Metaphor for Something

I want to tell you, I have nothing / but respect for your ribcage

I wanted to be a pugilist with clever hands.

Guest Editor Emily Fragos introduces six poets who write about family incarnations—Matthew Zapruder, Cynthia Cruz, Gabriel Fried, Mark Wunderlich, Lynn Melnick, and Jennifer Franklin.

Got my enzymes, a nickel bag of / Electrolytes. My entire life, / I’ve been waiting for this.

if you hate me / it must be / for ancient reasons

He’s not old, but he is / too old to live with his sisters / for no reason.

When thistles spring up in the field / of our marriage, when the noxious vine // twines onto the maple, let us pull it up / by its roots.

We aren’t native to this land. / It’s time to plant what is. It’s time to go home.

Thin arm around my neck. It doesn’t look / Strong enough to hold a small animal; but it is.

The Ministry of Hot Water / has posted an opening: Director. / Well, why not, we can take that on.

That woman who spreads her legs, / who is beaten, who cannot hold / her grief or her drink. / Don’t become that woman.

There is not one dignified thing about this life or that one.

There’s a box at the hospital in which to deposit / children unlikely to win the Nobel Prize.

because I hate your every-now-and-then anthems, / because I hate the smell of your socks in the stone mihrabs.

We played Steal the Bacon / and explored our unmentionables /

behind the gazebo

He says: look yourself up in the guide and tell me what you are.

Nobel Prize-nominee Bei Dao uses travel as a metaphor for life.

Then he remembered / That he couldn’t remember // If he had toes. What a relief.

…there / was always a lucky one, who carried with him / the mistakes of others, what a burden / it must have been that pushed him down, / but he was pleased by all this pushing.

A few of the prison reforms / you wrestled into implementation // in Madrid, will take root /

in the rest of the world

I understand this economically, and I’d rather not / mention the resemblance to prostitution, but when I open my / mouth it also fills with something called sky

Men suddenly become meek. / Damn, we all needed it badly.

Little boys in drifts of dulling orange were trying / to pack balls of wings to throw at each other; / she thought perhaps she wouldn’t have children.

Tonight, you are thinking of heroin, / Of the boy who pulled you to his lips / In a blue room and whispered heroin / So close you could feel it on your face like a cloudburst.

The mammoth and the dodo never saw it coming— / in the end, there is only the idea of species, like a chair / left swinging when the kids go in for lunch.

I buy some hair of two women, quarter-kilo / fasoukh, some honey, a lizard–

Too bad for you men who do not see who do not see anything

The soldier had been trained in the language of the people he disappeared. This language was a language of things and their ghosts.

The decomposing squirrel in the yard, / a plump sack. That night / I bled for hours, like a dumb animal.

Around Friday heaven arrives; they no longer supply / hell (it stays on the shelf too long), but I’ve got / hell at home, as well as heaven and the saints.

Nobody wants to be rain               falling in November

They huddled / under the turning maples—almost / as if they were asking to be tried for something / they knew they must have done—

To the country dug into our lives like a grave, / to the country etherized, and killed, / a sun rises from our paralyzed history / into our millennial sleep.

Back in our day there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know Albania / who didn’t know it was the bright light of European Socialism / or that the other bright light was us.

This is what you will not understand, / I tell this jelly, this fat crybaby girl.

You’ve learned it 34 years too late and it wrestles / with the story of Cyrus, /

the first man you’ve known with a woman’s / curved breast.

Next door in the neighbor’s carport, children / laugh, jumping on bubble-wrap, like the far, / perpetual small arms fire in the distance.

You thought I literally drained every boy’s canteen and / every last quarter and washer was mine.

we imagine rose tintedly because his hands are in his lady

After that, the sound of hammers and crows / through the open window, then somebody needs to // cut down that goddamn tree.

Forget some call love / Bedside grammar: // The body rules / And it’s a trick

We’ll never make it in time: you’re twelve, / riding west to see a corpse in a flood, / I’m your grandson at forty-two, riding east // to see my city’s flooded remains.

There is the talk of friends, uncles / disappeared, impossible to translate / because in English one disappears, // is not disappeared.

You are drowning but / knowing so will not help you.

his lips in the dark dog-warm against / the flat of my foot / became pain became not became flame

Our hands were/ the real language and we hit each other with closed fists/ just to unhinge the details.

…fir on a barren rock-sharp wall, the kind / the shepherds around here talk and sing to /

before felling when someone young and single dies.

Night and horses— / is this what history is all about?

Could have gone west. Could have packed your things, / who cares that you weren’t old enough to drive.

All things that find a death there take / an invisible token of that freshwater pout: / a bone is dragged into pines and oak, / an organ ends up sailing around in the rain, /

the rest is dissected there on the sands.

When he rows out to collect the geese, / he thinks, like any god, this is just / what you do.

With these five bones, human bones, / Doctor Chanca makes me a cannibal / by arranging feathers from the hand / of another cannibal

A person could be at a loss. The width, spools and yardage, meringue / airs, impossible long fingers, of decorum. Its army sashay of the side- / walk.

The spine does its turtle charade / and the fingers can be counted on / to dance the spider dance or perform

Poor us, we are all kings / when we gaze at the starry sky.

Beautiful, finally, inside the quiet / Latrine of my Mexican / Confessional: // Rode a pony, drove / A tractor, and never / Finished the first grade.

The whole time he tells you what to do. / His voice is chocolate candy filled with hysteria. // He is a loving blackmailer. An owl blind in one eye.

It’s as if for a man battered by the wind, /

blinded by snow—all around him an arctic /

inferno pummels the city— /

a door opens along a wall.

In these moments, I’d imagine, / though I never saw anything / like it, the spray of twelve gauge / buckshot entering the body / of a goose in mid-air, / and its mate, its mate for life, / would honk, drop down, / honk, follow the limp body / to the ground.

On this rainy afternoon in Hollywood / California, I’m practicing / philosophy, watching him sip Napa Red / while he remakes me / into a dog-slut

Isn’t it funny how good numb can feel? Is that / the experience? Or is it waking up after—lucid but no longer asking (or caring) /where it throbs—or when—or why—or because of whom.

I have plans to kill a creature. The best / I can explain it is: I’m afraid. Of what / will be left—a hoof, the jaw, one sun-dried- / soft-as-oats ear.

Cellphoned to their continents, Pilgrims / from whatever persecution, kill those turkeys in / want, want, want, and the landing gear drops.

Fold back your sleeve, cara, so I can see /

the lining and the wrist bone’s alp. A girl /

in Castello grew white fur on her tongue //

when I was fifteen. All but the pink tip, /

like a tiny monk’s head, a tonsured pate. /

Then the fur blackened, and the monk

grew horribly young.

To enter the state of being a tree it’s necessary / to begin with a gecko’s amphibian torpor /

at three in the afternoon in the month of August.

Bruce claims it would be madness to suppose / these two poles of American Romance / —does What Maisie Knew fit at the North Pole? / The Land of Oz
at the South?—could even / hypothesize each other’s existence…

We pour the eyes in with a ladle / like post-holes half-filled / with mud-water, tap them in / with it if we have to.

Honestly I don’t understand many / People. But, Friends, if you plan on dying // By your own hand, don’t use pills. Swallowing / Is simply another way of marking time.

let me go don’t be a dog / my very dear cage / haven’t we agreed

Here at the continent’s end, fortifications / linger for the end of the world. They greet // each California morning, these barracks in the fog. / Below, the lagoon is gunmetal, or mercury poured.

Space is full of mental rooms where we can go / Like a hunter unleashing his dogs, I freed my spirit into them

I am a poisoned well, / I told the ram / as he flared his nostrils. / Everything in me is poisoned.

The stagnation is deafening. / Then some menacing / Nudists walk past / Laughing, which doesn’t / Affect the stagnation.

It’s true I slept with Abe Lincoln. / I now know everything there is to know about this country. / Believe me, I carry a tapeworm for you the size of Kentucky.

Beautiful baby / With your head cut off / Why didn’t they bury you then?

When you have left me / the sky drains of color // like the skin of a tightening fist.

I said to Connors that the miracle for me was that that wood once had bark surrounding it, & that look, now, those carved figures are the spirit of Man.

Night renders everything insensible, / her eyes are filled with feathers, filled / with burning bridges, burning cornfields / wuthering to wind-blown ghosts of smoke.

No matter the time or place, I’ll always grow for the one who is the sea. / With one thin finger cut in half. / That is why I’m the oldest recipient of your on-again, off-again love.

How it rises out of waves in the bay / and shudders like a gentle thrust / of the sea, which sooner forgives /

than punishes, doomed as it is to feckless birth.

Of Bedlam in its prairie pride. Of the roach that winds between the stars, triumphal. Of well-water served in garnet goblets. Of crusted penknife sitting on the pillow in the crib.

I am given ten cubic meters of darkness / every night I pace over them obediently

In the name of his own history, / in a country mired in mud, / when hunger overtakes him / he eats his own forehead.

We make Buddha ride an elephant like the way a village boy rides on a man’s shoulder, and we let Buddha run and play, then make him cry, and we make him couple blissfully with a buttery woman and call it Tantra…

Mobley talked about revolution. / Asterisk, palladium, forever unjaded. // He talked about two lives—the one we learn with / and the one we live after that.

The woman at the DMV wasn’t happy / when I asked if I could keep / my old driver’s license and use it / to fight terrorism. She doesn’t understand / I’m trying to do my part.

It is the bog hour, the minute / which dwindles into a speck of ash. / As I do every morning I fall into my chair, / like a pebble thrown into a well. I think / you are not too thin, though I am lying.

Briefcase brother, what silver / Steamboat, brother, have you / Got for me this time.

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives /

alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.

The animal must be shot. You must / be hungry enough to skin it without / flinching, must be willing to cook it, / still trembling over the watchful eye / of the fire.

Shouldn’t you both be used to it— // a ritual which you revert to each night? / This turning off the light, /

lying still, falling asleep.

Guest editor Tracy K. Smith introduces poems “that will save you from drowning, only to admit they were the ones to push you overboard…”

it’s a fine American laggard sea found Haitian / with a boatload sinking under the precipice there / fallen into the new sink / in the new kitchen

Last night at the mambo cinema, with its wide screen / diamond sheen, my medulla oblongata / was knocked back to the Stone Age, primal scream / rising as I took my seat like a black sheep, Red Queen

Somewhere there is a perfect architecture / where light, form, shadow, space all move / to form a language beyond architecture, / where to dream of the wrong architecture / is to dream of dying.

The fate of the inter- / office matchmaker // is to be forever / sitting on press // releases intuiting one / big happy time zone.

At this point your credit score / will be helpful. Turn in your old train tickets / and walk the way you have always walked, / feet turned out, heels light as oars.

I’ll give you a roll of barbwire / A vine for this modern epoch / Climbing all over our souls / That’s our love, take it, don’t ask

The hero arrives in an armada, years after you begin dreaming of him in black and white. // Armies stamp through your sleep, dole out chocolate, dried milk with a chalkiness

you long for.

when dusk says hand it over / what am I supposed to hand over // in printing you have to choose / between portrait or landscape

He was hurled to the ground by the same unjust blows that hurtled him far ahead in his life, toward future years when one person alone could no longer make him bleed.

Yes, that’s right, maybe I’ve run out of / patience, we have certainly run out of cigarettes / and the later, as Cioran used to say // hold more fire than the Gospels in our blessed country.

I will try to live on earth without you. / I will try to live on earth without you. // I will become any object, / I don’t care what— // I will be this speeding train.

I HEAR THE AXE HAS FLOWERED, / I hear the place can’t be named

skywriting its name in the/ optical illusion blank spaces/ shifting around the surface/ of the necessary paperwork (also in mouth)

soporific for the earthly,/ but for the waking,/ a buoyancy, the medium/ for floating up with/ flutter-kick, with wings

“I always do everything wrong. Sans exception./There I am again using ‘sans’ instead of ‘without.’”

A snake drags along looking for the ocean./ What would it do with it?

Her tears drop on the mirror / and around the guttering lamp insects swirl.

A few horses returned with torn flags we couldn’t make out. / I would have a ceremony for you, but what if you are alive?

I don’t know you personally, but I saw your photo in the paper / and I feel deeply offended

if I am not green and horses do not fly

The hedges, as square / as the capital letters important / books begin with, screen // the neighbor but not / his feet

…to leave you is to grow up.

I would see teeth and a quivering tongue / and that little glistening punching bag / that hangs from the roof of the mouth.

We were trying to make the best / of a very short time.

Aida knew it was the sound that would get to her.

Night—a twelve-wheeler / goes by making the dreams of / the inmates shiver

If I were fire, I’d burn the world down;

By this glass of wine so dark it brims / Like rising nightfall, with a heart whose deepest faith / Is insatiable thirst

It’s lonely it’s getting harder / To do the dirty work of ever getting them back.

My El, my pallor, my gas- / fed water, tell me how to touch your walks.

Coyotes swarm these hills at night in great flurries of electric lantern-light.

The flinch of it lingers // As I exchange my insides for the front of the line

The sound of wharves aswarm / with rats woke me from stupor.

We build a fire which will repeat at night / what the sun did during the day…

After history we will all drive home alone / through present darkness and impending rain

This is sanity—when love comes—/to offer a bed, a chair,/sustain and raise it like a pet

At birth a slow star/ bursts inside us

We sleep on stilts, above the floor

And so it transpired, richer took from poorer,/ as if politics rules even in death.

The midden / of kindling gleams in cloudy sunshine / like bloodless, dismembered flesh and bone

perhaps that agate’s circular gaze was your gaze, / which from water in the air unfolds itself

The heart is made first, to make a foothold.

They were children circumnavigating a haunted house, / trekking into private property

Then you fell / like something fancy and on fire in my lap / and there’s no going home for me.

Under pines these riders halt beside a brook / calm like them, yet like them close to sobs

The sorrows of the world are truly abundant; but wine is abundant too.

A blue glow / Streams out from my clothes. / Midwinter. / A clinking tambour made of ice. / I close my eyes. / Somewhere

Everything tumbles forward end-over-end / like a stone down a mountain. / I keep waking up (it’s a pinprick, / like the mosquito that bit me on the neck

The sweetest thing in the soul is the fire / Of your love; still sweeter is the fire / Leaping out of the soul from your love

Our ideas leap like fish upstream / to spawn and die in / sunlight / their backs/flecked with blood / their eyes ruinous and open.

It happened 31 years ago, / I can’t forget it, / in Singapore, the rain / falling / hot like blood / on the ancient white walls

Like bugs in a bowl / we all day circle, circle / unable to get out.

Again I try to explain how all talk is slippery.

Already the ship hovers, a soft mark near the harbor, / the ashen shore unsure if it is approaching land / or leaving, its curved back—that long labor—rocking land

One stunned passerby will drop a bottle of cranberry juice on the pavement. / You’ll blink, surprised it doesn’t shatter holding in the red lake of its lung.

Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs. The smoke / Circles and begins to clear.

History may even forget that tonight / I determined who would live / And who would die

to look for a lifesaving buoy in the flood / the destruction of the last drop of man

But your eyelids hold such flowery perfume, / that they breed inside my mind the bastard’s doom

in which city do I want to be? / I want to be in the face / between the realms

It’s a special kind of frigidity, / a cold no man’s meager skin is match for…

The sphere rolls a short distance on the grass, / stops. On a sunny morning, a blink, and the sounds – // march, wings fluttering, shells.

I want this heat, this choice.

He smells me, / and I in turn smell a faint scent of tumeric, // or bijol, the colorant my mother used / in her paellas, or arroz con pollo dishes.