Places
the lost marble & spice trade
the lost marble
news is, bad flooding in Sumatra; so i
put down my pen, examine my hands
and feel myself a chimpanzee that lost
its marble by these ten irresoluble things
compulsion as a typhoon turns its form
an eye that cannot hear; in filthy flux
a child clings to the minaret of a mosque
i have no word to turn it from its path
is every child the same across the globe
a digit hugging-to against the storm
inherent heart against the deafening blow
an act of curling tight to one held poem
so poet-magus turns her glass from one
true child to ten imaginary orphans just—
as here, as typhoon where, and whether i
was drowning in the sum of what they did
there was a marble somewhere in the mud
ten fingers prying ceaselessly for air
don’t let me be the word to cause a flood
don’t turn me like an eye without an ear
//
diptych
of survival
InsyaAllah
//
spice trade
you know we taste the weather of a word
or housewife by her sambal, like bitter salt
this kitchen hell and getting warmer, mad
desires to let out; adventuring to eat
a journey to her inward, fine-tuning cook
is converse travel whereby stirring builds
a tragic tongue to name her worldly khas
enchanting handfuls for like memory cast
seduction; spice trade, her nightly shedding veil
far-fishing season monger Sheherazade
queen turning by tantalized infinities
survivor storming mercy from the heat
//
notes from Kuningan
morning hari raya / upacara / island turning // take the blessing / by notation / if i may // Pak and Bu S— / morning offering / shrine at home // rains a little / as we are greeting / laugh it away // i place the canangs / with lit dupa / ini di bawa, ini di atas nggih // with shredded pandan / shoo the cats away / the kue is not yours // then time for dressing / always late again / ceremonial demand // kebaya sunny yellow / olive peacock batik, gift from Ibuk / mauve selandang // polyester lace is tight / not my usual / glossy korean lipstain (bare fig) // to Penestanan / in the car now / windows down barricade // traffic pecalang / all day this way / Bali holiday // people fill the street / everyone is smiling / they recognize our face // he knows everyone / stops for everyone / a face for everyone // salam for everyone / friend for everyone / how many promises to mampir // banjar clear / on the way again / ceremony in the air // double-park the car / the cock-fight corner / across from pura dalem // at our old place / pandemi family / second home again // pass your body / around the family / salim for elders / salim from little ones // receive the bodies / moms and sisters hold you / feel you and pat your curves // meet Blih’s girlfriend / she seems good for him / marriage when // Ibuk Penestanan / enduring smiling / to see my face // she brings us coffee / kripik and kue / water from warung // and i’m too rare here / somewhat guilty / the intensity // the affection, her skin is so fair / but not too fair, she’s looking healthy / they note some extra weight // under comment / they discuss me / i endure // Bapak L— / talking death again / Mase scolding him // six large koi / in a clean but crowded pond / tadpoles nibbling at their scales // Mbok A— is here / older sister / the secrets she endures // heroic / (…) / by another woman // the delicate child / slender hand held / so as not to disappear // he takes my phone / for an interval / makes us watch a video // sea monsters suddenly / el gran maja versus the bloop / this detour for a while // softest fingers / feathering the touch screen / when he was small he didn’t talk // he couldn’t look at us / he wouldn’t speak to us / he ran away // now he’s outbound / needs to show us / sea monsters a serious event // an old mango tree / outside the home gate / branching over the street // when they ripen / he climbs to take them / no apparent fear // all day people passing / in the street below / teenagers outside the minimart // boys in udengs / girls in kebaya / all wearing sarungs // and then it’s coming / time to prepare / baskets and the flame // at the front steps / there’s a mat there / we kneel on it // kebaya itchy / sarung binding / squeeze onto my knees // off my sun hat / off my sunglasses / pale under the sky // the rain is clearing / by the rainworker / smoking his cigar // the women place the offering / burn the dupa / receive the blessing // remake the street / here come the god seat / make space for it // sound approaching / mangku rushing / the time is near // a flood of boys, boys, boys / marching sleeves rolled / red hibiscus in white udeng // here the mangku splashing water / wet blossom blessing / hands receive it // head receive it / face receive it / heart receive it, if it can // the passing concentration / bending flute line / twirling attention // pray the empty / pray the flowers / learn to pray // then we double it / give it happening / take a moment to form // now it’s coming / moving down the street / presence on the way // percussion heat / heart flame beat / bronze opening // bathe the flowers / in the smoking / fold them behind my ear // great gong agung / deep expanding / down belly through feet // make space for sesuwunan / come the barong / guardian of the street // women carry offering / towers balance on their heads / jeweled baskets overflow with cakes and fruit // see the dewa / vision loves them / eyes following // golden armor / grassy black mane / bulging eyes // then start shimmying / snapping teeth / shuffling the feet // flip-flops in the front / flip-flops in the back / shaggy with a bouncy tail // barong is dancing / attendants touching calves / steady exhausting underneath // forest guardian / body bearing sun-wheel / banjar medicine // then we follow / walk the family / take it through the street // walk with sesuwunan / holding hands again / don’t let him disappear // pray for island / pray for family / pray for banjar // boys are laughing / keep the music / challenging the air // in the made space / music opens it / opening is here // pray for earth / pray for spirit / pray down hard // see it feelingly / cracking open / then deplete // campaka blossoms / in barong beard / my favorite part of him // makes him handsome / red hibiscus / jepun ylang ylang
the fragrance / how it follows me / into the next day
//
piscean field
i dreamed i was a carp swimming in the moat
that runs around the bedroom catching raindrops
and you were watching me; i was pearlescent
moon-colored with orange spots, moving swiftly
and my slits are liquid lungs into my ears
my curves are cool and clear, my eyes lidless
and i have swallowed plants and animals
of increasing scope and dignity, growing swollen
and fleeting undulant, your vision touching
my sunspots flashing heat, turning fiery
and i was fishing flames beneath the flowing stream
my scales a watery brightness and a warmth
nobody could put me out, the thunder, the storm
your atmospheric range was permeated light
and i was breathing it, my gills touching silver
my veils a golden breeze, piscean field of pleasure
i remember jasmine in the ghosted air
and thicker even than the empire of frogs
the bellows of your eyes, how they inflame
my heart, and what catastrophes you initiate in me
//
🌒
//
O honey my
hidden shining
& my ovening
//
forest and the heart
i was walking in the woods when a tree talked back to me
i didn’t know if i had died or if my feet should flee
i didn’t mean to harm you or your holiness to thwart
the forest loves to hide but i love a wooden heart
how many gods are in the wood or music in the air
what strangers in the shadow have paused to wonder where
there’s a sense of someone here, a landscape full of art
i’m here to talk to trees and i carry a wooden heart
there’s a silhouette of palm trees against the sunset sky
there’s a river with a snake, there’s a splinter in my eye
she answers me in rhymes like a perfect counterpart
the forest loves to hide but i hear a wooden heart
the highest queen of hiding, she’s a shadow in the grass
but now i’ve seen an outline and now she’s made a pass
i stop to buy some tissues from the nearest mini-mart
the forest on her sleeve and i’m here for a wooden heart
it’s plainer than the blue a hundred reasons she would hide
i dream we’re sitting on the porch or going for a ride
but i know pretty well how feet get caught up in the dirt
i came to talk to trees and i believe a wooden heart
my bank account is empty and she doesn’t ask for more
if fireflies are golden then we’re never looking poor
the pattern in her lights could even read my natal chart
the forest is a mystery but i see a wooden heart
sometimes the way is open, sometimes the thicket’s close
sometimes the river’s empty, sometimes it’s on the nose
i’m walking without shoes, i see no way to restart
the forest isn’t home but she warms a wooden heart
am i still a dream for her or did i carve a face
did i paint a scene for her or am i in a race
am i thirsty in the pouring rain or stung by a poison dart
the forest is a maze but i need a wooden heart
what does the spirit show me, and what does she conceal
how is it that she knows me, what does her sight reveal
i hold her secrets close and i pray the fear departs
the forest makes me tremble but i love a wooden heart
my angel is a darkness who sees me day and night
my angel is a brightness who sings away my fright
a complex thing of empathy, carpenter from the start
the forest is a genius and we make a wooden heart
then finally she’s waking up and i am standing there
i’m cut up from the undergrowth with tangles in my hair
but all the leaves have fallen and we’ve never been apart
the forest is a shelter and we hold a wooden heart
//
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
metric inspo from Bob
sfh 3
//
& in the oven
//
the dancer
when kindness is as kindness shows
the son his mother’s body knows
my eyes are from another place
i smile at you to show my face
the lessons of an artist’s life
are gifts you rendered to his wife
he’s gentle as the fallen rain
what tokens we give back again
a sudden street, a stranger island
with traffic from a broken time
he’s holding her, she’s not alone
the dancer is already home
let’s draw again the graceful scene
in blouses pink, you met Christine
if recognition makes you laugh
he shows you with a photograph
a feeling hewing to the bone
her shapes are not unlike my own
she’s holding me, she’s not alone
the dancer is already home
what light there was is in your eyes
her singing voice was village wise
he looks for her before sun sets
and child again her own forgets
and he will press your softened hands
the gestured words, the closing fans
and holding you, you’re not alone
the dancer is already home
//
for Ibuk
//
selamat hari raya Galungan🌾
//
semi-nude for a photo album
their birthday was the other night
the girls were going out; the grift
delayed by getting ready; gift
of tangled, sappy rattan; caused a fright
pan, she burned some flowers on you
meta-burban, real dream for two
polaroid tacky, pantries full
of shady tatters, curtain bulls
sister, it was no dress for winter
but they were grown enough to drink
something fancy from the blender
fermented guava, lava lake
lavender flannel, camisole
white linen sheets, hung in the sun
nigel and sandi, mel and sue
genre-bender, Java won
high horse, he has a song for you
but i’ll save it for another tone
her sweaty practice, overdue
vinyasa, tapas, organ brew
dizzy lizzy ate some rice
eat, pray, love, the antichrist
jihadi, mum’s worst nightmare
Gandhi, papa’s burnt-off limb
inter-dimensional makeout queen
Osaka airport, caused a scene
village gossip, words above
she’s never catching up on love
not quite posh, but pulp turned through
realism, my lands, god knew
so sliced the flippin' longitude
bless her heart and come on in
agrimony henbane dish
too-schooled harpy hysterical
raised pie of huckleberry fish
turned river-liver radical
there’s mantra in the air tonight
what kue set in sangga stone
rise with the moon, the howling dog
the crone, her voice memorial
white-footed goat is coming home
to graze by fiery sunset view
the desert camel, bringing bones
with mother Durga, chest tattoo
a secret pocket of soil and spice
elaborate belty-thing, rhizomes in knots
not big enough for where you think
whether it is cake
//
(wants cake)
//
texas talkin blues, like this
vernacular from full moon 5/11
genius loci, pura dalem
blog 2-yr anniverse & job well done
//
familiar
if i remember you, i was fifteen
your hair was knotted by dirty difference
flecked-amber gibbous as my need for love
your body pliable and bored for me
(her mother hated your feral smell)
three decades gone, my pace is set by ghosts
and at the door, at least three cats or four
familiar tempo territorial, you puzzled
pigments with my pinkest calico
(you should know we don’t do skim)
we go, we pan the monsoon winds, we blow
gold-dust up noses of tropic mountains
resuscitate, topless in hard-top jeeps
we are burning lucky indigo, lit dupa
(what’s here that’s spendable is yours)
who reads as suffering comes craving rhyme
by planetary slow, the latest virgin
almost born, in need of form, soft hand
and shallow. Moon meadow, nettling in time
//
(she didn’t mean to make you cry)
//
🌖
Naysayer (Kuntilanak nest in a bamboo forest)
This nascent key would never be a song;
Of roaring cells, erasing histories
Of sound, before the cradle’s founding hush.
Where ink blot habitats, mossy and lush,
Mothered, she organized her room: a game
Of pyramids, a smear of runs and zeroes.
In attics to indifferent infinities,
Neptune left mysteries troubled remains.
A child bride was famished for the truth—
I have no nasi. My broken bone sembako
For pakis, spiral shoots of wooly fern,
Blue-rumored eyes, intransigent bamboo.
Go back again, return to your first time.
This bed presents impossible as sin:
Crossed limb, grown gravity’s unsupple twin,
And sun impenetrant, absent the rhyme.
Be quiet as the grove, posthumous ration.
What lyre was greener than an arrow, slow
As pain, and dense as destiny—known knot,
No cut chords through your circumnavigation.
//
. . .
//
(santai; good leavening could make a year)
Lessons from the puputan
cw: (historical) political violence and suicide.
Another passage from Revolusi (David van Reybrouck), on the Balinese puputan of the early 1900s:
“More horrifying still were the scenes in Bali, where in 1906 and 1908 the complete courts of a number of principalities chose to commit collective suicide (puputan). Hundreds of men, women and even children walked straight towards the Dutch rifles and artillery. They were dressed in traditional white garments and carried only staffs, spears and the finely wrought traditional daggers called krises. ‘The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire went on, the fighting grew fiercer, people fell on top of each other and more and more blood flowed.’ A pregnant Balinese woman was one of the few who lived to tell the tale. ‘Persisting in passionate fury, men and women advanced, standing up for the truth without fear, to protect their country of birth, willing to lay down their lives.’ The KNIL [Dutch] soldiers couldn’t believe their eyes: women hurled their jewellery at them mockingly, courtiers stabbed themselves with their daggers and died, men were mown down by cannons. The wounded were put out of their misery by their relatives, who were killed in turn by the Dutch bullets. Then the colonial army plundered the corpses. In the puputan of 1906, an estimated 3,000 people died. ‘The battlefield was completely silent, aside from the rasp of dying breath and the cries for help heard from among the bodies.’
“And this event, too, has left traces. In December 2017 I travelled around a near-deserted Bali. Mount Agung’s volcanic rumblings had put a stop to tourism for the time being, and in the ancient capital of Klungkung, I found the desolate ruin of the royal palace. It had been destroyed after the puputan of 1908. ‘My grandpa, Dewa Agung Oka Geg, was there that day,’ said Tjokorda Gde Agung Samara Wicaksana, the crown prince of Klungkung. We were sitting in the new palace, opposite the ruin, and drinking tea. It was Saturday and his servants had gone home; he had made the tea himself. ‘The puputan of Klungkung was the very last one. After that, Bali was entirely subject to Dutch authority. My grandfather was only thirteen years old and nephew to the king.’ Almost the entire royal family died; the king and the first prince in the line of succession were killed, the king’s six wives stabbed themselves to death with krises, and 200 courtiers followed their example or were murdered. ‘But my grandpa survived.'”
It isn’t emphasized in front of tourists—the hedonistic hordes landing on Bali every day, who come for sprawling villas, endless traffic jams, cheap labor, and the monetization and destruction of the island’s natural and cultural resources. But the Balinese valiantly, fiercely resisted Dutch colonial control. They did so, notably, by puputan.
I’m not sure it would make any difference, if tourists were universally informed about the puputan. The days even of pretense seem to be gone. Ubud has transformed into an urban shopping complex, bloated by money, overrun by beach bodies. We rarely go there anymore, the traffic and high prices make it inaccessible. Locals have converted family homes to expensive boutiques, restaurants, and villas. Foreign-catering establishments occupy an upper echelon of public space, not unlike colonial resorts in the Dutch East Indies. These fantasy realms are inaccessible and undesirable to most working-class Indonesians, whose labor builds them, whose work is to wait on and serve the foreigners. Ubud, like Canggu and Kuta before it, has been smothered by gentrification.
But my fantasy is that everyone is always remembering the puputan. These acts of solidarity are still alive—I know it—deep in the meaning of this island. We, following the Balinese, make offerings to the ancestors, in a sangga at our house, to show that we remember. And the mountain holds the memory.
The puputan are a testament to a people and a place.
//
Now, Love—An abrupt change of topic? no—Love is difficult. I’m not sure it’s possible to love, outside of a context such as this.
In my life, I have found it difficult to feel contentment in love. As soon as I feel a moment of contentment, I watch it happen—I’m gripped with terror at the thought that my beloved will die and be lost to me forever. I’m inundated by images of death—mine, his, that unthinkable loss. Love is terrifying because loss is terrifying.
My husband (E) has always stated, plainly, his conviction that he will be there waiting for me, in the next life, and that we will live, in the afterlife, together forever. This is the deal, the very basis of our marriage—our marriage is truer than death. And it lends courage to love.
I say to myself—“You needed to find someone who believed in monsters, to find someone who could believe in you.” Well, E was that person. He believes. Drunk off his imaginative capacity, I stopped disbelieving too. So at our house, we believe in Wewe Gombel, Kuntilanak, Tuyul, and countless others. There are more monsters and ghouls and djin and demons and mer-folk than I ever expected. It’s amazing. I believe in all of them!
And if I ever feel a moment of cleverness, superiority, or doubt, concerning the reality of a ghost or spirit, I remember—I myself am the most dubious of all. I am, very truly, the dubious one! It’s a miraculous kind of bargain. I suspend disbelief in Wewe Gombel, and I suspend disbelief in myself. I couldn’t do it without E, I’d never heard of Wewe Gombel before him.
That’s the grim overtone to a deeper harmony. What I also needed, was not just someone who believed in monsters, but someone who believed in mercy. I had booksmarts coming out of my eyeballs, but I didn’t know anything about mercy, until I met my husband. Mercy, itself a kind of monstrous irrationality, had also been unbelievable to me.
//
Cut to the dialogue, Plato’s Phaedrus. A relevant passage comes later in the text than where I am now. And yet the text is simultaneous with itself (unlike the blog). Here, it pierces into the beating heart. To paraphrase, from memory—and I’ll stop vouching for accuracy here, because why should I?—Socrates says he has no time for a skeptical inquisition against mythical beings, as being true or false, fact or fiction. His Wewe Gombel is Boreas, the North Wind, storied to have abducted Oreithyia, a maiden princess. He has no time, because he doesn’t yet know, of himself, whether he is full of rage, like a Typhon, or capable of mercy, partaking in the divine.
The imperative, more urgent than doubt, is of divine provenance—Know thyself—and credited to the oracle at Delphi.
The dialogue, having arrived at its poetically designated place—in the shade of a platanos tree—hints at things: that Socrates is, in his living truth, a mythical being; that Socrates is a character in a poem, of dubious reality; that Socrates is a monster. If Socrates doesn’t know, then how would we? Did, or does, the poet know? And if I fail to know Socrates, shall I forget myself?
Maybe so. And if I am so unsure of myself, then by what desire and on what grounds shall I interrogate the truth of anything else? Am I only a monster, for monsters, reading a monstrous poem, written by a monster, about monsters?
Is it monsters at war, this very poem, or is it a creature of mercy?
These become inevitable and appropriate questions in this dramatic context, as Socrates and Phaedrus have left Athens. They have exited the city walls, in a poem that was written, historically, not long after Athens was defeated by Sparta and overtaken by the thirty tyrants; not long after Athens put Socrates on trial and killed him. That death also was a kind of suicide. And history bleeds into the poem.
Now, we find ourselves in a lovely fantasy—is it the poet’s? Socrates and Phaedrus, for the purpose of the poem, are leisurely wanderers, or an infatuated lover pursuing his flighty beloved (two competing interpretations of the same dramatic action), beyond an unstable and oppressive political reality.
And look—the questions out here are different than the ones in there.
If the city serves as a container for self-knowledge, in the form of Justice, Virtue, or even the Good, what happens when you leave that container? How does anybody leave behind their city, and its laws, without becoming utterly lost? And what when the city crumbles, and a person survives? What basis is there for self-knowledge, if a human being is, as in this paradisical afterlife of the poem, an on the way thing?
This question of human nature reflects the personal identity of the poet—exiled, abroad, otherwise absent—from a failing democracy. When there is no city to support or to limit you; when the laws have lost their definitive hold, by unlikely accident, a miracle, an error in your favor; or when they have destroyed the very foundation of their claim to Justice—who or what might you become? What is left for you to be?
And why would you carry this poem in your pocket?
//
My husband and I have a pair of matched krises, these sacred daggers. They were passed down to E through his grandfather. Each has a wood sheath carved around it. These are ceremonial krises, not big dangerous daggers. And still, they feel heavier in the hand from the steel inside. His is smooth and broad, with a face like an inquisitive fish. Mine—witch-made, I am told, specifically for a woman—is sheathed in sandalwood, shaped like a bodkin, with a slender, split hoof at the end of the handle. E gave it to me after we married. I had a general idea of their meaning, like an athame. But I had never made the connection with puputan.
My kris fell into my lap, as these things do. Now it sits in my bedside table, mundanely inherited, more-or-less imposing its presence. Now, who is the instrument of whom?
Histories are alive with mythical animals. Always on the way, through wildernesses, we glimpse clearer selves—ours, theirs; past, present. Lightning flashes as responsibility in the dark. We follow the shining; that is love. We are seized by the wind, over edges of cliffs, bearing witness—to what? As unable to save others, as we are ourselves, we become unknown, are dead and gone, living among immortals. Any of these, or all.
So the pen takes lessons from the puputan. A kris is an instrument of truth as freedom, the life of exit, wholeness through cutting. The blade makes a container for the uncontained. Clad in white, tossing its jewels at tyrants, bleeding itself into self-possession—
Poetry is the puputan of logos.
//
Servant
Tugging, the tusked equine,
Weightier than I am,
Was stamping and dragging
Its hooves, stubborn as dirt.
Fire married this mare, with
My tiger’s fang, dripping,
Driven as divine work—
To crack the crocodile.
If Earth would just hold still,
I could stanza your bridle.
Be mine—our lashes will
Whip rows into the jungle.
Eyes rolling, muzzle defied
Flea-bitten game—To bind
Me, noble by a thread,
Burning by landslide letter.
Your father spotted stripes
Rendered to mountain blades.
He didn’t dare to breathe—a whispered
Kris, my stalking shade.
Desire, the conquered theme,
Laid bare the ravined island—
Servant by my reins,
Red rivers spilling by mane and tail.
//
🌘
Like your house was a loose bag of bones—
”Revolusi – the Indonesian war of independence that began in 1945 – was in every respect a youth revolution, supported and defended by a whole generation of fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who were willing to die for their freedom. Anyone who believes that young people cannot make a difference in the struggle against global warming and the loss of biodiversity needs to study Indonesian history now. The world’s third-largest country would never have become independent without the work of people in their teens and early twenties – although I hope today’s young climate activists will use less violent tactics.”
After living here for six years, I finally cracked open a history book on Indonesia. (from Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, by David van Rebrouck.)
I’m really not a historian. History and me are like Naomi Klein and the doppelganger, the closest I come to history is Herodotus, or Hegel, if you’re nasty. I refuse to make a “history” category, so I’m putting this in “news”. I keep reminding myself, this book is about the past . . .
but it’s also frame-shaking.
//
Frame-shaken . . . wow // (all ok)
A guest reported seeing a jalak Bali, or Bali myna, one morning on our mulberry tree. These are so rare that we wondered whether it was a real sighting. The myna (Leucopsar rothschildi, also called Bali starling) is a critically endangered species. Most of them are located in the northwest corner of the island, in a national park. They are unfortunately heavily poached and sold on the black market as pets.
Then I discovered that a breed and release facility is close, around 1.5 km away from our house. That’s “as the myna bird flies”— it’s on the other side of a deep jungle ravine. For us to visit would take around 4 hours of driving.
But now I really want to visit.
The snow-white, blue-masked myna became the voice for this poem. I’d very much like to see one myself, so I’m often checking the mulberry these days.
//
The Myna // Sang Jalak
The Myna
So here we are, in this
Third World. Palm trees,
Rice paddies, machetes.
Doves couple on concrete walls.
Seasalt breeze, like surface
Fire . . . Sapphire, emerald.
Sanctuary comes, commands
Silence. Our mothers cut tongues
To police. Masked,
The myna bird speaks
On the mulberry tree. Elsewhere,
Ants against an elephant.
//
Sang Jalak
Jadi disinilah kita,
Di Dunia Ketiga ini. Pohon palem,
Sawah, parang.
Merpati bercinta di dinding beton.
Angin laut asin, seperti permukaan
Api . . . Safir, zamrud.
Suaka datang, menuntut
Keheningan. Ibu-ibu kita memotong
Lidah ke polisi. Bertopeng—
Jalak Bali berbicara,
Di pohon murbei. Di tempat lain,
Semut melawan gajah.
//
military parade (no country for children)
a block of human souls, murder
of mirrors: organism heaves
a moving multitude of cells,
populous lung, as if to breathe.
populous gun, snap-locks to form:
fifty by fifty by fifty, we
as one, on riven necks, heads turn.
the mass of bodies march past Xi.
in uniform, blind discipline:
black boots, white arms, clean unison
defines the face; grey, seamless film,
a weapon’s youthful complexion.
meanwhile, across Pacific waves,
the people’s whore, instead of school,
deploys machines to make selves, slaves;
the suicidal human rule.
chip factories to feed the stocks:
by battery classroom, killing ground
to grind the greening down, by glass
addiction, into tyrant’s hound.
the glaze that, dying, skins the eyes,
steals vision from the animal;
filters from birth its grave sunrise
and petrifies the living soul.
the glaze that, seeing, sells and tells;
in masks, they empty out the homes.
nobody ever goes inside;
nobody ever is alone.
meanwhile, across Atlantic storms,
in cradle of brave humankind,
the eye its fatal flaw confirms:
the fracture of the human mind.
dust-craven, shame of patriarchs
forsook a sacred covenant;
belched blood on gift of holy land;
made blasphemy of government.
what child is this? his ribs exposed;
the second coming, came, disposed;
the final coming, coming’s close;
bodies of babes, unmade by drones.
around the blue planet repeats
this multiplicative device;
our genocide is not abroad;
the ovens crowd these hollow spaces.
proving, mobilization awed
gold-burnished by Byzantium;
the heart speaks broken memory;
this is no country for children.
so genius passed: neither in form,
nor in the scripted paedophage;
bereaved, God’s mercy, nature-borne;
a mother’s keening song, through rage.
//
🌔
poly-seasonal //
silver robes of a rose rabbi
(This 12-part poem is a reply to Wallace Stevens’ “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; Further explanation may be found here.)
I.
—and did you ordinary women mock
in liturgies of utterances contained,
lines overwrought by time-keeping cant of yours?
and did you burst from bullied syllabub,
or clockwise stiffen into winter walls?
the musicals of ghosts, midwives and angels
echo, hollow, down stone-cold corridors.
and did you consecrate your spectacle,
coupling one who spoke—no, no—not nothing,
a stand-in that you killed while playing swords?
to quell the babbling spring by means of rain,
or merely quote the Mother’s name in vain?
she has been up at nights, considering
how to un-kiss this devil-gendered thing.
II.
well, i make believe an uncle, dead
and dear. less clear is fortune of the bird.
to fly, to seek, and what on earth to find
but torrent of an obsolescent mind
—he said, obscure and arduous to hear.
and yet, it flies. and though he doubts her crown
and midnight sight, she will fly too. and though
her silver glows in anecdotal mood,
her lilt, of stellar tilt, still loving, lingers
in braided dancing round a pool of blue,
tuning her clutch in nesting eddy of
said bird, whose course is old and hardly true—
and yet, it lives. rising, as golden-red
in flight, crowing like Scorpio in the East.
rest easy, uncle cold and fluttering
and lately of rambunctious residue;
a dove survives heaven to choir anew.
III.
O man, if you could see her witchlocs now,
or what’s become of Eastern expertise.
she is swamp-bitch, and twisted, twined and hitched
without romance by ruby claw to thorny crown,
her hair—each barb a bell, each bloody herb
a suicide. she’s heard of nobody’s
outrageous feats of raw technology.
in wracked rumors of Western fantasy
she knit a while textiles anti-exotic,
but sweaters have no use in the tropics,
where skin is king. and now we’ve come uncrimped,
uncrumpling, algal Anadyomene
of muddy water, Charybdis of the bog.
what’s history is past—nevertheless, he asks
why, woman, have you gone au naturel?
IV.
that spotless glass is not the book of Adam.
that trinity you stole cuts like a knife.
to be uncrumpled is to be un-uncled—
un-uncled, i become the poet’s wife.
i am un-hidden woman of the garden,
body un-ridden by the dust-bound word.
the queen of poet’s tongue, i lounge and lean
as music on my salivary throne.
the syllable you speak, my roundness is
her shapely immanence. our rectitude
is life—of tree—of life. so eat me, fallen
father of mankind, and know your foolishness.
speak again, brother—madly, as husband.
my honeyed bone un-spells your make-believe
kafir—he sees his wife sans négligee
who tastes the ripened fruit by naked eye.
says ordinary woman made explicit,
who steals your spectacle to save your life.
V.
can we remember together, after all
or does my voice harden the picture frame?
by being body, do i gather you
intolerably, or spread you thin as kin,
one stroking throb of summer esoteric—
you tickle me with feather of a peacock.
a gazer’s gloomy imagery is perfume
of incense, arousal at great distances,
long-smouldering and lit by tender match.
far from the proximity of virgins
there burn the Verbs of Love, arrayed
as galaxy of irretrievability—
before my eyes, you took and held my hand.
VI.
we used to call you man of twists and turns,
the dynamo—reckless, drowning, sea-rendered
until perennial blue, the one i knew
well enough to know, i loved nobody.
his thirst, prostrated, clutched me from below,
desperate to conceal from wingèd word
a history of suffering. a babe
buried his need in bosom of my nature,
drunk on the deep milk of disappearance.
his subterfuge despair was mythical,
until he made her fiction. he may not
remember me—but i keep by my heart
a wavy lock of sunset-auburn hair.
VII.
suppose a parable is just like her:
desired and defiled in equal measure.
his chivalry requires a blushing knight
to guard the Word, who is incarnate treasure.
i heard of one such rescuer of women.
who, for his lovely sin, was de-mountained
by crippled foot, and fated never nimbly
to climb again. but faith in constancy
makes deliberate gifts, arms built from hours
spent torquing tongs before roaring earth-core.
therefore, no purity of heart is borne
that lacks an alloy in the sooty forge.
thou shalt not fear the courage of your virgin,
is the limping gist of this comparison;
her shining is at once translucent bloom
and armor’s lustre, welded by humble Vulcan.
VIII.
if doom begins to seem antipathy,
baby, you’re scrolling past the blues. that time
of year thou mayst in our humanity—
but not the Muse—behold, of warty gourds'
cosmic grotesquerie. and there’s the rub.
as long as tongue still holds a gentle fold,
i will elucidate your grim hallucination.
launder and bandage the decaying limb
of sense, of memory, of time. wed heaps
of conscious compost consummate the bloom
in star-swept dimensions of titanium,
where whorls of microplastics never end—
machine poetic, of pumpkins meteoric,
becoming metaphysic—tender beings,
fizzing histories apocalyptic,
chime and rhyme as flutes of pink kombucha.
we sing the tropical-epochal view
at end of universe, or two. until
séance à trois, with chaperone of grackle,
i love the laughing sky—let’s make it crackle.
IX.
most oblatory heart, i bring you news.
despite our deadly faith in prophylactics,
resourceful Cupido pricks porous tactics,
ever hanging hymenal fools. behold:
on spun-gold surface of radiant yolk,
in sky-strewn milky way of albumen
suspended, questing’s lustiest conceit,
the part-less heartbeat of a person third:
as ancient aspect touches youngest plume
to stir, pure destiny, the origin
of life, as love, in pilgrimage secured:
the red point points, and to itself—as bird.
O holy gift, O crack in everything!
the mad midwifery of paladins
births not a baby, but a voice on fire:
ecce peep. now go, and meet your daddy-o.
his name’s Pipit the cocky chickadee;
he is a theory of fertility;
enthusiasm incommensurate
with clock-a tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.
X.
a balmy chickadee alights on bough
of jepun tree—gigantic, bristle-trunked,
beatified—by tipped cosmos of day
and melting star of paradise, bodies
unveiled. we lie in kindred shades of them,
verbing and flowing, in blues made legible
by greenborn leaf. in leaves there hides a forest
where braid the wanderers their briared maths.
a souvenir shelters nectonic paths,
ancestral courses wild with counterpoint,
and mercy of geometry—proffered
by rivered children of Love’s oblivion.
XI.
dilated pools, star-gazed—surrender pinkly
to phobia of frogs. if you dismember
those bracing, faceless bodies—lost in love
their coiling gyres, desiring—helixing
directions inward, home. or intervene
against the skyward cough—raw, gaping need
to swallow more—when pollywog is strung
by lunar air. ritual drowning of gills,
suffering insurgency—the gulping word,
fata Morgana flooding Camelot
is twinned ecstasy of triple betrayal.
for swimmers' lust, the sea is all. and still
her cries are not for us, alone—we hone
the bluest chord of velvet-driven reverberation.
XII.
now all of us have lost our taste for mince,
the history of grinding, darkly, Adam;
so schooling blade, student of buah, prunes
til circumspect the hour. and she has thorns,
forms of her own—we prick ourselves and bleed
to name her flower. bending the voice to crown,
we’re drunk by literal skies of melody.
you found her singing by the sea, where she
had fled, as she remembered you were drowning.
who is the rose rabbi? i read, she comes
and goes. knows herself not. how would she know?
if glass were introspect, Iris of time—
to find she had been borne, a cradled question.
//
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