The long while

The long while has much silence as words.
A married woman arrives on the front door.
She holds a picnic basket.
She has eyes that say 
"Do not ask anymore, I am here."

And all the long while I wonder
What prompts a man to open a door, 
Let her come in. 
Or yet, closes the door behind him
As he joins her elsewhere.

Winds blow and leaves

A document arrived this morning.
I was on my way out, I decided to leave 
the large envelope in the living room.
I was supposed to have a daylight-day:
somewhere off the desk, 
a table outdoors finally. With a book
to mean nothing else but joy.
Shoes without socks, ripped jeans, an apple.
But something else always happens, the way
things, unexpected, do.
I returned the book unread,
the apple without a bite. I returned
hungry and angry

receiving another unhappy news.
When will things go away? I want to go away.
But the winds blow and leaves 
stay on the branches.

i started a joke

I should be a little too old for this.
But

in the mornings I still have my tea,
the toast, slices of a piece or two
of fruit

as though nothing has changed.
The weather 
has been kind of late, two days now.

It tells me to come for a run or what
may resemble like it.
I try not to think of a woman 

filling my recent days, with whom
words are exchanged
like gifts.

To each other as though we are young
again, somehow. In a way.
I am a little too old and she is 

a little older than I am; but also, 
married. Isn't it quite an old joke?

I think about meeting you

I think about meeting you 
in spring when the forsythias are in bloom
and on the twigs of trees are flowers
and the days are lovely,
the nights are cool.
It would be like we are young again
believing there may be worries 
but nothing could stop us from loving.
And then we would extend the hours
into a one long inexhaustible conversation
as though a movie.
As though a movie.

forty-so degrees

The temperature still has its cool hand
pressed flat against the surface of air.
Though the sun is bright
and gusts come not infrequently.
Dog walkers are out, their dogs patient
with the slow stroll; more lovers
are out nights. Their soft warm glow. 

I work continuously for days now,
trudging 
over translations and retranslations,
that the sun also keeps longer hours.
Outside the large windows, there may be
no indication of evening, not even 
when sometimes I feel my palms cold.

There is an end, though not in sight.
There will be summer, though not yet.
At the moment, here, 
forsythias in bloom.

A poem for you

Photo by WV Mozer

Time for rowing 
and fishing.
A bear alone
but not quite 
in the distance.
The sense
of quiet.
Though nothing
truly is.

the wall is thin

At the conference this morning, an independent researcher
reads her paper about nostalgia and peoples in transit.
She says "doors" to answer in an ambiguous way a question
from the audience; she describes as doors the door 
of airplanes that, like magic, one comes through to places;
also the screen of phones like doors.
My friend J- is having a depression and is remembering
all the people who used to read poetry with him; they are 
all either dead or have gone away. He repeatedly says

come over the house for dinner, but that last time his wife
casually says "I have no friends", repeating it as she leans 
on the doorframe. It troubles me to this day.
What can a person say to someone well past his fifties
with two children not yet even of school age? There are
children in the news feeds, children from far away, dying.
The graduate student who, during consultation, repeatedly

say how she did her work she did her work she did 
her best, her work
was truly only navel gazing 
at her own miseries. Sometimes it angers me

but only because I have been to countries of bone dry misery.
Where people do not have rooms for pathologized miseries, 
caught as they were in systemic and vicious precarity.
It troubles me to this day, how I cannot say
stop it

because I have no right to; because I, too, am flawed with
my own miseries, trifling in the larger scheme of things.
What can I say that will be of interest to you?
When I come home and open the door and see you, beautiful 
calves, legs stretched comfortably while your feet rest 
on the table after a long day at work, your attention now 
on a book, your long braided hair, what is there to say?

I hope there will be no need of words. I will 
fall on the space beside you, a door, a sigh,
so at last there will be no need of words.

note to the secretary

"Dear Gloria, I received your email..." 
and it is frustrating
how the contract is still there, you 
find it indistinguishable from the one
form that is significantly different.
The instructions are clear and simple.
Due to circumstances, the contract

will have to be printed in three copies.
Signed by two offices. Mailed.
To the one office for the action.

The other form, you need to print
in one copy; then have the necessary 
person to sign it. Scan the form, email
it to me. I will take care of it.

"Dear Gloria, I received your email..."
which part confused you?
A part of me understands there must be
a hell of other things to mind, as it
always is the condition everywhere.
I do not know where you are coming from.
I try

to understand. Like the student who is
always asking for consideration, 
an extension, always saying she is doing

the work. If she could have a little more
time, appealing for understanding. 
How she is wrapped with the blanket
of color, dark and struggling. I try to

extend the breadth of understanding.
Push back the word that intends to quell.
The word that is impatient at the slow
to understand, at the constant asking
for understanding. "Dear student,

the world does not stop. I must fail you.
It is not alright to fail. But it is
alright when you cannot make this mark.
Some just don't. It is alright. 
There are other marks you can make."

"Dear Gloria, I received your email..."

inside the ribcage

Here, at this time of the year, the sky flatten 
the hours. It becomes almost impossible to tell,
sometimes, the time unless you press your pulse

to know you are still among the living. Here,
where every thing has become so efficient and
then not. The selvedges are ripped, if one cares

to notice. Such small things like the seeing
through an opened window the lovers, now kissing,
have forgotten to close. Most of the time

every one has learned to move with flat-line
hearts that have become so civil, so tirelessly
euphemistic that at times I am beginning to feel

this calamity, incredibly scripted, un-human.

be careful of adventures

Be careful of adventures. The point is 
not always the going but the be-coming 
something else, familiar and not. 
The change, something that will happen, 
that has happened, within. We will not

be ever the same again, as the river
is crossed, as the day has ended.
As we have entered the wilderness
of love or of loneliness--the being
that was once our old selves suddenly

turning to be so much younger, so much 
a believer than we have finally become
here on the other side. 

the silk road

Names are always beautiful. As beautiful 
as we can imagine them to be. Framing 
them with the lines of our wants, the unsaid 
and unanswered needs. We tell and we do not
tell; the yearnings are always difficult,

no words come, they balk at the touch.
If I may be direct, how will you respond?
If I tell you I wonder how it will be
to be right across you, the table meant
for two? It is possible.

All these exchanges happening while sharing
a metaphysical table. So it is this, we
have no bodies, no faces, no names; but
how the words flow. Moving and always
in a state of unsettled be-coming.

The silk road can be seen from outside
our window; a candle flickers, you unfold
a table napkin; I search for a word trying
to find an excuse to look at you.
Someone comes close, asks what we'll have
for dinner. 

light

The conversation tonight was about light. How temporal it is. Like body, like breath. Like how two people meet. Living, and then, also, leaving. Both. Always happening at the same time. This mad provision 

we call here, now, what exists, merely passing in time & space, brushing, lingering, lingered, in transit, a longing, through the vastness this presence, phenomenon, is-ness, then gone, to where? from where? extending, to nowhere, elsewhere, liminal, between, nuance, distance, distances, horizon, eternal.
The commonest road has no name. It is a road that is not a road. It is light. That stretches. A beam, a bridge, crossing, reaching us at the selvedges, where we are on the folds of happenstance, wrinkle in space, in time, breathing each other, are you there? am i there? here i am. here you are.

the unsame world

How can we live in a same world?
I made the mistake of looking out 
the clear glass of the front door 

and smiled (did I really?)
           
that the man who saw it took it
as sign he could shovel.
My shovel was leaning on the porch

so there was no need of him.

But it was early in the morning
and I was just coming down to tea
and the man was cold, explaining

his deal for something to eat.

The things we could, need to do.
The real things beyond our real.
I didn't carry

cash, what is also called the thin
line between warmth and cold, 
the places where people stood. 

the steady rhythm

There is a steady rhythm in the pulse of the universe.
This I believe 
At the same time I believe

The necessary erratic erranty of the cosmos.
The Great Barrier Reef is dead
And the thousands of salmon continue living

Their lives all about the long return.
So ours, also, must be.

From where to where, from whom to whom, the definitions
May not be necessary.
What is it that we truly long for?

That which is repeated over and over lying between
All the lines and names and breaths
Including the time we stare at the seemingly 

Boundless sea.
Have we moved enough yet? 

Farther or closer who is to know.

wsw 18 mph

There are movies about this.
And books, and love affairs
and stories.
How there is a wall, call it
wind, geography, distance

upon which we press our ears
and listen to the other.
Words and breaths.
We place our palms flat
on the wall and listen to

the wind howl, the gusts
shaking the leafless treetops
and making the windows sound

as though knocking, to open.
But we do not. Knowing why
it is better, not.

waking up with no memory

It is the entanglements after. If there are any.
Most of the time, it is best

when both know it is nothing else. But that
spur of the moment--

muscles, adrenaline, the quickening of beats
towards cosmic release

before returning to the exhaustion of bodies 
and what is it that has always been there: our

own tired places in a slow and spinning world. 
It has been a long, long time

since.
Never quite losing sobriety facing passion.

Always steady to take the long drives 
and decide at least three steps ahead, as though

still playing chess with whoever it is across.
On better days,

I think myself in transit on a lucid boat
crossing an ocean called Weather&Time.

There has got to be a return or an arrival
somehow, although at the moment

my thoughts are only as simple 
as has she thought of me today.

do you sail?

The past few weeks I have been thinking of rowing.
There are two rivers nearby, large 
at this time of the year. 
There is much need to release and attempt to draw 
out into a clear line what has been repeatedly said.

I have stopped taking walks and will have to resume.
I no longer have my dogs.
I sleep and dream and wake up as though 
I haven't slept at all.

St. Patrick's may be a day with a reason.
Maybe one day we will happen to meet, you whiskey 
on hand, me, on the rocks.
And because I do not believe in therapists, 
I wrestle with own shadows,

Fill up the to-do list and bed with heaviness.
Sometimes the day begins with a clear mind
which means nothing and I come down to make tea,
which means coming through a number of doors 
that entering or exiting becomes uncertain.

sitting on the steps, leaving on a bike, at 10

There is a plausible reason why
women (may) tend to believe it is
they who are rejected.
The apparatuses of ideologies
repeatedly soak them so.
But long ago, before all these

we were ten and I said something
that had hurt you and I was sorry
and you wouldn't accept it,
refusing the popsicle offering
already starting to melt in my hand.
Sitting on the steps that summer

I learned who will always be
fearful; and suddenly fearful 
of my own discovery, I 

threw away the offering in anger.
The popsicle's sweetness 
melting away, its bone to the sun.

Was it my first desperation then?
The first grand show 
to the largest audience of one

whose magnificence I discovered
and feared. And she?
She wouldn't even look at me.

So at ten, I took my bike and
learned to leave in pompous glory.

what a wo/man does

What a woman does, it seems, is keep   But who am I to talk about woman?
all windows and doors, holes, slits,   When there is truly no difference.
fissures and cracks, gaps, spaces,     No lines of be-ing. 

open. That is no sin.                  Isn't everyone not and is     
The sense of whole-ness.               The same?

A continuous flow of wind & water,
fire and memory. There is no sin.      An endless lecture on construction,
Only a means to control people, his-   Suspicion and disbelief...

story, ideology...                     Also, indefatigable hope
I have stopped believing               In all its sarcasm and irony.

six hundred lifetimes ago. Not enough  
knows how we receive distorted forms   I am tempted to ask her
after translations: Freud's            Straightforward.

"die Seele" which meant "the soul"     But here, now, much caution
became "mind" in the pages rendered    Almost not unlike young again.

into what seems an undying treatise.
It is difficult to trust               Is it her rejection?
the nuances after a long time.         There is truly no difference.














                                     
                   

some parts anger

where do you place your anger? do you pour it in the sink? 

i find my temper short these days.

there are always 

indistinct night sounds.

must be impatience & something else.

where do you place your anger? i pour mine in a drink.

27 things

1. I must tell you I met someone.
2. Named Gold.
3. Fire burning tight in a small frame.
4. Birdcage, voice box, body.
5. Skin supple, subtle to the eye.
6. I want to, but do not.
7. So much age, so much youth.
8. She laughs and she says.
9. I step back and hold myself back.
10. Half a hundred smiles.
11. Three hundred times of waiting.
12. I search for something else instead.
13. Try again patience, the kind that sees through the last of the ripples so the liquid surface calms again into a mirror of sky.
14. Morning, afternoon, night, the chairs and tables by the streets are with people, warm temperature in the middle of winter.
15. Spark, spark, spark.
16. I dream of the outline of her.
17. Search for something else instead.
18. Is it possible to call it mirror? 
19. Translated into permutations: woman, night, flower, gold.
20. No one remains innocent, not after the wars folded in the years.
21. Are you spring cleaning?
22. I have two rugs and two wooden, folding chairs.
23. There is a list made into existence everyday and made to disappear everyday.
24. Am I waiting? Yes.
25. It is always the same woman.
26. In different translations.
27. The same.

a dark impenetrable forest

It is raining now where I am. 
The heater hums, the gray will not leave
until the weeks of winter will finally
exhaust themselves. In the meantime

the tea, the sound of rain, the days
in the calendar filling up
like things to do that march on and on.
I sense my right eye stooping now
like an old working dog. It means
the glasses will have to be changed.

In the meantime, how to talk about
translation? When everything 
we manifest are truly incomplete.
A student, armed with practice and theory, 
argues: translation is always a gain.
In time

one will know gentleness; and why 
the horizon is what it is: something
perceivable, what we can move towards
eternally, as we would a dream, 
as we would each breath. Always beyond. 

There are many ways to live.
Even the one who ruminates drinks tea,
the bag possibly packed in a factory 
filled with underpaid men and women,
children too, in some developing country 
never far beyond.

All in an open circle.
Echos-monde.
The water from this rain.
Me. You. What the limitations I have
make of You other than the You
that you actually live. What we imagine
of ourselves, of each other. 
To one another.

In the meantime, I write a letter
to a You.
Letter without postal stamp, physical 
address, even a legible name. As though
believing the tangible is an organic case 
always subject to decay, unable to contain
what we are truly trying to reach.

young man

The list for the grocery would be short.
But walking through the aisles, 
By itself, The List would grow, long and
With wings, maybe, as in poultry.
And promising as in spices, sweet like
Dates in a section closer to wines.
It would be important to impress the girl, 
Nope, not soda or beer or pizza.
Not in that old way of wooing 
That she would be a queen, 
In the kitchen.
The young man would show off he could
Make fire and keep a pot warm,
Apologize as well he's no cook, but
She should stay put on the high chair
And enjoy his attempt to show grandly
What he has trouble saying plain.
And the pretext for her coming over?
Anything but a movie on a small screen,
Anything that would lead to the couch,
Anything that would lead to anywhere else
Except the kitchen.
And seeing him trying not to be a klutz
In an apron with a wooden ladle, she
Would most likely offer to cut the onions.
Between the two of them, someone would 
Banter and another would quip,
And laughter a chorus that would fill.
The fried chicken wings, burnt.
The butternut soup, no salt.
Only the multigrain bread absolved.
He: "We got the dates, though."
She: "And this is some wine."