is blank, not ruled, and that paper—its white narcotic
emptiness—takes me back to the soft-spoken clerk.
Lisa DeSiro
Babel Tree
You’ve heard of the tower. Well
I tell you, on my street
is an evergreen that speaks
as if in tongues, sounding
like a mob of children
crammed inside a classroom.
Who would think a tree could have
so much to say? St. Francis-
beneath-the-boughs,
presiding over his fellow
statues—cats and raccoons—
steadfast behind their fence,
provides a captive audience
for the prim trimmed evergreen
whenever it’s infested
with that unseen sounding
like a multitude of tiny chimes
rung inside a church.
Truth is, this tree serves
as a container, a mouthpiece
for common sparrows
who “when interrupted by
suspicious noise”
shut up.
I tell you, they do. And who wouldn’t
be surprised
if a tree fell
silent
the moment he or she
walked by?
Felled
The hard-hatted cutter climbs with rope and chainsaw,
lopping off branches like hunks of hair
from the top down, until only a shorn torso remains.
Back on the ground, he circles the trunk,
incising. The engine whines.
Two other men stand at a distance holding cables
tied to the highest stump. A third holds up a camera.
When the saw pauses, they gather
together, leaning back,
pulling, arms taut. Takes all their strength
to make the elm tip, then topple. A colossal thud
shakes the whole house.
Spectators on my neighbor’s porch applaud.
They don’t see me at my window
trying not to cry because this one tree—
that seemed alive while dying, that stayed standing tall as a tower—
has, in less than an hour, been rendered
horizontal and now
lies helpless as a human body.
The black birds never minded
it was leafless every season.
But a petition circulated.
I signed.
Bereft
That we won’t go this year to Payne’s to buy
Boston ferns (three for the backyard gazebo,
one for the front porch) and a few red geraniums
and a single green spike (for the terra cotta pot
by the driveway); that we won’t open the shed,
pull out the muddied gloves and the wheelbarrow,
weed on our knees as if in prayer; that even though
we will never again share these rituals, spring will
return nonetheless and the earth will continue
undeterred, giving her garden the usual flowers:
daffodils, peonies, roses; that the black-eyed susans
went crazy during summer, as if nourished by her
ashes, my father tells me, months later, still
amazed; that she isn’t here to see.
Greetings from Paradise
Here, breeze-rustled palm trees make a sound almost like the sound
of brown oak leaves clinging to branches tousled by March
back home where winter lingers.
Here, it’s already spring. Grass greening the ground. Full-blown
blossoming, purple roadside weeds, fuchsia, jacaranda,
jasmine scent all over the island.
Here, some flowers look like birds and some birds look like flowers.
Even the plainclothes crows strut their stuff with sunlit flare,
glossy as polished patent leather.
Here, a loon joins me for lunch on the bungalow patio. Seagulls
keep me company at the beach while I stroll by the water’s
edge, my feet sinking in sand.
Here. Read this. Then send me a message if you’re there, if
it’s truly a garden, if they’ve given you petals for wings.
Tell me what it’s like.
Going to Visit the Dead
I know you’re here somewhere, intact.
God has given you back
what you lost—
your breast, your ovaries,
your vision, your weight, your energy—
everything. Almost. Lost
me in the passenger seat,
my Bulgarian friend in the back seat,
her mother driving.
The landscape expands around us
wide and flat. We pass
an orchard adorned with martenitsa:
red-and-white tassels worn during March
for good fortune, good health;
tied to trees on the first day of April
as a sign of winter ending,
spring beginning. I know
you’re waiting. I’m afraid
we won’t find the way. I can’t speak
their language, yet I understand
when my friend says
Sunlight feathers in your hair
and her mother agrees—yes, wings—
Michael Fleming
Reptiles
Evolve? We’ll evolve when we want to. We’re
reptiles—we decide. No mother love, no
promises—that’s the rule. Don’t get too near,
don’t think too hard, don’t think, don’t think we owe
you anything, cause we don’t. Where were you
when we hatched? God, you should have seen our shells,
one perfect world piled on another, blue
shells, green—it’s true: we made our way. To hell
with your nipples, your kindergartens, your
wedding bells, your rings—oh, we’ll show you rings.
We’ll show you claws—remember those? The more
you hurt, the more we—nothing. Go ahead, sing—
we don’t do music, don’t do memories—
why, when we’ll outlast you? We don’t do fair/
unfair. And we don’t do thermostasis.
Go ahead, cry—we’re reptiles, we don’t care.
Adventures
Be admonished: of making many books there is no end.
—Ecclesiastes 12:12
For making books, you need to have a certain
appetite, a certain longing, you
need to look, to be quietly alert,
not quite earthbound. It helps to have a few
ideas, to be sure, and to know the rules,
exceptions to the rules, movement of tides.
So many books! But then, so many fools
adrift without them, mapless. Darkness hides
from light, muddle fights with meaning,
illness sleeps with ignorance—it was
ever thus, and so little time between
reckonings, just love and books to shield us
from the rough, mindless elements as we
set out for adventures on sun-drenched seas.
for Fannie Safier
The Importance of Vowels
Luxenberg tries to show that many obscurities of the Koran disappear if we read certain words as being Syriac and not Arabic. . . . In Syriac, the word hur is a feminine plural adjective meaning white, with the word “raisin” understood implicitly . . . not unsullied maidens or houris.
—Ibn Warraq, The Guardian, January 11, 2002
The maître d’ is sharply groomed, in tie
and tails, he greets you warmly, Welcome, sir!
We’ve been expecting you! And as you eye
the virgins at
the bar, selecting, certain
of your righteous consequence, a waiter
approaches with a bright, blinding smile,
and on his fingertips, elaborately
wrought, a silver tray with something piled
beneath a silken napkin. Sir! he says,
plucking off the silk, Before we begin,
your seventy-two raisins! Let us praise
Him! With that, he vanishes in a thin
blue wisp of smoke. The virgins are gone. You
invoke your god. A low voice answers, Who?
Traffic Stop
It’s just these glasses, officer, I swear—
they’re progressives and I’m still getting used
to peering through this tube of startling clarity
amidst a blur of color—blues
like this undersea mountaintop, these reds
like bloody marys, these greens like Vermont,
like forests suddenly summer, like dead
presidents, like love—out here where we want
to be beautiful, here where it’s just me,
you, and the universe, a voice to say
that all is well, everything’s fine, you’re free
to go now, ma’am—you can be on your way.
Hot Cherry Pie
I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn—
that pink and copper shrine on the way down
the missionary coast, along the thin
thread of mother church’s outpost towns—
San Francisco, San José, Santa Clara—
rosary beads a day’s walk from one
to the next, or now an hour by car
but still with sacramental purpose. None
of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off
the freeway, San Luís Obispo, hungry
for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee,
body and blood for a soul wrung
out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted
those kids—a boy at the men’s room door,
poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not
quite his age, maybe a bit older, or
a little further along in the game,
obviously the one in charge, standing there
at the women’s, stock still until she aimed
her eyes at his and whispered: Go. I dare
you. With that they were lost for good behind
those doors—or for better or for worse, who
the hell knows? I paid up and continued my
mission to Santa Bárbara—to you.
for Ellen R.
Michael Berkowitz
As regards the tattoo on your wrist
It’s not that I don’t believe you. Rather,
call it some natural curiosity,
born of a childhood’s nights
spent beneath the starry curve
of the sky, that makes me
want to discover
for myself
whether Orion really is
the only constellation
traced out on the curves
of your skin.
Ad Cassandram
Let them come with their black
ships, princess. Let them come
and let them take back
what is theirs. You are not theirs.
I will love you and I will protect you.
Let them come with their black
horses. Let them harness them
to their chariots, let them rein
in their flaring nostrils
with bit and bridle.
Let them ring the dust
around our city
with the tracks of our dead.
It will take more than horses
to bring down our walls.
I will love you and I will protect you,
my beloved. My beloved,
beloved also of the deathless
gods. Most beloved by the most
deathless: master of the strings
of bow and lyre.
•
Cursing the aim of another’s arrows, he cursed your own aim: that it might always be true, but never find its mark.
•
Let them cover the sky
with a dozen dozen arrows.
I will love you no less
among the shadows. But
do not put your trust in shadows
and in dreams only you can see.
There is no one else who will.
I will love you and I will protect you.
I will love you but I will not believe you.
Begotten of the Spleen
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone;
I will make him an help meet for him.
—Genesis 2:18
And so God reached past Adam’s ribs,
and from his spleen was woman born.
And gone from Adam was the melancholy
that the Lord had seen in him,
but for Eve there was nothing
except that same sadness.
There is a way in which you look
off into the distance
that weighs against the lightness
of the heart behind my ribs
in your presence, that I can describe
only as the sinking of swallows,
who do not remember this
morning’s sunrise, into evening.
villanelegy
well
(i said
hell
he fell
on his head (she said
it’s just as well
too soon to tell
(they said
what sent him off to hell
or heaven (hell
we said
he liked his drink too well
and so he fell
(they said
hell
there’s nothing more to tell
so toast to heaven for the dead
and for the living, well,
hell
Julie
When you think
about it, if you
think about it,
what did us
in wasn’t your
anger or my
apathy, but that
if in the second line.
Michael Brokos
Landscape without Rest
I step aside as a boy pedals
fast downhill, our path blazed
by cedar chips, his father
ambling at the crest, and fret
against the grip of my own
vectors, the straight lines, strict
dimensions, days that race by
too easily for the neighbors,
too scrutinized for me; but don’t
we make a fine match, strike
a spry exchange, don’t we
light a fused flame, how they
keep the tires of their bicycles
inflated, and how no one ever
showed me how to ride, and
the way these widening lanes
make way for flashes of rubber,
flares of cottonwood leaves.
Singing Stone
—After César Vallejo
My cigarette proves suitable
since I, too, am burning to a stub. How dizzying,
how carcinogenic to wield the world between
my own fingers, my own star going down in smoke
for a few moments
until the ember begins to flicker, and the world
takes its last drag,
s
tooping down to put me out in an empty furrow.
Lying in an open grave,
through the abiding veins of light I can see
my back story, my body
carried away in a trade wind racing across
blotted out mountains
made of stars
that Paris keeps turning towards itself,
stars that turn over thousands of times more
of their own accord
in the Andes, Trujillo, Santiago de Chuco,
caves collapsing
and my villagers’ bones asleep in their red hats.
Downpour descends on me
as forecasted, my voice dry from trying to greet
the raw and forgotten
in music not precisely music, only the ashy
expectorations of panpipes and corequenques.
Hunting Season
Out in the clearing, the cold
season’s coming on, a walled fog
of lights and my bones
courting evasion, coerced
into stealing away
from a public suddenly
steadfast on staking me out.
I’m sticking close
inside the high embankment
of the river, but they will
find me, and take aim.
The facility with which
I shift through the seeming
boundlessness of the forest
appears to play in my favor
but in effect forms
the groundwork of the game, of my
bulls-eye. I sense their scopes
sighting in on me when I bend
down to drink from
the smallest streams.
The sky letting go of its
last warmth, limbs their leaves,
storm clouds leaning into
trees—the terrain
betrays me in the same
distention that my instincts,
being so sought after,
forget how to seek escape.
Wingbeat
Not the procedure of inverted perch;
not the flitting at the feeder
brimming with sugar water
dyed bright red. Not the reverence