migration

decidedly, you lose altitude. 'descending,'
as you had predicted, 'into the heat of delhi.'
the plane's monitor shows it quite clearly, the
desert bird whose wings are made from sand,
backboned by mountains.

you: conduct geometry on a sphere, crossing
the earth in a curve.

niqab

the gift of women, then, in a
sort of heaven:

• humans don't so much shatter
  as come apart.

• "they don't love their children."

• daughters, now, receiving
  the send off, not coming home in
  boxes, not enough to be
  found,

• sentries. walkers that go
  any where, watchers that
  suspend in black a motif of eyes.
  

what do they offer them for that?

within the shroud, a shroud. an eye.
within the shroud a ticking heat.

(You assemble a percussive beat, which
is not the heart's beat, but rushes in
the blood all the same)

last entries, part one

from some notebook a year or so ago.

__________________________

You do not think these things. You
Unthink. Hands' fingers follow
Gravity; hands on knees draw the
Line of the eye you cannot
Look away from.

You begin to envy -
"who then can love" - Rilke.

But hypocrisies - Catullus
Lied and you caught the
Disc of it years too late -

Only the alone can truly know
The tremble of field before plow -

At the edge you are, the field's
Edge, the flower-falling edge.

Having the lesser of it.

The last night's night spent gritting your teeth.

A glint of smile. Something
about his mouth around his smile captivated you. You
looked longer.

Outside wind makes motion sinusoidal, rippling the
structure of things.

He in his house. You on your side.

a secret! don't tell:
a serendipity.

No wonder someone was able to fall in love with the word.
It falls from your mouth like edict.

The life of your words when you aren't speaking them.
What deeds you do when you don't pay mind.

He extended his key
and it turned the lock
and fit the lock of a place
90 miles further away.

(That is what you learned today from the paper's wedding announcement.)

9 years ago, you are waking up unaccustomedly early to watch the news
and you see dust fall from buildings in advent of war.
9 years later, the man takes your shoulders in between his palms to contain you.

Later, still.
Someone else notices with precision your sad demeanour.
'Don't pick up the glass,' you say, as he comes silently to your aid.

'I like to do that.'

And nothing.

And nothing.

series of shorts

I am writing again. Or actually, posting newish things that I would like to see outside of notebook-scrawled-handwriting format.

Mostly garbage. Apologies in advance.

still life:

Winter.
Bright.

In the late evening, I sat propped,
sad statue,
tilting my head so the refuse of water ran, evaporatingly
in whorls.
Spoke to my self the whole night --

Measured the fall of snow.

Remembered to unarm anger
(I taught him what he knows,
the several-atoms-thin facing of me.)

Inward movement impossible.
We spected, politely, on outsides.


I tried to lower myself out of love with the same ease.
Drank and thought to appeal to him, dear object.

Revised standards:
broke through the old anger like puncturing a skin.

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--

No title yet...

White lights,

A morning train from Valdemoro --

Why have they turned them on?
Nothing like darkness
to soothe the fog,

the vision that climbs the hills
of each stranger's face
and attempts escape through a window.

The car is now
a compartment of eyes:

Pinto, San Cristobal,
Atocha.

Clear, wet ribbons
cut down by the sky.
A vein-work of yellow fields on the glass,
growing.

The harder it rains,
the more you learn about distance.

On either side two men
are speaking Russian.


----------------------------------

Here is Lorca's "After a Walk," from which I've taken a line.

After a Walk

Cut down by the sky.
Between shapes moving toward the serpent
and crystal-craving shapes
I'll let my hair grow.

With the amputated tree that doesn't sing
and the child with the blank face of an egg.

With the little animals whose skulls are cracked
and the water, dressed in rags but with dry feet.

With all the bone-tired, deaf-and-dumb things
and a butterfly drowned in the inkwell.

Bumping into my own face, different each day.
Cut down by the sky!

Sequence

I.

The almond tree, the flower from underneath the almond tree
by that fence, the stone fence
It blew and upturned like sea plants
like hands and bowls asking
The almond tree in spring.

II.

I bathed in almond oil and milk, skin
inned the little red tub
when I was a child we ran out of soap
My mother she washed my hair out like so
many little galaxies of black, dusted black
She polished me so I gleam-smiled and
broke my teeth on the red walker
Played with sticks of red and black, their meetingsounds
hollow.

III.

Now if I saw an almond tree in the ground I would not
stop to say it is an almond tree I would
never think to know the flower which grows on it, where
inside the carbon has married an N, that
the carbon inherits the end and I

begin to ignore, eat
the aspic taste I learned in childhood was wrong,
That bitter almonds are spat before the carbons inside poison
the first erring step - inside the grown arsenic
taste lines mouth and twists it like grass leaves breaking

IV.

The almond tree. Its flower has five white leaves.


_____________________________________

I rather want to call this "The problem of describing trees" but maybe "Envy over other people's poems" is more apt, ha.

annunciation, winter

If I believed in it, my constellation has eroded.

The earth sign, the negative
treble that is true only inside the mirror of tongue,
eye.

It is not true, let it not be true.


____________________________________________


not that i've had the time or mind to read anyone lately, but i still find myself sounding out peg boyers often.