Poetry

I sit here staring at her because I am afraid to say the words that will prove to her that I am fully alive. Why must we move through life with such formalities? We are catching up over coffee, using other people’s words to talk circles around each other so that our conversation holds a kind of pathetic absurdity. I want to say I like the way the tenderness shines through your eyes and the syntax of your sentences; I like the way your frame moves when you walk so much that I wish I could fall into perfect step with it and feel it as my own. I say, “It’s good to see you,” but what I mean is that the shape and sound of her voice feel something like a weighty summer breeze, and when I’m with her I can’t help but to pay extra attention to what it means that blood is coursing through my veins. “How are you?” But what I am really wondering is if she feels this, too: does her body somehow also house an incompressible galaxy that feels all at once like an unending expanse of sky and a dark, empty room in which you can’t see your own hand in front of your face? And if it does — I want to believe that it does — why are we behaving this way? Why aren’t we planting fields of wildflowers just so we can lie in them, or holding each other constantly, or singing, loudly and without fear, because our voices and every other part of us may as well belong to each other anyway? Her hands mirror mine as we reach for our cups. Knuckles brush. “Oops,” she says.

My nine-year-old asks about the dark sides,

sides not easily seen, and if they cannot be seen

do they exit. I feel I am about to enter a black hole.

Before answering I imagine asking this didn’t

of my own father, if he saw other sides

of his son. If he bothered to look.

With internet help my son learns a myriagon

has 10,000 sides, a megagon has one billion,

and how an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite

number of sides. Imagine that, he says.

And I do, confirming the geometry of my youth

and numbered days as an incomplete theorem,

wholly incongruent. Then he asks what form has

the most complex or interesting sides. I know this

as if were etched into my skin: The human form.

But I say – I don’t know. It is his problem to solve

now, to look with intent for complexities in things

appearing deceivingly simple and one dimensional. 

To write poetry is to keep watch

over your dwelling in a dark forest:

It isn’t often that some creature

catches your eye — most nights pass

without as much as a rustling in the trees.

But when it does, it grabs you, wrestles

you to the ground, and demands something of you.

Sometimes a few pennies, sometimes a warm meal,

and sometimes, it seems, your very life.

Sometimes it is the angel, holding you

by the hip, tenderly but with a strong grip,

and it is your great privilege to hold it tightly

and whisper sharply between your teeth,

I will not let go until you bless me.

And only when this scrappy bandit

of a creature is speaking the words over you

as you hold a knife to its throat

do you realize, as the morning sun

is finding its way through the trees, that you are staring yourself in the face.

 Snowfall’s white descent is piling up, uninterrupted,

in layers of soft milk-chalk, as if this is its burdensome

intent, to lay rule over a silenced city.

Snowflake: not the modern fragile sense, but as perfect

crystallization, the sum of every shade of color,

each one as wholly unique.

Children on the PS 118 playground know this,

know that snow is an invitation, a communal call

that bestows no rules.

A snowman gets built, rolled through dirt and debris,

patted down with wet and snot-smeared mittens.

His dirty, rock-coal eyes wink to their delight;

a smile of stones follows. A child pulls a button

from her thrift-store coat, offering what she can

to make things whole. 

My mom reconstructed our lives from junk.
Unbleached cardboard Orisha beaded masks,
Glass-shard mosaics of proud Mary’s face,
A twisted crown of bottle caps and barbed wire,
Found relics, littered our tar-paper house,
Each objet d’art, a fetish, meant to stave
The shame of being poor. We ate, each night,
On painted plates of resurrecting suns.
She formed so much what others tossed away.
Now I scrounge through virtu and bric-a-brac,
The scattered trifles of remembrances,
To find her, traceless, gone. My soul sets bare.
Unfit to curate memory, I house
No rags, no cracked cups, no heart, fit for pawn.

The re-racked tops, bottoms, frocks beggared us.
Remember, bodies, once, possessed this cloth,
My mom reminisced. When we took the bus
Past bodegas, the hot-press mill, the swath
of storefront churches, tarpapered shotguns,
A land of corrupting rust, engorged moth,
To purchase, for the next fall, clothes the nuns
Found fitting, we, too, made out like a thief
At night. She dressed me like the rich man’s sons,
And gave herself, yet attained no relief,
Cried out, “Come, Jesus!,” where, then, was the Lord?
Without memory, one can have no grief.
Now, she is dead. My loss, my pain, I hoard
Indulgence even beggars can afford.