It’s easy to invent a life,
God does it every day —
Creation but a gambol
Of His authority.

It’s easy to efface it,
The thrifty Deity
Could scarce afford eternity
To spontaneity.

The Perished Patterns murmur,
But His perturbless plan
Proceed — inserting here
A Sun—
There — leaving out a Man.

I cautious scanned my little life,
I winnowed what would fade
From what would last till heads like mine
Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a barn,
The former blew away —
I went one winter morning,
And lo! my priceless hay

Was not upon the “‘scaffold”’,
Was not upon the “beam”,
And from a thriving farmer 
A cynic I became.

Whether a thief did it —
Whether it was the wind —
Whether Deity ’s guiltless
My business is to find.

So I begin to ransack —
How is it, Heart, with thee?
Art thou within the little barn
Love provided thee?

Over the screech of the morning 
traffic of Eagle Rock Boulevard
I thought I heard the rooster 
from my parents’ backyard,
calling. They lived close enough,
it could have been. I’d been
awake for hours but was still 
in bed looking out the window
where a flock of red-crowned parrots
skated through the blue. 
The Echo Park Parrots. 
The Pasadena Parrots. The Silver-
lake Parrots. Everyone wants 
to own the birds, yet
here they were this morning,
serenading me. 
They come and go, they came
and went. In my dreams, I’m sometimes
a chicken. I fly from one man
to the next, hoping their arms
are strong like guava branches,
strong enough to roost 
in for the night, ripe with seeds. 
I’m malnourished in my dreams
because there are no trees, just birds
in nonstop flight and song.

Da ocean like us know we all going die.
She stay keeping all our bones.
I seen da wave take ’em
den bring ’em to da shore
den take ’em back out again.
Plenny bones, 
and inside da bones—mana.¹ 

One day, da ocean all quiet,
da waves all calm, den alla sudden
all kapakahi.² 
Da waves wen straight up,
alla way up, 
up to da sky
fo’ real kine was all spiritual like
like I was at church
and everybody all quiet.  

I wen³  look up
up at da stars, and das when,
inside da stars
I seen all da bones
all da answers 
to everything.   

Our fren Herman, 
way up high in da blue waves
he not evah going come back.
Way up high, 
his bones, his mana
da ocean stay keeping ’em 
so lucky da ocean 
fo’ keep Herman fo’ evah
cause only she can. 

If I have a gender, let it be a history learned from orange
Freak            Sun Sucker           Queer            Orange Boy

Rumor of 6th grade sunrise, dressed in you I was a child
of unspeakable obsession. Archaic language, Giolureade

Until Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots. Her lips unlocked
your sarcenet line, my fingers knew taste before the orange

Dared on Norwood apartments, Dutch colonies
hunted man straight into your family crests of orange

Scraped from dust to crown our bruises, warriors we
stared directly into the sun, Tainos dyed in orange

As if we always knew we were history. Amber hardened into gold
tricking mortals, mortals tricking gods asking Was it the fruit or the color?

First, Tibbets’ grove, millions of fruits grafted
instead of born, from two parent orange trees

The key to a philosopher’s stone: Colormen flirting
with volcanos to retrieve your arsenic orpiment

Forever in danger of sliding into another color, I ran
after you, tracing rivers and creeks and streams of citrus

The Washington Navel Orange, a second fruit protruding:
not a twin, nor translation, but a new name every season.

^{—after Ocean Vuong}

I have lived around the corner from the houses of jinn,
held collapsed stars in my hands like I could reopen them.

Outside, the street is littered with acorns and the bodies
of dead parables—tell me, do you know where to lay a hurricane

to rest? The old women who interpreted
nightmares and the migration patterns of birds

died last Thursday in her sleep—collect azaleas, minor
keys, other debris of this life. All things return home—

pollen born of dahlias and the last syllable
on your tongue, a night sky with exit wounds.

The whispers of wind chimes cling to the morning
and the bronze I broke off the edge of the sun. In the garden,

the honeyed insides of figs are sunk into earth
to wash over all the death held in this soil.

Look, I couldn’t tell you what the blue jays
grieve, only that they live, so they must

mourn. And I recognize in fire its hunger
or love, maybe I felt that once

in a dream I don’t remember now. It was a
dream of nightjars and a grove of sequoia trees

and other omens of danger. I wake to the sea,
brimming with salt and sleep, mottles the shore.

The sound has slept long years inside the mouths
of bells, and I want to coax it out, the way blood longs

to leave these veins or these scraps of language settle in dense air.
No one sees the bullets streak the sky softly in the dusk,

and every unanswered prayer, splintered on broken clouds,
returns to these hands I hold out for your name.

    Let all the flowers wake to life;
  Let all the songsters sing;
Let everything that lives on earth
  Become a joyous thing.

    Wake up, thou pansy, purple-eyed,
  And greet the dewy spring;
Swell out, ye buds, and o’er the earth
  Thy sweetest fragrance fling.

    Why dost thou sleep, sweet violet?
  The earth has need of thee;
Wake up and catch the melody
  That sounds from sea to sea.

    Ye stars, that dwell in noonday skies,
  Shine on, though all unseen;
The great White Throne lies just beyond,
  The stars are all between.

    Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
  And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
  Ring out the stains of sin.

    O banners wide, that sweep the sky,
  Unfurl ye to the sun;
And gently wave about the graves
  Of those whose lives are done.

    Let peace be in the hearts that mourn—
  Let “Rest” be in the grave;
The Hand that swept these lives away
  Hath power alone to save.

    Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
  And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
  Ring out the stains of sin.

Argument

(S) Being a good people, if we were wrong, we would change.

(S) We would not change.


Proverbs

Without passion, no reason.

Without mind, no body.

Without body, your soul.

Without point, our purpose.

There must be an extraordinary.

There are contradictions.

A dog's skull is slightly thicker than our own.

We will have coffee, and, after breakfast, a short walk.

We will wear shaggy coats and carry sidearms. There will be a game of chance. We will lose. We will win. We will ascend to the throne and make apple fritters drenched in warm syrup.


Arise criminals!

We will find pockets of peat and hot cross buns.

If you have no daughters, marry your sons.

Oh, what lidless day, when they took my baby away.


Psalm

I do not intend to hurt anyone.

I did not intend to hurt anyone.

O Jerusalem, we gutless few delighting

sobre tierra de libres

In perspicacity

what you would see if you were not

drown'd in sound and sight

wooly-headed as a chrysanthemum

literal as the lamb.

What we could do as one in two,

our prayers made hand-in-hand

you are my voodoo chile

my voodoo chile

Were pity pure birthright

and charity simplicity;

Were babies born not guilty

and ladies told the truth

were human nature natural

and

catastrophes unmanned,

were people made of popsicles,

accliving the summer sun

were lidless pearls more decorous,

and all our battles won

were these the these which would us please

there'd be no need for Americans

for heart would will what it would want

and all of art be

damn'd.

All young cops have soft
mild eyes. Their upbringing is lavish.
They walk between blueberries and ferns,
rescuing grannies from rising waters.
With the motion of a hand they ask for
a snack from those plastic bags. They
sit down on tree stumps, looking at valleys
and thinking of their moms. But woe is me
if a young one gets mad. A Scourge
of God rings, with a club that later you can
borrow to blot your bare feet.
Every cop wears a cap, his head murmuring under it
A sled rushes down a slope in his dreams.
Whomever he kills, he brings spring to,
whomever he touches has a wound inscribed.
I would give my granny and my
grandpa, my mom and my pa, my wife
and my son to a cop to play with.
He would tie up my granny’s white hair,
but he’d probably chop up my son
on the stump of a tree. The cop himself would be sad
that his toy was broken. That’s the way they are
when smoking pot: melancholy. They take off
their caps and breathe their tears into them.
Actually, they’re like camels riding
in the desert, as if it were the wet palm of a hand.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants a friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
   The shaft of beauty, towering high;
   He plants a home to heaven anigh;
      For song and mother-croon of bird
      In hushed and happy twilight heard—
The treble of heaven's harmony—
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants cool shade and tender rain,
And seed and bud of days to be,
   And years that fade and flush again;
      He plants the glory of the plain;
      He plants the forest's heritage;
      The harvest of a coming age;
The joy that unborn eyes shall see—
These things he plants who plants a tree.

What does he plant who plants a tree?
   He plants, in sap and leaf and wood,
In love of home and loyalty
   And far-cast thought of civic good—
   His blessings on the neighborhood,
      Who in the hollow of His hand
      Holds all the growth of all our land—
A nation's growth from sea to sea
Stirs in his heart who plants a tree.

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
   That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:—
A Poet could not but be gay
   In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

In Malick, my cousins were clearing a drain.
Silt and vine were tangled in the water. 
Muscle in the water like dregs of an abattoir. 
When the river came down it brought panty-wash,
dialysis swill and original bones 
from mansions hid in the northern hills 
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss. 
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down. 
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post. 
Empires of galvanise and dirt. 
I stood in my English clothes and watched
my cousins make a river flow again, 
and colour come back to the earth.

This is not a small voice
you hear               this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river mouths.

This is not a small love
you hear               this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron and lace.
This is a love initialed Black Genius.

This is not a small voice
you hear.

All but Death can be

Adjusted ;

Dynasties repaired,

Systems settled in their

Sockets,

Centuries removed, —

Wastes of lives resown

With colors

By superior springs,

Death — unto itself exception —

Is exempt from change.