You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe

You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet

You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June

Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts

You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal

You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question

You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes

You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping

You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream

You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies

Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens

You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.

You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children

You cactus, water, sparrow, crow      You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,

getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds

You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail

You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations

You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick

You are who I love, sighing in your sleep

You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut

You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still

You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses

You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand

You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to

You studying stars, you are who I love
braiding your child’s hair

You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert

You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,

bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late

You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home

You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often

You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love    I love

your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there

How “Fuck you” becomes a love song

You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face

You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love   You are who I love  You and you and you are who

Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the step-ladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow-jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn’t understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c’mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.

the way that soap loves an airborne virus. 
Wants nothing more than to whisk it all away. Half fragile 
as water, half hydrophobic wildchild. Doing it daily

as thirst trap. Posing in the fat of fruit. in the lipid 
of a milking cow. It’s unfair to say

it’s afraid of anything. Hunting virus by riding hydro. 
Mobbing the scene in micelle. Trailing pond for a bond. 
Shooting its shot near the nearest swarm of greasy tail. How 
good it is at pulling every germ. Every dirty little frag. 
Every bacterial bevvy. 
                                         Loving it all 
to its silky death. to its silty bottom. to its graywater demise. 
How it hungers the virus until neither function. Melting its thick 
heart and ripping it all away.

Little soap bar playa. Little Dionysian pump of cupidity.

                           Oh, to desire virus 
                           to death. To take it dizzy 
and broken down through the falls. 
Slow soaping the sick

from our living, 
wet hands.

I learned to chop from the hand.
           The onion a palm-cupped moon
sliced by a blade almost
           grazing thenar eminence.

Was trained well before YouTube and
           Top Chef told me I had it all wrong,
before my cousin went to culinary school
           and brought back the gospel of
tucking fingers on cutting boards.
           It was my hand in the pan,
inevitable burns, cuts that meant
           I had skin in this game
the least I can offer for a meal with no hunt.
           My hands not toiling with much soil—
what could I sacrifice for a harvested vegetable,
           treetop-plucked fruit, cream from
an animal whose name I do not know,
           nor felt the fear of her kick in my chest?
I learned from those who as children knew
           the heartbreak of naming whom would be slaughtered.

My part now:
           a swipe of my credit card. Electronic notes
in a world full of blood and tendon,
           exhausted muscles, pesticide leukemia,
weary backs that bend nonetheless
           under a hot sun.

These hands may shake in fear
           of what has made its intentions known,
but they will feed me and mine
           in the way of my people
so used to living in the cut
           where danger and love dwell:

a pot
a table
a stove
a knife.

1. come. pray. know histories. today

                   is mother’s birthday. she insists on

                   dying. offer her a framed memory, 

                   her maiden name clotted in a map older

                   than “america.” she will refuse, turn

                   away. grief sharpens the gales of wit.

                   again, she abandons.

2. a twice born girl knows to rotate a tomb, 

                   suspend mother’s crude gape, temper

                   a piston with cane syrup. terror is the knotty

                   clutch of an umbilical cord, an archive pulsing

                   with the carriage

                   of empires. 

Once there was a bridge I couldn’t cross. 
Cusp of summer. Sound of insects
carried with me, from Melville’s fields
in my-heart-on-the-bridge, their zzzz.

Year’s end, now. A theory of edges. A vow
to complete certain tasks—they will not
improve me, but dissipate, burn off 
like vapor. I’ve already been too good.

I thought keys would fly out of my pocket 
and then I would have to fly after, 
to enter the terrifying room 
where things blow away to.

Scraps of lists, a paper flower,
the raspberry clouds of the day’s 
attenuation. A series of signs said 
help was there, but not for me.

Who hears the humming 
of rocks at great height, 
the long steady drone
of granite holding together, 
the strumming of obsidian 
to itself? I go among 
the stones stooping 
and pecking like a 
sparrow, imagining
the glacier’s final push 
resounding still. In 
a freezing mountain 
stream, my hand opens 
scratched and raw and 
flutters strangely, 
more like an animal 
or wild blossom in wind 
than any part of me. Great 
fields of stone 
stretching away under 
a slate sky, their single 
flower the flower 
of my right hand. 
                              Last night
the fire died into itself 
black stick by stick 
and the dark came out 
of my eyes flooding 
everything. I 
slept alone and dreamed 
of you in an old house 
back home among 
your country people,
among the dead, not 
any living one besides 
yourself. I woke 
scared by the gasping 
of a wild one, scared 
by my own breath, and 
slowly calmed 
remembering your weight 
beside me all these 
years, and here and 
there an eye of stone 
gleamed with the warm light 
of an absent star. 
                               Today
in this high clear room 
of the world, I squat 
to the life of rocks 
jewelled in the stream 
or whispering 
like shards. What fears 
are still held locked 
in the veins till the last 
fire, and who will calm 
us then under a gold sky 
that will be all of earth? 
Two miles below on the burning 
summer plains, you go 
about your life one 
more day. I give you 
almond blossoms 
for your hair, your hair 
that will be white, I give 
the world my worn-out breath 
on an old tune, I give 
it all I have 
and take it back again.

^{translated from the German by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky}

She sits upon my bed at dusk, unsought,
And makes my soul obedient to her will,
And in the twilight, still as dreams are still,
Her pupils narrow to bright threads that thrill 
About the sensuous windings of her thought.

And on the neighboring couch, spread crepitant, 
The pointed-patterned, pale narcissus fling 
Their hands toward the pillow, where yet cling 
His kisses, and the dreams thence blossoming,— 
On the white beds a sweet and swooning scent.

The smiling moonwoman dips in cloudy swells,
And my wan, suffering psyches know new power, 
Finding their strength in conflict’s tortured hour.

Sphinx

 Sie sitzt an meinem Bette in der Abendzeit 
Und meine Seele tut nach ihrem Willen, 
Und in dem Dämmerscheine, traumesstillen, 
Engen wie Fäden dünn sich ihre Glanzpupillen 
Um ihrer Sinne schläfrige Geschmeidigkeit. 

Und auf dem Nebenbette an den Leinennähten
Knistern die Spitzenranken von Narzissen,
Und ihre Hände dehnen breit sich nach dem Kissen
Auf dem noch Träume blühn aus seinen Küssen,
Wie süßer Duft auf weißen Beeten.

Und lächelnd taucht die Mondfrau in die Wolkenwellen
Und meine bleichen, leidenden Psychen
Erstarken neu im Kampf mit Widersprüchen.