drawn, unhurried course across its tracks.

Its sound reverberates through the grates, an
electron in its shivering orbital.

Here, colder still, in the railway tunnel
of the MRI, the liquid helium

embraces in its coiled magnetic frame.
The shutter trips, and I become a flash,

protons cascade, a corona of light.
Etched in the scanner's screen like the Turin

shroud, a self-portrait. The cranial tumor
a frosted silver, like a crown of thorns.

Silence Has Bound Me

2011-02-10T18:41:00.002-05:00

Silence has bound me devastated, desolate;
Has me in its anguished cocoon,
Bound in an ember, pining, dying.

Me an ember muted in gloom.
Devastated, anguished, pining in darkness deep.
Desolate cocoon, dying gloom, deep tomb.
.....

#Revolution

2011-02-05T18:18:00.042-05:00

You say you want a revolution
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
We all want to change the world
- J. Lennon, P. McCartney

You talk about a #revolution?
You there, carrying the bayonet
Of Internet protocol, bearing
Elliptic cryptography’s body armour –
Listen – let me explain a few things.
Alongside the armies of salvation
March your trending hashtags #Tunisia
#Egypt #Jordan #Algeria #Yemen -
#7thcolumn at the squares of liberation.
You say you want a #revolution?

You there, standing in the plazas,
Surrounded by the salt of merchandise,
Armed with nothing but your placards,
Your Molotovs of #poetry; your comrades
Slumping in the streets of your suburbs,
Bloodied like a dried inkwell, swirled
In hake. You falter like a weathervane –
Listen – you are not alone. Raised with
Your fist our own, fingers together curled.
We all want to change the world.

You hear about the #revolution?
You there, despots, heedless in your
Palaces, your pyramids of gauze,
Your minarets of conjurement and smoke –
Listen – that is the sound of the great deluge
Bearing down upon the tined illusion
Of your gates, etching away the mortar
Of your garrisons, wave after furrowing wave
Sweeping your citadel in watery immolation.
You tell me that it’s evolution –

Let me show you how the comet
Struck down the ancient tyrant’s reign
And made it brittle bone, cowed in stone.
You say you want a #revolution? This is the
Word, meme, singularity – seize it, share it,
Chirp it, reddit, storify it, glorify it, tumblrd
And tubed, until we surge victorious,
Philosopher, mason, poet and serf,
#Freedom the final stone that's hurled;
We all want to #changetheworld.

New Orleans Lullaby

2011-01-31T21:39:00.012-05:00

There is a voice in New Orleans,
A baby's mother's sigh,
And as she holds her daughter close,
She sings her lullaby -

     Now dry your tears, my darling girl,
     Your daddy's said good-bye.
     He loves you still, as he loved me,
     Sweet baby, rockabye.

Outside the storm begins to grow,
The evening turns to night,
And as the clouds begin to close,
She sings her lullaby -

     Now dry your tears, my darling girl,
     Your daddy's said good-bye.
     He loves you still, as he loved me,
     Sweet baby, rockabye.

And soon that voice in New Orleans
Begins to break and cry,
But as the rising sun appears
Still sings that lullabye -

     Now dry your tears, my darling girl,
     Your daddy's said good-bye.
     He loves you still, as he loved me,
     Sweet baby, rockabye.

     Please dry your tears, my darling girl,
     I'll never say good-bye.
     I love you still, I always will,
     Sweet baby, rockabye.

     I love you so. That's all I know.
     Sweet baby, rockabye.

One Stop, Poetry

2011-01-22T09:53:00.006-05:00

The bus folds shut its wide accordion
doors, and reels away from shelter.
Finally settled in our seats, we press
against the window glass. Outside,

the world unrolls its cinematic
cartography, the vagrant landscapes
of imagination. Here, a young boy
swivels on a bright red

bicycle, his suited father panting close
behind. There, two women edge
a garden path, hand in hand, one on
the stone, the other on the grass.

Beyond, a wife and husband swing
together on a porch; the sunshine
wanes across their faces, and their forty-
seven years of cinnamon and tea.

These are the triolets and villanelles
of life, and we its jostled passengers,
marvelling at the projected tapestry
that weaves, unweaves itself

across the circuit of our journ –
browsers, writers, dreamers, friends –
companions on this craft
that has but one stop, poetry.

Eleventh

2011-01-15T22:16:00.009-05:00

The streets
weft breeze-swept sheets, texts,
letters, sentences never ended:

Beth,
Next bet, Everest! Ever been
there? They tell me extreme,
WTC-sheer. Yes! Wherever
there’s extreme, there’s me! Tell

Jeff:
See Excel sheets 20-23, rev 7.
The VP feels the new Eng’g Dept
spend needs exec check. Prep
NYSE. Then pre-Dec 3, delete

Bennett:
These extensions skew the
expected rent levels. Next term,
they’ll exceed the free expenses
precendent. Nevertheless

Helen,
When we met, speech deserted
me... Never expected the sweetness,
the perfect tenderness... Melt me,
tell me the deepest secrets... Let me

September 11.
The breeze sweeps the letters.
The letters never sent.

A Child's Plate c. 1840

2010-12-29T18:44:00.005-05:00

This is the last of you, consigned
as part of a collection to Sotheby’s
for an afternoon auction. Lifted from
the salt-glazed stoneware teapots –

a Staffordshire child’s plate,
polychrome, 5-3/4” in diameter.
Impressed on the border, a pearl-white
pattern of alternating pinwheel daisies.

In the center, a garden scene –
handpainted in orange, yellow, red and
green – an oblivious boy, intent
on his book, and a young girl pining:

The tulip and the butterfly
appear in gayer coats than I -
Let me be dress'd fine as I will,
such poesie exceeds me still.

Your first discovery, unearthed
from an outing to Portobello Road. Later,
when I got back from my conference,
you presented it to me in triumph.

I remember it, your smile –
the same smile you had that last night,
propped among your pillows and tubes,
the muted blip of the bedside monitor

pacing my own heart. You pressed
my palm with the soft of your thumb,
whispered finally to me Piaf’s:
Non, je ne regrette rien.

But this is mine: that I might have seized
more zealously our days with one another.
And now, this is all that is left of you,
the pearlware figurines, the pottery

figural clocks, the thimbles, the scent-bottle
holders, enamel necessaires. And they mean
nothing, nothing – only your smile
remembered, wistful, underglaze.

Hallelujah

2010-12-23T23:52:00.028-05:00

You may have heard this song before,
A carol to a mournful score,
But you don’t really care for Christmas, do you?
When all you hear is reveille,
The treble of the cavalry,
An old, unspoken psalm, this Hallelujah.

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

God rest ye merry, gentlemen,
Your soldiers round on Bethlehem;
The angels, they all say they see right through you.
How swift your brothers disappear,
Your sisters' eyes avert in fear,
And in their hearts they stifle Hallelujah.

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

The columns burn, the fourth, the fifth;
The major falls, the armor lifts,
And finally the foe who near outdrew you.
Your ammunition's shown its worth,
Now maybe there’ll be peace on earth,
Not just this cold and broken Hallelujah.

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

Maybe there’s a God above,
And maybe all you’ll know of love
Is when a painted Death knelt down and blew you.
But Cohen sang and Lennon fell;
If there’s a heaven, there’s a hell,
Where all the damned compose their Hallelujahs.

     Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

Radar

2010-12-08T07:04:00.012-05:00

Against the violet sky my Piper Saratoga
banks and shifts, a paltry sparrow
lost in the expanding gloom.
Dimmed in a room below me,
the radar on the Island Airport
circumnavigates the darkness.
Its luminescent arm swings a clockwise
arc across its screen, and pings
the rumor of my existence, up above.

Last month, I stood beneath the wash
of the rainshower, the buzzing of your
Philips razor mixing with the water’s hiss –
love’s wondrous morning ritual,
familiar as coffee, comfortable,
soapy, serene – when I found it.
Two fingers retracing open circles from the
areola, ranging in spirals across soft
tissue, outward like a radar’s sweep.

Like a malign backscatter off my
startled fingertips, a sudden thickening,
unaccustomed, beneath the surface. There.
Two weeks later, at my call-back diagnostic
screening, the radiologist scanned the bright
Nazca lines of my mammograms.
Aerial maps, pinpointing my pain, this
purgatory between parallel plates,
compressing my world, again, again.

Last week, a stereotactic biopsy,
a geologic intrusion into the core,
an aftertremor shattering my broken world.
140 knots, 5000 feet. Rain falls,
the wind shifts, and my aircraft’s wings
drop suddenly on a power-on stall.
If I chose silence, I could ease up,
let the winds wash over these
pallid wings as I fall.

I could close my eyes, let gravity’s distant
wavelength uncoil, and draw this shell
into its tethered, unrelenting pull.
But here, in the momentary silence
of this spin, my heart’s radar reaches out,
probing hope’s dim cavern –
pings the summer of our daughter’s graduation;
pings a showering of rice at her wedding;
pings our grandson’s wavering first steps;

pings him scoring in his first home game;
pings us on the shore at Orchid Beach;
pings you holding me crying in the shower,
that first day, love, as if you’d never let me go;
pings this life, this fragile, precious life –
And I must draw my strength into my hands, haul
resolution’s ailerons back, back – until the curve
is righted, and the wind is stilled, and the
airfield markers part the darkness into stars.

Garden

2010-12-07T23:45:00.003-05:00

I stop at Williams
Cafe, victim of
a conspiracy
of hunger and rain.

In the line ahead
of me, a couple
hover, fourth in line
to place their order.

Blonde hair cascades like
dawning over her
sunprint dress – a rich
tapestry of light,

Gauguin’s dream,
a collage of leaves
and streams, and a frail,
pastel innocence.

He circles his arm
all around her waist;
and as he does so,
the emerald snake

that is the tattooed
sleeve on his right arm –
his ring and middle
finger the forked tongue

grazing serpentine
her sheering fabric –
slithers into Paradise,
tightens its embrace.

Tears

2010-12-04T17:58:00.004-05:00

after Kotaro Takamura

The world sinks, downcast, into night.
Evening, and at Hibiya Park, people gather
Near the edge of the palace bridge,
Smiles masking disquiet hearts.

At the gardens of Matsumotoro,
We share crushed ice and syrup.
The rumors travel in whispers,
Faint, like the sound of a distant bell.

Like Meiji-tennō’s verses,
Silence pierces us, like knives.
But nothing makes sense now,
Not poetry, nor this summer night.

Not this night, veiled in ice like grief,
Grief as cold as silver. Your folding fan,
Inconsequential, falls as you flee. I pick it up.
Outside, by the dark road, you are crying.

But I dare not say what I should.
Outside, the people walking past us
Think it is all about the palace news –
Heartbreaking, heartbreaking –

Strangers, passing us by, leaving us
Awash in our own desolation, our sorrow
Swallowed up in theirs, praying
They forgive us these, our secret tears.

The Kiss

2010-11-23T23:12:00.011-05:00

What is there so fragile as this kiss?
To bend her close, as she is sleeping;
to watch her from her dream awaken
into morning’s evanescent beauty;
to suffer her up into the heart
of warmth, into these arms’ embrace.

Thus, in the Musée Rodin: that embrace
unrequited, that interdicted kiss,
incised and polished, those hearts
enmarbled in a frieze of sleeping,
as if in that purgatorial beauty
they are from a spell still unawakened.

August sculptor, in us you awaken
glimpses of remembrance, when we embraced
such canticles and myths – the frail beauty
of childhood, a mother’s fragile kiss
in the cradle as we are sleeping –
revenance from a chiselled heart.

There they are, in the second circle’s heart,
that dolorous hostelry of awakened
misery. Motionless as if sleeping,
arms ellipsed in an arrested embrace,
eyes mute of all light, lips parted to kiss,
souls at the precipice of beauty.

Camille, Rosamond, Aurora, la belle
au bois dormant, Francesca, the heart
of Guinevere, awaiting a kiss
from one who is himself unawakened,
caught in each other’s eternal embrace,
together waiting, longing, sleeping –

Dreaming, perchance, of when this sleeping
unfastens its raiment of beauty,
subjugates reason to this embrace,
lets love conduct them both unto one heart,
stirring flesh into a pliant awakening.
Your eyes, your face, your lips, your kiss

Stir now this beauteous world from sleeping.
From dissolution’s heart, from night’s embrace
let us awaken, thus – the kiss.

Hydrogen

2010-10-15T19:37:00.021-04:00

LZ-129, 97 aboard. Piercing God's
flood of clouds like humanity’s
ark, its shadow engraves the water,
diffracting its wake. Air-
ship of dreams, traversing earth,
skimming the sun's face of fire.

Ailerons, tempered by fire,
lay a course across the heavens,
an icarian defiance against earth's
mighty pull. And we mortals,
suffered thus to soar through air,
to bridge this abyss of water.

'H' – For an instant the waters
reflect an elemental symbol. Engines fire
a final approach to Lakehurst Naval Air;
then the full emblazon, as if the Lord’s
hand writ the tablature of human
frailty, 'HINDENBURG', on earth.

Near moored, to be winched to earth;
bow-trimmed, even-keeled by water
ballast. Suddenly, what no one
expected, explosion, fire –
"Starboard! Aft!" – a fury, act of Fate,
hydrogen flames engulfing air.

The bow rips, exposing to air
a frail skeleton, tilting to earth,
flinging passengers into Providence.
Dreams dissemble into ash; water
sublimates into fire;
we watch, helpless to a soul.

"Crashing to the ground... oh, the humanity!"
We surge screaming to the wreck, air
strangled with smoke, dreams a fire-
chalked silhouette across the earth.
And faith unravels like a contrail over water:
Nearer my God, nearer my God -

All around, burnt air, scorched earth,
untethered fire; so, this vale of water,
this coil of man - Nearer to thee my God.

Panther

2010-09-25T08:25:00.009-04:00

Panthers cover a lot of sins - the names
of past lovers, stray associations,
a misspelled vulgar Latin epithet
pointed out by a former colleague whose
erudition earned him two knocked-out teeth
and a bruise that spread over two days to
his cheek, like a purple Rorschach
                                                                 tattoo.
Too many of my days are spent this way,
and more than enough of my nights, poring
over the mistakes of some half-strung-out
druggie thinking of calling himself an
artist, or the malapropisms of
a biker's slurred instructions, insisting
that on his chest he wants the word
                                                                 MATHER.
Thus in my dreams a silent panther roams,
black ink liberated from my needles,
stalking the arboreal shadows of my
past life, seeking the broken, the infirm,
the scandalous, the vague, the forbidden,
devouring unforgotten history,
taking it all in its abysmal
                                                                 maw.

A Song of Us

2010-09-23T22:53:00.004-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

(A penny arcade show, a child’s flip book, a puppet play)

In the northern Michinoku
Is the town of Nihonmatsu,

In this village is a building
Made of brick as red as wine.

One day from this fermented dream
A girl, a spirit of wine, takes flight,

Finds her way to these unworthy
Waiting arms at Kichijoji.

Fire, fire, fire! Kichijoji’s burning!
Fire, fire, fire! How this heart is burning!

And all the Abukama river’s
Flow can never douse these flames.

Water and fire, you and I,
Our wine, our love, our nursery rhyme.

A Child's Sky

2010-09-12T17:07:00.007-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

That isn’t sky in Tokyo, you tell me –
How you long to see real sky.

I look up, surprised.
There, beyond the cherry leaves,
In the pale morning overcast,
Is the sky I’ve always known.

But your eyes have a faraway look.

There, where every day the sky is blue, you say –
Gazing in the direction of Mount Adatara –
There’s the real sky.

Wistful, your words. As if you were
A child again.

Heart of Night

2010-09-09T23:28:00.007-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Moon in July,
See it, there above the poplars, luminous as a fever.

The air trembles with the scent of cyclamen,
Gentle as the trembling
Of your lips as you cry.

These woods, this path, the grass, that distant village,
All cast with desolation, misted
In a sigh irresolute,
A breath visible in the cold.

Side by side we make our way,
Hands clasped, across this darkened landscape.
Around us, fiendish ghosts frail spirits imbibe.
The sound of the night’s last train
Reverberates on distant rails, mocking destiny
Like the shuddering of a soul.

Your cotton sash dabs your perspiration;
Stoic martyr, in silence you suffer all.

Oh heart, my heart
Arise my heart
Arise oh heart

What can it mean? To seek deliverance
From this torment, and yet, sweet torment,
To be unable to tear away.

Oh heart, my heart
Arise from your infirm bed,
Arise from your hallucinogenic dream.

But the eye offends, sees only
Bedlam, madness

Like this moon in July,
There above the poplars, luminous as a fever,
Like a lingering affliction.

Oh heart, my heart
Lain in the verdure of your glass house
As if by a scorpion etherized,
Beautiful, but as if asleep.

Oh heart, my heart
How to cry out?
Now that silence has dissembled into night.

Two By Night

2010-09-05T01:08:00.010-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

The end, when it comes for us, will be by famine:
The night rained soft this sleet-rune divination on the snow.

Undaunted, you hold fast your medieval resolution:
Not famine, no; you’d rather be consumed by fire.

Silently, we listen for the rain’s riposte.
The wind rises, scrawling rose-branch portents on the glass.

Supper

2010-08-28T02:10:00.011-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

In a rainstorm,
Soaked to the bone.

I buy a packet of rice,
For 24 sen and 5 rin,
5 dried fish,
A pickled radish,
Red pickled ginger,
Fresh eggs,
Seaweed dried in steel-flat sheets,
Fried fish balls,
And salted bonito.

We boil water for tea,
Bolt down supper, famished.

Outside the storm rages into monsoon,
Beating at the roof tiles;
The whole house rattles to the bone.

Our hunger, unbounded,
Is bred, too, in the bone; and thus we sup
Until our souls are full to brimming,
Until, hands clasped, we find
Our hearts in fervor steeped:
And we pray

May we find fullness in the smallest things
May we let light shine abundant on every detail
May we allow our lives to always be overflowing
And may we always be full

Thus, our communion convenes
A power more formidable than the storm,
Stirring in us this mysterious
Sacrament of flesh. Each to each,
We consecrate our bodies,
Phosphorescent in rain.

This pauper's supper,
When night falls, our sustenance.

To a Woman Now Gone

2010-08-25T23:21:00.006-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

Sparrows tap at the window glass, and I stir.
Beside me your gloxinia blossoms, as if you were here.

And all my senses suddenly awaken to a morning breeze
Wafting in at 5 a.m. with your fragrant ease.

White sheets flung off, I stretch my arms in the light,
In this morning sunshine that is your smile.

Your whisper in me asks, how will this day be unfolding?
You stand and watch me, all-seeing, all-knowing.

As if I have become a child;
As if you have become a mother, mine.

Here still, here still.
You have become everything, what moves, what fills.

And though I am the least worthy of your grace,
Here I am – by you surrounded, enfolded, embraced.

To a Woman

2010-08-11T13:19:00.014-04:00

after Kotaro Takamura

I can’t bear this,
The thought of you
Leaving me.

Unnatural and fathomless,
Like a fruit before the flower,
Like a flower before the seed,
Like a spring after the summer.

I break down
When I think of you,
Your bohemian calligraphy
To such a conservative consort
Betrothed.

You!
Who can be as timorous as a nestling, and yet
As headstrong as a hurricane!

I can’t bear this,
The thought of you
Going away.

How can you do this so easily?
How can you – how shall I say this –
Sell yourself this way?
To go from your singular existence,
To espouse the prosaic?
To resign yourself to him?
To absent reason?
Unforgivable,
Like a Titian
In a rummage sale
At Tsurumaki.

Alone. Destitute.
With what words to express my heart?
This bouquet of gloxinia,
A gift from you, wasting away now
As I, abandoned, waste away.
As a bird traces its migrant path
Across the sky, to disappear.
This sadness overwhelms, desperate.
This empty solitude burns.

Not love.
Bless me,
It is all wrong, wrong,
Yet I don’t know
How to make it right.

To be betrothed.
To be another’s.

I can’t bear this,
The thought of you.
Gone.

Moon, River

2010-08-06T11:58:00.000-04:00

Vastness of sky;
Far river, vastness, sky;
Fragile the evening mist across the sky,
Across this fading sky.

Pale moon and stars;
Wide river, moon and stars;
Fragile the night, of shattered glass the stars.
Promises, lies.

Rain, bitter wind;
Cold river, bitter wind;
Fragile the cloud that scatters with the wind
Across the fading sky.

Your hand in mine;
Moon, river, your hand, mine;
Fragile the binding around your heart and mine.
Promises, lies.

Time and regrets;
Slow river, time, regrets;
Fragile the light that flares its last regrets
Across the fading sky.

Pale moon and stars;
Dark river, moon and stars;
Fragile the night, of shattered glass the stars.
Promises, lies.

Avolare

2010-07-11T15:21:00.004-04:00

The last time that this wind touched ground
it was Asia. Arms stretched, I fly
lost in the cliff-spray, ocean-sound.

The last time that this wind touched ground
its verdigris dreams stirred, coast-bound;
now cobalt blue, verging on sky.

The last time that this wind touched ground
it was Asia. Arms stretched, I fly.

Wellspring

2010-07-10T01:04:00.002-04:00

Wellspring of life, the earth's fuse
sputters into a fraying of leaves,
oak, birch, maple, juniper, pine,
strung out like Roman candles

an explosion of light

And suddenly the wind stirs this
palette of foliage into the landscape's
dream: a verdant collage,
green, orange, green, brown, yellow, green.

Southwester

2010-07-07T07:41:00.003-04:00

Wind steady across my face,
and the sky stretched out in clouds
like a billowing line:

when all at once the heavens broke,
and from the lines our hands pulled down
a sudden rainbow

shirts and wraps and drapes and shawls
caught up from sunlight
into sunlight into rain.

.....

And on the 48th Day Awoke the Buddha

2010-06-23T22:20:00.002-04:00

He does not know how long this sleep will last.
The milk porridge that the young girl offered
before his descent into dreaming, he

digests slowly, dissembling molecule
by deliberate molecule life’s frail,
unravelling essence. Flesh hesitates,

after 47 days of fast, weakened,
ready to be shorn off in his spirit’s
expedition. Beneath arid fig tree,

the journey swerves between immolation
and indulgence, asceticism and
desire – and even the heart, exhausted,

falters, not knowing what waits just within
sight, just within reach, just within his grasp.
.....

Guernica

2010-06-20T22:46:00.004-04:00

That night, in Paris, when the news came that
they had bombed the village, you kept waking
from sleep. In one dream I heard you call out
‘Maya, Maya,’ your mistress’ daughter.
Across from you I lay barren, afraid to breathe.

Next morning, the soul that just yesterday
wept was quiet, charcoal in hand, as you
tried to corral in the vast cold room the last
nuance of the night’s dream into a
silhouette of form, reshaping your nightmare:

Underneath the condor’s swirling legion,
the bull’s retreat, the stallion’s agony,
the screaming of the sixteen hundred men
and women and children, a market day
turned into fire, a holocaust of innocents.

Once you stopped, watching me. You strode over,
cut a swatch of my hair, fixed it onto
a sketch, as a collage; then fell to work again.
Three hundred drawings, and every drawing
a dream, and every dream another death.

Finally, on the fifteenth day, you stretched
your mural’s canvas, twelve feet by twenty-six,
slant-braced to fit under the studio ceiling.
There, on that expanse, you found a way
to give voice to those unspoken horrors:

The woman with a dead child in her arms;
the man engulfed in flames; the subjugated
bull; stigmata on a soldier’s open palm;
a javelin in a writhing horse; daggers and fire;
and the lightbulb’s bale, unblinking stare.

From across the room I aimed my camera
at you, my sniper’s rifle, counting each shot
with your every stroke – color against white,
politics against art, anger against tears, as you
waged across the canvas your uncivil war.
.....

Flags for David Judah: The International Code

2010-06-18T22:20:00.003-04:00

In flag-hoist, in international code,
they have pennants for each single letter:
stripes, fields, squares of red, blue, yellow, and white
to cut through mist and distance between ships.

The code has pennants for numbers and signs;
and a syntax to string flags, letter for
word, so in peril, one might say, “My ship
is on fire, can you take my men on board?”

But there is no vocabulary, no
sequence of symbol or colour, to say,
“When you passed, you left a space in this world,
as wide and deep as the Labrador Sea.”

Practiced mariners can describe the state
of the ocean in three flags, ten degrees
of roughness, depicting waves of up to
forty-five feet; and they can speak about

VHF radiotelephony, and
foam fire extinguishers, and nuclear
incidents. But for your memory there is
no ensign, no pennant, no semaphore.

And so we raise this flag for you, voyager,
selector, siromani, ‘need for ship’,
in a rearranged alphabet, spanning
Y and Z, ‘the wind’, ‘to communicate’:

Hoisted full-mast in its constellation
of flags, against the billowing sails, as
your spirit rounds the horn of Africa
at the helm of the Flora S. Nickerson.
.....

Fire Down on the Labrador

2010-06-15T23:12:00.002-04:00

Awash on the lifeboats, we cling to oars
and pull away from the ship, toward shore.

Not far, the subtle conflagration spreads
its wretched treachery across the deck,

touching off the veined sinew of the nets,
devouring canvas, timber, lies, regrets,

sieving memory from desire, turning
sackcloth to ashes, our whole world burning.

Prayers cannot salve our desperate flight,
drifting into the maw of endless night.

Unmoved, the sea around our struggle swirls
in its unfinished current, the blue world

untethers icebergs in its patient stream,
continues in its deep cetacean dream.
.....

Outport Relics

2010-06-08T00:46:00.002-04:00

Like an outspread net torn from its anchors,
from time to time the memory falters,
releasing shard by shard a sheltered thought,

a shade, a fingered relic, remembrance
slipping between the layers of the strands.
Each faltering rush of wave, each feathered spray

of salt breaking from the icy pewter
of the night, each driven silence. The hand
pauses from its obligations, wavers

between what takes and is taken, between
stillness and storm, between hate and desire,
like a promise, a whisper between waves,

forever lost, forever silenced, borne
away from the last outport of our hearts.
.....

Sounding Whale

2010-06-02T22:49:00.004-04:00

One last breath, and then the giant lunges
forward, its spine arched like a tremulous
spring, flinging free from the water its tail,
then drops straight down into its element

Like a projectile over Hiroshima.

Across the crescent of its heavy tail
the waters stream in a cascade of white,
blue, silver, black, a thunderstorm unleashed
at the aqueous surface of the earth

Fallout from an apocalyptic cloud.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet
into the depths, driving before its wake
a ponderous shockwave, billowing fire

Engulfing whole the deep crustacean dark.
.....

Lone Mummer Approaching

2010-05-30T22:51:00.006-04:00

Twelfth night, dead of winter. Across the reach
a stranger crosses, illuminating
his path with a dim pentacle of flame.

For a moment the wind flings back his veil;
but we cannot make out his face, shadowed
in the blackness, like an unnamed secret.

In the houses beside ours, the lamps are
darkened, the shutters closed, the curtains drawn
against this portentous visitation.

Midwinter stranger, approaching with a
measured stride, oblivious to the night,
to all except your studied resolution:

Pass on, let your shadow darken other
doors, spare this heart your cold epiphany.
.....

Haven

2010-05-27T02:52:00.005-04:00

At times you would come and stand here, eyes closed,
not speaking, facing the sea. Above you,
the sky would unfold its dark rorschach of
clouds, until the storm washed away the stain.

At such times the wind would barter silence
with the plummet of great wings sheltering
from the sea squall, the sadness creeping in
and out with the wave, insistent as rain.

And now only the granite will recall
what you would have forgotten: looking up,
when you would find yourself suddenly there
at the edge, stumbling like a ghost unchained:

Wandering in the spray, never where you’d been,
never where you'd thought that you would be.
.....

Spirit Departing

2010-05-25T22:45:00.002-04:00

Gone, all of them gone. He alone is left,
the last of the sealing expedition.

Under the dim light of the crescent moon,
he decides to settle there, on the ice.

Hope is a phantom limb, amputated,
lost, nonexistent, only felt as if

it were real, when he closes his eyes.
Far off, the search party retreats back to

the ship, faces cast in the kerosene
lamplight. Night pulls its starry coverlet

across the frozen landscape’s face.
Falling into sleep, he exhales his dreams.

They gather, swirl above him, drift and fade,
a hesitant secret, an epitaph.
.....

Bragg's Island

2010-05-22T19:50:00.002-04:00

7:15 pm. Outside, a squall
buffets our rough windmill, sending the vanes
whirling in a tight blur, enough to charge

the circuit to a single yellow bulb,
warm its filament, here inside the store.

7:20 pm. Our neighbours
from the other island step in the front,
press closed the timber door against the wind.

Saturday evening’s last visit, before
church and Sunday rest, before the close.

7:55 pm, surveying
the offerings on our tables and shelves –
gloves, boots, cloth, thread, molasses, flour, salt –

by the north wind’s amber incandescence.
.....

Fallen Mummer on Brookfield Marsh

2010-05-18T21:53:00.005-04:00

If I die, this is the way it should be:
surrounded by those I love, who love me.

Not wandering lost among the ice floes
like a hunter, stumbling as the storm grows

stronger. Not adrift in the Labrador,
on a wayward schooner, hull ripped, sails torn

by iceberg caprice. But warm; attended
by a sainted entourage, befriended

and familial; comforted by Yuletide
rhymes and songs; in kindness wrapped and quilted.

The wind flutters our veils like angel wings.
This starry sky deep consolation brings.

Away your tears, for I die not alone;
but stay till death’s sled comes to whisk me home.
.....

Molly Glover on Bragg's Island

2010-05-16T22:38:00.002-04:00

Your hair, so carefully combed and severe
in its familiar cut, is shale grey now;
and when you lift your cup from its saucer,
your fingers, ever so slightly, tremble.

And in a drawer is a crystal shard,
picked up that fearful day you ran out of
words to say, took up a sturdy broom,
went through the house, shattered all the windows.

Some days it feels like your whole life is glass.
But if by chance the sunlight prisms in,
lose yourself in your springtime, run again
the island path to the top of the hill.

There, pull the ribbon from your hair, at last,
and let it flow out: dark, long, beautiful.
.....

March Kite Off Shore

2010-05-12T22:40:00.002-04:00

When I was young, simple things found brilliance
through my father’s patient alchemy. Thus:

Two wooden skewers tied into a cross,
notched and edged with wood strips into a frame.

Thin brown paper from the grocer’s, unwrapped
from a parcel of salt beef, measured, cut.

Edges folded, pasted over the frame
with a glue mixed from flour and water.

Half-hitches tying a string bridle to
the spar, lark’s head knot to the flying line.

Coloured pages from gran’s old magazines,
fanned into ribbons, strung out as a tail.

And last, a soaring March wind, transmuting
these hopes, these gossamer dreams, into flight.
.....

Black Rock Light

2010-05-07T20:34:00.003-04:00

The lighthouse beam encircles back and strobes
against the crystal of the iceberg’s mass,
like a cinema projector running

the night’s feature reel. Far off, the storm clouds
curtain off the darkened stage, the night sky
hues to indigo, and the vapour flames

of stars begin to quiver, waver,
flicker into light. And we are silent
at the splendour of this shattered vista,

unworthy to do anything but breathe
a resolute prayer. The beacon turns;
as our rapt vessel drifts along, the freeze

frame of the iceberg ignites and lingers,
captured in the daguerreotype of dream.
.....

Man Warning Two Boys

2010-04-25T15:25:00.006-04:00

Mid-thaw, and the ice off Trinity Bay
shrugs off winter in widening rivulets.

The fissured spring beckons the unwary,
the bold, the foolish, to hopscotch across

the unfettered rafts of ice. Boys. As I
was long ago, following my brother

in a show-off game of tag, a touch and
run across the bay. And then it happened,

the edge dissolving underneath his feet,
three floes ahead of me. I yelled and ran,

skimming the snow towards his flailing arms.
The last I knew was him warning me back,

before he disappeared into the calm.
Mid-thaw, in the ice off Trinity Bay.
.....

Hauling Job Sturge's House

2010-04-23T20:19:00.003-04:00

The structure loosed from its foundation stones,
roped and pulleyed to an anchor-point
away from the crumbling cliffside – we pull.

From here to the still centre of the earth,
three thousand nine hundred and sixty-three
miles, and all that volume of igneous,

metamorphic, sedimentary rock,
that mantle of iron magma, that fist
of molten ore – against all that, we pull.

The cables stretch and groan, serrating our
resolve, our heaving shoulders, blistered hands,
in a tug-of-war against gravity –

Until we feel it give, until the earth
falters, lets slip its tether – and we pull.
.....

Down on the Labrador: Towing the Nickerson

2010-04-22T21:56:00.004-04:00

I have towed my father’s schooner further
than any vessel has ever been pulled:

two thousand, one hundred and twenty-nine
kilometres, to where my spirit lies

exhausted, pining like an orphaned child
for a half-remembered home, far away.

And I have towed icebergs, shoals of them, from
where my grandfather sailed, in waters deep

as the waters of creation; and whales
more ponderous than any edifice

of man’s design or art. Towed here by my
inconsequential heart, encircling solace

like a familiar harbour, flinging deep
in wave-tossed life these anchors for my soul.
.....

The River-Merchant's Wife: An Answer

2010-04-18T02:23:00.006-04:00

I have revisited my parents’ house in Chokan,
where we played before we were married.
You would still recognize it, the same
long-stemmed vines intertwining the front gate,
budding with flowers. So bashful then!
I tried to make you laugh, striding with stilts
and plucking blue plums to juggle
eight feet in the air. I watched
as your lips struggled with your eyes.

And I have drifted by the look-out rock,
where we pledged a thousand times
that we would grow together old, never look back.
Weathered now, where your sandals have filed
a melancholy pattern on its face.

I have tried to speak to you
in your dreams; but yours are always
the same: A big storm shakes
through the woods of Pa Ling,
tearing branches and leaves,
turning the whole world black.

I call you, but the wind drowns out
my voice. And when you wake up,
shivering, I am invisible, your eyes
look past me at the moon.

On the walkway, outside,
the mosses have taken the steps now.

And so I flow with the wind,
whirling with each western gust,
lifting the hair from your face as you
search the horizon toward Hsiang Tan.

And I flow with the river,
swirling with the current, until I reach you,
press against the soft skin of your feet,
as you wait for me, ankle-deep
in the waters past Cho-fu-Sa.
.....

How to Sharpen a Knife

2010-04-14T23:51:00.018-04:00

Your metaphor is your whetstone; choose well.
Perhaps a swallow, a comet, a bell,

an amethyst, the moon. Wet it with tears,
a typhoon, the amber sap wrung from fears.

Lay one side of the blade, dull edge against stone,
and hone it thus, hard, as though against bone.

In one direction only; back and forth,
and the metal splays rough, loses its worth.

Now the other side, slow easy strokes, same
direction, wide edge to the point of pain.

Tendered thus, when you thrust the sharpened
blade between unwary ribs, it should rend

as if through parchment, shearing burnished art
past muscle, sinew, deep into the heart.
.....

Prelude to a Kiss

2010-04-10T02:15:00.004-04:00

Some say that blood is thicker than water.
Some say that water can turn into wine.
You think nothing can come in between us.
The truth is blood can be sweeter than wine.
.....

Tango Desolado

2010-04-06T20:16:00.004-04:00

I am making love to the ghost of you,
blindfolded by the gauze of your pillow

instead of meeting the gaze of your eyes,
hands clutching myself instead of your thighs,

crying out your name and hearing only
silence. I am embracing history,

what I can conjure of our moments past,
the length and breadth of you that could not last.

I pull to myself the absence of your hips,
impale these sheets as if they were your lips.

Oh that I could breathe again your breath; instead,
this fragile passion’s one more little death.

My heart, or what is left, remains but true:
I am making love to the ghost of you.

Juggler

2010-04-02T00:33:00.000-04:00

What if Wednesdays came before Mondays?
Or Tuesdays after Saturdays?
Would February have two days more
if placed between August and July?
And who would complain if the sun
went around the earth
instead of standing still?

I am tired of lingering over
too many unquestioning sunsets,
poles and morning stars that rise
at some appointed time or place,
and rivers that insist
on running to the sea.

I want the summer where the fall should be,
the sun stopped short as if it brought to mind
some winter or uncertain spring it left behind.

Let me have the savor of strangeness:
peacocks and watermelons and oranges and spring,
giraffes spread out on spindly legs,
a sudden Africa sprung out and rising
like a sudden continent out of the sea,
brimming with amethyst, topaz, amber,
brilliance sharp and stinging as an uncut stone;
broadleaf, evergreen, untroughed waters
plunging upwards to be caught
into a sudden white and crystal yearning,
bursting here and there like morning
flecked with rust and green;
the spring and autumn tossed like leaves
into a crisply seasoned salad of our days,
the unchilled winter's sparkling flare
like a brandied raisin's ember,
and spread across the mouth the August tang
of rind peeled back from off the fruit,
and summer falling into slices
into October's bowl.

How I would give this day
for the uncertain lingering of an afternoon
that never ends, a Thursday
skipping across September's ripples
like a stone flung gently out
across the water's edge...

The captured breath,
oranges and hands, a snowfall in July,
a whirl of leaves caught headlong
in a February gust, and morning
melting into stars - all the world
turned upside down into a spinning,
clear, magnificent madness
risen from this Magellan heart.
.....

Ode to Dawn

2010-03-31T01:14:00.002-04:00

Gold anklebone cups,
brazen straps interlacing
from the edge of her calves
down to her heels – just now
gold-sandaled dawn flings
back night’s changing-room
curtain, sweeps out to
take a mirrored self-
appraisal, takes a
half-turn in, and
vogues.

Ensconced in such finery, such
aggrandizement, how fashionable
the doorkeeper’s feet are; seven
armlengths long, and seven
fathoms deep, the
bienséance
lingers.

Clutching close her diaphanous
handbag of sky, merino-wool
scarf of clouds, she hesitates –
but all is to be dared, because
even a person of poverty, a
plebeian, could not resist
the entreaty of
this patrician
season.

If not, winter will come like a spartan,
seasonal critic, sweep away
exuberance, like a flame.

Thus the alchemy of accessorizing
her morning dress, the one with
wisteria screened above her waist,
the one with violets in her lap, a
floral boisterousness, yet no more
than the bird with piercing voice
that calls chirping from the rosewood,
that sweetbitter unmanageable
creature who steals in when
our hearts are threadbare,
and unexpectant.

Sudden dawn, you burn me
with last season’s fading color,
this vanity’s gaudy fair;
but I to you, of a white goat-
skin shoulder-slung
silver-buckled
carryall,
sing.
.....

Status Updates

2010-03-19T19:10:00.011-04:00

is listening to Blog Talk Radio
is just finishing a letter to you

still likes Titanic more than Avatar
hates the photo on her hospital card

finally got to update her Tumblr
is checking out her CAT and NMR

became a fan of Flo and the Machine
thinks she understands what her Rx means

joined a Raymond Carver discussion group
won’t get to return that library book

can’t edit her last poem on Posterous
is trying to find order in chaos

got caught doing 50 in a school zone
tweeted her sister but no one was home

tore up her ticket, tossed it in the trash
is walking on, walking on broken glass

thinks nothing beats a good tub bath for warm
isn’t going To Write Love On Her Arms

can’t find her cell, don't bother to call her
likes the red on the edge of the razor

The Way the World Ends

2010-03-12T09:03:00.007-05:00

The world will come to an end tonight.
Not with comets slanting through the rafters,

Or tidal waves surging across the coast,
Or the braze of volcanoes, unsubmerged.

Not with the earth’s decimated orbit
Spiralling it into a strangled sun,

Not with the rush of spurious armies
Turning fallow the scope of mankind’s dreams.

But with the last of your voice, and your hand
Closing that door one final time: it ends.

And the night sky may as well be shattered,
And the sun never rise again, or set,

And the stars may as well burn to cinders,
For all the worth they are, when you are gone.
.....

Bend to This

2010-03-07T19:04:00.014-05:00

Bend to this, your wondrous lips;
To these, which desire your kiss;
This, which engenders our trembling limbs.

Your desire, our shared hearts' caress;
Wondrous, your trembling heart's entwining flames.
Lips kiss, limbs caress, flames embrace.
.....

Flight Into Egypt

2010-03-04T20:15:00.000-05:00

No, only one day. Can't figure it out.
They said they would be here three days at least.

Half-price for the stable, I'd said, paid in
advance. They seemed willing enough, no cause
for any complaint there. They left – early.
No sound from the dogs. Not a word to me.

There, where the straw is layered out onto
the ground, I expect that's where they slept.
Yes, there was a child, born last night, their first.

No, I didn’t bother, I've five children
of my own, and besides, I have an inn
full of guests to look after, rooms to check,
meals to see to. Others were curious enough.

What's that? No, no forwarding address.
.....

Tarmac

2010-03-02T18:19:00.001-05:00

As suddenly as it had begun,
it was over:
the waiting shattered,
their holds broken
on either side, the shout,
the crowded faces turning,
the hands and eyes
reaching for you,
fumbling at windows, portholes, doors,
straining, searching for you
as if you were not there -

In the terse space
of a single shot,
your life traversed a breath
across the stairs,
flinging us headlong into the abyss
of the long assassin years.
.....

Flying to Nantucket

2010-02-28T22:40:00.001-05:00

I have set out a course to Nantucket,
Seeking wind, with my wings out to tack it;
But my heart, it lies shattered
Off the hurricane-battered
South shore of the island Nantucket.

This July, I am following his flight,
With his wife and her sister, that night;
Past Point Judith, over water,
Along the path that was shorter,
And away from the coastline’s faint light.

Did he know what was going to come,
When the fog rose, embalming their sun?
Did she try to stay calm,
Put her hand on his arm,
When she knew day was finally done?

I have set out my course past Nantucket,
Forging north, with my compass to track it.
But my heart, it lies torn
Beneath waters forlorn,
As I fly, as I fly past Nantucket.
.....

Pulp Fiction

2010-02-27T01:10:00.001-05:00

You can call me by name - Mr. Black.
That's a Glock 17 up your back.
You're a reservoir cur,
Who'll address me as sir,
Cause I'm someone who don't give a jack.

You imagined that you were the boss.
And just who did you think you would cross?
Twenty kilos, we're tight;
But you've ended up light,
Now a kilo ain’t all that you’ve lost.

There's your natural place, on your knees.
Did you think you might run to police?
Read my clips, read my gun:
You can’t hide, you can’t run.
So you keep your mouth shut. Pretty please.

Boom boom pow, now your right ear’s a hole.
Just be glad I’ve left most of you whole.
Next time things are unclear
Finger that souvenir.
Drive the highway, have change for the toll.

So remember who’s watching your back;
I’m your friend, while our friendship’s on track.
Now get up, shake this hand,
It’s just business, my friend.
And remember the name – Mr. Black.
.....

Only Wait

2010-02-26T16:29:00.012-05:00

In the winter, you say you must go;
Now my heart feels as heavy as snow.
Though I say I will grieve,
If you must, take your leave,
Only wait till the springtime to go.

In the springtime, you say you must go;
As the stream breaks the ice dam to flow.
I will cherish you still,
But you fly, if you will,
Only wait till the summer to go.

In the summer, you say you must go;
As your dreams, like the grasses, must grow.
I would beg you to stay,
But if you must, away,
Only wait till the autumn to go.

In the autumn, you say you must go;
When the winds blow my hopes from the bough.
Wait till winter to go,
All I ask: Not now, no.
Only wait till the winter to go.
.....

Sustenance

2010-02-02T16:11:00.029-05:00

          Ingredients:
3 pounds pork shoulder, cubed to 1" size
1 cup orange juice, sour to bitter
1 hot green pepper, diced
1 large onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup sliced shallots
1 teaspoon each of salt, black pepper
thyme
          On the kitchen
television, the evening programming
brings in the latest from Port-au-Prince,
a different litany of figures: 7.0 magnitude;
245,000 buildings destroyed; over 160,000
dead; 3,000,000 injured and homeless. And
here, in my chef’s kitchen, I am preparing
griot,
          a calorically
sinful dish we’d fallen improbably
in love with, on a trip five years past.
Paired with riz djon-djon, an exquisite side
of rice sautéed in garlic and butter and
a type of tiny, aromatic mushroom
from the northern sweep of
Haiti.
          Everything
in a large pot, marinated overnight
in the refrigerator, so that the flavours
infuse the meat. Placing the pot
on the stove, I fill it with water until
it just covers all the mixture, then
bring things to a simmer.
45 minutes.
          But nothing
is the same anymore; not the Cathédrale
Notre-Dame de L'Assomption or its
lighthouse cupola where we made our
pledges; not Pétionville where you shared me
banana pésée under Antillean sunshine; not
l’Université d’Etat, where I rediscovered
love.
          Only to lose it.
I am tearing off the mushroom stems now, the
inedible parts, like the pieces of our lives
we cast off, bury, try to forget, hoping
that it leaves us more whole than we were
before, hoping that this time we will not
taste that caustic undertone, acerbic and
bitter.
          Like a dispassionate
oracle, the televised satellite stream
pronounces its dreadful aphorisms:
near the epicentre, an obliterated Léogâne;
Petit-Goâve destroyed; a Jacmel broken and
desolate; the holocaust of a Port-au-Prince
put asunder by the earth’s titanic
shrug.
          And I am consumed
by the immensity of it, drowned in the loss
of you, overwhelmed by the triage of Haiti,
my heart, and the demands of this griot, this
melange of memories that was to be my comfort
food, burning in oil, 1/2 cup of despair.
And suddenly I am texting, over and over,
Yele,
          Yele, Haiti, to the number
scrolling on the periphery of my vision,
sending out pieces of my soul to wander
among the dispossessed, to assuage
the hungry, trickling droplets to the
thirsty stream, trying in desperation
to stem this raging, inexhaustible
fire.
.....

A View from St. John's

2010-01-31T21:35:00.006-05:00

Barely two, we stand here watching
the yellow leaves press back against
the clear, flat palm of the window pane.
You turn your head, your small hand
clutches in mine like the first time
you came to visit,
and I had to ask your name.

The morning seemed so bright then.
I remember turning away
from the windows, and then, without warning,
Sister Maria's face above mine,
and her voice and hands about my shoulders
shaking me from sleep.

You were there.
Just down from the city, your eyes
wore a look of trains and stations
as real as the slow, steady bump
of the seat underneath you had been.
You hadn't changed before coming in,
and you explained you'd spilled
the chocolate on your dress
just after the stop at Baler.

I'd asked,
could I hold you?

Yes, just like that.

Five years younger, I suppose,
I wouldn't have given in so easily
to reason or to trains,
or mornings waking up forgetting now
the way we came, or why,
each village drifting back like leaves
into the night. I might have realized
that what I'd left behind
would have been enough.
.......................Somehow
I might have fought, and ended it,
somewhere else, not here,
but in ending stretched each year
as far as I could reach,
just as long as I could hold you,
just this way.

I remember you were six.
Suddenly eleven, sometimes
I don't know if
I've a right anymore
to hold on half as hard
as I do.

It doesn't matter.
You're here now.
And I promise I'll take you
wherever else I may go,
if you promise to show me Baler.
.....

Billows

2010-01-31T09:03:00.003-05:00

Your long hair billows out
behind you on the stairs,
like a bannister of light.
.....

The Seven Last Words

2010-01-18T21:28:00.013-05:00

Pater, dimitte illis, quia nesciunt, quid faciunt.

They hadn’t seen the wire, threading the grim
eyelet of the dead soldier’s left boot, so
when he shouted, it was too late, the pin
had pulled, and the incendiary blew.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

But not before he was able to throw
himself onto the I.E.D., sparing
his troop the shrapnel flash, the inferno
that tore his chest like a lover’s raging.

Mulier, ecce filius tuus.

And in the middle of his agony,
he heard his mother’s voice: and there he was,
five again, tumbled tricycle, skinned knee
being wrapped up in tenderness and gauze.

Sitio.

Pulled back, he felt the drought in his mouth salved
by the salt of his own blood, where his jaw
had ruptured, ripped. He felt himself hauled, shoved
across pavement, into the transport’s maw.

Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso.

His brother, lost to another army,
to another war, sat across the way,
squeezed his hand. Real enough, it seemed; quietly
saying, It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.

Consummatum est.

And it was. Around him he saw them – crushed,
pounding his chest, weeping, wiping his face –
but all there, saved by his instinctive rush
into the abyss, taking their place.

In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.

And his breathing slowed into an even
skate, his eyes closed, and his spirit rose high,
wings like a dreamed Chagall, through the open
window, past rooftops, into violet sky.
.....

Signs

2010-01-17T21:50:00.003-05:00

As I trace my way
across the sands, the waves
wash up against me like a
premonition.

Above me the clouds
inscribe a portentous
calligraphy.
.....