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of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory
everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
—no, forget it,
it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia
begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.
If there is a god, let it be the hyena
who plunges her mouth into the river after eating
our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who,
dark with thirst, poisons the river
unbeknownst to both of them.
Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called
already through “time” out of our houses. She tells
her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth
with what is sharp. She asks, Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace?
Yes, we will add this story. We ask her,Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songsabout hunger & thirst & fur? & she, being wiser than we,
says, Yes, I will sing them ifyou grant me your permissionto turn them into poems abouta mercy.
Please raise your hand,
whomever else of you
has been a child,
lost, in a market
or a mall, without
knowing it at first, following
a stranger, accidentally
thinking he is yours,
your family or parent, even
grabbing for his hands,
even calling the word
you said then for “Father,”
only to see the face
look strangely down, utterly
foreign, utterly not the one
who loves you, you
who are a bird suddenly
stunned by the glass partitions
of rooms.
How far
the world you knew, & tall,
& filled, finally, with strangers.
after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden
The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing
only things ordinary
as water & light.
I adore you: you’re a harrowing event.
I like you very ugly, condensed to one
deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest
question, your hold is all clutch and sinker.
Cannibal old me,
with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides
with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver.
How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you,
the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today.
Curiouser and curiouser,
your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body
is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle
in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes.
In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry.
You put on my heat,
(that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping
hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly,
hungering down the valley, no one question to cover
all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use.
You’re wrong and right
at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring
chopping down the back door. You slap my attention
all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime?
Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.
Taking on an aspect of the Orient,
Skies full of hatchets and oranges
Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood:
But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor?
Skies full of hatchets and oranges
Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh—
But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor,
As the nights grow steadily into mountains.