Natural Selection
The blackberries that make it back to the house
are not the ones that have left inky stains
on my lips and tips of my fingers, not the ones
whose bunched drupelets are big
as thumbs, not the ones whose sepals
slide easy from the inner recess
of what makes blackberry blackberry.
The ones eaten under the beating sun –
warm as tongues – are like a drug that
makes a man forget his lover waits
at the door for her share, makes him
ignore thorn-ripped skin, makes
this one berry, and then this one berry
and then this one berry all that ever was.
Hannele on Her Death Bed Reads Garcia Lorca
1.
Everything I’ve told you is a lie—
the rape, my mother’s time under
the reeking Cossack, my father’s blood,
even what you see here, my gray
face, my swollen tongue—these
are not what they appear. Every
time I laughed, you thought it was
joy, but this is the way the marauders
taught us to cry, this is the way
your Zadie’s servant girl trained me
to lie with the old man, to turn his
sweating grunts into you.
When you tell your children
about me, tell them I was never scared,
that I said the blessings
every day, lit the candles like my mother
did, even when what was around me was
evil as Eden.
2.
She took them from the pouch she wore
tucked between her breasts. She said:
here are two jewels: One is the moon,
the other is you. Keep them from
the sun which will never be your
lover. Bury them if you must
but make sure you have them with you
when you die. Why? I don’t know
except my father told me.
3.
She shuddered one more breath.
From her mouth fluttered a single
sheet of paper, on it written
four letters I did not know. I put
the paper under my tongue
so I could tell you this story
so you would never forget:
Hannele had four thousand
kin-sisters you will never know and each
died with a such a slip of paper under
her tongue, each scrawled
with a cypher
meant for me
to eat.
Sestina for Darkness and First Light
“What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.”—Robert Frost
Time had a beginning when even darkness
did not exist—when the universe was so small
that it fit on the sharp tip of a pin and was really nothing—
except for everything and all that now delights and appalls
(stars and dark matter, gentle caresses and men ungoverned
by right and wrong) — is this what is meant by “design”?
I am not superstitious but I see signs
everywhere: deer scat, fallen limbs, the dark
stains coffee leaves on my shirt. I am not governed
by the gods of rabbis and priests, but believe in the small
ones of dust mites and quarks and shadows—these appall
and thrill—like bits of ink, sprouting seeds—simple things.
Hydrogen, helium, black holes accreting gas, this thing
we call light from the beginning of time—who could design
the line from then to us myth-making machines, apple
eating, Eden leaving creatures who learn more from darkness
than a god would want us to, who feel large and small
at the same time, who suspect that we alone are love?
Ask my wife, she’ll find what you’ve lost—like that one glove
I tossed off picking through parts, looking for the thing
I needed to fix our pump. It was a spring, so small
I needed bare fingers to pick it from the bin. You should design,
she said, a tool to keep you from dying of lost things. Her dark
humor kept me alive when death visited and left its pall.
And yes, death has stopped by—in the way only it can, pale
and needy. The neighbor boy, my son’s best friend—governed
by doubts, possessor of guns—was overcome by a darkness
only he could see. And there was me, my beating heart, a thing
so clogged with rust and and crud. It gave me one clear sign—
that the cosmos is inside us all—infinitely large and small.
The night sky and its stars heal the wound of me feeling small.
Yet, the strip-mall’s lights casting their bile-spun pall
bury me. I’ll often stay inside even on clear nights, resigned
to let universe expand without me, to waste the awe I’ve been given.
In my room with books of poems, fingering my wedding ring, I think:
Before the florid light, there was all that could be made by darkness.
Inside us is something so small—all the goodness given
and all that will appall. This is the singularity—the one thing,
the universe, a sign—that the dark embraces all that shines.
From a Line by Paul Celan
It is time the stone made an effort to flower.
For too long it sat waiting to be thrown
through a window, to smash the library shelves,
to bring books to the fire, to crush the skulls
of non-believers who doubt the crown. It is time
the stone made an effort to flower—
to send roots down so deep it can’t be raised
by the mob to hurl at bones not ready
to be broken, bones of the bodies of those
who don’t bow to a god, those whose church
is their own or none. It is time
the stone made an effort to flower,
to bloom in all the shades, not just black
and gray, the stems to be placed
in the barrels of guns, to bleed
in hues tinged pink and rose,
some the color of pride, some glowing
like a flushed cheek sore from so much
smiling. It’s time to spread the news:
the king is dead; stones are for lining
garden beds, roots are to remind us
we were all once rock and now
we can be flowers.
What to Do If You’re Surrounded by Coyotes on the First Warm Day of Spring
First raise your head and loose a raucous howl.
Don't try to explain, don’t stare at the alpha.
Spread your arms like barred-owl wings and breathe
the musk. Recite Isaiah chapter forty-three:
“Forget the former things.” Forget the gods.
Grieve the creatures’ winter mange, the raw
abraded flesh, the festered wounds, the fleas.
And when they circle, snarl and bear their teeth,
and reveal their ulcered gums and stinking breath,
when you fear the big one going for your neck,
concede—like you would to a heart attack or a kiss
Don’t flee. Recall that fear provoked this myth—
that the land is yours. Don’t call friend Steve with his
lust for guns and predators’ blood. Sing hymns!
Fission is a Bomb is a Fist is a Kiss
The “Fat Man” bomb dropped
on Nagasaki should not
be a metaphor for anything
and the fact the bomb’s target
was at the heart of the city
and the fact that it missed
its mark is ironic because
“missed its mark” is what
cheit means in the Hebrew
Bible, not “sin” like those with
the mind of a child think because
who but a child would smash
an entire city just because he can,
but I digress and it’s complicated
why a bomb has a hot pressed
plutonium heart as big as a fist,
and that fist was as beautiful
as a perfect kiss, as my lover’s
breast which my hand is obsessed
with—that a mushroom cloud is what
it looks like when that hand closes
so tight on itself that it makes
a Geiger counter tick and a man might
mistake it for righteousness—
and haven’t we all been there, at war
with someone who is definitely not us
and most definitely is—and how
fortunate I, in particular, am that I
didn’t have an A-Bomb in that hand
when my lover and I were younger,
when my lust was radioactive and under
the pressure of a shaped-charged-
blast that I forged out of
a man-child’s expectations of what
a city of love was to look like.
The Fig, the Firefly, and What We Carry
This is a time for a child’s hand
to hold mine, to not fear the flesh
that shrivels like a fig in autumn, the time
to caress the bleeding bruised skin
thin as the skin of an onion. Open
a bed to two old lovers whose
hands intertwine like recollection,
like lemon peel, whose probing
fingers open a door, their time-lined
palms waning moons that unfold
one and the other, like splitting
the fig of their tender places. They savor
the seedy, the sweet— forgetting
that one will die before
their lust does and the other will carry it
like a child carries a firefly in
his cupped hands trusting
darkness can be illuminated
by such a tiny light.