the villagers, an entire clan. Who
does she think she is,
assuming she can renew herself among stars?
EDDIE’S STEPS
Flagstone set in cement,
higgledy-piggledy up the bank
to the high deck where lawn chairs
go to die in the rain. Not hard to know
these the first he’d built, set to his
stride—twice that of mine. When
I pointed this out, a sweet, startled look
came over his face, and he set to work
with a good will, slating in the extra
wedges just wide enough each foot
could advance and hold.
I wouldn’t take anything for those steps,
I realized, when the visitor disparaged
them—the recalibrated provisional shifts
by which Eddie’s steps accommodated
mine. The true flower
that day though was the accidental discovery
of Josie abed past noon—Eddie’s “Your face looks
funny, Josie,” then helping him negotiate
trousers. Gemma steadying her grandfather
to the car for the drive to hospital. But for
rebuilding my steps, they would have been
miles away in Cork, and Josie lying—speech
unraveling, steps blurring. I take my time
going up or down, feel the mind sharpen
to that day’s escape. Easy now to think past
that visitor to the quiet beauty
of the climb on a dark star-filled night
when moonlight
makes its effortless way before me
all in one shining breath.
for Edward and Gemma Fitzgerald
FOUR-FOOTED
Silk napkins across our laps
like the sleeves of geisha—we eat
brown bread and salmon with capers
at the lodge on the rim
of the valley. The rumor that slurry
on fields has contaminated
local wells drifts from
our minds. Idyllic countryside
is manufactured here daily
by tourists. We crumple tea-stained
tents near empty plates,
pay our bill, then head for a walk
in a wood planted like a crop
where every tree is identical to its neighbor,
a daylight nightmare. Although
the path is marked, I fear we may
never get out. I follow you
from the dim thicket at last
into a field so open to sky
we forget the land belongs to
anyone. A woman comes out
of her cottage to stare. You wave
and she waves back as we cross
an immense distance to an iron
gate. The road downhill is no
wider than a cart, but something
incomparable has died there—
a red fox, its small perfect teeth just
visible, the blonde undercoat,
and the plume of its once airborne
tail—held in a spell now against
the ground. From the hedge
I draw out an arm’s length
of wood to lift the fox-board
of our sudden death to the side,
sparing indignity. Strange how we
take voices again like two
young girls with a secret
between us, companions
now into old age and
a redundant death.
for Eli Tolaretxipi
THE GOLD DUST OF THE LINDEN TREES
commands a battalion of street sweepers
in Cotroceni Quarter. Car hoods,
the backs of cats, a tablecloth printed
with cherries under a cherry tree,
someone’s left shoe marooned
on the sidewalk—all gilded with ochre
pollen. Swish swish—say the brooms
to the asphalt that once was cobblestone—
the rhythm tender as the hands
of a gigantic clock measuring its day, or
wing beats of an invisible bird
made known only as broom strokes.
I walk in gold dust with Liliana
remembering our times on these
at night coming home, a standoff
with a pack of wild dogs: “Don’t
look them in the eye!” Liliana’s warning
to prevent my challenge. Now we stroll
down the center of the street like queens,
the dogs’ fangs safely behind iron gates
as we pass. Who would guess how earlier
we washed our nightgowns by hand to appease
a broken washing machine, wringing dry
sleeves and hems before hanging them under
the lost blossoms of the “flying tree.”
Nor would they realize we walk
everywhere on our Picasso-legs, carrying
the secret cargoes of poems yet to be
written, the gold dust drifting down,
sifting into my silver
hair. Don’t mistake me—I’m still a girl
under this disguise, the one who rode
a black horse across a river in Missouri
to visit Indian caves. And Liliana, she’s
still a girl picking wild strawberries
on the mountainside. Of course there’s
no money for the printer’s cartridge
and we write like Egyptians, everything by
hand. What is this word: “drag” or “drug”?
as we transcribe a poem into typescript.
Nothing disturbs our quiet intent to
carry words from one language into
another. Not even the white kitten’s paw
swiping air as I tempt it closer with
the cherry-tree branch—its striking
and missing mirroring our eventual grasp
on each word with claws. We put down
our pens to bake a cherry pie and to speak
with Dr. Demitri, the neighbor who calls
Liliana to the open window. I notice
the crown of his gray fedora is lightly
feathered with gold dust. No one knocks
at doors on this street. Voices lift
and fall in the open air, like our laundry
breathing calmly above the kitten basking
in the garden. We let it sleep. Someone is
calling us again to the window in the glow
of lamplight. Liliana asks me to sing—
“that Irish air once more”: “If I Were a Blackbird.”
As I sing, the spirits of Ireland, America
and Romania join, as song binds, pours down
gold of the moment to give memory
its gilded power—that which returns us
to our most gentle, sustaining powers
of love.
for Liliana Ursu
BLUE EYELID LIFTING
The stars have come onto
my pillow as they are want
to, these frigid nights
below Orion’s star-slash
of welcome. I get up and
marvel with all my being.
Suddenly you are standing
behind me looking out
over my shoulder
from our back-door window
at the high display. I say aloud
the names of the few constellations
I know, told to me by my first
love. Who would have guessed
he would become our
star-bridge, he whose future
fell away from mine
in fitful times of war?
In the morning I’ll unlock
the double gates to let
the workmen in, try
ing not to
dislodge those moments
when the blue eyelid
of unexpected closeness
pulled us in by the empty sleeve
of its far away.
for Josie Gray
vii
A raging sea
thrown from the deck—
a block of ice.
DOPPO-AN CHOHA
BUTTON, BUTTON
i
Green Peach, that’s the lapel button Bashō asked Roger
Shimomura for when he spied
the “I Am Not Chinese” button Roger gave to Larry
Matsuda, as a gift at the Minidoka reunion. But, at the Irish
renga party in Stokestown following the opening
of the new wing of the Famine Museum,
a smart aleck thought Bashō’s terse pen name had insulted
Greenpeace and gave him a shiner. Indeed, Green Peach,
the recalcitrant pith of it, was an unlikely name
for a poet. As for me, in Ireland I need a button
proclaiming me Not a Banker,
where honest folk lose homes daily and nationalized banks
send a country into debt while their managers
join arms in a jig singing “Deutschland Über Alles!”
Thank the Berkeley antique emporium sincerely, Larry,
for the 1960s ABORTION NOW
button, though I could not wear it with impunity
to the Strandhill Ballroom of Romance, even having
readjusted the baby-bump pillow in my trousers when
I glimpsed the priest and ducked
into the Ladies. There, a fourteen-year-old held out
a crisp bag, collecting spare change to get to England
on the boat for her solution. Cut marks in a ladder
up her arm had failed to convince a judge her life was
in jeopardy, her attempts so “amateurish.” “Ah, you’d
have to slice a jugular, and sure, what would be
the point? You’d bleed out then and there,” she sighed
and thumped my pillow as if she’d like to take a nap.
I dropped a fifty-euro note and skint past her belly,
on her neck a cameo of Savita secured by a black
velvet band. Savita, our lady killed by a heartbeat.
Savita, who took her degree as a dentist in India, then
came to die of sepsis and neglect in a Galway
hospital, an untenable pregnancy gone wrong,
her care put aside for her child’s vanishing
heartbeat. “Take my child,” she’d pleaded earlier,
to no avail, as she traded her heartbeat for her dying baby’s
silence. Savita, Savita, our lady of long suffering,
who believed her death would not be required. I drop
my Not a Banker button into the crisp bag and Savita smiles
shyly from the girl’s neck, as if she knows her husband
is taking her death all the way to the Court of Human Rights.
ii
The moon tonight is so bloated I think its mirror-moon
in Lough Arrow will pull it down. Let me wear the button
stamped Moonbeam all the way to the bottom.
Bashō has scribbled in my dream: “See you at Sun Ya Bar.”
That dirty vodka martini I had with you there, Larry, at our
between-planes feast still beckons. But when, oh when,
will Roger inhabit the dark corner with a solitary
scotch so our glances can meet? I promise to engineer
an appearance if Kansas blows him our way. I could give him
some of my signature portable kisses, red as a goldfinch’s
beak-rim, for his next painting. Irish Red let’s call it,
though these finches migrate from Africa. Birds
have no boundaries and so, dear Cloud,
they don’t agree to confinements, nor passports, nor
gun turrets, nor dispossessions, nor calling what was done to
Japanese American citizens during World War II anything but
words reserved for the worst injuries to spirit, body, and mind.
Maybe though, along with a concept like “concentration camp”
to recalibrate the level of that harm, we need more telling,
more stories with exact details of what was suffered. Nothing
substitutes for that. Josie is humming the opening bars of
There was an auld woman
from Wexford, in Wexford she did dwell. She loved
her husband dearly, but another man twice as well.
With yah rum dum dum dum dee-ro and the blind man
he could see!
Which song ends in a bad way for the auld lady,
so I shall turn in my moonbeam for a javelin and cinch up
my babushka for certain travail.
Moonbeam, we need your
accusing light: Our Lady
Savita has died.
Slow death by bureaucracy.
Civilized, remorseless.
for Lawrence Matsuda
BREATH
Frost on the glass—breathe it
open to the glass world. It
breathes back
to prove neither it
nor you can end
this exchange of breath
for worlds.
TO AN IRISHMAN PAINTING IN THE RAIN
He is a force against nature,
stroking stain on raw boards between
showers. Yesterday sun blasted him
free and he knew enough
to develop a bad back, though in fact,
he had wrenched it
enough for reprieve. How often
his joke during a downpour: “It’s a great day,
isn’t it? Let’s go to the beach!” Now
between lashings of rain his brush
lavishes hope on the boundaries
of my garden. Between fresh attacks
he smokes under the eaves,
squints out across a forest to Bricklieve
as if to say: wait long enough and things
will turn, will wear themselves out.
But even hope and industry are no match
for Irish rain. Paint washes down
the white pier like rust or the teapot’s
leavings. He musters a fourth coat in defiance,
as if this misunderstanding between work
and weather could be cured by holding out
against a glower of sky. Not to be beaten
he suddenly remembers an errand
and is away. Rain
washes the boards clean and is nobody’s
handmaiden. Later, when the air
is mizzling against my cheeks
like cat’s whiskers, I’ll take in his
drowned brush, wishing always
to remember this day, on which the certain beauty
of the human will appeared to me as an Irishman
painting in the rain.
for Malcolm Gray
ENCOUNTER
Over the rain-rutted avenue
I’ve walked to horses at Kingsborough,
neglected estate, now plundered
by gatekeepers, the twisted arms
of rhododendron hacked for firewood. The locals’
mild compensatory salute: “It’s grand
to finally see the lake!”
I hold my palm to the muzzle of a mare,
her deep eye that sinks me in,
its richly fringed lid closing over
my reflection, then lifting me
like an emissary of unknown offerings
down corridors burnished with inklings
of hounds and masters, drops of port
spilled from a flask onto her neck, or
Cromwellian plunder of silver
dug into the pasture while the horses, unbridled,
&nbs
p; gazed on. She snuffles my empty
hand, then tosses me and history into her
farthest cavern. She’ll keep me for the contraband
I am, a lonely walker who doesn’t know
what she wants in a borrowed land
far from home. A small entitlement of steps
led me to mystery, seeking to be
left out. How else let difference tell you
what you are?
PLANET GREECE
He says, with mystification, the government
took a third of his dead wife’s pension, she
who, fearing to lose her job, never told anyone
how tired, how depleted she felt
as her blood more and more refused to carry
her. Then one day she died, leaving their eight
children nearly grown. But she’d worked every day
and no one knew, but him, of course. He knew.
And her pension, which proved she had
worked, now leaked out of her death and over to
the government, which claimed it as his surplus,
money which sustained him when work
was scarce—the faint signal of her life blinking now
like a worn-out star in the pocket of the State.
How boldly they announce they will next take a portion
of his own small pension. What would he use it
for? Coal? A bit of meat? Seed for birds?
Without leaving his hearth in Ireland, he flies
through space with his country on his back. The place
he lands is rocky and chill, just like his homeland.
He sits at his hearth in a kindred field, and
spirits rise up from the ground, and the tiny hearths
of the stars take over the field of his mind.
The slow white ovens of the sheep come close. History
and governments whirl like planetary dust away
into the vastness of space. Coming in from the nightshift
at the mental home, she kisses him
as they pass in the hall, and, as in the days of their youth,
hands him, like a small kingdom,
the keys to the car.
for Madge and Josie
CLOUD-PATH
With steps freshened
by wearing a man’s cast-off shoes,
I follow the rain-rutted road
as far as the fishing boats
turned upside down
on the soggy bank, their oars
secured elsewhere to provide
against thieves.
Mottled light through
waterside trees over the bows