What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field.

What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms.

It shall be and it begins with you.

Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous.
How it frightens and confounds and enrages.
How strange, unfamiliar.

Our love carries all those and the contrary.
It is most incandescent.

So, I vow to be brave.
Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear.
I’m done with silence. I proclaim.

It shall be and it sings from within.

Truly we are enraptured
With Whitmanesque urge and urgency.

I vow to love in all seasons.
When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl.
When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England.
When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies.
When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds.

I vow to love you in all places.
High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands.
In our dream-laden bed,
Cradled in the nest
Of your neck.
Deep in the plum.

It shall be and it flows with you.

We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops.

You embrace my resilient metropolis.
I adore your nourishing wilderness.

I vow to love you in primal ways.
I vow to love you in infinite forms.

In our separateness and composites.
To dust and stars and the ever after.

Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family
We have arrived.

Look. The bird has come home to roost.

I
    On ashes of old volcanoes
    I lie baking
    the deathward flesh in the sun.

    I can hear
    a door, far away,
    banging in the wind:

    Mole Street. Quai-aux-Fleurs. Françoise.
    Greta. “After Lunch” by Po Chu-I.
    “The Sunflower” by Blake.

2
    And yet I can rejoice
    that everything changes, that
    we go from life
    into life,

    and enter ourselves
    quaking
    like the tadpole, its time come, tumbling toward the slime.

When I walked across a room I saw myself walking

as if I were someone else,

when I picked up a fork, when I pulled off a dress,

as if I were in a movie.

                                    It’s what I thought you saw when you looked at me.

So when I looked at you, I didn’t see you

I saw the me I thought you saw, as if I were someone else.

I called that outside—watching. Well I didn’t call it anything

when it happened all the time.

But one morning after I stopped the pills—standing in the kitchen

for one second I was inside looking out.

Then I popped back outside. And saw myself looking.

Would it happen again? It did, a few days later.

My friend Wendy was pulling on her winter coat, standing by the kitchen door

and suddenly I was inside and I saw her.

I looked out from my own eyes

and I saw: her eyes: blue gray    transparent

and inside them: Wendy herself!

Then I was outside again,

and Wendy was saying, Bye-bye, see you soon,

as if Nothing Had Happened.

She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t known that I’d Been There

for Maybe 40 Seconds,

and that then I was Gone.

She hadn’t noticed that I Hadn’t Been There for Months,

years, the entire time she’d known me.

I needn’t have been embarrassed to have been there for those seconds;

she had not Noticed The Difference.

This happened on and off for weeks,

and then I was looking at my old friend John:

: suddenly I was in: and I saw him,

and he: (and this was almost unbearable)

he saw me see him,

and I saw him see me.

He said something like, You’re going to be ok now,

or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it,

but what he said mattered only a little.

We met—in our mutual gaze—in between

a third place I’d not yet been.

We will count on these walls
             to whisper
                           our resumes 
to the strangers who take up
             the work of these rooms,
forwarding them
             past dust.

Our purpose shared,
             suspended in trust
                           to a poem
      that told us a long love
                                          is willed.

Believing such
             we are bound to exit
             flattered
                            by our design,
unmindful that this thing
                            has also always
             been lying
                            in wait,
                 a thing
                            in itself, bossy and brutish
that has thrived in spite of
              sabotage chapters
                                           occasional giddy
                           neglect.

              A volition
                                           apart
        that exceeds
                            dull need
a self-interweaving
               imperative be mine
                             that will whisper
               our love
                             past dust.

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take

       anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

                                 all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers

      in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

      and empty, slung over his back—

                                a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth

      as it gives itself away to the universe

                                of a sweet-milk body.

Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads

      of your throat and thighs.

When you said people did you mean punish?
            When you said friend did you mean fraud?
When you said thought did you mean terror?
            When you said connection did you mean con?
When you said God did you mean greed?
                When you said faith did you mean fanatic?
When you said hope did you mean hype?
            When you said unity did you mean enmity?
When you said freedom did you mean forfeit?
            When you said law did you mean lie?
When you said truth did you mean treason?
            When you said feeling did you mean fool?
When you said together did you mean token?
            When you said desire did you mean desert?
When you said sex did you mean savagery?
            When you said need did you mean nought?
When you said blood did you mean bought?
            When you said heart did you mean hard?
When you said head did you mean hide?
            When you said health did you mean hurt?
When you said love did you mean loss?
            When you said fate did you mean fight?
When you said destiny did you mean decimate?
            When you said honor did you mean hunger?
When you said bread did you mean broke?
            When you said feast did you mean fast?
When you said first did you mean forgotten?
            When you said last did you mean least?
When you said woman did you mean wither?
            When you said man did you mean master?
When you said mother did you mean smother?
            When you said father did you mean fatal?
When you said sister did you mean surrender?
            When you said brother did you mean brutal?
When you said fellow did you mean follow?
            When you said couple did you mean capital?
When you said family did you mean failure?
            When you said mankind did you mean market?
When you said society did you mean sickness?
            When you said democracy did you mean indignity?
When you said equality did you mean empty?
            When you said politics did you mean power?
When you said left did you mean lost?
            When you said right did you mean might?
When you said republic did you mean rich?
            When you said wealthy did you mean wall?
When you said poor did you mean prison?
            When you said justice did you mean just us?
When you said immigrant did you mean enemy?
            When you said refugee did you mean refusal?
When you said earth did you mean ownership?
            When you said soil did you mean oil?
When you said community did you mean conflict?
            When you said safety did you mean suspicion?
When you said security did you mean sabotage?
            When you said army did you mean Armageddon?
When you said white did you mean welcome?
            When you said black did you mean back?
When you said yellow did you mean yield?
            When you said brown did you mean down?
When you said we did you mean war?
            When you said you did you mean useless?
When you said she did you mean suffer?
            When you said he did you mean horror?
When you said they did you mean threat?
            When you said I did you mean island?
When you said tribe did you mean trouble?
            When you said name did you mean nobody?
When you said news did you mean nonsense?
            When you said media did you mean miasma?
When you said success did you mean sucker?
            When you said fame did you mean game?
When you said ideal did you mean idol?
            When you said yesterday did you mean travesty?
When you said today did you mean doomsday?
            When you said tomorrow did you mean never?
When you said hear did you mean hush?
            When you said listen did you mean limit?
When you said write did you mean wound?
            When you said read did you mean retreat?
When you said literacy did you mean apathy?
            When you said fiction did you mean forget?
When you said poetry did you mean passivity?
            When you say art do you mean act?

translated by Carolyn Forché

Fourteen volcanos rise
in my remembered country
in my mythical country.
Fourteen volcanos of foliage and stone
where strange clouds hold back
the screech of a homeless bird.
Who said that my country was green?
It is more red, more gray, more violent:
Izalco roars, taking more lives.
Eternal Chacmol collects blood,
the gray orphans
the volcano spitting bright lava
and the dead guerrillero
and the thousand betrayed faces,
the children who are watching
so they can tell of it.
Not one kingdom was left us.
One by one they fell
through all the Americas.
Steel rang in palaces,
in the streets,
in the forests
and the centaurs sacked the temple.
Gold disappeared and continues
to disappear on yanqui ships,
the golden coffee mixed with blood.
The priest flees screaming
in the middle of the night
he calls his followers
and they open the guerrillero’s chest
so as to offer the Chac
his smoking heart.
In Izalco no one believes
that Tlaloc is dead
despite television,
refrigerators,
Toyotas.
The cycle is closing,
strange the volcano’s silence
since it last drew breath.
Central America trembled,
Managua collapsed.
In Guatemala the earth sank
Hurricane Fifi flattened Honduras.
They say the yanquis turned it away,
that it was moving toward Florida
and they forced it back.
The golden coffee is unloaded
in New York where
they roast it, grind it
can it and give it a price.
Siete de Junio
noche fatal
bailando el tango
la capital.
From the shadowed terraces
San Salvador’s volcano rises.
Two-story mansions
protected by walls
four meters high
march up its flanks
each with railings and gardens,
roses from England
and dwarf araucarias,
Uruguayan pines.
Farther up, in the crater
within the crater’s walls
live peasant families
who cultivate flowers
their children can sell.
The cycle is closing,
Cuscatlecan flowers
thrive in volcanic ash,
they grow strong, tall, brilliant.
The volcano’s children
flow down like lava
with their bouquets of flowers,
like roots they meander
like rivers the cycle is closing.
The owners of two-story houses
protected from thieves by walls
peer from their balconies
and they see the red waves descending
and they drown their fears in whiskey.
They are only children in rags
with flowers from the volcano,
with Jacintos and Pascuas and Mulatas
but the wave is swelling,
today’s Chacmol still wants blood,
the cycle is closing,
Tlaloc is not dead.

the night swoons
               to the hip-hop
               of gunshots
               and stars.

a young woman’s teeth
               challenge
               everything

about sorrow’s suitcase
of explanations

and i am learning to hope
               like a bird
               learns
               its first
               affair
               with wind
               and sun

               like an orange
               learns
               to take flight
               into the mouth
               of a boy
               in summer.

the trees are prophesying.
the mountains are waiting
for the long trek to the sea

and the sea
               waits
               like a lover
anticipating the kiss
               of three thousand
               lost kisses.

the night swoons
               and the trees
               begin their blue-black
               dance
in the wind.        

            after George Jackson

Because something else must belong to him,
More than these chains, these cuffs, these cells—
Something more than Hard Rock’s hurt,
More than remembrances of where men
Go mad with craving—corpuscle, epidermis,
Flesh, men buried in the whale of it, all of it,
Because the so many of us mute ourselves,
Silent before the box, fascinated by the drama
Of confined bodies on prime-time television,
These prisons sanitized for entertainment &;
These indeterminate sentences hidden, because
We all lack this panther’s rage, the gift
Of Soledad &; geographies adorned with state numbers
&; names of the dead &; dying etched on skin,
This suffering, wild loss, under mass cuffs,
Those buried hours must be about more
Than adding to this surfeit of pain as history
As bars that once held him embrace us.

I.

my lover is a woman
& when i hold her
feel her warmth
     i feel good
     feel safe

then—i never think of
my family’s voices
never hear my sisters say
bulldaggers, queers, funny
     come see us, but don’t
     bring your friends
          it’s ok with us,
          but don’t tell mama
          it’d break her heart
never feel my father
turn in his grave
never hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?

II.

my lover’s hair is blonde
& when it rubs across my face
it feels soft
     feels like a thousand fingers
     touch my skin & hold me
          and i feel good

then—i never think of the little boy
who spat & called me nigger
never think of the policemen
who kicked my body & said crawl
never think of Black bodies
hanging in trees or filled
with bullet holes
never hear my sisters say
white folks hair stinks
don’t trust any of them
never feel my father
turn in his grave
never hear my mother talk
of her backache after scrubbing floors
never hear her cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?

III. 

my lover’s eyes are blue
& when she looks at me
i float in a warm lake
     feel my muscles go weak with want
          feel good
          feel safe

then—i never think of the blue
eyes that have glared at me
moved three stools away from me
in a bar
never hear my sisters rage
of syphilitic Black men as
guinea pigs
     rage of sterilized children
          watch them just stop in an
          intersection to scare the old
          white bitch
never feel my father turn
in his grave
never remember my mother
teaching me the yes sirs & ma’ams
to keep me alive
never hear my mother cry
Lord, what kind of child is this?

IV.

& when we go to a gay bar
& my people shun me because i crossed
the line
& her people look to see what's
wrong with her
     what defect
     drove her to me

& when we walk the streets
of this city
     forget and touch
     or hold hands
          & the people
          stare, glare, frown, & taunt
               at those queers

i remember
     every word taught me
     every word said to me
     every deed done to me
          & then i hate
i look at my lover
& for an instant
     doubt

then—i hold her hand tighter
     & i can hear my mother cry.
     Lord, what kind of child is this?

Let's use our nicknames
When we apply for this next job
Even though it's past our bedtime
And our current paycheck
 
Can't shut up the muse
Who mewls at the dinner table
Begging for a crust of bread
To sate the nightly terrors.
 
For they come, don't they,
Leaving empty spaces numbers
Are supposed to fill. Buddy
And Chip loaded their coffers
 
Before the hard freeze.
The ice burns our tongues
As we swallow prosperity
One parched drop at a time.