Like crawling black monsters

the big clouds tap at my window,

their shooting liquid fingers slide

over the staring panes

and merge on the red wall.

Some of the fingers pull at the hinges

and whisper insistently: “Let us come in,

the cruel wind whips and drives us

till we are sore and in despair.”

But I cannot harbor the big crawling black clouds,

I cannot save them from the angry wind.

In a tiny crevice of my aching heart

there is a big storm brewing

and loud clamour and constant prayer

for the reflection of snow-capped mountains

on a distant lake.

Tires and dazed I sit on a bear skin

and timidly listen to the concert of storms.

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry

   In your travels day by day

Are they bright and lofty visions, 

   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy, 

    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought; 

Man, though high may be his station, 

    Is no better than his thoughts. 

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly, 

   Let each one an honor be; 

Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly, 

   Then in love set each one free. 

Nisei, remember the party line?
How you shared the same line,
The same mornings,
The same problems—
My girl is sick, the check was mailed late,
The irrigation pump doesn’t work—
Two hundred for the man to come out.

Life on the nisei family farm… 
If Mrs. Oda lifted the black telephone
And another voice was there,
She set it back into the cradle,
Looked up at the clock,
Maybe folded baby clothes,
Maybe cut coupons from the newspaper,
Maybe ironed a shirt,
Maybe took a broom to the spiders
Near the ceiling.

(Water drip from the kitchen sink,
Tractor roar near the barn,
Dog barking just to bark,
Sunlight hot as an iron on the sill.
She looked at the telephone, looked and looked.)

Mrs. Oda smoothed the front
Of her dress—printed with chickens,
Little white fences, roses faded from the wash.
She could have cooked rice,
Chopped green onions and carrots,
Nappa if one was in the fridge.
Elbows on the kitchen table,
She could have examined her book
Of Green stamps.  

At a quarter to five
She lifted the receiver of the phone.
She called her sister-in-law on the next farm
To say that she had folded clothes,
Ironed and cut coupons,
Swiped the broom at spiders,
And saved the better part of the nappa.

Her sister-in-law would say,
“I did those very things—
Okazu’s for supper.
You could come over
But looks like you’re having the same.”

Where did the shooting stars go?
They flit across my childhood sky
And by my teens I no longer looked upward—
My face instead peered through the windshield
Of my first car, or into the rearview mirror,
All the small tragedies behind me,
The road and the road’s curve up ahead.

The shooting stars?
At night, I now look upward—
Jets and single-prop planes.
No brief light, nothing to wish for,
The neighbor’s security light coming on.

Big white moon on the hill,
Lantern on gravestones,
You don’t count.

Small fellowship of daily commonplace
    We hold together, dear, constrained to go
   Diverging ways. Yet day by day I know
   My life is sweeter for thy life’s sweet grace;
And if we meet but for a moment’s space,
   Thy touch, thy word, sets all the world aglow.
   Faith soars serener, haunting doubts shrink low,
   Abashed before the sunshine of thy face.
Nor press of crowd, nor waste of distance serves
   To part us. Every hush of evening brings
   Some hint of thee, true-hearted friend of mine;
And as the father planet thrills and swerves
   When towards it through the darkness Saturn swings,
   Even so my spirit feels the spell of thine.

¹⁸⁸⁸

                               for Lucie Brock-Broido

 

            I was there at the edge of Never,

of Once Been, bearing the night’s hide

 

            stretched across the night sky,

awake with myself disappointing myself,

 

            armed, legged & torsoed in the bed,

my head occupied by enemy forces,

 

            mind not lost entire, but wandering

off the marked path ill-advisedly. This March

 

            Lucie upped and died, and the funny show

of her smoky-throated world began to fade. 

 

            I didn’t know how much of me was made

by her, but now I know that this spooky art

 

            in which we staple a thing

to our best sketch of a thing was done

 

            under her direction, and here I am

at 4 AM, scratching a green pen over a notebook

 

             bound in red leather in October.

It’s too warm for a fire. She’d hate that.

 

             And the cats appear here only as apparitions

I glimpse sleeping in a chair, then

 

             Wohin bist du entschwunden? I wise up,

know their likenesses are only inked

 

             on my shoulder’s skin, their chipped ash poured

in twin cinerary jars downstairs. Gone

 

             is gone, said the goose to the shrunken boy

in the mean-spirited Swedish children’s book

 

             I love. I shouldn’t be writing this

at this age or any other. She mothered

 

             a part of me that needed that, lit

a spirit-lantern to spin shapes inside

 

             my obituary head, even though—

I’m nearly certain now—she’s dead.

Reverend Walter Peters, All Angels’ Church, November 18, 1849

Someone has died, who will never see the black
joylight expand in her mother’s blue eyes.
Who will never grasp a pinky, nor be danced
up, down and around and lullabied all night.
Someone who will never come to realize
that her Dada’s palms aren’t dirty, they’re just brown.
Who made HER mother, HIM father, then broke their hearts.
Who is their shooting star, glimpsed only once.
Someone who will never laugh, or play, or care …

Praying that little box into the earth,
Rev. Peters asks forgiveness for his faint faith.
He thinks of the life of pain Someone was spared.

“A female still born child of Egbert Stairs (colored) & Catherine Cochran his wife (white) was buried in All Angels’ churchyard, November 18, 1849”—from the church record.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
     I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
     He did a lazy sway . . .
     He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
     O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
     Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
     O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
     "Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
       Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
       I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
       And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
     "I got the Weary Blues
       And I can’t be satisfied.
       Got the Weary Blues
       And can’t be satisfied—
       I ain’t happy no mo’
       And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

When I left, I left my childhood in the drawer
and on the kitchen table. I left my toy horse
in its plastic bag. 
I left without looking at the clock. 
I forget whether it was noon or evening. 

Our horse spent the night alone, 
no water, no grains for dinner. 
It must have thought we’d left to cook a meal 
for late guests or to make a cake
for my sister’s tenth birthday. 

I walked with my sister, down our road with no end. 
We sang a birthday song. 
The warplanes echoed across the heavens. 
My tired parents walked behind, 
my father clutching to his chest
the keys to our house and to the stable. 

We arrived at a rescue station. 
News of the airstrikes roared on the radio. 
I hated death, but I hated life, too, 
when we had to walk to our drawn-out death, 
reciting our never-ending ode. 

Lady in the leopard skin

Has a fear of plunging in

Traffic like a muddy river,

Starting gives a little shiver.

Gears and peers and fears again

That her horn is not too plain;

Edges to curb, pauses to think

How to move upon the brink.

Go ahead, implores the tender,

Heavy-handed on the fender,

In her ears the engine sings

Yellow-eyed, the lady springs.

I shut my eyes under the scalding stream, 
                scrubbing off last night’s dream,
when suddenly I hear your voice again 
         as though it caught in the clogged drain

and was sent bubbling back up from the other 
                world where you’re not my mother.
This time, it’s really you. I’m really here. 
        I blink. We do not disappear.

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop 
                so I don’t need to stop
just yet—and yet I do, unable to
         resume old customs, unlike you.

In a one-bath four-person household, we 
                learn what we mustn’t see,
growing, in time, so coolly intimate 
        with one another’s silhouette

behind the opaque frosted shower screen 
                that once more stands between
us two. While at the mirror you apply 
        foundation and concealer, I

wash out my hair with rosewater shampoo, 
                which means I’ll smell like you
all day. Mama, I shout, I’m coming out,
        and as you look away I knot

around me tight your lavender robe de chambre, 
                cinching my waist, and clamber
out of the tub, taking care not to step
         outside the cotton mat and drip

on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal 
                we’re mirrored in each tile.
Yet, you’d forgive the spillage, or forget. 
        What else will you love me despite?

What is home: 
it is the shade of trees on my way to school
    before they were uprooted.
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding 
    photo before the walls crumbled. 
It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants
   slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and 
   put in a museum. 
It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and 
   roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house 
   to ashes. 
It is the café where I watched football matches
   and played—

My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold
   all of these? 

^{After Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed,”
oil and pencil markings on pillow, quilt, and sheet, 1955}

So garish: the arc of his interior
thinking. So red,

so deceptive. The coordinates of this project fall
between sheets and box spring:

the command of horizontal passage.
The bed soaked

with the overlapping tongue
of his brushes, with pattern interruption, the departure

from edges. Let’s say he is within
his composition. Inside

his story. As he tips
the paint, the objective can be taken

altogether away until he detects
only desire: a rough strike

of purple
censured from exuberance. The room remains

with the weeping wreckage
all around, and the panels

in the corner
beaded with aggressive desperate skins.

Below the window, the dirty
city, its permanent

tensed distances, its hungry
catastrophes, its bare

windows. His pillow is creased. It tells everything
we need to know. Each drip, directionless.

Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really 
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know 
everything in us we are trying to show them—
but in the specific, 
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you 
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice 
tumbling forth—like I said 
I don’t ever really mind
how much more 
you might keep speaking
as it simply means 
I get to hear you 
speak for longer. 
What was a stream 
now a river.