Poems of 2008, January through March

Beware of This

The first thing to go
is usually the teeth
in the town and then
the roads. Notice
when the animals
start coming in closer
to look and feed
because the lights
are suddenly
a bit dimmer.
Sound diminishes
but the voices within
are clear enough
as they mumble
through their mangled
gums and dentures.
Is it that time again?
says the rock.
The trees only say:
that is how it once was
before the fences.

She's In
The Book of Nogales

I'm all eyes you see
wherever wisdom goes
the parade follows
but in the wrong direction -
this ratio of angels
drives us mad.
A plain old drama
drowns the bedlam
with its fury, this
snake swallows it whole:
(Remember this?
Of course not.)
Nothing escapes
a point of view
at a checkpoint
where we wait
for indictments and polls,
that sacred ammunition
and those officious absolutions.
From the windows
cameras spot vendors
as they ply the ancient art
of bait and switch,
the carrot on a stick.
I'm sure of it.
Our trunk is only full
of statues and banks
but they don't believe it,
those types insist
on certificates and honey.
Those types don't know
much about bones
and even less about the sea.

In the shadows
hueras exchange
dirty looks for pesos,
treasure after
treasure, Catrinas
for thin-thin dimes.
It's a long way home
for that one -
her clothes tell
the thousand tales
of babies and begging,
the stories that never end
and we've heard them all before.
She's a whole
cartel in her papoos
and just another exodus
on the sole of her huarache
spelled novena, nueva, nuestros.

The Wondrous Magico

Most things never really happen
to us and those that do
are truly nostalgic.
The tired old promise evaporates
once the war is fought
and supposedly won, as planned.
The corpse wrecks the best-laid plans:

like clockwork and clairvoyance.

The dreadful poses staged
on the triage of life
and death innuendo
are a pleasant compromise
for the real thing
as it fiddles and burns,
cuts everything in half
and disappears the rabbit
from the land of the living.
Those that shake the snakes
from bags and wave their
crooked old sticks
past all our pleased
and dumbstruck faces
say like this:

and and and and and
Voila! Lo! Behold!

Sawridge Hotel, Fort McMurray

When I think of Beirut
I think of hair,
of weddings and war.
A never-ending cycle
of hair, weddings and war.
On our way out
we spoke to a man
on his fourth or fifth
flight from an Israeli

incursion.

I think of hair, weddings and war.

Euphemism

Some things cannot go twice
and others just cannot go
as I tip toe through the shadows
past your closed circuits
and into the backyard that is lit
like an ember to the sky
where these eyes are gemstones,
to write captions.
It's not about making waves
yet the birds are taut,
treacherous and on the line -
no one put them there.
The satellites cannot preach
to the stars as they drift
into the sea,
in silico, as they say.

Al-Moqawama
(The Resistance)

We have to embrace the idea that we are the leaders we are looking for. - Grace Lee Boggs

By Allah, if I see that on one side is the truth and on the other side all the rest of the people I, without caring and paying heed to those reproaching me, will fight all alone with my sword, on the way and path of the right, against them. - Emir Ali ibn Abi Taleb, pbuh.

War is not the time
for poetry -
that is for the evenings
of old men in other lands
who ring the bells
to commute their sentence,
those who barter time
with the ancients in senate.

Dare I say that?

But I am a fighter
at heart and know
a warning has to find
the warned, has to abandon
the bles-sed for a while.
A warner has to call
the laggers to the front
one by one in order
to cut them down
or lift them up.

We prayed on those nights
for ourselves. We prayed
for the ones who crawled
through the fields
on their bellies.
We watched the skies
and hoped the bombs
might be jubilations.

They weren't.

The tarmac and the dairy,
every single bridge gone.
The long drive through
abandoned streets
and the stockpile
of rice in the big
drama of flight.
The bitterness of translation
is the joy of understanding,
and vice versa.
There will be more of this.

The Honey Moon

Beirut:

Tell me this
is the last adventure
and I'll go home, stop
bothering God for information
about you. I'll stop spying
through your candles and dirty
mists. I married not a man
but the whole country, wedded
rivers while marching
across stones, my innocence
lost on a flight from which
I stepped into a sea
of armies and posters.
My teeth got ground into paste,
a dowry wasted on one hiding
place after another looking
for the auction of the future
where the last bidder is death.
I gave birth to mementos and distress
near bodies of chalk
sucked naked by gravity.
Our children tugged
baggage and dread
through the streets
as the news catered
our bitterest meals.
We never leave and never arrive,
airport to airport with a cold bravado
saying the strangest things.

From Allah's Book of Reflections

As the bee tends
the tendrils of time
on the outskirts
of her metaphysical chores,
she is weightless, harmless, free.
Her chapels are flowers
in space and so small.
Daisy, peony, carnation:
you paper-puzzles, you grand masters
how about me? Is this a Valentine?

Hey pollen pushers, egg minders
in the society of specialists,
who gave you your orders
to sting and mend?
All this subatomic origami, all these stars.

My Valentine

In the encyclopedia of the ancients
we waited to be born. It was said
that we were yet in the loins
of our forefathers. It was a very
very long time ago by current estimates.
We woke to find our coins
-the same old ones
were not as useful and told
not to say anything about
our condition, we abided by that
doctrine of secrecy before we
knew what our secret even was.
Now is the time to come
to this drama, now is the time
to see our plight. Now is the time
to wonder if any of it
really matters or if it is even true.
We were told to take two deaths.
We were told about the others
who slept for one hundred years.
It is only mentioned to disquiet,
it is only mentioned in order to warn
those in whom a heart still resides, a heart.
Those in whose chest still beats an anthem.

On Account Of It

These pieces should fly
instead of bark or for instance,
the future ought to open
into the right scenes
as being dispatched properly,
following a certain evolution.
The lady at the bank says
it is time to apply, to complete
forms for exile, igne combusta.
The embassies call each other
at home and say:

keep a low profile, avoid being
whoever you are.

The locals drift to sleep
with the knowledge of long
summers in dreadful times,
even longer winters and nights
occupied in the worst of all dreams.
Fruits arrive on trees withered,
pickled in dust and weary tastes.
Rumour has it that garbage
is the first luxury of mankind
but few people know
until it is too late
and the rest are used to it.
You have to wonder
about the eyes sometimes,
scour the old photographs
to find something there-
some little particle- reunions.
While counting blessings:
estimate the shipping weight,
resale value, insurance rates.
He apologizes by saying:
you are still a gypsy,
when will you get home?
These credentials in suitcases
labeled: hope, caution, trouble
are more than enough collateral.
There are still places
on the planet where we might
find a vacancy or try to wish for.

Z Flies

Part of the reason is the desire
to keep pace with the frantic show
of tomorrow, yesterday in the bin
swept toward the infinity of amnesias.
Everything is a deliberate parable,
the fly who drifts away
with his delicious meals, unretrievable -
that wiley thief -
to the great dreams we cannot recall.
Limbo! Oh paradise of purgatories
is the hell of the ancients, this sphere
a masterpiece of vain and partial speeches.
The people come and go, unaware, save a few.
They wipe their brows, carry bricks and lipsticks,
dance their jigs. Everyone is so familiar here
with marks on their foreheads to the tightening
of their ears. Smiles, sighs, puffings.

The sea is only a tremendous bucket swarming
with a few fish where currents are
mysterious maps under the most popular of orbits,
she keeps her gemstones there, near the edges
yet the divers want so much more,
want to see the habitats of the blind.

Limbo on this contiguous shore,
a great divide between salt and drink,
that mountain under this dome described
and traveled, such slight migrations to and fro.
The weakest birds who fall in April
are found in those sad positions
without ceremony or feather.
They do die trying don't they?
Smile. They die trying.

About Real Estate

There is a fear going on
out there in the calla lillies.
Everyone knows about it
yet no one seems to mind.
It's an empty oh no
even though it was
an ordinary old thing.
There was a house
of big and empty
that I wanted
all of a sudden
or maybe it wanted me.
I don't know why
because there isn't much
I want anymore
and a house opened
and empty is never greedy.
But I wanted that
and that
scared me too.
But still the question
remained, why?
Why want that?
Because it is big or
because it is empty?
Or maybe because it was sudden
and it never seemed to be there
before. I know it was never
there before. I'm sure of it.
So it is this slow panic
of normal intensity, a generalized
fear about everything
and everyone knows about it.
It's an empty oh no
and they talk about these parts
all the time. Just a little
every day and without the index.
Hopeless. Well fed. Insatiable.

The Bookmark

These houses are either
empty or sad, constantly
changing hands -
in the dusty keep
of the ages, the dark tunnels
of heat and mouse steps
voices come and go
to those places and back
where funerals are less eager
to offer rides and pastries
a body transparent
a body not her own
a body of work
a body
with a finger trapped
in a book to mark the place
a body sewn to the finger
trapped in the book
a gold crown waiting
in a nearby town.

The rain is patient this year
April is patient,
the lilacs that live
two hundred years
the scrub oak
the generations of poppies
on the hill scattered,
are all patient.

Why is it that people cry
over corpses and why is it
they do not cry about death?
You've seen one die
you've seen them all.
No one goes there to visit the dead.
No one goes there to cry
or whisper or clasp.
They go there to wonder
about themselves
with mouse steps, riding
side saddle in the aisles
careful not to bunch up
or bump into one another.
Their faces tell lies and more lies.
No one thinks they'll get caught.

Epocholypse

Had I been able
at the time
to record the sound
of blankets, it would have
been the fossil
of tears embedded,
blood stains in ash,
tremendous piles of ruin
in the equality of the eons
and similarities of time.
Not abandoned as a child
nor treated unnaturally
according to the era
in which these blessings
are accorded:

say: pews, votives, statuaries
milk money, for these thy gifts,
pretty rocks and mirrors
of all kinds,

I am hopeful still.
Whole civilizations
rise and fall because of this
thready pulse within them.