dialogue

"You know that it is serious, India's malcontent and the idea of China, large already and growing more strong.

Even as an official said, "[Obama's] bowing before the Emperor of Japan was an act of courtesy; his bending over backwards for China was an act of appeasement," you cannot help but laugh and remember him, our young American president. Star-struck, for all of his experience, bowing to awkward depths like a marionette and smiling broadly, the strength of his back stretched gingerly at us.

Because that man, he is
The Emperor is very old. A dignified oak, he, with no need of polish; he has been ingesting a calm grace from boyhood. It is somehow endearing to watch that."

from nytimes, perfect for the soon-to-be miserable weather - multinational iterations of chicken soup =)

Pastoral.

From the hall, a smell of cooking intrudes,
wraps around the room and bed linens -- in other houses,
fixtures are bolted stoic and revealing nothing.
Voices, din.

Two women smoking quietly.

From the balcony.

See the framed us:

a family of two eating children:
one boy one girl the father drinking tea the mother
going from one to the other, the white dog watching like a
whitedog clock on the wall.

When I finish shifting my eyes, you disappear.

Jars of fruits steeped in alcohol reclaim
for themselves shelves.

I retrieve my trickeries.

What you have, I have the lesser of it.

Bookbinder of Hyderabad

Jugs of methyl blue. Paint over all the walls. Women

sit cross-legged, Indian-style, in suits of the same.

Long arms Oriental eyes Kohl.

If I wrap my ribs around, it will keep me unseen.

I fit to cardboard, memory. Old newspaper,

tanned skins, the cured skins of animals.

I don't do anything for the love of it. I make

pennies. I make money, a binder of books.

portrait

your father:
with surgeon's hands
stealthily picks knives out of kitchen
drawers late at night

protectionism

put out of mind, but the mechanics of never erase.

still -- now imprint
of arms having remembered holding
many things,
a small white dog (two)
a man in the cold.

and one not-short:

You fashion a return. The city collects now its snow and ices down like breath,
lights effuse, having been strung from limbs of trees.

You cannot find in the straight backs of men, the clean cut of men
on any street the modicum of him. The ocean you have left
carries you with inertia, always
tugging in the inner ear, the seahorse horseshoe bones of it.

the singularity, then, that
opened up, the pinpoint bloom of lead and things heavier than lead
would pull him in

as you troll the streets in which you imagine --

thinking of the man as krill.

a series of shorts

the sower
in the artful current, ground flows down.
and the river leans blue. the sky twists around sun in pulled-wool turns.

lurid colours of pink and green, the whip-hearted seeds.

the parabolic flow of things only part of the physics we are seeing, the
truncated orbit of falling things

a series of shorts

the haw from hawthorn, the scrolled
universe of a single walnut,
refuse,
me, every morning
i walk past the trees loosening leaves in the corridor of that street

which doesn't rhyme, shoe beats and museum-piece
children echoing each other-like
noise follows a flat-palmed hand.

the pavement freckled with a fat rain, offal of
trees rubbed level by heel, wheel until they've settledlike
spots of black white dalmation, how curious. one peers__

gum, scores of it. moulded by teeth into a flat fate.

a series of shorts

in speaking of the kiss, two hands meet each other's fingers.

something akin said - (behinddoors and instairwells translates to passion she says)
speaking of things, men and women things, the meetings, all of them i tell her

all the times i kissed i never asked permission we never spoke, just went for each other like -
went for each other's--