In Ireland the Notes to the Milkman Are Poems
I came down this morning, wary of you, hot day and cool shorts and furry legs. I counted up just how much you are due, I started my listing, a dozen eggs. I remembered your jacket, slick as silk, Pushing my body to the pantry door. I went back to my task, two quarts of milk, I felt your soft disgust, “you bleeding whore.” I crossed out cream, it is too dear for me, I almost smiled when I wrote half-and-half, And that’s when I saw we can never be; Not that you laugh, it is the way you laugh, You can’t even bother to seem to care. That will be all. Please do not...
Read MoreFalling in Love Again
“Never wanted to” – Marlene Dietrich You begin by believing women are chiffon pastels, floating on foam, soft petals yielding to softer centers. Naturally you compare them to roses. The shock of flesh is a grand surprise: heavy bodies wrestling. A bigger shock is the granite mind: that doorless cube where no one answers. These are really preparations for the throb of earth in your blood, gravity tugging at your shoes as you fall at the speed of life toward the truly astounding earth. You discover you actually want to fall: to yield and open layer on layer. Then women fade,...
Read MoreTrain Through Nebraska
Train whistle draws its inspiration from the trill of endless insects Summer night accordion, tin pipe, flute enough to float the blood from heart to head and back again. The heat is the most and the crickets are least, and through it all, the locomotive, stretched taut silver, strains against steel rail and contour and knock-kneed sound, to crush another mile beneath its wheels. From darkening berth, the night’s forensic, a shrillness here, a click-clack there, evidence gathered to implicate field and sleeper in the distance gained. Farmers wave. Children pedal. Russet hills just are in...
Read MoreSettling Into Outside
Close to the land at Carrizo Plains, California After several days you know Where to put every item for easy Access, you remember the feel Of air, sun, wind, cold all day And night, the lantern hums In that familiar way, your hair Smells of dust and smoke, Clothes turn dirty without notice The food doesn’t matter now You forget to check your watch Can’t remember the date or day Sleep at dark, rise at first light Sit anywhere, stop talking Listen to killdeer at sunset Meadowlark calls, coyotes At night on the hills, silence Field of stars, no moon Walk without light,...
Read MoreSmoke Invasion
The balcony puffers with their squat bellies of gasoline out-number all our pores. Your skin and mine. Power generators plug their pipes into our narrow alley-ways, lined with hair. Exhale, inhale. Carbon-monoxide smoke lays eggs in infant lungs. Our faces, palms ripen into crimson fruits then, become black, the colour that enriches the fading into oblivion. The National Electricity Company crows a darkness, mid-way between Lagos and Abuja like an impotent rooster . Enter the balcony puffers invading lungs with locusts of smoke. For breakfast, we eat bread baptized with spongy spores of...
Read MoreBridge Crossing
When I walked across the Hong Kong border bridge at the Sham Chun River crossing on March 10, 1972, and boarded the shiny Chinese steam engine for Canton, I pinched myself. I was part of a Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) delegation, and we were making history. We were one of the first American groups to visit China after the freeze in U.S.-China relations following the Chinese Communists’ rise to power. Nixon’s trip had occurred only a few weeks before, Ping-Pong Diplomacy only a year. The bridge crossing was a turning point in my life. Listening now to the Chinese human...
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