“Poetry is an emergency.”
Selected poems from Motherland
“I keep forgetting”:
my mother, losing her mind
Into those rare palaces I cannot follow,
where words buckle and collapse like walls
in an earthquake, an ocean of words, turning me over
and under, filling my bathing suit with sand.
I come up gasping. And you sit still, in the nursing
home you call the museum, moving from one
roomful of light to the next in the museum
of your mind, where objects are displayed in an order
only you understand. You smile. I hold your hand.
Mother/Daughter
It’s like looking for you
in a forest of mirrors,
like trying to climb
a mountain of glass.
Standing on opposite shores
of a river
we hold out our arms
while the other sweeps past.
Sorrow,
my good dog, you go with me
wherever I go, sit when I sit,
stand when I stand, wait with me
for the light to change, so we can cross
the street together. Each day I brush
your glossy coat. I feed you from my plate.
At night you sleep at the foot of the bed.
Yours, the first face I see in the morning.
Selected poems from No Witnesses.
Livestock
1
Not enough to fill the air with gods
who look like us and act like us and spill
manna and ambrosia on our plates.
Still, still we crave dominion.
In Kabul, zoo animals starved.
The Baghdad pet market, a favorite
of children, was bombed half
a dozen times, even
by two Down syndrome women, wired to be
exploded by remote, hundreds killed,
hundreds wounded, air full of flesh
and fur, feathers drifting down. After 9/11
eyewitnesses described birds on fire as they,
like the falling humans, tried to fly.
2
A red tug pulls a garbage scow downriver,
garbage piled almost twice as high
as the side of the black barge visible
above water. The Palisades command
a view of the city rising like a mirage
beyond the George Washington Bridge. A gull flies by,
white as a tooth against the dark cliffs.
The tug moves south toward the city.
The water is the color of the sky.
In a 17th Century print, the Palisades
are light, not dark, dove-colored, rising
above unpopulated shores and
a sleeping river, pale as desert sand,
unfamiliar as Afghanistan.
The Peaceable Kingdom*
Of course we are surprised
to be standing here in broad daylight
with no place to hide,
flank to flank, nose to nose,
side by side. Time after time
he plants us like trees or stones
and every time we are surprised,
surprised, too, by the children
who stand or sit respectfully
extending their hands as if to caress
as if they would not grow up
to kill us for food or for pleasure.
* Edward Hicks (1780 – 1849) painted over a hundred versions of The Peaceable Kingdom.
White
“…female chimpanzees at the Tulsa Zoo…took advantage
of a renovation project to…paint their babies solid white.” - NY Times, 06/02/09