Category: April 2018

The Measure

Fierce is the conflict—the battle of eyes,
Sure and unerring, the wordless replies,
Challenges flash from their ambushing caves—
Men, by their glances, are masters or slaves.

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The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government had decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

■

Spoken For

I didn't know I was blue,
until I heard her sing.

I was never aware so much
had been lost
even before I was born.
There was so much to lose
even before I knew
what it meant to choose.

Born blue,
living blue unconfessed, blue
in concealment, I've lived all my life
at the plinth
of greater things than me.

Morning is greater
with its firstborn light and birdsong.
Noon is taller, though a moment's realm.
Evening is ancient and immense, and
night's storied house more huge.

But I had no idea.
And would have died without a clue,
except she began to sing. And I understood

my soul is a bride enthralled by an unmet groom,
or else the groom wholly spoken for, blue
in ardor, happy in eternal waiting.

I heard her sing and knew
I would never hear the true

name of each thing
until I realized the abysmal
ground of all things. Her singing
touched that ground in me.

Now, dying of my life, everything is made new.
Now, my life is not my life. I have no life
apart from all of life.

And my death is not my death,
but a pillow beneath my head, a rock
propping the window open
to admit the jasmine.

I heard her sing,
and I'm no longer afraid.
Now that I know what she knows, I hope
never to forget
how giant the gone
and immaculate the going.
How much I've already lost.
How much I go on losing.
How much I've lived
all one blue. O, how much
I go on living.

■

Promittor

Dew falls on the oysters at low tide
And the sea is ablaze with pearls.
I ride a horse to moongate
Where the water's fire
Lights the backbones of prehistoric fish
Tangled in my brain.

■

"I'm Rooting for Everybody Black"

     — Issa Rae

Everybody Black is my hometown team. Everybody Black
dropped the hottest album of the year, easy. Everybody Black
is in this show, so I'm watching. Everybody Black is in this movie,
so I'm watching. Everybody Black wore it better, tell the truth.
Everybody Black's new book was beautiful. How you don't
know about Everybody Black?! Everybody Black mad
underrated. Everybody Black remind me of someone I know.
I love seeing Everybody Black succeed. I hope Everybody Black
get elected. Everybody Black deserves the promotion more than
anybody. I want Everybody Black to find somebody special.
Everybody Black is good peoples. Everybody Black been through
some things. Everybody Black don't get the credit they're due. I met
Everybody Black once and they were super chill and down-to-earth.
I believe in Everybody Black. There's something about Everybody Black.

■

Killdeer

You know how it pretends
to have a broken wing to
lure predators away from its
nest, how it staggers just out
of reach . . . if, at this moment,
you're feeling metaphorical,
nest can be the whatever
inside us that we think needs
protection, the whatever that is
small & hasn't yet found its
way. Like us it has lived so long
on scraps, on what others have
left behind, it thinks it could live
on air, on words, forever almost,
it thinks it would be better to let
the predator kill it than to turn
its back on that child again,
forgetting that one lives inside
the other.

■

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,
     All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
     Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder in a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
     Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
     Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
     Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
     Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstacy
Give all you have been, or could be.

■

The Santa Ana

Desert born. Wild
     As corn. Dry
Bitch. Itchy clit.
     Meteorologists
Measure me

     With mercury;
Police with murder rates.
     But I’m neither
Mercurial nor monstrous.
     Everything I touch

Explodes with flame.
     Everything got the hots
For me.
     I’m flamboyant.
I’m a witch

     Still burning
At the stake.
     My red dress
Right off the runway.
     So Vogue

I make you death
     Drop. So gorgeous
I make you drop
     Dead. Jesus Christ.
My winter will last

     Longer than Wintour.
Foehn named
     After Saint Anne
—mother of the mother
     of the Messiah—

I’m the only testament.
     Apocrypha.
Apocalypse.
     Take my word
For it. For God

     Sent me to Eden.
To Sodom.
     To Southern California.
Like a Real Housewife
     Holding a butter knife

To her husband’s neck,
     God sent me
Here to rinse and repeat,
     To singe this land
Of sin, singing

     That Eagle’s song.
Haven’t you heard me
     Howling down the cliffs,
The dark desert highway,
     Swishing my hips

Into the Cajon
     Like a lovesick coyote?
All thrash. All ass.
     Deep-throat. Whip-
Lash. I bat

     My eyes, and Los Angeles
Lights up
     Like a cigarette. Ash-
Tray to ashtray.
     Angels no different

From Lucifer
     Falling all around
me. LOL. So wow.
     Much merry-go-round.
Very Mary. Go

     Round up
Your little lambs.
     Nothing is safe
From me. Try me.
     Give me the trial

Of the century.
     Give me Liberty,
Or give me Death
     Valley. I want
all the flowers kneeling.

■

CHECKING OUT

I turn off the Xerox machine and the fax and the other fax
and the PC tower and the fluorescents,
put the check register in the desk, lock the desk,
and take the elevator eleven floors down
to the narrow front of East 21st Street.

When I come out, the space between the buildings
is so thin it's an upside-down skyscraper of sky,
narrower at the street. There will be no sky at all
for the next two hours of trains back to Brooklyn.
Someone once told me I should come to New York, so I did.

Two trains and three stations later—and a walk
past a housing project like a cliff made of bricks—
I am back in my windowless basement room
with the tile floor, staring at the square grate
in the middle, wondering what the drain was for.

I eat the same sandwich I eat every night.
A car alarm punctuates the seconds of the dark,
as if to say how few hours of single-malt sleep
stand between me and tomorrow's trains.
Someone once told me I should come to New York,

so I did. Tomorrow I will try to buy food
for a different kind of sandwich and it will not go well—

I will see the word California on a bag of mandarin oranges
and start crying in the narrow aisles of the supermarket—
and a man with a cart full of cat food will ask me to move, please,

he is trying to get to the checkout. Where I come from,
I want to tell him, they make the grocery stores
big enough for someone to cry in the produce section
and someone else to move around them.
And when you get to the parking lot

you put your oranges in a car, not a backpack,
and you drive the car home, and you park the car
in a driveway above ground, never under,
and you eat the whole bag of mandarin oranges
at a kitchen table bigger than Brooklyn.

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