Underneath the stars the houses are awake;
Upward comes no sound my silent watch to break.
Night has hid the street, with all its motley sights;
Miles around, afar, shine out the city lights:

Stars that softly glimmer in a lower sky,
Dearer than, the glories unexplored on high;
Home-stars, that, like eyes, are glistening through the dark,
With a human tremor wavers every spark.

Glittering lamps above and twinkling lamps below;
The remote, strange splendor, the familiar glow:
One Eye, looking downward from creation’s dome,
Sees in both, his children’s window-lights of home.

Who have dwellings there, in avenues of space?
Whose clear torches kindle through the vague sky-place?
Are they holding tapers, us, astray, to guide,
spirit-pioneers, who lately left our side?

Never drops an answer from those worlds unknown:
Yet no ray is shining for itself alone.
Hints of heaven gleam upward, through our earthly nights;
Tremulous with pathos are the city lights:—

Tremulous with pathos of a half-told tale:
Through therein hope flickers, burning low and pale,
It shall win completeness perfect as the sun:
Broken rays shall mingle, earth and heaven be one.

    There are ghosts in the room.
As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there
They come out of the gloom,
And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair

    There’s a ghost of a Hope
That lighted my days with a fanciful glow,
In her hand is the rope
That strangled her life out. Hope was slain long ago.

    But her ghost comes to-night
With its skeleton face and expressionless eyes,
And it stands in the light,
And mocks me, and jeers me with sobs and with sighs.

    There’s the ghost of a Joy,
A frail, fragile thing, and I prized it too much,
And the hands that destroy
Clasped its close, and it died at the withering touch.

    There’s the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others—this ghost; yet a ghost at the best,

    I am weary, and fain
Would forget all these dead: but the gibbering host
Make my struggle in vain—
In each shadowy corner there lurketh a ghost.

I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but digs holes in the earth, plants trees, buries his shadow. The country hates him and hates me too, a little less, because I have papers. A document is a strange thing. To ask the placenta for its numerical origin. To tell the dirt it belongs to you. Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers. I call it my life. This language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something. You are alive among flesh explained back to us as furniture. Hope is a tax. Each word—say it aloud—I am here—is a coin, a debt owed to love. Take the echo seriously. Our living is the plot to sing completion. Let it fill you, let it bruise. Greet the stranger: did you know we share a wick?

&   for  years    i   skipped  over                        crevices. avoided   the  cracks
split  by the   ancient roots  of                            trees. my young  self treated
each break   in   the  earth   like  a                     cliff   echoing   my  mother’s
name—why give a child the responsibility     to keep a mother whole—& i
recall  how   my  mother  broke   the                      bridge  of   her  body four
times  bringing   four  daughters  into                the   world.   our  dimple  &
babble  cries   becoming   the  joy  to              rebuild  herself,   holding  the
weight  of   breast  milk,  overtime                 at the  mercado,   hunger  that
spoke   to    her   through   tantrums.                           now  in    my    thirties
i    reminisce  about   saddle   shoes, the ones                 i  wore  in   catholic
school   where   sister  lilia  a   white  nun  in               black  veil  once   said
to   a  class   full   of   brown   girls   that                birth  was    beautiful   her
only   proof  were   outdated     diagrams                        of  women’s   insides
becoming   newly   fledged   mothers,  images                    of    women   with
mannequin  stares   when a child  spilled  out                       of   them.    how
sister   lilia    spared   us   the   ache  of   truth   &               jumped   straight
to    claiming  this  miracle,   miraculous  like                      the  movies   with
actresses   with    their   fake   swollen    stomachs           &  almost   perfect
hair   &  damp   skin   &  pretend   husbands          holding  video   cameras
feeding  their   wives  ice  chips.   i  say                  this to say, i want to make
room   for  the  real   work,  to               celebrate  the   overworked  muscle,
the   stretch  marks  like              the  ridges   of  dried  grapes   the  effort it
takes   to    make   sweet             fruit,  to   honor  the  blood   that  leaves  &
the    blood   that  stays           never  aftermath   of  flesh  but   a  mosaic  in
what   it   means   to            have   a    light   escape   from    inside  you   &
watch  it become   its       own  kind   of  living.

The sky was blue, so blue that day
    And each daisy white, so white,
O, I knew that no more could rains fall grey
    And night again be night.

                    . . . . .                    

I knew, I knew. Well, if night is night,
    And the grey skies greyly cry,
I have in a book for the candle light,
    A daisy dead and dry.