Poetry

For a period of seven years, I sang opera arias
floating on water wearing a giant dress made of umbrellas

I wasn’t aware of it at the time

We were not aware of what we were
doing when we waltzed upon
Rte. 355 at 4 in the morning.
Stepping lightly:

One,

two,

three.

One,

two,

three.

We couldn’t explain it to the man who swerved
to a halt and emerged
cursing at us from his beige VW Rabbit

Now I can explain it: we saw pavement as a way to tell time.

I’m trying to be more conscious
of what’s happening while it’s happening.
What are the facts? What are the questions?
What are the options?
And what does it mean?

Let me pause. Let me savor last Friday:

The Siamese cat
likes food wet. Sleater-Kinney
released a box set?
We could drive, but let’s waltz to
town. Every step cuneiform.

*The first two lines of this poem quote Dutch composer Laura Stavinoha.

now that we’re Apple watched
Silicon Valley outposts all

Congo, China, Brazil, Bolivia
cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, coltan*
brick-and-mortar serfs mine the metals
cyber-proles in hazmat white
hand-assembling devices
in sparkling clean rooms
Shenzhen Seoul Sri Lanka
they go home to unwired, fetid slums

blinking cams track our data
logged in, ponied up our passwords
checked “accept” at the bottom
after speed-scrolling
past pages of fine print
then hypocrisy
declare, I am not a robot

roads all ash, roving ragpickers
cheerleading tyrants
water level rising, “extreme” weather
short-listed for the apocalypse

Google, Amazon lock us down
Apple, Facebook record our lives

Verizon’s stacks
(now smokeless)
will hook us up
so go back to bed
click the remote

*columbite-tantalite used in capacitors of cell phones, game consoles, etc.

He saw himself as coal, on its way to glass,
thinning through a pane of time. Scarlatti

danced window-thin under fingers, lively
and crystalline in its sharp velocity—

the velocity of intense, crystalline light—
morning’s illusion of clarity

in a breath’s elusiveness while mourning.
He was a coal seam jacketed in rock,

the surrounding strata seeming seamless
despite sun pouring through a window

in glittering arpeggios sharp as glass.
Caught in a pane, he was passing though pain,

under diamond-forming pressure. Saw himself
though a looking glass, face speckled with coal.

Line 1 taken from the poem “Days of Superman,” in the collection Mars Being Red.

Robin’s-egg sky cracks and runs cerulean
its royal-blue yolk twilight and ocean,

rolling into night, tide deeper than thought,
broader than a slow breath and free—

free as breathing once was. Gold and silver gleam,
pinpricks buoyant as the bobbing moon.

The moon smiles wide with an unmasked face,
as if a person were ocean not sky,

a wave foaming blue-white across its face
in crash and settle, gold and silver sand—

flecks of mica, shell, sandstone settling
with the density of bone, compacting

bones of broken stars and lapis whorls
of fading breath—a robin’s egg, shattering.

*Title take from the poem “Retro” by John Ashberry, in his collection Where Shall I Wander.

At midnight the soul dreams of a small fire,
night balmy but body shivering

in the quivering atmosphere, heat and chill.
A keenness the soul perceives as black ice

sticks and burns in dry ice’s cold clarity,
a lone lucidity—a conflagration

whose biting flare cuts through the fog it creates
in deceptive, devouring radiance.

The soul circles, perceives this fire’s bitter want,
knowing the lie but fluttering, pale winged,

on pain of immolation, knows the lie
but senses an echo of its own hunger,

a mixed resonance of fullness and bareness
which cracks at midnight in sparks from a small fire.

Line 1 taken from “Poor Angels,” in the collection For the Sleepwalkers.

My mother taught me how to cook mushrooms.

Don’t

      crowd them

she would say.

It’s quiet in the still frame of air-conditioned mid-July,
in the white-washed walls that smell like fresh paint,
in the echoed hum of five-hundred unfurnished square feet.

While you sleep on a king-sized mattress in the next room
I lay the mushrooms carefully in a pan, two inches apart
so that they do not cry
                    and become waterlogged and grey with proximity.

They sizzle to brown crisps and I wake you gingerly with coffee.
We eat on the floor in the pale light of afternoon.

I cook rice that evening. My mother tried to teach me
how to make each grain full and soft and entact,
                                but I never listened, rushing ahead to a boil and now
each grain is a broken ball of glue, burned black in the bottom of the pan
and in the next room there is a mattress and a cup of cold coffee

                                                                                           and that is all.