A few nights on the Uros Islands of Lake Titicaca, Peru

 

Uros
 
You are tired after ten hours on the luxury train
Taxis and dark-sky boat to the floating islands
Tonight’s bed has twenty-four kilos of blankets
You cannot sleep for the flapping corrugated scraps
Clacking and warping to the milky way
 
Yet it’s perfect--your body is saying--says a blue
Blip somewhere on earth that is your body
We are weaving sapphire love in the hovel of a room
Unabashed as the sheet of stars across Lake Titicaca
Aloft, upon wobbly mats of totora reeds
 
The island waves. They must dream of cutting
Hoisting, drying, laying, laying reeds to stay afloat
Could it be that feet sink in with every step?
It could be his knock at 8:37am, handing me my phone
Which has charged in his hut, or how he tells me
 
I have received 4 calls in the middle of his night
It could be Mateo, who is three, wearing my glasses
Whose face is wide as a handmade quinoa cake
Or his sister, Geraldin, in a dance between Mateo
And adulthood. Or, it could be the grandfather on the roof
 
Or is he the father?—dismantling boards to move in a day
A whole building, wrenching nails from the roofbeam,
Sounding in the lake breezes like andean birds
Or last night, climbing the teetering ladder for a
Dissertation, above the lapping waves, on sky
 
An entire island of reeds blown by the wind, creaking
It is to say, disorientation, and you have slept late
into the natural float of time, and coca tea, and reeds
Have been gathered and the man at the apex must
Descend to rap on your door with your phone

Going with Elliott

Going With Elliott

In the morning, nerves crook like they always
And birds sing dirty again, uninterrupted by
Trucks charging double sound below their canopies
I can’t decide if the room is the height of heaven
Or, with these low-slung thoughts, an abyss
 
I smell more like my grandpa every day, while
On the coffee table, a borrowed map I splayed out
With a glossy sky--exotic and crisp--goes limp
After a humid night, draping like a tablecloth
And I wonder if I’ll be punished by the library
 
We will go there, this new woman in my life
This place with border crossings and altitude
With the dead curled into pits in the arid hills
And as interesting as the trip folds out to be
All I can imagine are her breasts in the Andes
 
Gusts make leaves quake on the Fourth of July
Will we get on for weeks in travel’s centrifuge
As we do in clumps of live and wayward hours?
Lastly, will the branches of another continent
Chirp as singlemindedly, beckoning the hoary day?

Listening to Jazz on a Saturday Morning After the Invasion of Ukraine

Listening to Jazz on a Saturday Morning After the Invasion of Ukraine

 
 
What hope gives us, I note while making breakfast
Is a palm facing up, a gesture beyond words
Not a course of action, nor to defend against
Lomaya dveri--in Russian--breaking down doors
 
Remember your childhood, how it was possible
To gather fragments into place, order the chaos
To cypher the codes to someday understand it all
And the stars would not blow out in night?
 
Blown into dust, broomed like a mandala by monks
In a drone chant, this hope, scattered as it is
Through woods unknown, to its borders where silhouetted
Trees burst with sticks and leaves thrust into spring
 
That’s all we’ve got: This peculiar hope, the stars and sticks
Listening to jazz on a Saturday morning after the invasion of Ukraine
What can one do but hope about a war, cracking eggs
Being careful of shells and the counter measures?

As if we are getting to know what has been for years a thing unacknowledged

The Arne Norell Sirocco Safari Chair
 
 
My sons bring up the chair
That no one likes to sit in
In the corner of the living room
 
One has looked it up:
Cognac leather, rosewood
Era, Sweden, and so on
 
With more value in pairs
Yet our mouths hang open
At a lonely chair’s yield
 
    We hover around it
    Concoct an enigma
    Touch its skin
 
As if we are getting to know
What has been for years
A thing unacknowledged
 
Just a chair in the corner
Slid carefully over maple
Into the heart of the room

Sitting, surrounded, I feel
The supple charisma of 16
Year old patina
 

    How much could you get?

    What would you buy instead?

    Go their young tongues

Unlikely, its new value:
Bounded by children
In a stark light

If only I could stop remembering

 

From Here to There, and Back Again

I found an antique door to match
The others upstairs and finally got it hung
In my 116 year old house
With some penache
 
Restoring something to its original
A cause celebre, or chasing after the wind
Says King Solomon. Nonetheless
I’m looking up
 
The neck muscles groan a little
And a headache comes on, but the tangles
of the hammock don’t keep me from
Rocking a while
 
With another cup of coffee
Remembering what responsibility was
When the kids were young, when rocking
Was not for me
 
It would all be capacious, this space of life
Except that the man on the internet cautions
To carry a load heavy enough
To hurt a little
 
Even if you’re taking up a burden
From here to there, and back again
To fog the lense, the omniscient lense
Of your pathos
 
And so, I have hung a door
With precision, drilled the latch strike, refurbished
The dusty innards of the mortise lock to click snug
Shut like 1905
 
If only I could stop remembering
The laughter, going back and forth to Minneapolis
And the amazing smile of the woman
I have loved

This is us in the future, taken out to lunch by human kin who we will never know.

Lunch With A Cranium

We wander underneath the shivering limbs
Of České Budějovice, hungry in the belly
Overstepping the pits of an archeological dig
 
Or is it plumbing work, unlicensed
Raising our cousins from the raw soils
in heaps, to poke up from their piles?
 
Unholy holes, everywhere we have roamed
Earth’s pregnant past, in the cities,
Depraved villages, fire-scared caves
 
And burial pits filled with taboos
Since the first seeds were strewn
By subjects of crown or headman
 
Along the church wall, in the shadows
We stoop to inspect an adult, by size
Stained ochre in the darkest way
 
I hold you in my hands, precious being
Gone from the memory of mind
Your cranium as empty as ours of you
 
No doubt you have borne the cold
So we bring you to lunch; you sit beside us
Under a warm coat at the wooden bench
 
We talk about times before the nation state
How you would have enjoyed the knedliky and beer
On a more animated day
 
A shame has come about. I carry you across
Samsonova Kašna to drop you off
With a prayer of soul and bone
 
At church, in your conversant pile
With your kinsmen—the beggars, serfs and wenches
To rest in peace
 
Thanks for joining us for lunch
It’s been so long. Let’s get out more
To convive again
 
 
     Although we did return the cranium safely to its
     exact spot in the ramshackle pile of dirt and bones,
     I regret this adolescent-minded misadventure and
     strongly believe that the ethical mores of any
     community should be respected.

When the phone is finally caged, you are free as pulsing jazz at dusk, with all its tentacles.

 

When The Phone Is Finally Caged


When the phone is finally caged
And you are free as pulsing jazz
At dusk, with all its tentacles

You may then be aware
How the room surrenders to poems
Your eyes widening with each

Each better than the last
In an evening collapse of color
As the cicadas go calm

And birds land in your palm
With kisses from Grandma
Caressing pecks, twenty-three

Years later, fresh with onion
But tonight, in New York City
Your friend who has it all

Speaks of pain meds
And anguish, angustía
In Spanish

In Spanish, they say,
We make the dust
Glow if we can

In the disappearing moments
So thank the gods at dusk
And the poems, their birds and kisses