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.

This sunshine

It will be shy of three months time. 
The day set, traveling the wires
Paper to paper, what fate.

I thought it will be like floating.
While away time on placid waters.
She wakes up in time for office 

Plants a quick kiss, I get up later 
At sunup to walk the dogs, running
To leave what behind, moving towards

What waits ahead in time, in space.

               * 

The world too large, we have only
Such life. The dog who survived
Inner city to become part of home

Offered a rat she wrestled this morning.
Dead on its back at the front door.
What is not allowed to pass.

We picked up a snail making its way
Crossing the road and let it 
At the side by the grass and puddle.

               *

Over here, a butterfly comes to visit
The lemon on the sapling 
We bought at the market three Sundays ago.

Three Sundays from now, a despedida.
What must be, must be done in celebration.
Bring in the wine and the photos

Posterity. No one gets left behind.

                *

She and I recently painted the front door 
Yellow and called the place Sunshine,
What is constant in this country. 

the space between cities

The space between cities is a body of distance
hardly translatable into a map we can pretend
able to transverse by way of roads and rails,
ports and piers cohering so-called boundaries

of what is there and here and then and now as
east and west and north and south referring to
sun and wind and seasons, the way we attempt
landmarking passages if only to remember all 

places we've been, also those never been to 
except heard by name or gestured at in story.
The space between is body of distance, tunnel
lighted dimly: memory and dream, both palpable

to skin, real enough to hear the laugh from
a mind's photograph of one's own ageless self 
in a moment everlasting. Who else is there?
an entire library of snapshots handwritten in

cursive with names, some clearer than others, 
invoked often as bridges over which one's own 
mind and body travels, loop of a map a place
only in river-spaces crossing between cities.

words do not die, one must remember the sunshine

Words do not die, one must remember the sunshine
what it was that used to feel 
the world is large enough for all the rooms 

of love. 
All the windows open, you kiss by the street
both twenty 

or something again. Words do not die, especially
unsaid what it was that used to feel
what was meant when she said 

to never call again. One must remember the sunshine.
Words do not die in another universe
someone has courage to dial the phone again.

exiles

That one has to drive two hours from the City of Angels to see stars
we all laugh about it, it being close to impossible where we are now
seated in the middle of an island still to be overtaken by what has
already covered cities of our past lives, stardust, blankets, bog
no one really wants to talk plain about in words brave enough not to balk
from one's own forgiving the things underneath, unspoken, hidden.  
A circle of us who ran away, who got away, are sorry to have left but are
not coming back, are lost but not asking, are abandoning, are making.
Here, no need to drive anywhere to or walk away from but the moving
is constant anyway, from shadows real or of our own making.

do you have time for the movies?

the way we used to do when so much younger
the movies and always something else before and after
an entire saturday, an entire whole altogether
we park the car farthest in the lot, take time to
walk as slow as we could, turning twice and thrice
around the same block for conversations
that had much to do about nothing
touching voice than anything else.  as if we could
touch the other's soul with it.  snippets of stories
and faraway dreams about leaving and becoming

the shy kiss on the doorstep

do you still have time for the movies
the way we used to do when so much younger

What I found

between pages of a book, a torn piece of newspaper
showing a foot on tip toe, perhaps dancing, and
nothing more; the two pages facing each other,
one telling What you need more of in your life, I think,
are some elephants, the other about finding brave.

Be favorable to bold beginnings, said Virgil
Easier said than done.  I'm still wary
from the last beginning.  Nevertheless, I've begun
a vigil: wait for the ally who believes
endings make beginnings necessary,
and who's plenty bold.  Enough not to worry

about how much to give, how much to withhold.
I held my breath and closed the book.




(after Centolella)

A Whisper of Storm (a pastiche)

Three days of rain             Early sunrises             Early darks

On this listless December         On this island of rain
There is a whisper of a storm not half an ocean away

Nights the beggars pretend not to beg by carolling
The city gates have opened         The strays have come to stay


                                          *  *  *


I drove all the way to your neighbourhood and found
You were not yet home         Your new wife        The one I haven't met

She answered the door and knew my name
She looked different from the last two I've known

What leads you 
one woman to another?  

"I just dropped by.  Friday and thought maybe a couple of beers."
I drove around town


                                          *  *  *


Finally at 65         G will be leaving for Spain            to retire
We threw a celebration for her leaving or for her life        both

T made quiche
And after everything        we all had tea

Of course nobody really talks about leaving


                                         *  *  *

And

Adam wrote to Eve
"I am breathless and anxious and sick with dread and desire."



















 

the quiet of nothing

The time it takes to float on the surface
of things is equivalent to peace.
We do not insert bird for sorrow.
We do not make room for empty.

Sometimes I still dream of receiving
your letter now long gone.  
We have agreed to be quiet.
We have agreed
and distance have agreed with us.

in keeping with silence

In keeping with silence, the idea of
another city is no longer the same.
There is an absence that was once
not there, a kind of empty in the air.
No else knows of this, even though
surely there are those who feel
a certain trace on their skin. A damp
weight of memory that memory has
already forgotten the name.  Some-

times, when enough of us has gather
into a circle of remembering, we can
string together the beads of stories
recollected from dampness in the air.
Re-creating the city from another time.
From the days when we were young
once immortal in love.

The Kamasutra of Kindness (Position No. 3)

The Kamasutra of Kindness
Position No. 3



It’s easy to love
through a cold spring
when the poles
of the willows
turn green
pollen falls like
a yellow curtain
and the scent of
Paper Whites
clots
the air
but to love for a lifetime
takes talent
you have to mix yourself
with the strange
beauty of someone
else

wake each morning
for 72,000
mornings in
a row so
breathed and
bound and
tangled
that you can hardly
sort out
your arms
and
legs

you have to
find forgiveness
in everything
even ink stains
and broken
cups

you have to be willing to move through
life
together
the way the long
grasses move
in a field
when you careen
blindly toward
the other
side

there’s never going to be anything
straight or predictable
about your path
except the
flattening
and the springing
back

you just go on walking for years
hand in hand
waist deep in the weeds
bent slightly forward
like two question
marks
and all the while it

burns
my dear
it burns beautifully above
you
and goes on
burning
like a relentless
sun




by Mary Mackey

Explaining Summer

On the first day of existence,
the sun chose us. And that was that.

He’s got a street address now
and a delinquent tax record.

Let me explain. I am lying to you
because it is cold where you are.

Cold and far and snow and darkness
and chilly hands. Or maybe not.

But such dichotomies are easier.
And who are you to stop living

multiple lives and occupations
in the snowstorms of my mind?

Teacher and farmer and secret poet.
I need to tell you I don’t love you.

I just need to stop falling in love
with you each time a cool breeze

rushes past the tips of my fingers.
Or revising another novel I will shred

in the hidden office behind my rib cage.
As if my entire body were a mob front.

But isn’t everything a front for something?
How, in my world, cold weather is nothing.

Only a history of you. Remember that talk?
The gulls? The Baskin Robbins in winter?

I said: Anger is almost always shame
in an existential crisis, writing poetry

in a café, shielding its notebook
from each passing stranger.

Oh, I might as well be talking to myself.
Besides, I theorize that you

will only read this in one of a thousand
possible universes. If not here, there.

Or in the warmth of my skull. Imagine that:
One goddamn poem for each world

in which our lives intersected.
Like hairs tangled in sunlight.

What’s not to like? What person
would say no to zipping from body

to body on some madman experiment,
taking notes on the many cuisines

of love, giving each of them names
like they were your children.

“Instead of love, why not sky?
A species of bird? Or the changing

climate of the heart?” I give up.
I am thinking of names now

as a breeze passes and I do not love you.
I am merely enjoying the cold

in the national park of myself.
As if the origin story of something

entirely unimportant were about to begin.
A new sub-breed of sparrows.

An alternative to happiness.
Curtains raising to a new color of sky.

by Gian Lao

pomegranates

do we still look for Virtuous? the tribe
has long vanished.  gone after its
last, and last farewell parade.  how 
they had come together, a flock 

merging from crevices of mountains 
wet mounds of rivers, wides from flatlands. 
i look past the large glass windows
of the 15th floor and wonder

was Virtuous ever real at all? or are they
as real as stories of nymphs
no longer believed and yet, men
dreamed in the kept hollows 

of their minds? do we still look for 
Virtuous? on the streets, there could be
a nun, a student, a lawyer,  a thief,
mother, father, children, aunts, uncles

a strange array of the Less
--this whole world--including ourselves
who, after having bitten 
the pomegranates of the underworld

attempts every day
to rise Virtuous above the self.

other lives and finally

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed

anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

 


Bob Hicok

white nest mornings

you and i on an eternal morning, bright and white the scent of fresh linen, white sheets, a curtain bask in early daylight, the scent of your skin, soft, the gentle outlines of your curves, a geography of light, woman, breath, and warmth, and the oh so beautiful tangle of wilderness.































 

tourists

strolling through the night market road,
they found her shawls
one carnation, one ocean hue




















 
 

shawl

She could mean a half hundred things with it.  Leaving the shawl
on the passenger seat while I parked the car at the side street.
I wouldn't have noticed, until she came back and said "I left something."
And pointing at the red shawl beside me, she smiled that smile
beautiful and warm in the December night.

truskawkowy

there may be a sense of comfort from uncertainty.  if the weather permits.  i ran this morning and collected thoughts along the way, had they been pebbles i wouldn't have made it, even a block.  maybe it is better to say 

i plucked thoughts along the way.  the weather was gray with a bite in the breeze.  the sky was slate.  a few days ago there had a been a strong quake that broke down hundreds-year-old churches.  not counting the real houses of the living.  

i went to see a part of the city and the traces of earth-moving.  she recalled the sound of glass straining on the 19th floor, and the narrow escape staircases swaying.  the quick escalator 

couldn't move.  a crippled woman had to be carried through the flights.  still there were cars on the streets.  in another place, there were no more bridges.  in yet another, tons of rain.  and flood.  isn't it too easy to say 

all of these are a reckoning?  the cab driver said calmly.  there was a cross on his dashboard.  his radio airs an advertisement for floorwax.  in between the spaces of every so few hours 

were aftershocks.  the national media feasted for sympathy.  but in the meantime, in some places, there was talk on the importance of mayonnaise despite a protein living.  a well-taught 

young conservationist pointed how egg yolks were used to build the heritage churches.  this, of course, was all well-known.  still, every body went on living.  and in a pad, a cheese and wine party with cold cuts.  

a german who was stranded in hongkong arrived exhausted in the country.  and wondered why the people play mournful love songs.  some prefer to take photos of themselves.

i looked from a high point at the capital and thought of bubbles.  random and uncertainty.  like a child who died at four.  or a dog born from a stray to be a stray to die unloved and starved.  a body without burial on a public high way.

sometimes this country makes me very sad.  and while a good number debate about the future, i return with my luggage and kept fever.  she gives me medicine for colds, which i refuse, preferring water and rest.

how a friend is so happy to give a sachet.  From home, she says, reading aloud the ingredients.  skrobia, regulator kwasowości: kwas cytrynowy, 1,1% sok z limonki (syrop glukozowy, koncentrat soku z limonki), ekstrakt z czarnej marchwi i hibiskusa, aromat, substancja wzbogacająca: witamina C, sól, barwnik: annato.  but there is no truskawkowy, she says, pointing at the strawberries as advertised on the cover.

of motion

among other things, there is the constancy of motion.  the comfort of it.  like a kind of softness that urges one, gently, to move.  wake up, darling, the sunup.  the windows are the first to know.  and the curtains.  and she kisses you on the lips.  you wake up to find she is still asleep.  it is less than a minute before the alarm.  that your body has awakened you through dreams.  and the first day of the weekend has found you:  it is the temptation:  to be in abandon.  but some part of you is waiting for the daily paper, and an expected post that may or may not come.  and the knowing that the abandon is only an illusion:  soon she will wake up and rearrange her mind into a list of things to do.  most likely the laundry first.  the dog now licks your toes, it is time for a run.  the blanket still covers you, and her scent is beautiful.  you think: five minutes.  and if there are still eggs and milk in the kitchen to make her breakfast.

















 

copenhagen

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says, reviewing the number of murders and theft, the number of people that is less 

than the population of stricken children in the humid city where we were 
eating eggs benedict in a place that smelled of vanilla.  A waiter named Denmark 

came to pour water.  The name on the tag on the crisp white shirt.  Only in this country, he adds, noticing the name.  I only thought what a happenstance--having known 

such penchant for first names:  a Xhemei, an Angus, a Lucy Pearl, a Lefer, a Lady Goddess,  
a Lady Macbeth, a Sir Lord, a Phil.Mighty, a Douglas McArthur, an Avril Lavigne.

Copenhagen is not a real city, he says again, pointing at more cities and stopping, perhaps
not without a touch, the cities in his Italy.  The man missing his home.