New Poems Online

Three of my poems can be found in the May 22-24 edition of Counterpunch.

I also have two poems in the current issue of Breadcrumb Scabs.

Equalities

Torrid sun pounding sandstone west of the Moapa
reminded her of wind howling off the frozen bay
through wallboards into what was left of papa’s heart.
The house, older than he was, finally was torn down
by the township, then reconstructed
in her head where, if the kitchen faucet broke, it didn’t
matter, just as long as she could listen
to his stories about the mother
she’d never seen.

She understood the desert, the heat’s status
as the ice’s other side.

Wedged like an unbudging chuckwalla between two rocks, her mind
held its place.

No matter what she wanted, this was what she got:
when the dry wind battered the dune primrose’s white petals
she shivered, feeling the flower’s seizure, how it convulsed
like a sand rat after being bitten by a rattler
or like John Clark who in 1915, hiding under his buggy
to escape the heat, ripped
his shirt to shreds in a dehydrated delirium
before dying in the Mojave a half mile from a well.

One night at work, as focused as the ancient carver who chiseled a flute-player
into a boulder west of Logandale,
she reinvented “Fever” in a tawdry hole a few blocks from The Flamingo:
You give me fever when you cactus me,
fever when you make my love-cave bleed,
fever when your Nazi oven
makes ashes of my needs.

Bead-stringers’ voices in the cliff dwellings further south
are what she heard as she sang that night.
“The old grammars, they’re what we should think about,”
she told Hakim, the piano player, following the last set.
Later she wrote in her notebook
“I’m too thin. I should drink more milk.”

She gave these details after breaking the news to me:
“Papa died last year.”

Or we don't

No tease,
the worm slithers from grass to sidewalk
wih barely a wiggle.

A secret on its way
beyond truthfulness, its movement
into greater light is an arrival
the average voyeur might wait
a lifetime for.

I'm lucky, already here.
Perfect timing.

Later, resting on a bench at Foglietta Plaza,
I think of you, the reader, how your eyes, like lovers
holding hands in a park dense with shrubs and trees,
will one day wander among these words
as the page ends beyond wherever
the worm, fat
with life, now is.

Behind me in the dark
a car's brakes squeak
at a stopsign on Dock St.

From this point on, there is no
“from this point on.”

We either make the right choice now or we don’t.

(revision)

For Cesar Vallejo

Your bread, old and stale.
When you wrote poetry, crumbs
hard as cinders
got mixed in with it,
coarsening the feel.
Sometimes you blabbed in the shadows
of opera houses but you didn’t go in.
Instead, you once made a poem
about watching a spider
with a big abdomen croak.
You were a real nobody, how you came
paupering from Peru, scratched by awhile in France
then died, 1938, in an obsolete clinic
somewhere in Spain.
Your death was like your poetry:
ugly and reeking of pain.
Who gave you the right
to be like that,
sticking your nose in street-ick
and preferring doorknobs to abstractions
and behaving like governments owed you something
just because you were poor?
What a monumental
ego you must have had!
Yes, it’s interesting: how although
your spittle was as meaningless as thin
wax incrustations in the ears of birds,
you nonetheless stared
magistrates in the eye and acted
with dignity, like a human.
I remember the poem you composed
for your little brother
who died:
it was
so gentle, nostalgic.
Better than most, you knew:
even slime like us can be poets
if we try.

(revision)

Breathless

Sunlight’s gray ashes pile up on the eyelids of the absent child .
A teapot whistles on the stove.
Across the street, gardenias in Mrs. Reese’s window box.
“I don’t want to listen,” someone says, turning off CNN.
A SWAT team patrols the rundown districts west of the river where the current’s sound is too melodious
for the guitarist to hear.
Trees stay busy being nothing but trees.
It’s night now, and I’m in love.
Firetruck siren.
Romero is gone and so is the wounded sparrow I helped as a boy.
It's been humid like this
all July.
Stricken with emphysema, the streets wheeze.

(revised)

Childhood Day Opposite the Palisades

A man in wide-brimmed hat laughed in front
of Morley's Groceries,
then we all disappeared.

I don't know how we got there, the field
filled with mustard flowers.
Next to it
a collapsed house and behind it
a dirt path winding to a root cellar.
The sunlight was too bright
for anything to stay unseen.
I played hard when dad took out the baseball.

Later, we ate on blankets, then
while my uncles drank their last beers
the sun set
bleeding like the crushed bodies of quarry workers killed
grandpa Mat had said earlier
in an accident years ago on the cliffs on the river's other side.
I saw blood drip down dark rock and seep
steaming into water.
We were a few miles north of Yonkers.

I didn't realize it then
but beyond the cliffs
were gas stations with broken toilets, and also
grasses taller than I’d ever seen
and also out-of-the-way places where the only sound
was people whooping
as they kicked in doors.

Endangered Languages

"For me, fiction can only be written in Malayalam, however unexposed the language is".
-- O. V Vijayan, one of India's great modern novelists

Although Malayam, one of India's many regional languages, isn't on the verge of extinction, it's role as one of India's "secondary" languages places it in a position similar to that of many languages world-wide: i.e., because it doesn't have the influence of imperial languages like English or old colonial languages like Spanish or French or nationally sponsored languages like Hindi, it is sentenced to second-rate status by the global powers. Consequently, the cultures that speak such languages are often condescended to, exoticized or simply ignored by more dominant cultures. This of course impacts negatively on the literatures of the less politically powerful cultures, forcing many wonderful writers with probing insights into the world situation into invisibility as far as the international scene goes. Ignoring such writers does the world no good, since it is precisely such writers who are most likely to possess insights into the nature of mass culture and power relations that the dominant cultures don't possess because they don't have to endure the experiences which underlie and feed those insights.

For a decent essay on the endangered languages problem, go to Dennis Baron's The Web of Language site.

The Way

The first step:
opening the glass door
at the end of the hotel corridor. It’s a simple walk then
to the elevator. Not

stopping to think what it’s like
underground
beneath chrysanthemum roots, you step

into the open elevator, push
the button and descend.
Only now is it clear

how moisture from old rains still migrates down
days after the storms have passed. Even with no car

in the parking lot below, the journey there is worth it.
Think of the corridor above. Without it, you wouldn’t
have gotten here.

(revision)