Poems
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be
counted as warriors. I think that you thought there was no such place for you,
and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we
will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change
the laws of history…”
–Adrienne Rich
“Sources,” Your Native Land, Your Life
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Gravity
I feel that language should never be an escape. It is what you need to dig out of the rubble of
your body. It is the earth of your body bearing witness to devastation; it is all you have when
others come to ask, “What is happening here?” It is not a matter of posturing, not a matter of
simply shifting a few polite stones, no–every time you pull up the earth you pull up roots, gravity
collecting dust, the memory of water, dirt. This is the way it is. Then again, I have never
witnessed a bombing which children called the Christmas tree, because there were so many lights
that roofs were blown off houses, and so much ruin that villages burned down to their very roots
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–From Architecture, by Christina Turczyn, a performance piece rendered by the Yara Arts Group, La MaMa Experimental Theatre
You Are
You speak at the level of bone; you are
political. You know the growing poem in a woman’s
throat is not far from her silence, thick as it becomes
with rape in wartime, buried manuscripts, inner rain.
You are in the place where a woman is. Her shadow
fits your body, and her shadow-arm is yours. Whenever
she moves, you move– whenever she dreams you,
you exist. You are political, you read her body’s
letters without claiming them, you know
there is no owning another’s voice. There is no
speaking a foreign language unless you have loved
in that language, unless you have made it familiar
by accepting the one untranslatable word as a word
that will never be yours, but the grain around which
your life will grow. You are political, you hear
the voice of sand, the sand of forgotten meanings.
Without exposing her pain, you recover a woman’s history.
You stand inside her silence like slow music darkening.
–First published by Passaic County Community College
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There Should Be
There should be a room in the deepest heart of the day,
in which we can cry, where webs of autumn shadow dissipate
against the shock of unexpected warmth: words of a stranger,
voice of a color, flame of a dance.
And yet, the heart grows tired, and the hands grow tired
as we are, the unemployed–
starting winter cars, slowly heating our windshields
for essential clarity of vision, as forests shed
their leaves, and thin lines of water become trees.
Tell me where this room is– not escape, but a meeting
of one survivor and another. Tell me
where it is I can watch the news of Robert Champion
without closing my eyes, and still see. I am looking
for that room; perhaps the place where warriors go
to weep is one where there are neither warriors nor victims,
a room where words have no walls. If here, or elsewhere
a woman calls for her missing son, then her song rises
in my voice like morning between rafters of stone.
—First published in Chronogram, ed. Philip Levine
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Fractals of Rain
i.
The horses, both facing the hills,
stood so close to one another
that they might have been hatred and love.
I have been tired, sleepless, past the fires of this city,
past green, broken ribs of poems,
past rumors of shootings,
the bail bond window, the Galapagos Night Club,
ferns of smoke that become the spine,
leaving ash in the mouth if you let them.
ii,
In Vermont now, I am
from “somewhere else,” even in my home town,
“foreign. ” My language’s patina suspect,
a deepening light, the self’s aging wine.
What is the distance between freedom and a doorframe,
star and wood? A person in recovery I knew,
tried to comfort her mother before she died, ended up
in the hospital from grief–
worked at a woman’s prison.
A woman’s prison is where you go as enforcer of rules,
if you have broken all of them and have no other place to live.
iii.
At the end of the college block,
just before the war begins,
a young man holds a woman
against the backdrop of a widening street;
standing there, they are fractals
against loosed sheaves of rain blown here and there by wind.
I think of someone I loved,
no longer with me,
fall back, in that moment between
bars of remembering and open spaces
where the horses stand, oblivious of everything,
leaves of night enfolded by leaves:
Rodin’s body of a sculpture still asleep
inside the memory of stone.
—First published in Lifeblood: Woodstock Poetry Society Anthology, ed. Trina Porte
Past the half-life of grief…
what remains is the self beyond
whatever it can lose.
At home today, we hold each other
cry black stars of tears
as leaves of sky close around us so
tightly, we forget
all of those still with us who are
dead. Just for once you become
the young man you were before Viet
Nam, ride your bike
in a storm without bullets, the rain
so beautiful, it breaks
like laughter.
–First published in Lifeblood: Woodstock Poetry Society Anthology, ed. Trina Porte
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Ask Yourself
This is all I have, a poem, If you want to get to know
spokes of pine turning in sunlight how a woman in another country
cirrus spines of sky braids bread, or how bodies of sand
leaves of shadow falling– blow away in war, you need to leave
people I knew, who almost your hotel. You need to stand
made it. This is all I have: a page in the middle of an open square,
of earth, a tree, sky, body, names watch pigeons huddle under
carved on bark, dunes of jazz, a bench, hear shops stop breathing
wood, grasses, in the dark. Ask yourself what
syncopated consonance of love, you came for, if you would
words shaking off the rain live with a local woman, learn
of music until only sinews the words for cobblestones and fear,
of rhythm are left, until words watch the flower of a winter sky
are bone-dark flint striking stone. break into snow, ask yourself
This is all if you would try to pronounce
I am–everything pared down her name, at least that much,
to words, a woman saying eat berries,
“This is all I have. No more, no less.” syllables, her life.
–Read on Felician Radio’s Sunday Storytellers series
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I Could Have Told You
I could have told you that it should
not be this hard, that everything our parents
warned us about did not stretch
from the continent of one dream to the next.
Perhaps we should not have put so much
aside, the fear of loss so great
that we shored up moments
as though they were stones.
Perhaps we should have lingered
just a little longer at the place
where birches, suffused with watery
green light, settled quietly into dusk
at the river’s edge.
The stories we heard, of relatives beaten
into the dark wine of silence,
of icons left in places
where no one would
ever pray to them again,
were enough to make us think
that time remained only for those
who did not know how to count.
Still, we lingered,
played bad records on our porches,
made trips to the Catskills,
stood unafraid while wind
blew in our faces, and caravans
of planets moved behind our backs.
We had to stop thinking, we had to live,
just live, feel the way that thin leaves do
as they lean into this thick rain of stars.
–First published in Vanguard Voices of the Hudson Valley
Witness
My grandmother gathered
bread for sparrows.
At the end of the week, she scattered
dry crumbs in the yard.
Was she waiting for something unnamed to return?
A brother, a prisoner, a storm?
Some shy angel, freed from duty at the bar?
Or was this the road home—
word after word thrown out to the cold,
bones laid bare
for witness?
–First published in Chronogram
Untitled
On the field beyond my porch, deer gather
like sparrows of silence at the edges of guilt.
One leaves the herd, flies, like a promise briefly
remembered.
After the hedges shift, blue quiet settles in again.
It has been a long time since the deepest self
became a poem, lover, a familiar street. Ages, it seems
since we met, hands moving over braille of bodies,
reading what we could not speak, that you, a medic,
and I—broken—
could somehow drink deep water again.
How, when the world exploded around us?
When border deserts ran dry, women walked in heels
for work?
You carried me, as over
the river of my life.
“In case I had to,” you said, and I wished
you could let go of Viet Nam.
I wished that we,
could fall through the rifts in our lives,
like tears, in this moment balanced,
between today and today,
this hush of deer,
waiting for rain.
–First published in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, ed. Laurence Carr
After Paquito D’Rivera’s Kites Over Havana
As a child, the composer
dreamed kites over rooftops, their atonal
ribbons of music loosed from strings.
If rivers could fly, they would look like this:
Winding without thought, and hungry—
orchestras tuning flutes before rain.
Was freedom the weightlessness
of dreams that drifted
closer to clouds? Their paper wings?
Was it Billie Holiday’s voice let go
from grief? Was it everything she knew
but could not speak? The slow climb
of note
after note
out of the body—
hand over hand,
open danger over tide?
Freedom? Green leaves
struck through with light.
thought without banks,
a woman dancing pain.
Was freedom recognition?
Here, a man brushed
a branch of shadow from his lover’s face
and saw his own,
released from silence.
Or was freedom the kite’s descent
through gradations of sky,
resembling water’s ripening light—
merely this imperfect life?
This life, a wing,
a dress cast off
somewhere between air and earth,
war and its telling,
thorn and skin.
–First published in Apiary Blog
Accident
You startle me with your brilliance, you speak
in poems not because you want to, but because your
memory fails. Near an abandoned prison, albino deer,
fenced off, run in herds for generations,
blood banging with the redolent wildness of grief.
You read Thoreau and Dickinson,
Sartre and Rich, each page rendering the one
before it blank. Yet words about healing imprint themselves
beneath your skin–bare bones
of leaves, white phosphorescent stems.
Tell me how it is I can help you, angry bang
of entropic wisdom, beeper in your pocket, hungry for joy.
Who will rescue your anger from riptides of loss?
Who will match your sandy phrases with eroded recollection?
Who will run with you head-on because youth does not walk, no matter
how far there is to go?
Listen to me:
The world is full of hunters.
Be careful, still, rise
in your lived strength,
in the way you give birth to yourself daily,
in the way you wait and wait until all thorns fall
from your voice.
How do they know what it is to wait until
names sift down through your hands, a few grains of light
on the ocean’s bed? What are grades in the face of hunger? What
are words in the face of survival, of trust? Not
the half-baked uttering of connoisseurs,
but what we use to summon
our lost children, or the bread we feed to shadows
that come home from war.
I tell you:
take your time until the world slows down,
until intelligence is measured by a love of the sea,
until a dissident is not a ruler’s hunted twin.
Take your time, observe a cloud’s slow breathing,
read rivers on a woman’s aged face.
Offer water, be careful.
Do not swallow stones.
Then teach me how to write
as though there were only
five arrows left.
–First published in Apiary Blog
With Doors Wide Open
I have heard that in war-torn countries, people take brooms to their porches after a bombing,
sweep away bits of debris during that millisecond before the bombs fall again.
My mother knew the word for war. The language did not matter; once you had experienced
devastation, you could never go to a tearjerker again. “Tragedy is for the young,” she says, as a
challenge to what many people think. Her youth was spent in D.P. camps in barracks, and she
associates tragedy with youth, questioning the existence of horror films when so much terror
resides in real life. “It is no escape,” she tells me. “One needs an escape.” “You realize,” she
says, “that we left our home with the doors wide open.”
–From Architecture, first performed by the Yara Arts Group, La MaMa Experimental Theatre
Clay Birds
Toward the right end of the yard, the roof of a garage holds up a stretch of turf, and if you look
past the fence, the staccato light of an afternoon sun bounces off hubcaps, wires, and some dishes
that have been left collecting water for years.
I think we are all like that, waiting. I think we know there are things we can achieve, though
we don’t have the words for them, yet. I think we know that we stand in concentric circles of
gardens: the gardens within our bodies merely intuiting light, our bodies, gardens, knowing where
the skin’s thorns begin, our bodies standing in that garden of at least a hundred roses–that garden,
another circle within the greater circle of Passaic. I think we know where the skin’s thorns begin,
where women pray and yell at their husbands, when they are defeated and when they are strong,
when they fold dough in church, create thousands of pierogi like clay birds that wake and fly
toward warmer climates. How many secrets do they knead into that dough, how many hopes?
–From Architecture
Renaming
What is love but language renewed daily? It is not the act of renaming, but rather, finding the hidden name in someone else, coaxing it out of them. What is language but belief, branches of sentences tending toward no conclusion, a single leaf turning in the windless sky? Renaming is an act of violence; peoples renamed are pried from their histories–unable to look in the mirror of the past, they do not recognize their beauty, but always look for affirmation elsewhere. This is a tragedy.
It happens to many women who “take one day at a time” because they have been convinced that no future exists for them.
–From Architecture
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Ulster Heights, New York
As children, we looked out of our windows
when the aged reverend and his wife set out,
every evening to row. From our perspective,
they were spirits of trees,
etiolation of grief against a negative
of sky.
The street had no lights, and we heard
their footsteps long after they passed: It was as though
everything they loved and sought to feed
hungered without name.
We imagined their lives before this summer:
A famine survived,
memories like herbs that did not grow here,
suitcases left on banks,
lost letters– fireflies rising.
No one understood,
why they pulled more fish out of that lake
than anyone.
Other seasoned fishermen imagined moonlight
carving circles on still water–
scrimshaw of history against
silence,
or silence–
obverse of song’s rising bread.
Somehow, the lake yielded up its secrets
catch after catch.
But we knew it was the heart they listened for,
glittering with relentless scales,
unforgiving, fiery, and brutal,
as the war they fled,
night after night,
in sleep.
In truth,
it was love they plumbed–
nothing less than a net slipping soundlessly
over
a boat’s mottled side, returning,
again and again
with forgotten life.
—First published in Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers, ed. Laurence Carr
Matryoshka
The outer woman dresses well, with impermeable patterns and bold red prints. Enamel flowers are all she can offer, painted as she is by other hands. This is a poem about the way things go unnoticed, about the way you are taught to dress well against all of life’s daily questions, not a thread hanging frightened from your hem. A poem about the way you memorize long lists of words, year after year, a kind of beaded amulet against the draft of other languages and their hints of prisons and spells. This is a poem about the precision of your speech, the affected pronunciations of an English grammar afraid of its own body, a wooden tongue afraid of its own roots.
The next woman listens. She can hear daydreams tick in quiet bones; can grow a huge belly full of the world’s complaints. It is a commonplace that women were born to listen, and they do. But who hears the riffs of rain blowing through their bodies? Who hears the silence, the sadness, the thorns? This is a poem about putting your grainy nature aside, opening yourself up until the many parts of you are scattered on the table because it is the only way you know to share your innermost self.
And you cannot even get to the outer woman from the innermost one, because they have not painted hands on your body.
The next woman is closer to the center, and you will notice, in the world’s eyes, she is smaller. The woman within the woman within the woman does begin to write and sing and talk a great deal more than before, but this disturbs the outer shell. The outer woman is thin and easily broken. This is why men like to hold her. Yet the woman within the woman within the woman has been trapped so long she has a great deal to say. She is a nuisance at board meetings. She is not sporting designer poppies. If you stand closer, you will notice that she is not small; she has been stooping all her life in order to accommodate this idea of largeness. She is not small.
The woman at the center is wise and unpainted, difficult to grasp. Yet she rattles in all of the others like a thorn, so that no one in the city can sleep. She has no clothes. No one will hire her, though they take her apart to see what she is made of. Though she tries to warn the others, they do not understand her language. Sometimes she is thrown out for her vigilance. So she finds herself young or naked or homeless or crazy, a saint, a witch, a poet on the subway, a root without a tongue.
–First published in the Paterson Literary Review
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Leaving Harvard
That year, my mother did not leave
the house from grief, as she knitted
words and untold stories into the grains
of knotted sweaters. A bit of shadow,
a broken silence, a copper button. She looked
as lost as she must have been when
the German soldiers went through the refugee camps looking
for blonde-haired, blue-eyed children.
Or perhaps it was only the rumor
of their coming, but it was enough to make her stay
in the same apartment on President Street
for twenty years.
So she knitted the seasons
into her scarves, and the fibrillating reds
of leaves in autumn as they rushed across
the pavement with dry life. She knitted
the fluorescent stalks of winter trees,
the electric hum of emptiness, blue ice of thought.
All that year, I was not sure if she mourned
my grandmother’s death, or my return from Boston by train:
two suitcases stacked above my head, black gloves
sliding down my wrists as the landscape expanded
on the window’s surface in dendrites of rain. I didn’t know
why I’d dropped out of Harvard, the roots of this knowing
so deep that I could not dig them up without
taking myself apart. Twenty five years of preparation,
the weaving of invisible theorems, the hope
that I would one day live in a brownstone in Manhattan
with enough room to dance and no memories of wars.
Still, I was so accustomed to leaving–leaving,
the only imagined path of the future, although
none of us would say it, we did not really believe
in a future. Houses, marriages, and wills were
for those who never had to part with their children
in a foreign country, for the ones who knew that tomorrow
their village homes would still exist. And so, I left without
knowing why, to write my mother’s poem, or mine,
not even sure to this day, which of us went to Harvard
on a full scholarship, which of us left, and which
of us came back. All I can know for certain is that
every time a woman’s home is razed on another continent,
I can hear dust settling in my voice, and know the only
real poem is a song without a room, a heart without walls.
First published in the Paterson Literary Review
A Daughter’s Song
Nothing in my life prepares me for this:
In a room as large as a basement,
they work, bent over checks,
as though there would never be any place left
to see. When I walk through the door, her friends
cheer wildly, “Here comes Maria’s daughter!”
Not since my graduation have I felt
so oddly like a pop star,
warmly venerated, welcomed, loved.
Honey-dark light flows
near staggered boxes at their feet.
Young women blast radios; men argue
in different languages, leave their tables
no more than twice a day.
My mother, over sixty, with phlebitis, pushes
a heavy box of checks aside. The work will be finished
later, sheaf after sheaf, coded by hand, while cartons
are filled and quickly removed, repeating
the rhythm of a railroad if it could
run over the tracks inside your body,
keeping time.
How I would like to see my mother cry
on the hour-long drive home,
but she stopped crying years ago, even learned
to help the others on her team by coding
faster than anyone, moving her pen
over stems of numbers, thinking of nothing
but finishing by five.
I would like to know how, at home,
she stands reading Joyce, Rhys, and Stein
for the first time in her life
and loving them,
saying, “This sure beats magazines,”
or “Do you have another book
like the Garcia Marquez I just read?”
I would give her another life
if I could, one that did not suffer
the skywriting of beauty,
abuses, the assurance of outstanding jobs,
coveted possessions, jewelry, summers
in the Catskills, expensive lessons
in designing clothes.
“If I only had an education,” she confides.
“If only I could have finished high school,”
and I ask myself how much
a person needs to prepare in order
to enter a room wide as false hope,
to believe that this is not a test,
that somewhere the parameters of language
become real, as that black rose of shadow
we call grief.
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You Tell Me
It is difficult to laugh without the knowledge
that a bad day brings, that the lisp of light on water,
the insect, the rind of music on a beach are all
there is, all we are given–definition in the sands
of seconds, black and white, nothing more.
This is what it means to sing:
to measure time with the grain of your voice,
to go beyond time with the aberrant half-beat.
Somewhere in solitary a man sings against
his life, desire breaking the injunctions of silence,
blood becoming silence again, but the memory
of sound is deeper than his voice.
You tell me you have lost your voice, and you believe
that it is everything–it is not even words
but the roots of shadow anchoring real trees.
–First published in Gulfstreaming
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Lena Speaks
one day I fail an exam and no one knows why no one knows the phone calls I’ve been getting and the looks and the walks to my car and the lectures on why I’d rather talk theory than roses and no one knows why I don’t have a heart for these things why I don’t have a mouth for them either no one no one knows why I drop out of school and lose years to dull work and quarrel with male shrinks who suggest that I always want to be on top no one no one picks me up when I fall when I crawl on the ground and my life writhes under silence like a snake of false words no one listens to my silence to a tree that grows behind my back year after year soon its apples are beyond my reach and its shadows become my spine no one listens to my gestures speak to the way I cry behind your back like a leaf turning in a windless sky cry like the bone-white skin of a star twitching in space no one
so I have lived and I have done these things and more and I have carved my words out of the silence of my bone and I have dripped white rain of song and I have taken every word from the black earth of my thought and I have taken every word from my children never conceived and I have written down hope in braille and followed blindly its staccato path and I have lost everything once and then again and I have been proud and crescent thin–almost invisible
so tell me how I should theorize these things because I feel that those who theorized my academic decline did not think it would ever really happen if they did they would
have used different words used words I understood and I would not have failed have failed with a nearly perfect academic record so tell me how you theorize the sound of your life falling stillborn through your body and the way that you bend to pick it up
and the way that you bend and the way that you bend and the way that you rise because you simply choose to do so because you simply were that close to dying because you found there was a mortal cost to saying I read paul celan because I love his work I love it and no more no less than that
Rivers:
be careful. words also frame. just the other day,
I read that gossip is a form of moral policing: he did/she did/she is is is. we are all guilty of homestead morality before the wilderness of questions. an intern works with a group of doctors who won’t treat a woman because she is mentally ill. propriety is the ruler that comes down on her hand. what are the markers of judgment? does it take one sixteenth of an inch to slide too far toward freedom, toward the unmarked field? what are the diagnoses? the numbed can’t question. an entire country saved by medication never asks “from what?”
poets ask. lovers ask. only the dead don’t ask.
so tell me that this poetic endeavor is just a matter of posturing, then tell me why they kill poets in hard times–not for the high salary, surely, not from greed. poets talk back, hurl their vertebrae of words, break their own hearts to find them. so tell me why the silenced die. all those experiments with prisoners in solitary and children never spoken to. words are life. words are sane and insane. they lead us out of ourselves and corral us. so take care. be free. be careful. watch those diagnostic acronyms. take finely-crafted nothings with a grain of salt, and remember that embroidered rivers are not the real thing.
Chagall
After the White Crucifixion
A single
nail
overturns
the universe
sends
the minnow
of the moon
scurrying
into the dry
river of its voice.
–First published in Christianity and Literature
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Van Gogh: Church at Auvers-sur-Oise
Blue of windowpanes that do not see,
blue of midnight waiting for the moon,
blue of time growing thicker in love,
blue of the deepest layer of water become sky,
blue around which temples are built,
silence around which lives are bent,
aster-blue of winter stars growing without sound,
blue of the roots of music before they flower,
blue of a night without dreams,
blue of courage gathering like a storm,
blue of open irises, of thoughtful dresses,
blue of sapphires humming beneath ground level,
blue at the black edge of coal, at the rim of fire.
All of this you saw, because you sifted through moods
of color, lived the color as though it were your voice.
You who listened to the universe, who heard
the spaces between its bones of light, who painted
families, fruits of stars, secrets,
who heard winter rain inside your sleep
but did not become cold for the life always waking you–
who painted waiting selves we could not see,
who listened to light shifting in the oceans
of our quiet days–you knew the point
at which light breaks and becomes human.
Page Break–First published in Art Times Journal
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A Practical Poetics
Poem:
roots too deep
for drought, for bleach
of sun, accolades, po-biz,
sabbaticals,
praise, those roots
too deep
for hunger.
the poem
pulls you toward yourself
like the swift undertow
of dream
or love waiting
in another country.
the poem is material, dark
as a lover’s body, palpable
as its lack, the poem
is phantom pain.
the poem suffers
like a child, but laughs–
an old woman
who knows that time
never cries.
in case you believe
the poem is soft, it is
the heart’s negative space:
the heart resides in the body
but the poem embraces
the pulse, the blood, the rivers of the world.
–First published in the Paterson Literary Review
Page Break
Winter Morning, Montclair
After the painting by George Inness
A tree breaks the field in half, as though
memory, too violent for dream, falls into dawn.
The grass itself is peaceful: Wood shavings
scattered across a frozen surface;
here and there, reeds summon deep water,
in ways that lovers recall mistakes.
In this museum, time, like water, is distilled.
Elsewhere, children hug tanks.
I, too, can freeze, become the oak’s striated skin.
I can stand here forever, transfixed.
But then—the figure of the grandmother, her back turned,
quietly sweeping light.
All she holds are branches, yet what she gathers
is ice. There has been
a near-hurricane in my county, and I imagine
a survivor on her porch, making quilts of days
against a sunken roof.
Hands move over the blood’s quiet hum.
I want to ask the woman in the painting who she is.
Why, with shoulders stooped, does she refuse
to turn around? What is her sorrow, and how cold?
Does she know that in Haiti, a mother trapped
beneath concrete tells her husband she will love him,
always?
She will not talk to us.
The winters, the wars, the impossibly slow mornings.
What else, after all
is there to say?
–First published in Chronogram
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Love:
always love without punctuation
but watch for those blank pages
it’s something as simple as
this–
one day you wake up and remember
a snapped twig, and although
you would re-enter sleep
to find it, it’s already
and relentlessly
morning.
–First published in Christianity and Literature
Thinking
It would be like kneading dough, except that you would knead in the sky
and the grains of shadow that collect in trees. You would knead in the cry of a man
about to leave his country, the stars that turn within his body and lead him out
of the forest at night. You would fold in fruits of darkness and rinds of sunlight.
You would remember hunger, black holes for weight. You would add in bits
of the morning paper for leavening. You would watch light bend at your table.
You would watch your lover’s arm repeat the motion of light. You would think.
You would love. You would braid the rivers of the earth.
–First published in Christianity and Literature
Dream's Long River--Arts Education 