Blinking at Survival (2008)

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

- W.S. Merwin



The Gift



No longer of any use, intricate like
bugs or unbroken spores in amber
as silent forever as the glitter in

a paperweight. Another gift
like any other gift that aspired
to be taken, cherished and used.

In my mother’s school I poured
a Dixie cup’s worth of molten
plastic and stirred in the shimmery flakes

but had to be patient and wait an entire day
for it to cool and harden into a neat way
to express my love. Another time

I had gathered loose pieces of denim,
corduroy, polyester, even shag
carpet and stapled them all together

into a purse. Or a knife holder
I sawed, sanded and glued in wood-
shop. Or the polished bull’s horn,

coinciding in time with the story
of the Jersey Devil, at summer camp
by night. Our monitor had stood

beneath the lean-to’s light bulb
among boys in screen-lined bunks
and told us of its second bunk

height, hind cloven hooves; orphaned
in the Okinickin woods. Why it was condemned
to roam precisely in that land and what

it was looking for have gotten lost in time.
I could look into it though. The horns
curled ram-like back, and it breathed

clouds of heathen air, scuffing pine
needles in imaginably dark nights.
By day, stories like this remain;

like the moon, they slip behind
what we see and know;
transferred to the deep

sharkless waters we swim across
rushing up mossy ladders
to the champion glory of docks.

I would take my halfway polished
horn and keep at it, the gift to be,
perhaps connecting the two, or three,

in some sort of heroic gesture
transforming the rough grain
into its secret marbled sheen

brought to the surface in a warm
round of forest applause, a reflection
in the eyes of all living creatures;

a trophy I just as well gave myself
to hang a while from a leather cord
before it too got lost in the muck

no longer of any use, intricate like
bugs or unbroken spores in amber
as silent forever as the glitter.




An Entire Song



The door opened to the living
room. It was an orange, a bright

neon pumpkin orange front door.
Once open you could occasionally see

right through the house, through the giant
dining room window, the vibrating

feathers of a peacock in heat like
a slowly revolving radio dish signal.

It must’ve been its own reflection
that brought it down to the backyard.

Why do they have to scream from rooftops
if nature has already outdone itself?

Beats me. As you entered to the left,
behind the sofa on the floor,

I sat at the wheel of the stereo
searching for the beginning

of my favorite disco. Nothing
like an entire song, that first note

denoting, that first swoosh
hailing the three and a half, four

minutes of joy to come, however faint
the volume.

Last dance, last chance
for love

This is my last chance, for romance,
tonight

Maybe one was in the spring,
maybe the other on a winter night,

but I need to bring the two together.
Donna Summer, low on the radio

and the peacock that arrived one day
and stayed, screaming on the rooftop.




Saint Anthony Market Calendar



Eleven-forty in the morning, 1935 and the flash
lamp bursts light into nearly everyone’s eyes,
onto a collective white apron ignorance
they’ll be searing some seventy-three years
ahead to March in a future calendar; carcasses
on hooks, a cleaver stops short of a bone,
a boy is being wheeled away and two women
grin down at their bookkeeping , shielding
their eyes from the man behind the camera.
A door is open. The war’s not quite there;

it’s much further off in April, some twenty years
before, 1915. All these men rummaging
through heaps of books, their minds aloft
beneath their caps; a tram’s pulling itself north
along a network of electrical cables; La Africana
announces woolen dresses for ladies, La Esperanza
articles for mourning; an altar boy suddenly will
never blink at the man behind the bellows, beneath
the black cloth; it’s not really April, but it could be
with its Saint George of dragons and roses; and

today is a fine echo of paradise. The February
kids who sat in the sun have been replaced;
the apothecary’s jars of herbal remedies
replaced by giant high-definition honeybees.
I’m well over twice the age of the schoolboy
whose eyes meet mine nearly every morning
about five to eight; our similarity stronger
than our difference. What hasn’t changed remains,
the street’s northerly-southerly route and the reasons
why; November’s barely begun and this year’s new

stars and tinsel are already burning away at night.




Sitting On the Dock of the Bay
– Otis Redding



I never knew the guy
who sang Sitting On the Dock of the Bay

drowned before it ever came out.
I normally go right past

the obituaries. My newspaper will
occasionally highlight someone

who’s died or who’s been dead
for some time, for years, decades,

even centuries to the day.
But Otis just stood there in the doorway,

smiling. At me on my way to work.
What’s the date today? and the kids

repeat. Today is Monday, today is
Monday, the 10th (the th sounding like

a whopee cushion for they don’t use
ordinals in either Spanish or Catalan

at least not for the date), the 10th,
of December, of December,

two-thousand whatever,
two-thousand whatever,

goes the chant. You’re
flying north in your Beechcraft,

with your name on it. Your band is either
asleep or awake for there are no other options.

All musical instruments are in their cases.
Caps on pens and note pads in pockets.

Your trumpet player’s blinking at survival,
at breaking out of a sinking wreck

and thrashing across an ice-cold lake
any minute now.

The mere act of letting your mind go
– the warm cabin flush with

morning sun slanting
brief prisms,

crystallized corners
of airplane windows – was

the most natural thing to do.
You too had blinked at survival, don’t we

all, a flurry of seagulls criss-crossing
a blinding sun, sky-diving, snatching

at bits of bread thrown into the air, just
wasting time?




A School of Fish



It was officially over. The lingering
final evening’s light, a matter of hours
before turning off my own light and calling it

a summer. The sun had left my back, the hill’s
shadow already reaching the wet sand and I
was about to call it quits when a school of fish

had something to say. If I could say they were
sardines or minnows, or an even more precise fish
word in a language, would it give any deeper

sense to the way they shot and fanned
out of the sea, first one and then that second
display of electricity? They were the mackerels

in somebody else’s poem; mine were alive,
flashing a relayed message to me from the sun,
sitting there alone on that beach of ours,

a handful of naked men at the end of the season.
I will keep up my own search, nevertheless,
for words; sometimes the most exquisite

lifeguard is a poem. To put words to
the chemical equation between scales and feathers
helps; but when I leave you on the shore and go

swimming past the dip and rocky makeshift reef,
the nuder I am the more defenselessly charged
I feel diving below the warm swells, eyes closed.

When I bring my goggles I get a better look
at the attraction, coming face to face with a stranger
wordless world, pulled into the vastness and awe;

though even there things still pertain to this world.
A rusting pipeline’s presumably full of sewage.
The message went something like this: a flower

or a colorful plaid print dress on a little girl running
beneath a Shiite mosque dome of zigzagging
mirrors going in and out, in and out, of the water.

That is, of course, if I had actually been close
enough to appreciate such a display of the color
I trust is there. What I did see, despite the end

of that particular summer, was the electricity.
I walked home. I soon came to the conclusion
that I would never leave you.



Mutiny

I.

By the time we had passed Samarkand,
Shakrisabz, Bujara and Jhiva,
along the highway’s rusted circuitry

gesturing to lasso the southern rim
of the Kyzylkum desert; by the time
we had passed trillion-piece puzzles

rising again to heaven, attempts, to mythical
and not so mythical heights of success,
to reinvent themselves, mosques

and minarets of adobe and turquoise tile,
flames were fanning even greater heat
into the naked bleached sky, annihilating

the weeds and trash their keepers piled high.
This was the summer following 9/11.
My country, in the throes of its own

re-invention, was re-designing Afghanistan
next door and, as a consequence, the world
had declared holidays in any other religion.

In my mind I was trying to imagine what one
measly sentence in our guide book meant
by a ship cemetery. On the simplified map

west of Jhiva, a thinner broken gray line
–worse than the potholed one we’d been on
till then– went north. I would’ve walked straight

there if I had been alone; no guarantee of anything.
Hours, days, weeks if needed, into the immensity
of the Kyzylkum, to Moynaq, once the southernmost

village port on the now nearly completely dead
Aral Sea the Soviet Union had drained to irrigate
the cotton belt created in the state of Uzbekistan.

I would’ve walked there, hitched, probably let
anybody get me drunk, do with me whatever,
a wad of cash in my pocket; there are immensities

everywhere, but this one had all the ingredients,
or the utter lack of ingredients, for oblivion.
But there were two of us, I wasn’t alone

to wander and besides, the driver had been getting
crankier like a mule far from his barn the further
from turning around we got. By the time

we were within a day’s journey to Moynaq
and its ship cemetery, we decided to head back,
to Tashkent, and it was a good thing we did.


II.

A few hours into our journey and an hour outside
of Bujara, a bang and the thud-thud-thud
of a flat tire brought us to a halt.

That would’ve approximately been right
around when that thinner gray line started
to break up into dashes. The finger tapping

to music on behalf of our driver turned into
a thumb hitching him into town, sweating
and pissed off for, it turns out, that was the spare.

So what happens is the vague brownish
nothingness suddenly becomes specific.
Where before there was smear and blur,

alarm to some degree registers in locusts
clinging to cracked sprigs, emiting enzymes
in their endeavor to survive the invasion,

giants proceeding to leave one of those metal
spaceships to inspect some failure in their transport.
Where before there was nowhere

to have tea, a tavern of sorts lies just ahead.
Some of those people whose lives were equally
vague become two young men just kicking

back at their job. Beneath the hot corrugated roof
we laughed at the little Uzbek or Russian
we spoke, broke bread and ate what they had.

They had names. The idea of a drained inland
sea for crops of cotton to dress the working
masses, turned into a radiant twenty-year-old

running barefoot in drenched underwear falling
down, playing fetch with a dog, going in and out
of the canal of dirty water still flowing.

This is what rusts the circuitry. The water
we need to take dips in, the sugar in our tea,
the hours killing time in the middle of nowhere.



III.

In a village in the hills, far from the obvious
flat tires and broken mailboxes, some kids
showed us to a vast high golden ground;

something about Nature and Wilderness on one
of their T-shirts, Nike fading on another, the girl’s
lilac dress before the low sun and breeze,

the shiest in a brother’s hand-me-down once white
shirt billowing air-inflated muscles, and telephone poles
leading his turned face down into the valley.

The chosen billy-goat had its hind hooves in a noose
and Grandpa was stripping it of skin and fur.
The sharpened metal, the brown nova and urgent

message in the dying eye, the steaming blood
spilling onto the dirt. The flames in the earthen
oven. The shadows of the tree on the wall made

of tiny pebbles and dry grass caked in mud bricks.
Burnt freckled cheeks and Mom’s leathered hand
covering a full dentured laugh of Central Asian

gold. Broken bread, candy, warm goat and vodka.
A bicycle leaning against a collected world
of fogging glass and folded blankets.

That other immensity was there at its best
encompassing the outhouse, a beltway of stars
gesturing to lasso me in, unflinchingly.


IV.

By the time we had reached Tashkent
and its merchants paying off the privilege
to live there, its championship wrestlers

paying off the privilege to sport sunglasses
and platform-shoed, mini-skirted anorexic Lolitas
to the tune of till death we shall fuck,

and all the accordingly dressed Suny Muslims
kneeling before their poetic puzzles,
you had secretly been charting a new map.

We only had four days left. In four days we had
to be at the airport. We obviously didn’t want to
stay in Tashkent. Why not Kazakhstan? Now,

Kazakhstan is the ninth biggest country in the world.
Kazakhstan has three time zones. You don’t do
Kazakhstan in four days. Maybe just Turkistan.

If we manage to get a week-long visa at the embassy,
if we manage to cross the border and get a driver,
and if that driver is cool and willing to negotiate,

not only could we do the city of Turkistan,
its mosque and famous mausoleum, but also drive
one full day to and one full day back from

their own ship cemetery, amigo. The guide book,
it turns out, dedicated several sentences to this one.
Once the northernmost port on the Aral Sea,

Aralsk, Aral City, is today an eerie derelict industrial
hub that sand storms often and mercilessly assault.
By the time of WWII, the per capita income...

Maybe we didn’t see the ships in Moynaq
but apparently there were others out there,
and we were bound to see them.


V.

The “flames fanning even greater heat
into the bleached naked sky” image, “annihilating
the weeds and trash their keepers piled high”

came from Turkistan while visiting the mosque
and famous mausoleum. We swung by Shymkent
to spend the night and pick up the driver’s nephew

in the morning and it was a good thing
we did. Why? The ships (hand making waves)
in desert (hands clasped for little pillow) dead

(head tilted) dead (finger sliting our throats
then finger circling round and round the ear)
crazy how do you say crazy in Kazakh?

conversation came through the nephew
and besides, they could swap off driving.
The finger pointing to the horse, the cow,

soon trailed off as hours went by without either. Ships,
“catamarans”, dead, no horses, no cows, everything
dead. A dot ahead on the map’s thin gray line

meant the city of Qyzylorda. People live there,
lots, on the northern rim of the Kyzylkum.
Another dot north-west, Leninsk, Lenin City

near hidden Byakonur where cosmonauts
take off from. Russia rents the space station
from the Kazakh president, renting cheaper

than buying it from him. By the way, he was
in power back then and still is now, as was and is
the Uzbekistan one, the Turkmenistan one

and so on. The circuitry and the asphalt, two lines
promising to converge beyond The Steppes in Aralsk,
Aral City. The driver had calculated the mileage

and his money but not the monotony. Poor guy.
Shy, a real sweetheart. It was a good thing
we had picked up his nephew, my young siren.

Summer allows you to see things in what
is darkness at other times of the year. Children
already fed, running after metal hoops with a stick.

Lenin’s profile had been lifted from a wall
in the town square, the unmistakeable deadspace
and holes where it had once been bolted.



VI.

We weren’t quite there yet. By the time we had
had breakfast and gotton on the road
to the outskirts of Aralsk, by the time

we had taken a left hand turn on a dirt road
some fifty kilometers to the wind-swept village
which had anchored half a dozen ships

to its bay the day the earth finally wouldn’t let go
of their hulls, by the time a couple of windows
rattled and curtains were drawn, some pretty

sad cows turned to look, and some vultures were
flying figure-eights of morning surveillance
above the four of us walking due south

for longer than it seemed. The ships right
there yet not there, the flat sandy wrinkled bay
and we would glance at one another in the wind

crunching trillions and trillions of tiny shells
across the flat sandy wrinkled bay with the ships
still right there yet not quite and we would smile

for we were approaching the dead catamarans.
They were as determined as we were. And at last,
we touched the first and stood for a moment

in its shadow –one thing the rust hadn’t yet taken over,
bigger and more defined than it had ever been on water.
Mutiny isn’t just the rebellion of soldiers or sailors

but these glacial monuments of atoms. It isn’t just
soldiers or sailors abandoning the ship but the ship
slowly abandoning us, however buoyant

and permanent it all may seem. The American flag
on the driver’s T-shirt, the Soviet Union’s hammer
and sickle behind him in one of the photos,

rusted on the rusted side of a captain’s bridge.
Rust had taken over the entire fleet, from starboard
to larboard, from top to bottom, inside and out.

They were ribbed with steel girders, full of big fat
tubes and springs, cables, thinner sharper wires,
finger-sized screws in rings so tightly bolted.

I told the driver’s nephew take your clothes off.
Yes, everything. Sexy striptease sort of singsong
to my hands’ voluptuous curves in the air.

No, I was just joking okay your jeans no.
You famous in Europe famous in America
I coaxed him and proceeded to document

him in different places, different poses. Touching
one of the helms. Looking off into the distance.
No, no smile. His face was a sort of map

I like to think now. The heavy-lidded slanted
Mongolian eyes, the pock-marked acned, broad
sunburnt cheeks, the jet black hairs the wind

lifted, his bashfulness, his awkward eroticism: a map
to his place and time in this world, his knowledge
and ignorance. He will be my siren. I told him

to go into one particular ship, climb his way
to the deck and come and stand at the bow
no, no arms and just look straight ahead.




The Edge



The kite surf is up
in a flapping howling stitch

of dragon chartreuse,
kamikaze lime, ripping sky blue

apart. These tangles
of cord, harness and buckle

snap taut and light as tendons
and flicker the booming bright

and briny gale. Hands gripped
to the baton and running, they

slip their feet into the straps
of a polished board and razor

out upon this cellophane sea
and they’re up – gone off

the edge of the world not out
but up up for just a moment

enough to haul like major knots
and twist and turn – and man,

back down to this ocean going
on and on as if no kid could ever

look away, sitting ashore
with head too palsy to keep

looking upwards at the show.
My nephew is looking down

at Gumby and Pokey rubber
dolls trying to make them stand

up in the sand. I don’t know how
he has taken the kite surfers in

as his drool and wet smiling lips
seem more to do with the simple

novelty of another bright shiny day
and so many pictures. Maybe it is

a bit of everything. After all,
didn’t we all do what we could

with what we had, strapping
young and fit, snapping taut

at the edge of sunny days?




A Deal With the Sea Hag



Like tumbled bits of shattered
glass in the sea, glass in the ocean
goes back to where it came from.

They catch my eye even though
I’m too busy getting older
and make me wonder how

many I could collect in a day
if I just stopped, bent down
and picked up all the blues,

the greens, the mossy emerald
greens, and the browns’ richer
syrup than beer bottles had ever been.

The little mermaid can’t talk.
She had made a deal with the sea
hag to forfeit her siren song, the song

the prince sought far and wide to recover
for he nearly drowned one stormy night
and she saved him, pulling him ashore,

to a shore she would need legs
to walk on. I bank on the collective
understanding of six-year-olds

for tragic dimension, that drowning
is a possible end to all of this
and that, before then, we will fall

in love. Or, at least, I trust
they’ve seen the film; to reduce it
down to this play-acting to learn

this language. She whispers mute
I love you and he says
I’m looking for a little mermaid

and however dolled up she gets
and mouths I love you he says
I can’t hear you. Until he does. Or,

The Three Little Pigs, one they have
all seen or read in their own language
or somehow just know

enough to snarl and huff and puff
and laugh at the danger of your home
being blown to bits and getting eaten;

at Pinocchio for lying, Cinderella for shame.
They piece it all together, looking out
at this land of promises, villages

trembling in the warmth
of their first
blizzard.




Modern Dance



The times I took Michelle home
since she was a dancer in my piece,
The Story of Two People Together,

Alone. The last time I dropped her off
after the dress rehearsal, my little yellow
Toyota and the two of us and she’d be

going on and on about something tragic
before, during and after every red light
and then insisted that I come in to see

something about her dissertation.
Up till then I had methodically tried
to avoid her universe; I didn’t care

she was a freak, to a certain point
it was intriguing, and my tolerance
must’ve been intriguing for her,

she who was looking at a life sentence
of men shitting on her existence. Dogs
came yelping in wafts of old kitty litter

and what do you know, her entire family
was there, or rather here and there
from the sofa to the bathroom to the kitchen,

splashings of the essence of Michelle.
The Story of Two People Together, Alone
was compared to Einstein on the Beach

by my mom. Eight of us. I had what you
could say was one of the main parts, me
and a girl who could get up with her toes

bent backwards. At one point we were
all together in a sequence that suggested
a train until we broke up and everything

took on more asymmetrical choreography.
I saw Mike in a porno movie going at it
flipping through late night Spanish cable

years later. Carol, and her husband Paul,
joined a church, one of the liberal ones,
but a church, to give their child something

to talk about at school. A black girl whose
name I don’t remember. Phillip, big and gentle
and a lot more Einstein on the Beach than me.

Tracy, the Korean, I got into a Julio Iglesias
duet with; and Michelle was on the train too.
She took her glasses off for the show and let

her hair down. Totally into it, her fury
before the blurry grandstands, banging
her hands on the bright gymnasium floor

along with the rest, startling the Two
People Together, Alone from
a nightmare.

Her mom gave me a bowl of food. Pride
in her daughter turned down
the volume of a sitcom.

Who knows if she invoked me at night,
lights off, canned laughter and ammonia
creeping under the door; she showed me in

and handed me a spiral-bound copy of her
dissertation: The Life and Choreographies
of Agnes de Mille. “Agnes originally wanted

to be an actress and always had a love for acting,
but she was told she was ‘not pretty enough’.
It was then that she turned to dance.

Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, Carousel,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes...” I admit
I never read it, and I probably told her

I would write some day.




To the Boys

( for Eric, Malcolm and Phillip)


You weren’t Swedish. You didn’t even come
over much. You walked funny. You had a big
head, stupid hair, fat lips. You never helped me

cut confetti in the back room of the basement,
but it was our turn to lock the door. Big scraps
of shag and thick pile and corrugated rubber

lining formed the square arena of our game
beneath a shirtless Peter Frampton referee
back when a blow-job was just blowing

Fruit-of-the-Loom after-school specials away.
From the top of the grandstands on Saturdays
I could see the sole of my sister’s saddle shoes

down the bumblebee line of Charger pompoms
and a high school band of losers I had more
to do with than all of the quarterbacks hike-

hiking and passing long shots to other padded
grass-stained bleach commercial touchdowns,
my hand gripping fistfuls of newspaper confetti.

* * *

God you were gorgeous. With your rubber
tube and twisted copper belt creations Mars
was more witness to than any of us cashiers.

And on skates. Sweating, thirsty for carrot
juice and a shot of wheat grass, you rolled
into my line and into my life and assuredly

bought things I never charged you for. Maybe
it was the shrooms we steeped into the tea
we never drank but did like edemas, holding

in all the liquid we could. Michael Jackson did
moonwalk Brooke Shields at the Mister Heartbreak
concert and Laurie Anderson’s hair was totally on

fire. Maybe it was the tabs of acid we danced on
all night in our space accessories, or my trust in
you on wheels and the first early morning light

coming psychedelically down, the net beneath
the trapeze in a circus closed for rehearsal
when I finally released my grip to another’s.

* * *

To the hammerhead shark in the honey-
colored port and my name however fresh
and brief smeared the color of your lips.

To a tide I don’t remember even reaching
and giggles wrestling sand into the green
yarn of my worldliness. To a religion supposedly

out there churning out of minaret loudspeakers
the several times what we had lasted. Burning
urine a week later, the doctor and the penicillin.

The thick tar goo you rolled into the joints.
The way home from the port, the way to
the foaming edge of your adopted continent,

the sun that finally went away and the white
tender shark meat the gray rubber skin shed
curved atop a tray of sliced baked potatoes.




Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay

– Dylan Thomas


Death



1. In the wax museum of torture
and monstrosities, I add my own
explosion of light
to the four bulging glass eyes
of the double-headed man
tied to an operating table.
They’re pointed at where I am
supposed to witness the scene.
A doctor of sorts is sawing
him in two across the gut,
and not down between the heads
which might seem a more logical
and more humiliating way
to cut him in half, given
the nature of the museum.
The wax never fools me,
nor does the suggestion
that a double-headed man
is getting sawed in half,
albeit merely across the gut;
but something about glass eyes
is, how can I say,
uncanny?

2. Once in the pirate ship of taxidermy
I realize it isn’t a ship at all. A castaway,
weathered monkey nailed
to the deck, plastic cup for tips
glued in hand, rather welcomes
me into a converted trailer home.
A random kingdom lines shelves
where the kitchen and pantry had
been. Armadillos in Medieval armor,
baby alligators static in their endeavor
to get used to having such big mouths.
A fox I guess and a bandit raccoon
snarling gums at the light bulb.
A buck has been put back together.
If it hadn’t been mauled in life,
it has been now,
this collage of fur and cement
with some poles for tendons
keeping it all perked on the shag
in the middle of a wood-
paneled living
room.

3. One-hundred thousand cubic feet
of water per second charge over the Falls.
By the late 1800s, the Falls were seen
in the background of honeymoon
photographs. By the 1920s,
grooms and flapper-brides were
posing for theirs. Half the water
was diverted in the 1950s
with the advent of turbines,
the river bed leading to the Falls
was carved out, the banks
reshaped and the viewing
points rebuilt, the water
level raised, all in order
to keep up the appearance
of natural grandeur. The one
hundred thousand cubic feet
is about half the natural
flow.

4. A convention of nine-hundred and twenty
Red Hatters, fifty-year-old-plus
post-menopausal, single, married,
widowed women who wear
big red hats and purple
clothes, in the needed throes
of their self-importance,
form a two-tone rash of chatterbox
poppies in the Sheraton hotel lobby.
Fake fur and feathers, ostrich plumes,
tulle, sequins, bangles and beads.
Part of the whole thing is to be
ostentatious, over-the-top, kooky,
misbehave, pretending to be raunchy,
not going gentle into that good night,
but rather hooting it up, going out with
a bang. Is that what the poet meant?
Eyes all ablaze and happy. I put on
a hooded plastic poncho and take
a boat out into the mist...
The Maiden of the Mist, wondering
how all of this is only half and I’m
blinking right into it, so
powerful and loud.



Haven’t we wanted,
all along, to try on boundlessness
like mutable, starry clothes?

– Mark Doty




Flowers



It isn’t only Christ on the cross,
El Cristo de la Buena Muerte,
shadowed out in split seconds

upon the fortress wall I want
to remember. Did you see
the way flashes popped off

shadows of him, Him? Three, four
in the morning and the full moon.
The battlements. A sea of people

collected and quiet at the foot
of the ramparts and the rush
of silhouettes, black echoes of jets

the moment the eyes said
This is what we want
to remember.

I remember the flowers. The iris
purple rockets’ yellow flame
defying mountain storms.

The rash on my elbows and knees
because I wanted to look up at blood red
poppies, feel

the ever-so-slight crack
of dandelion milk
at my fingers’ will, the withered

roses and thorns above our heads,
one more than the year before
since the night we met.

Just the other day, far
from you, I went in to see
the wooden figure of Christ

where it’s been hundreds
of years. The man outside
said he was about to close.

When the head has fallen,
does that mean he’s a dead one?
Maybe he’s just thinking.

This morning, Monday
on the train, the road
in my book is still full

of ash. The father and son
are still alive for some reason
and the guy next to me

is reading the Bible.
A little one.
Once a year they take Christ out

upon a bed of irises. He’s just
one of many, “the one
of good death”. Early morning,

before the sun has a chance
to shine or swallows to fly,
a sea of people parts, whose eyes

take in a man on a cross
looking down, perhaps thinking
This is what I want to remember.




The Pedestrian Bridge



Maybe this time I’ll use just our bones and not
all those miscellaneous X-rays for my next photo

show, accidents I couldn’t recognize myself: hairline
fissures that meant as much to me as the dumpster

scratches on the plastic surface, an ankle,
lunar amid chiaroscuro where someone

had stepped wrong, ribs’ arc and grayer
amorphous clouds brewing cancers

or pneumonias that had coughed too long
next to a stranger in a different bed, a skull

that simply afforded me a field of texture
to put in front of stems and petals and light

sources with different colored cellophanes;
a flashlight banked on a couple of apples

and a blood-red sun in a bonsai forest
forgets and sets beyond anonymous pain.

It’s about time. We certainly have enough
X-rays ourselves sounding nearly thunder

flipped back and forth in front of the living
room lamp, halogen eclipsing our skeletons.

Your knee that became warlock to our lives
in dozens of full moons with different faces

standing up or banking their web-cams down
to your typing and my cankerous blind eye.

And it’s about time to take the decorative
onto more of a narrative. Lots of us slipping

into the ocean of forgetfulness. Snapshots,
or there, in the background of snapshots,

a glimpse of a private narrative: somebody
crossing a drizzled pedestrian bridge to his

or her winter’s work; thousands flocking
to the highest hill where antennas and Christ

had already strategically taken their spots
in fear of such seaquake tidal waves;

an old man and his plastic bag going home
where juvenile tornadoes practice to ransack

any dirt street of a cinderblock neighborhood.
In other words, stories that don’t stand a chance

next to Macchu Picchu. Some blurry pictures
taken from the second floor of a bus in Peru,

leaving the capital one Monday or Tuesday
or Wednesday morning, or creeping through

the meter-high asphalt cracks of a coastal town
the morning after mud-hay houses, businesses

and churches collapsed, or simply blowing exhaust
into the outskirts of nowhere. Your backbone,

the slight arch of gray rectangular bells above
your pelvis, could span its own cloudy morning

to give the rain a sense of order, the pedestrian
bridge and a river of cars; that I too was there

next to you, climbing the slow grade, neither
standing much of a chance but going forward.




Iguazu



It isn’t a money thing, the filming
of the boat ride we’re offered
as we reach the river bank
why I don’t want to possess it,
the ecstatic physicality: of us

there

on the left in the front two seats
going in and out of the falls.

Nothing mysterious about it,
we stand in line for a ticket and watch
others do what we’re about to do.

We’ve all been established,
a hand guiding us across the rising
and falling wooden plank, faces free

for the filming, all aboard and motors
gurgling the hum and then the vroom
through plastic seats, the expectant

visible difference in our body
language – mine, admitedly camp
thumbing up to the man in the seal

rubber suit and water-proof camera like
to an applause sign – That’s it, your face,

show me you’re alive – and I’m letting a sailor
howl clip the heaving maelstrom a second,

a third time into and under pure river
plummeting off a shelf heaven snatched out from

under; and you’re as stunned as I am – your body
language, more clenched up in orange life jacket
chunks of foam, black nylon straps and buckles,
pretty fed up already with the whole thing,
as thoroughly drenched as I am & I’m shouting
at you –

We don’t even see it, the filming;
I’m imagining what we look like: a couple
anonymous men in the front left two seats
in somebody’s 90 peso copy of the CD

– to look, to look right at where we are
not supposed to be, in thunder, a trick

The Rubber Man is playing on all of us,
to stick our heads out of a speeding train

and spit in the face of the executioner,
sequestered in a frenzied downwardness, corks

on the churning enzymes of a harpooned whale;
seconds after Delacroix painted the Medusa;
a great white’s barrelling void inhaling
the pure lard of a woman.
Deep down,

I really don’t give a shit, as you do,
to leave the boat soaking wet; covered
in mud might even make me feel closer
to submission. A glimpse: of myself,

before you,

tied beneath a table, legs spread,
a feeling,
gut warm fist
beating me off flat on my back is shook
up in there somewhere in how hard
and good and unable
to stop.

You pointed out the fire,
a hint of horizon, a hairline crack

the color of sun in the middle of the night
– They’re burning the winter fields, you said –

and this boat ride has turned into a bus;
my shoulder weighs your still heavy head

an anchor

in this, my own ray of halogen light:
I don’t want to see it all on TV.

I simply prefer to remember,
which is possession enough.




The Lion I Left Behind


We abandoned the plane, or it was evacuated,
because of a technical or mechanical problem
the details of which were never explained.

I understood technical but the Swedish girl
said they said mechanical and my French
is basically non-existent anyhow. So there

I was peeing again, Billie Holiday
piped-in ever-so coy to the airport
john where the X-ray inspector stood.

But before all that there was a lion,
and men being raised in neon pumpkin
suits to hang light bulbs at the top of ginko

trees at the center of a cobblestone square,
the center of concentric strands dangling
smaller light bulbs like a giant version

of real spider webs and sunlit droplets,
morning dew in city hall flower pots above
a river carrying other trees’ broken limbs.

And before that, just as I was imagining
a single priest giving mass to a single man,
a hand adorned the altar with a candle

from behind, and then another and another
until four candlesticks raised wax and wicks
flickering flames to the sound test glitches

of cathedral speakers, cataclysms in the furthest
corners of the naves and vacant confessionals.
Even before that, I had breakfast and a shower

and woke up alone in a hotel and my entire life
until then and steady nearly freezing drizzle
that finally seemed to give way to a ray of sun

slowly taking hold of the circus trailer;
the paws lain behind the bars, the defunct
camouflage of savannah chest and mane

arrested in this northern trap of Vikings,
but something kindling warm did seem
to infuse an ancient code the lion understood,

a swelling ray about a new day is upon
us, meat that will come to lazy yawns’
tongue and teeth. Maybe it was the uniform

or the urinal wall just high enough between
us, or Billie, that kept me from looking over
and down. The world below this particular flight

is a sea of darkness with a touch of helium blue, and
the lion I left behind
is roaring into the spotlight.




Swimmers



The water I dive into is still
full of the day’s original
equation.
Ghosts of mandarin and naval,
each with its tiny boo
hurrying to be
hushed at the surface.
Air scooped and clapped
and instantly confused
just needs the tug
lacing fingerprints
back into up
and open. Between breaths
and this
nova
on the other side of frosted
second floor glass
above the indoor pool, people
lose their edges
flapping black angel
wings
syncopated
to a hurricane of orange.

That’s one thing
that competes for a day’s
dosage of beauty. But the sun
has a tendency of going
away.

That’s when metallic blue
starts
to flicker till
it reaches an intensity
to carry on with what
we’re doing: swimming
laps at the top of this hill
above the city and sea
at the height of planes
landing,
in water still full
of the day’s original
equation. Some bodies,
on the flip-side of the equals
sign, banner in the competition
taking on the strong
contour of eels

and we spill out onto the deck
already breeched from underwater
language
and make our way
downstairs,
our tight panting
chests squeeze out of
the humid

lockers. And we’re free
to sit and wait in the warm
gurgling eucalyptus fog
for swimmers
to take the edge off
the day. Until
the equation is done,
or left undone, and I’m
home.




2001: A Space Odyssey



By now it’s dark already on the giant hill,
dark everywhere actually,
but we can sort of fake it down here
in the city. I bring you my face, the warmth
all sand-bagged in here somewhere
against the evening, chlorine
still on my lips. Escalators’ rubber rail
going round and round as we speak
up and down the steepest part;
you in the kitchen and me, hungry me,
putting on my pyjamas
and creams. I will never be forever
nor as beautiful as the naked statues.

By this time there’s a game show on TV,
on probably in a million homes;
the pretty hot boy-next-door host has a lot
more to do with the program’s popularity
than the intellectual pretext of alphabet
haloes around the contestants’ heads.
By the time it’s over we will have drunk
some 500,000 liters of wine.
That’s when the news comes on.

A 59 year-old man won’t reach 60,
in fact, he didn’t even reach today
since he was tired of artificially living
in hell. Can I kiss you, she said quietly
to his ear but they televised it and it
seems to have created a big fuss in the UK.
Of course you can.
Have a nice journey, she said.
I love you.
I love you so much, sweetheart.
And something about George W. Bush
ducking away from two shoes thrown at him
in a press conference in Baghdad.

It’s winter again. Around the weather
I’m standing at the sink, at the window,
in the tipsy, cozy confines of home,
no longer do I assume we’ll make love,
lost in my own private reverie; bubbles
lathering my hands in warm pine
gazing out to the giant dark hill,
its twinkling criss-crossed roads
and forest paths’ studded beauty,
Herculean, Achillean, Humanitarian,
just standing there despite time.

By the time I walk into the light above our door,
here at the top of this tall crumbling building,
green diode digits on the satellite receiver
silently click to 20:01... A Space Odyssey;

and the ape comes to me throwing a bone
in slow motion, into the sky, in the beginning
of a movie about what we once thought
the future might look like.




Men and horses are all shrouded in this mist.
Father Zeus, rescue these Achaean sons
from this fog, make the sky clear, let us see
with our own eyes. Since it gives you pleasure,
kill us, but do in the light of day.

– Homer, The Iliad


Furtive Wings


I.

The thickness of the fog would vary
so she went from high beams to low

for a while, and then from low to high;
each time she did this her left blinker

would brighten, and brighten, so even
I, reflexively, in the beginning, would

bank my own lever down though
there was no one to warn, hadn’t been

anyone for the last half an hour.
I didn’t make the connection,

the thickness of the fog, the changing
from high beams to low, or from low

to high for that matter, and an imminent
left we never took. It passed my mind

she might be lost, but that made no sense
for she was taking us home.


II.

The theater glowed cotton candy,
a nebula of rouge. The great Pavlovsky,

yes, Antonio, still alive, the very one himself.
A tiny car driven along the floor-strewn satin,

the face of such earth, would lavish in the folds
of endless, harmless mountains the puff of pink

heavens, and a giant, a god, the great Pavlovsky
gracefully greeting us at the gates. The human

condition, a quarried chunk of marble
he’d expose to tickled ribs and marrow.

Those days for which we cannot muster
the strength to harness even the most

furtive of wings, how the show, this show,
that show, must go on. Antonio doesn’t know

we know that love has whispered bad news
unto him, hastening, word has it, this sword

of Damocles; I glanced at his complicit grin
sitting to the right in the row in front of us

imagining him as a bird beating away
a wish to escape this world unnoticed.


III.

When Fede, Luis and María Jesus were able
to finally get their butts to the museum,

we had already done the Rembrandt and
even popped in to see the Greek statues

we wouldn’t have seen had Fede not
said we should definitely check out.

I was in line just about to order some coffee
so I was like making hand gestures to you,


but you all were already going away at it
like a pause button lifted from the night

before, yet another smoke-enveloped evening,
which just make my eyes cringe into raisins,

I mean, one thing is to smoke but another
thing is to leave your cigarette burning

a smouldering cannon’s ghostly fodder
banked in one of the ashtray battlements

in a clearing on the table, and the evil
draft set on destroying the attention span

of my targeted eyes, the only non-smoker’s
in the group, and the non-smoking smoker

was the very one who told us to check out
the Greek statues. If there isn’t a connection,

there should be, some sort of aesthetic
justice. Zeus stood there. Just stood there.

And then you saw me. Three more coffees...
We didn’t have time to see the Etruscans.


IV.

The truth is that I was feeling like shit.
The antacid I had envisioned at the end

of the ever-winding foggy road did not
exist. The otherwise comforting wood-

burning stoves just made me feel worse.
The wobbling self-esteem I was wrestling

on the outskirts of you two’s shared passions
didn’t need the gauze of a creeping nausea.


Maybe I couldn’t digest my own disgust.
When my amazement, the Greeks’ thaumasia

I pride myself on, doesn’t take the form
of word, I feel I’m falling from grace.

When La vie en rose gets in the way
of the detailed troubles of a friend I think

you fucking frivolous faggot yet blame
the volume and thickness of the smoke.

“Even though I feel my stomach is clogged,
I completely and profoundly accept who I am.

Even though I feel my stomach is clogged,
I completely and profoundly accept who I am,”

she made me repeat and repeat. The chamomile
hadn’t worked and I was resigned to go to bed

with a bucket, but then she remembered a trick
she had learned in one of her workshops, went

for the photocopy and started in on me, tapping
pressure points while I chanted “Even though

I feel...” and even had to sing Happy Birthday
and count to five over and over again and

you would think that after nearly twenty years
I could handle the Spanish but it was dizzying

so I was holding on to the country kitchen counter
and I was sweating and sweating and maybe I was

on my third Happy Birthday when I literally
burst gallons and gallons of black steaming puke.

V.

I dreamed a landscape of stiff egg-white
mountains folding you in and folding you in

somewhere in the deep recesses to my right
beneath the blankets of the freezing house.

And silent. And, once again, you emerged.
Daylight. Came through all the cracks.

The middle of nowhere was utterly crystalized.
How frozen fog does that. Gets up and under.

Everything. Mariluz. Her dad. The dog.
By the time I turned the radio on in the car,

we had already taken a wrong turn, but turned
around and got back on the right track; Grace

was singing When he takes me in his arms,
and whispers love to me, everything is lovely...

or maybe I’m just embellishing a morning
that truly didn’t need anything more

beautiful; my foot on the pedal, you, and other
occasional souls flying by just a foot above the asphalt

maze; indeed, driving towards a kindling
rendering of all these words forgotten.




You Are Here: A Future Note to Myself



I should gather and stack some stones,
big rocks into a pylon; call it
a temple, a secret totem,
a life-size stuffed gorilla
marking my northernmost frontier,
so I won’t forget how
to get back home.

They say we store memories
in our bodies, encrusted in joints.

Once, my brother was a guinea pig
to Rolfing classes, had his balls
and sockets yanked out and popped
back in. Excruciatingly sublime
or something like that he said.

The odd thing was what came to him.
Even random smells the primitive olfactory
kept in rubber-sealed vials at the back
of the top shelf in Grandpa’s tool shed.

I told myself to take care of this task
the last time, and the time before,
but I must’ve simply wandered far enough;
plants started to pop up, then trees
and busy cities, welcoming me back.

It’s just that I happen to be lost
at the moment

and don’t see the star
I’d rig a flare gun to shoot
brief and low on the horizon.




Sweet dreams are made of this,
who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas,
everybody’s looking for something.

– Eurythmics


The World and the Seven Seas


There it is. It’d been diffused. A milkiness
had been rising in from the southern rash
of Scandinavian pine archipelago: the light

now as sharp as it gets, the shadow on the wing
marking the steel bolts of a sun dial. If that
guy last night were out there he’d be splashing

his bloody nose like clubbing white seal heads.
He parted the sundry queue of dancers with more
than pee in their dicks, milk in their tits, truth, left

islands of blood all still oxygenated, neon droplets;
my bladder gleaning the gold from the hops. Oh,
towering wind power mills like diatoms nearly

microscopic chop chop chop the Baltic breeze;
“brackish” for the waters that linger and lose;
“sweet” water being tugged into the brine

losing an integral essence of its simplicity,
and its clarity taking on unfathomed grain;
salmon whacking and swishing their snouts

upstream to spawn their jism and die.
The ever most slightest tilt races my clock
a wave of shade receding from the tip

of this wing that’s busy keeping me alive and my
own nose blows bloody snot into a napkin.
More than sour, the bathroom tiles were tangy

oozing to the opposed beats, two from above,
one from below. And more than dancers
I’d say something like open heart surgery

sucked at heads where the whiskered orifice be.
Red rays spidered sideways the disco dungeon
dark salting torsos at the bottom of a sea.

There were even a couple of vacant thrones
on the recessed shores of this pageantry. One male
donning a beekeeper’s hat and tethered veil

did us all the favor of flashlighting himself
where a swarm would’ve just died to plant
their stingers, and one female with arms

raised to a sky, let her chest be unbuttoned
swaying there in the dim court of kings,
subject to crash in foaming truthfulness;

that is to say, at least while the song lasted.




Still



A little yellow bird
and a little yellow bird

baby lemon bellies bobbing on spring toothpicks

the higher tone bell in the church tower
and then the lower

breath in between

across the clay ruddy shingles
embalming a loss. Flies
in the shaft of light parting
the corral, frightful saucers playing
into some theory of chaos. To think,
how light’s able to make it clear, we’re
living in a fine storm of atoms. The twisting
and turning of wizened vines; re-young
and sturdy plans for grapes, green green
flicks of Spanish fans. And the other

reflected hornet in the still chime
climbs somewhat warped. Forks
and spoons, being put away
on the other side of the wall.
The tone of your mother,
your father

the sky, a compendium of blue
and me, that bright confusion.




Everything Impresses Me

(for Diana Barnato Walker and Joaquín Sorrolla)



If infinity is where the sea meets the sky
there isn’t much difference between a summer day,

1903 and the moment a woman dies in April.
The obituaries again. Just pages from Culture,

on my way to work.
The sun’s coming up over the English Channel

and a girl is born in 1918, marries at twenty-six and
dies just the other day, a legend in British aviation.

Escorting some 240 Spitfires to combat squads overseas,
the Royal Air Force pilot falls in love with another

towards the end of the Second World War, honeymoons
with the man to Brussels, sneaking off in twin Spitfires,

warranting a three-month suspension from military service
for him. It’s 1944. They must’ve looked at each other often

during that brief flight, one plane to the other, above
the sea, so far from all the gruesome details.

Those three months. He dies a month later.
In the photograph it’s 1945, black and white,

she’s alone, wearing a leather coat and cap,
goggles up for the picture, getting into yet another

cockpit, radiant. The speed of light and you’re frozen
in time. The 26th of August, 1963, she’s the first woman

to break the speed of sound.
The sun’s coming up over the Mediterranean

and a man opens his eyes. Looks at his clock. 1903.
By the time he gets to the shore, the sun’s gone

from breath to embrace and presently holds
the world at its mercy, barreling down harmless

gales announcing the imminent change of everything,
and imagination sets sail: the rustle and billowing taut

of three white-drenched sails, a bit of purple splashed
in their shade, the intricate wood-workings suggested

schooning south and salty through a brine of sea sky
blue crossing his mind. What does he have to imagine?

Imagine what three boats assail and three generations
of women walking along the edge of a windy shore

would essentially look like if they were to freeze forever.
I’m very enthused by the things I see on the beach.

Everything impresses me as if it were the first time
I’ve ever seen them, which makes me happy,

and I imagine I’ll make something decent,
and it’s about time I do. I’m still working a lot

and I announce a letter soon detailing what I’m
up to. The painting reaches Berlin in 1904

where it comes into the hands of German banker
and it glows for over 30 years in his office till

the Third Reich wants to confiscate it. It’s
bequeathed to his son-in-law, the only non-Jew

in the family, who, in turn, takes it to Dresden
where, in 1950, East German authorities finally do

confiscate it, once its owner flees to the West.
In 2002, water brings the painting back into light

as it’s hurriedly removed from the flood-threatened
basement of a Dresden museum and returned to its heirs;

those gales, filling the sails and charging the breaking
foam with iridescence, those women in their flapping

cotton aprons, scarves and hand-woven baskets full
of fish, ninety-nine years after the man had tried

to do something with his happiness.
Reading the news on the train on my way to work,

it was the first time I’ve ever heard about her,
just pages from a painting I’ve never seen till now.