Sorrowful Mysteries

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.

If I hide the blankets under the bed
If I cover the mattress with the bedspread
If I wrap the baby in a towel
If I put it in the backpack
If I put on my uniform
If I leave for school, as usual
If I walk slowly
If no one looks at me
If

In vain I called her in vain
I waited for milk streaming from her breast
a dark impulse seized my will
and I made my way unfurling hollows,
orifices, pores
all open to receive.
From one tunnel to another.
I foresaw the pleasure of licking
but the hands around my neck . . .

The interior landscape has changed.
Like worn-out flags
the membranes
wave over the recently opened trail.
Pleasure is now braided forever
with the desperate gasp of death.

Translation by Elena Barcia

Sometimes Silence Is the Loudest Kind of Noise

Sometimes silence is the loudest kind of noise
Like sometimes it was best when
Girls were girls and boys were boys.
Like back when freeze tag was a mating dance.
Like back when “Do Over” meant you got another chance.
Like back when anxiety was worrying if Wonder Woman would make it out alive.
Like back when freedom was sliding backwards on a slide.
Like back when success was jumping off a swing and
Landing on your feet, then
Doing it all over again.
Like new shoes made you run faster.
Like getting Ms. Gross again for math was a disaster.
Like failure was a word we hadn’t even learned to spell yet.
Like promises were sealed and kept with pinky bets.
Like a challenge was a double dare.
Like ugly was a cock-eyed stare.

And you liked it…
Like when you flipped your eyelids inside out
To impress that boy across the room,
‘Cause that’s all it took.
And there was no such thing as too soon,
As long as you checked the right box in that note from across the room,
The one that he…passed her.
Back when, “I don’t know, maybe” was a legitimate answer.
Back when, “I need space” meant he needed more elbow room to draw,
So he got on the floor and he coloured outside the lines.
Like the lines of colour were on the floor,

So we just existed in sandboxes and playgrounds.
And we hop-scotched and dodgeballed
And everything I needed to know, I learned in a shopping mall.
Like don’t wander off on your own,
Like know who you are,
Like know where you came from,
Like never let go of your mother’s hand no matter what you do,
Like if you get lost, just stand there until someone finds you,
And someone will always look for you
Because someone will always miss you
And someone will always find you
And when you cry, someone will always remind you
In that quiet, quiet lullaby voice,
That sometimes silence is the loudest kind of noise.

Axe

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday.

We are hatchets of steel and fire.
We live to reap and illuminate.
With the metal,
we fell the trunk.
With the flame,
we illuminate the cut,
the felling of what we are.

Translation by Lawrence Schimel

Autumnal Hook

What if Persephone remained a hard woman?
An ethics of care turned towards oneself.
Love’s harvest, the halves of intimacy in these latitudes.
A climate of change revealed as cycle of constant
return, how to reconcile, farm my inadequacy
for yours or simply distract. Let’s just say
for argument’s sake, let’s just say
pugilism is always political, platforms cropping hay,
the field of absolutes you might travel to.
I distil the brackish dark, listen low over the lees,
liar strings laid flush to decider core. Store
of regrets, bare-knuckled figs, a desire to fall foul.
Your rallying jig as jubilant plucked yew.
Cross-dressing Orpheus to your Eurydice,
I discover I want as a mode. To provoke
the strike back, for you to tell me that the light
is yours, and it is I who have disengaged song,
who must feel my way through the ever-burdened earth.
To be called a muffler, bobbing compliment.

On the Threshing Floor, I Chase Chickens Away

In honor of Labor Day, we present this scene of the poet at work.

And I see sparrows fly over. They look around
as if it’s inappropriate to stop for just any grain of rice.
They have clear eyes, with light from inside.
Starlings also fly over, in flocks, bewildered.
They flutter and make a sound that seems to flash.
When they’re gone, the sky gets lower, in dark blue.
In this village deep in the central plain
the sky is always low, forcing us to look at its blue,
the way our ancestors make us look inside ourselves,
narrow and empty, so we look out again
at the full September –
we’re comforted by its insignificance but hurt by its smallness.
Living our life this way, we feel secure.
So much rice. Where does it come from?
So much gold color. Where does it come from?
Year after year I’ve been blessed, and then deserted.
When happiness and sadness come in the same color code,
I’m happy
to be forgotten. But who am I separated from?
I don’t know. I stay close to my own hours.

Translation by Ming Di

Let This Be Your Praise

And what is praise but the offering up of one’s self,
the daily rituals: waking to the stream of light seeping in
under the bedroom door, dressing slowly, humming Marley’s
‘Three Little Birds’ or a made up melody,
cursing the traffic and the heat – the unbearable brazenness
of the morning sun – punctuating your profanities
with pleas for forgiveness. When you were a child
your mother threatened to wash your mouth with soap.
You have not forgotten how a mouth can sully everything,
its desire to be perfect and how often it fails.
At work you smile with the girl who asks stupid questions,
you imagine she has unpaid bills, a wayward child,
you imagine you are more alike than different.
You cut your nails at your desk, laugh when someone falls,
eat lunch too quickly, take Tums for the indigestion.
In the evening you drink peppermint tea, watch TV and
when your eyes grow heavy you say a quick word
of prayer, a thank you for another full day, a request that you
not be killed in your sleep. Perhaps, you squeeze in an orgasm.
And if this is not praise, this simple act of living, if this is not
enough, then let us lie here and do nothing and see
what God has to say about that.

The Grapes of the Desert’s Thirst

We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Revolution Day.

Some travelers measure the earth
with a patch of text

some philosophers go to
a carpenter to lathe a question

some poets head to a tailor
to escape the rips widening within them

As for me, I run towards the rubble of emptiness or a heap
of shade in order to erase what is.

There is no grave that can contain
the flavor of death pouring forth from the wooden bed

no grave that can gather what is left of words
sticking to the lips of a dead body

no room that can absorb the cold solitude
of a paper from which a poem has turned away

The narrator doesn’t walk in the funeral procession
but listens only to what is said at the dinner for the dead
and collects what falls from the crumbs of words.

I didn’t understand then
how the head can be in the horizon
and the leg in the grave

or how the gate of a graveyard can lead
to the courtyard of a poem

In the end
I felt the desert’s thirst
for the grapes of Dionysus

and the cries of the ruins for
the dying embers

and the sadness of gazelles for
the silence of poets

Instead of fleeing the blackness in my chest
towards the white of the paper

I threw myself in a field of yellow daisies
and fell asleep.

Translation by Deborah Kapchan

Irrelephant

We present this work in honor of World Elephant Day.

the intelligence of elephants
irrelevant, but eloquent
their clumsy sort of elegance
is one of many elements.
and when that wisdom elevates
it’s difficult to celebrate
for once we see our cells relate
the thoughts start to accelerate.
well wisdom seems aristocratic
dusted down from someone’s attic
pulled apart and cleared of static
(fluctuations are erratic.)
for how we trace the web life spins
parts swept away like bowling pins
still, consciousness, our human prints
will never match the elephants.

Eve Remembering

We present this work in honor of the 5th anniversary of the poet’s death.

I tore from a limb fruit that had lost its green.
My hands were warmed by the heat of an apple
Fire red and humming.
I bit sweet power to the core.
How can I say what it was like?
The taste! The taste undid my eyes
And led me far from the gardens planted for a child
To wildernesses deeper than any master’s call.

Now these cool hands guide what they once caressed;
Lips forget what they have kissed.
My eyes now pool their light
Better the summit to see.

I would do it all over again:
Be the harbor and set the sail,
Loose the breeze and harness the gale,
Cherish the harvest of what I have been.
Better the summit to scale.
Better the summit to be.