One Child Has Brown Eyes

One child has brown eyes, one has blue
One slanted, another rounded
One so nearsighted he squints internal
One had her extra epicanthic folds removed
One downcast, one couldn't be bothered
One roams the heavens for a perfect answer
One transfixed like a dead doe, a convex mirror
One shines double-edged like a poisoned dagger
Understand their vision, understand their blindness
Understand their vacuity, understand their mirth

This Talk of Poems

I will tell you this thing,
as I do
(this is the game we play together:
one retracts the half-revealed,
one coaxes out what’s left concealed). This, then,
is what I will say to you,
stumbling over your eyes’ architecture,
a clumsy grasping after words—
I called your eyes cathedrals, was sincere,
and blush to remember how you laughed—
this, then, is what I will say—

no, I can’t. Not yet! Not now,
not when the secret curls and stammers
while you clamour insistence, disbelief—not now,
but later, perhaps, when you don’t expect
a sudden surge of metaphor,
a tidal rush, a rising line of foam and salt
to soak shock into your ankles.

We’re not there yet. Not yet at the place
where I can tell you how I think
of days when you’ll tell some other girl
about this girl who read you poems
thinking you enjoyed them, thinking
you listened to anything more than the sound of her voice,
the funny lilting of her foreign vowels
and her foreign cadence,
mixing syllables and emphases
while longing for yours.

“She even wrote me a poem,” you’ll say,
to this other girl, cool and secure
in her place at the end of your history,
“and it was a bit shit, but what do I know about poetry.”

I won’t tell you this, won’t read you this,
because how could it ever be the time
to tell you I write in self-defence,
to tell you that to write to you
is to think of you hurting me—
to imagine you hurting me
if you haven’t yet—

and to remember that when I said
those poems I wrote for other people
those poems I didn’t write for you
are full of thorns, are healing stings,
are scabbing over wounds—
you said,
you don’t care about me enough
to write a poem—
but meant
you don’t care about me enough
to let me hurt you.

You’ll say this isn’t fair. How could you know
that a poem is a grudge
clutched tight against the liver, bile-steeped,
nursed to savage potency? How could you know
that a poem is catharsis,
is septic in conception, a boil
lanced in execution?

You never listened, after all,
to anything but the sound of my voice.

So I’ll cut you this slack. Here is a poem.
It isn’t pretty, it isn’t built
of honey and spice, isn’t sweet
or savoury, isn’t anything
like what a poem is thought to be.
I won’t call you Green Man, Diamond Jack,
Knight of Coins or Pentacles,
won’t speak of stretching out on graves,
or how the tracery of your irises
might have taught architects to dream
of stained glass.

I certainly won’t tell you I love you.

And maybe once you’ve read it,
to yourself, in quiet,
in your own mind’s voice,
you’ll think twice before asking me
to write you another.

Dos Corazones: After Papo Colo

My second heart got an email
about My First Heart at The Museum of Modern Art.

My first heart tells my second heart
that now is her chance to say something important,

Something for the archives about who she is.
About who her mother never got to be.

My second heart immediately gets to work
on the administrative portion and compiles a list

of possible exhibition titles.
Proud Diasporican. Diasporican Gang.
Lonely Diasporican. Diasporican in Distress.

My first heart is always Diasporican
but never quite knows how to feel about it.

My first heart doesn’t trust museums,
she heard they be stealing people’s hearts.

My second heart tells my first heart that things are different now.
These days they ask the heart for permission.

It’s for educational purposes only.
My first heart tells my second heart she isn’t anybody’s teacher.

She’s still trying to learn her own history.
That’s why my first heart became an anthropologist

and found out she was a rare artifact.
I’m talking wild vintage and shit.

Records trace her back all the way to 1898
but my first heart says that’s bullshit.

My first heart has a memory long as a Yuca root
and she demands you acknowledge that she existed way before that.

My first heart is a complicated machine
that breaks down in multiple languages.

My first heart knows Spanish is a colonized tongue
so she doesn’t feel bad about speaking it terribly.

My first heart knows English is a colonized tongue,
so, for fun, my first heart pisses off strangers by telling them

“In America, we speak Spanglish.”

My first heart knows where she is from
but still asks Puerto Rico for forgiveness for being born in Brooklyn.

My first heart knows where she is from
but still asks Brooklyn for forgiveness for moving to New Jersey.

My first heart can’t afford the rent anywhere,
so my first heart finds home wherever Boricuas are.

Wherever Boricuas have had to be.
My first heart has a plan to birth Boricuas on the moon.

My first heart has big dreams
that involve an avocado tree,

a 15-piece orchestra
and an aluminum tray full of relleno de papa.

My first heart doesn’t tell my second heart
about any of these plans because my second heart

is too busy trying to make it as a poet in America.

Solstice Poem

i
A tree hulks in the living-
room, prickly monster, our hostage
from the wilderness, prelude
to light in this dark space of the year
which turns again toward the sun
today, or at least we hope so.

Outside, a dead tree
swarming with blue and yellow
birds; inside, a living one
that shimmers with hollow silver
planets and wafer faces,
salt and flour, with pearl
teeth, tin angels, a knitted bear.

This is our altar.

ii
Beyond the white hill which maroons us,
out of sight of the white
eye of the pond, geography

is crumbling, the nation
splits like an iceberg, factions
shouting Good riddance from the floes
as they all melt south,
with politics the usual
rats' breakfast.

All politicians are amateurs:
wars bloom in their heads like flowers
on wallpaper, pins strut on their maps.
Power is wine with lunch
and the right pinstripes.

There are no amateur soldiers.
The soldiers grease their holsters,
strap on everything
they need to strap, gobble their dinners.
They travel quickly and light.

The fighting will be local, they know,
and lethal.
Their eyes flick from target
to target: window, belly, child.
The goal is not to get killed.

iii
As for the women, who did not
want to be involved, they are involved.

It's that blood on the snow
which turns out to be not
some bludgeoned or machine-gunned
animal's, but your own
that does it.

Each has a knitting needle
stuck in her abdomen, a red pincushion
heart complete with pins,
a numbed body
with one more entrance than the world finds safe,
and not much money.

Each fears her children sprout
from the killed children of others.
Each is right.

Each has a father.
Each has a mad mother
and a necklace of light blue tears.
Each has a mirror
which when asked replies Not you.

IV
My daughter crackles paper, blows
on the tree to make it live, festoons
herself with silver.
So far she has no use
for gifts.
    What can I give her,
what armor, invincible
sword or magic trick, when that year comes?

How can I teach her some way of being human
that won't destroy her?

I would like to tell her. Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone's voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can, when you can see it.

Iron talismans, and ugly, but
more loyal than mirrors.

STARTLEMENT

It is a forgotten pleasure, the pleasure
  of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard

skittering off his sun spot rock, the flicker
  of an unknown bird by the bus stop.

To think, perhaps, we are not distinguishable
  and therefore no loneliness can exist here.

Species to species in the same blue air, smoke—
  wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming.

So many unknown languages, to think we have
  only honored this strange human tongue.

If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination
  of all things upstream. We know now,

we were never at the circle’s center, instead
  all around us something is living or trying to live.

The world says, What we are becoming, we are
  becoming together.

The world says, One type of dream has ended
  and another has just begun.

The world says, Once we were separate,
  and now we must move in unison.

Genius

Two old dancing shoes my grandfather
gave the Christian Ladies,
an unpaid water bill, the rear license
of a dog that messed on your lawn,
a tooth I saved for the good fairy
and which is stained with base metals
and plastic filler. With these images
and your black luck and my bad breath
a bright beginner could make a poem
in fourteen rhyming lines about the purity
of first love or the rose's many thorns
or the dew that won't wait long enough
to stand my little gray wren a drink.

Poet’s work

Grandfather
  advised me:
    Learn a trade

I learned
  to sit at desk
    and condense

No layoff
  from this
    condensery

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

my grandfather and home

i

my grandfather used to count the days for return with his fingers
he then used stones to count
not enough
he used the clouds birds people

absence turned out to be too long
thirty six years until he died
for us now it is over seventy years

my grandpa lost his memory
he forgot the numbers the people
he forgot home

ii

i wish i were with you grandpa
i would have taught myself to write you
poems volumes of them and paint our home for you
i would have sewn you from soil
a garment decorated with plants
and trees you had grown
i would have made you
perfume from the oranges
and soap from the skys tears of joy
couldnt think of something purer

iii

i go to the cemetery every day
i look for your grave but in vain
are they sure they buried you
or did you turn into a tree
or perhaps you flew with a bird to the nowhere

iv

i place your photo in an earthenware pot
i water it every monday and thursday at sunset
i was told you used to fast those days
in ramadan i water it every day
for thirty days
or less or more

v

how big do you want our home to be
i can continue to write poems until you are satisfied
if you wish i can annex a neighboring planet or two

vi

for this home i shall not draw boundaries
no punctuation marks

The Fisherman

People arrive by water, unspeaking ones
keeping close to the hulls of the anchored ships,
startling at the bump as they heave to.

                                                    Early summer breathes
soft and low, wafts the curtains, caresses
grass, lightly stirs the hair.
It's sunrise, it is the hour
when nets are lifted, the hour of tremulous light,
its hesitant, uncertain brightening
from house to house as it conjures voids
and visions that abscond - look -
over the trees and beyond the hedges.

A time suspended between what is hidden
and what stands open, when it seems
the real is not inside us, but in some oracle
or miracle about to reveal itself, a time
that dupes men - and any hope it inspires
can be hope only for a sign or wonder.

My mood detaches me, makes me strange
shades by the water's edge
and on the wet sand: I keep watching them
behind those spars and stunted poplar trees.

Forgive me, it is a mark of the human
to search out, as I do, what is close to us,
humble and real, in hidden places -
there and nowhere else. I crane my neck
to follow with anxious eyes the fisherman
who comes over to the breakwater and hauls
from the sea what the sea allows,
a few gifts from its never-ending turmoil.