Oye! This is an apartment building ode.
But not just any ode, an ode about breathing,
walking, jumping, running, skipping people.
An ode to a time where we’d remember what
odes felt like to read outside. An ode about
oding so hard it boxes itself into a sonnet.
Harder than bus stop benches and light rail
seats, taxes, and systemic poverty. The oding
of this poem is an apartment building sonnet
about people stacked up like bricks like words
in a sonnet. People that will tap your shoulder
to make sure you’re listening to the fact that this
poem is a token, a favor, a shirt off their back.
Oye! This is The Apartment Building Ode.
 

There’s Freestyle, Hip Hop, and Bachata on the steps
depending on the time of day we pick up groceries.
There are bikes by the curb and notebooks on those steps,
soda bottles, 2 quarter juices, and candy wrappers in bags.
There is a 10pm curfew for noise and the music plays
until 9:59, because the stoop DJ wakes up early too.
There are “No loitering on the stairs” signs in every hall-
way though it is understood that what we do isn’t aimless.
There is the smell of food, home-cooked or homemade,
plantains in C5, Hot Pockets in A3 and Chinese in the lobby.
There are lovers, soothsayers, tall-tale tellers, doers, hustlers,
potatoes, flowers, lighters, and so many hand gestures.
 
This is a concrete box that we call home.
There is a life we’ve learned to love and live.

In crippled streets where happiness seems buried
under the sooty snow of northern winter,
sudden as bells at twilight,
bright as the moon, full as the sun, there blossoms
in southern throats rich flower of flush fields
hot with the furnace sun of Georgia Junes,
laughter that cold and blizzards could not kill.

Sleek black boys in a cabaret.
Jazz-band, jazz-band,—
Play, plAY, PLAY!
Tomorrow. . . . who knows?
Dance today!

White girls’ eyes
Call gay black boys.
Black boys’ lips
Grin jungle joys.

Dark brown girls
In blond men’s arms.
Jazz-band, jazz-band,—
Sing Eve’s charms!

White ones, brown ones,
What do you know
About tomorrow
Where all paths go?

Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,—
Play, plAY, PLAY!
Tomorrow. . . . is darkness.
Joy today!

I burned my life, that I might find 
A passion wholly of the mind, 
Thought divorced from eye and bone, 
Ecstasy come to breath alone. 
I broke my life, to seek relief 
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire 
Charred existence and desire. 
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.
    And he said:
    You would know the secret of death.
    But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
    The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
    If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
    For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

    In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
    And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
    Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
    Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
    Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
    Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

    For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
    And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

    Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
    And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
    And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

White peonies border the stones of the old foundation.
At the edge of the meadow peacocks fan light
            into small rainbows of flame.
You listen for the soft step of a bear,
            the black paws’ chuff on the leaf litter.
An old road closes its arms around the forgotten,
            fallow fields.
Your brother will return from there in the chiffon silence
            of the afterlife, wrap you in a reassurance
            unavailable from any altar.
And here, where the sun slips into the tangle of forest,
            a barred owl is singing for his supper as he always does
            with a question much like your own.
Who’ll cook for you, who’ll cook for you, who’ll cook for you?

My daughter says six is her favorite year ever
though she suspects that seven will be better.
Her dress spins down the corridor.
It’s made of butterflies and billowing
like the memory of a chocolate souffle.
Was I ever more like her than like me,
shoulders not flagging, breath hot
with awe as I sidestepped each stone,
the promise of age like a helium balloon
dragging me behind it on a flouncy string?
My daughter tries to show me everything
she’s left a mark on: painted clay,
a smiley-faced cotton ball perched on a stick.
her name in all-caps on an envelope.
Does she already somewhere in her spleen
or pancreas, in the soft tissues and marrow, sense
that the impossible goal is, for all of us,
just to keep going? No, she is not grieving
over Goldengrove whatever. Six is her favorite 
year ever, I feel not so much nostalgia
as Sehnsucht, the desire for something
missing, vertigo under the infinite sky. 
We crane our twin heads as a falcon or drone
pierces the cloud cover into the future.
How to get closer to the mystery.
Older, she will do whatever: name a new nation,
isolate a microbe, hear the whales mutter
the muscadine water. Every time the regimes change
she will dance Swan Lake, bending her knees
at the requisite intervals. Attagirl, daughter! 
The economy continues to show resilience
in the face of despair and mass depredation.
My daughter is swan. Is crab grass run riot.
Meanwhile, I am becoming unrecognizable
to everyone except myself, and it does not matter:
before it is time to resemble no one
I have had the mixed fortune to resemble most things.
My shadow lingers in the corner of the photo of the painting.
I may not know more than a bedraggled llama
craning its neck past the impregnable fence. Still,
I participated in the world. I wore the ceremonial
knee breeches required by protocol.
Led her through ferry boats and Ferris wheels,
this ardent daughter clinging to my hand
as though it was God’s hand on a church ceiling.
We took turns licking the strawberry ice cream.
In this knowledge, I feel content.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

^{translated from the Spanish by Aaron Coleman}

It’s melting helplessly,
the North Star.
Ten million, and still more
tons every day
(ice, cold light, gas)
waste away from the frame
of this immense animal.

You will see,
if you look just over there,
how our team of conservators
keeps putting puffs of cotton
in the empty spaces.
But this won’t be enough
and within four centuries at most
navigators will have
to blindly feel their way across the sea.

What responsibility!
The animal that costs us most
and the one we can conserve the least.

La Estrella Polar

Se descongela sin remedio
la Estrella Polar.
Diez millones, y aún más
diarios de toneladas
(hielo, luz fría, gas)
pierde de su estructura
este immenso animal.

En los sitios vacíos
verán,
miren ustedes hacia allá,
cómo nuestro equipo restaurador
va colocando masas de algodón.
Pero eso no puede bastar
y dentro de cuatros siglos a lo sumo
los navegantes tendrán
que andar a tientas por el mar.

¡Qué responsabilidad!
El animal que más nos cuesta
y el que menos se puede conservar.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.