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dapt-poems

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merely transitory evidence a stray boundary between
a much longer-lasting (invisible opposite polarities
feature the fields annihilate
the field tries to one another
repel the intruder rapidly
Foiled acqua-
moiré wings the
butterfly’s beauty-
mark hydraulic in its
purposes his
hair’s flame lifts
you snarls you
Sea-bed in semaphore / an
eyepiece wing-span
delft dye vat-dipped shingle
scintilla : truant
and acclimate enfold
or infuriate: SOS:Don’t surroundDon’t surroundyourself with yourself
amatory birds’
egg bulls-eye
Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells
us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a
number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to
others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if
perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic
things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit
field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a
purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image
at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass?
Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.
The coal-dust hushed
parameters of the room.
The boys laughed,
said Shhh
and stood me up.
I see my mother, at thirteen,
in a village so small
it’s never given a name.
is long, washed, and uncut.
My father does his own dental work.
A power drill and epoxy
and steady hands—
While watchingForrest Gump, he told me
how he too carried a friend.
He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.
She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed.
the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.
Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms
has changed early, burning with a light
grown accustomed to its own magnificence,
as old as light. I am always learning the same thing:
there is no other way to live than this,
still, and grateful, and full of longing.
The dry basin of the moon must have held
the bones of a race, radiant minerals,
or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy,
idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,
our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen.
Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures
digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated
Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer
electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit
like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl.
In the constant lunar night this luminescence
was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,
it poured into the room like a gradual flood
of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn
of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out
Manila would be blank ether, way station,
a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter,
at that moment, where our lives would lead:
father would disown one brother,
one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,