instead, insulted. to look, in green light. redact. can you read… the oracular, such indifference. failing in the halls of an unknown.
to have powered down. mission. some sort of cavalcade, plane flight caucus to indifference. a mission, museum, the night in the unknown. a city.
raked forest leaves, consorted with compost fires, down in steam, walked an incline, slipped to fall. the clatter of bones on buried stones, on those leaves fallen, but not as fast as I fell.
in Turrell’s dim light, I realized the failure of the art official. an artificial stance, an impossibility: to speak and listen simultaneously.
the train bed, we call them tracks, where two ties swim beneath. a gossip, these gadgets, soaked in white scrimmed preamble. I made the mistake of coming closer, again.
ihe rejection, a mastication of the brain, those thoughts that fuel the day. I can’t, besides, canning involves brine and fish we simply don’t have.
in the sea farm, large carp. in the lake, a new cat finds our resources, our swims, those precious summer waters, where the between marks space.
the train from platform; here, everything in an elevated series of windows, lighted, in yellow mirrored fashion. large tower rests on the ground. the pavement gives way, the grinding of breaks.
came across a few seats, edits, and large empty doors. there were paintings, an elderly man. a slipped space to look aside guards and walls. I can’t think of how many steps it takes to escape.
platformed, clasped, we waited to circulate, encased, dined within curator’s task, lips sown in a silence of those emeriti.
caustic, in bold approach, pallid lips, rouged face, nearly quaffed and ensconced. I edged the red, a rage lost in the linen weave, a time.
Between the train’s long slide and the sun ricocheting off the sea, anyone would have fallen silent in those words, the language of age in her face, the birds cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones have grown smaller. Though the tide is out, it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat that jumps into the street, the dust lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust- colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships, I don’t know their name nor the way to say lips of water in Italian and mean this: an old woman stood by the tracks until his hand stopped waving.
The air was like a bullet made out of silk I saw him at the curb on old upholstery saw him with his counted-thread-point and tent-stitch, bent over an embroidery hoop the trees lifted their drunk limbs and leaves while the evening looked through a succession of windows into other people’s rooms the evening was a powerful gun the evening had an Uzi broad evening in a neighborhood full of translucent teens sucking on one another’s backpacks filling up the trains with their heat their intelligence pouring out into the street, sobbing— I saw the devil with his sewing threads making something special for me and it wasn’t thunder it was perfect clouds I saw the devil with his stitching techniques textiles and shadow saw his hands that never stopped the clean amp of his forehead tight intervals of flowers in his teeth bright as an earing in the drain and I made a force field with the wilderness in my face and a fortune-teller’s neon sign that glowed a painted light onto the street and I said his name and his crimes three times against a curse and found a coin on the ground and read the tiny date and blessed a bag of weed and a wild bore I left my bones and my scars and went out like a poltergeist totally empty
One night, not long after the disaster, as our train was passing Astor, the car door opened with a shudder and a girl came flying down the aisle, hair that looked to be all feathers and a half-moon smile making open air of our small car.
The crowd ignored her or they muttered “Hey, excuse me” as they passed her when the train had paused at Rector. The specter crowed “Excuse me,” swiftly turned, and ran back up the corridor, then stopped for me. We dove under the river.
She took my head between her fingers, squeezing till the birds began to stir. And then from out my eyes and ears a flock came forth—I couldn’t think or hear or breathe or see within that feather-world so silently I thanked her.
On 20th between Madison and Ferry a line of municipal maples binds the community to an orderly, serviceable beauty. Platforms from which our sparrows and starlings might decorate our domestic sedans, perhaps these trees serve most to stimulate the car wash economy. Today, they remind me:
unsatisfied with workaday species, my parents nailed oranges to a post to attract the exotic Oriole. When the birds arrived, I wondered if they’d flown all the way from Baltimore, which in turn evoked a hotel, gables lined with black and tangerine, posh clientele spackled by the vagaries of Maryland living.
By nine I could sigh, climb our single red maple, which I imagined a national landmark. Child of movies, I could see the tree even at night as a kind of beacon, a singularity. White sheen on the leaves’ pitchy gloss, bodily. And I too would learn to feel glazed as any creature accumulating light
cast from stars, hidden in a federation of equivalent times, distant trains carrying sugar, coal, whole families beyond deserts, imposing ranges, shimmering coastlines said to define the spirit of a people. Far from the station, the pinpoint aurora, a line of municipal maples bears its charge.
Many of my race have lived long without the touch of
these fine things which separate us from beasts. Things
I call my own now. Having served thirty-six years as needleman
for a family far more ape than we will ever be, I rode
the moonlight train to find my free. Up here it is colder than I like,
but the gentlemen admire my frock coats above all. I taught my son this trade
and hope this picture I made will help retrieve him. Come summer I leave
this coast for Philadelphia where I hear we of color can breathe yet more free.
Tonight I stitch. The breeze off the bay smells of aria. It is almost the season for cloaks.
She sings her heart out with a smile
like Louis Armstrong on the subway’s dusty platform
with her band, a bass, guitar, horn player,
and drummer. She keeps singing with a smile
even as an old demented man dances up and down,
keeping rhythm in front of her, blocking the audience view,
with his big rag of a coat, swollen leg and crutch.
Undaunted, smiling even at the old beggar who steals her
spotlight. “Music Under New York” says her sign, and she’s among
the good jazz musicians who play in the subways for quarters
and dollars collected in a hat or instrument case open
in front of them.
Making music amidst the rumble of trains and rush of people
who are made more cheerful by their tunes.
Evelyn Blakey knows that the homeless man
who dances on his crutch is comforted by her warble.
“Georgia, Georgia…just an old sweet tune keeps Georgia on my mind…” he sings along with her, grinning soul,
the sort of smile that says: “I’ve been
through it all, but sing anyway.” Evelyn Blakey, listens
to the horn jam, listens to the drums roll,
with ecstatic eyes closed, face full of music,
and the old beggar dances on his swollen foot,
his ragged coat swings back and forth with his tired bones,
his grey head bobs in rhythm,
and Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn Blakely sings,
her heart full of sonorous sound,
her foot tapping the ground,
her subway commuters gather around.
Looking into the eyes of Gerard de Nerval
You notice the giant sea crabs rising.
Which is what happens
When you look into the eyes of Gerard de Nerval,
Always the same thing: the giant sea crabs,
The claws in their vague red holsters
Moving around, a little doubtfully.
2.
But looking into the eyes of Pierre Reverdy
Is like throwing the editorial page
Out into the rain
And then riding alone on the subway.
Also, it is like avoiding your father.
You are hiding and he looks for you
Under each vine; he is coming nearer
And nearer. What can you do
But ignore him?
3.
In either case, soon you are riding alone on a subway.
Which is not important.
What is important is to avoid
Looking too closely into the eyes of your father,
That formal eclipse.
Dear train wreck, dear terrible engines, dear spilled freight,
dear unbelievable mess, all these years later I think
to write back. I was not who I am now. A sail is a boat,
a bark is a boat, a mast is a boat and the train was you and me.
Dear dark, dear paper, dear files I can’t toss, dear calendar
and visitation schedule, dear hello and goodbye.
If a life is one thing and then another; if no grasses grow
through the tracks; if the train wreck is a red herring;
if goodbye then sincerely. Dear disappeared bodies
and transitions, dear edge of a good paragraph.
Before the wreck, we misunderstood revision.
I revise things now. I teach pertinence. A girl in class told
us about some boys who found bodies on the tracks
then went back and they were gone, the bodies.
It was true that this story was a lie, like all things
done to be seen. I still think about this story, what it would
be like to be a boy finding bodies out in the woods,
however they were left—and think of all the ways they
could be left. There I was, teaching the building
of a good paragraph, dutiful investigator
of sentences, thinking dear boys, dear stillness in the woods,
until, again, there is the boy I knew as a man
whose father left him at a gas station, and unlike the lie
of the girl’s story, this one is true—he left him there for good.
Sometimes this boy, nine and pale, is sitting next to me, sitting there
watching trains go past the gas station in Wyoming,
thinking there is a train going one way, and a train
going the other way, each at different and variable speeds:
how many miles before something happens
that feels like answers when we write them down—
like solid paragraphs full of transitional phrases
and compound, complex sentences, the waiting space
between things that ends either in pleasure or pain. He
keeps showing up, dear boy, man now, and beautiful
Everything shimmers
with the sound of the train
rattling over the bridge
especially the ears and nostrils and teeth
of the horse riding out
to the pasture of death
where the long train runs
on diesel fuel
that used to run on coal.
I keep listening
for the crickets and birds
and my words fall down below.
I mistook the train for a thunder storm,
I mistook the willow tree
for a home, it’s nothing to brag about
when you think of it
spending this time all alone.
I wandered into the hay field
and two ticks jumped in my hair
they dug in my scalp
and drank up my blood
like the sweet wine of Virginia,
then left me under the Druid moon
down here on earth in the kingdom.
Battleships melted down into clouds:
first the empire died, then the shipbuilding,
but cloud formations of gun-metal gray
ruled over the sea that was England in June.
A scarecrow treaded water instead of barley,
gulls set sail across a cricket ground.
In a suit woven of the finest mist,
Death took the last seat on the train,
the one next to me. He loosened his tie.
His cellphone had nothing to say to him
as he gazed out the window, ignoring us all.
Had the country changed since he was last
on holiday here, a hundred years ago?
Like family, rather than look at each other,
we watched the remains of empire smear the glass.
Had we met somewhere? “Out West last week,
I passed your parent’s house,” he said.
“I waved but your mother didn’t notice.
Your father must have turned off his hearing aid,
in that way he has.” In the rack overhead,
a net, a jar, a box, a pin: Death had come
for another of Britain’s butterflies.
He rose, unwrinkled. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
II. Demeter in Winter
Earlier and earlier, the dark
comes to the door, but no one knocks.
No, the wind scratches at the window.
Clouds skate the ice of your old room,
Daughter, a cloud falls to the floor
and can’t get up—
or are you my sister? Remember the rope
tied from schoolhouse to home,
so the blizzard could find its way to us?
It climbed into the attic,
spread a white sheet and ay down in the dust.
Who left behind the army greatcoat
into whose cave we crawled that night?
Lie down beside me. Under a blanket of snow,
something freezes: the mind’s gray rag,
caught on a rusty nail. Come closer.
Say I am not the woman I used to be,
just bones turned to sand in a sack of skin.
Daughter, if this page isn’t blank, turn to the next
and read me the part where you disappear.
III. Persephone on the Way to Hell
Over there, beside the road—
is that the letter I should have left you, Mother?
The shade of a scarecrow waves a blank page
as big as he is.
Blond waves of winter wheat roll up
to the knees he’ll never have,
tempting his shirt to set sail
for some other myth.
He’s a white plastic bag
tied to a stake and stuck in a field
at the end of summer. What’s left of a river
lies in a bed grown too big for it,
surrounded by rocks it carried this far.
Mother seems smaller, too.
I saw you, my lord of the dark,
take her hand as it were just a child’s.
The door of a room had closed in her mind.
“Where am I?” she wanted to know,
reigning from her old recliner. You knelt
and tenderly took off her shoes.
IV. The River of Forgetting
Why aren’t you packed to leave town?
my mother asked. Why was I holding a rock
worn down until smooth,
gone dull when it dried?
Where was she, who prided herself
on being born with no sense of direction?
Where were the fifty years
of maps my father drew for her?
Did she remember her own name by the end?
Remember for her, you modest houses,
so alike that only those who die there
can tell them apart.
Cottonwoods crowding the driveway,
did your leaves whisper which turn
the dead should to take to the water?
The ferry that hasn’t run for fifty years
leaves for the river of forgetting tonight.
V. The Azalea Justifies Its Existence
Dream of yourself or stay awake,
Martial says, and the azalea agrees:
fifty weeks it dreams,
not the greater green of Florida
the rest of us do, but a pink almost red,
a shade I’d forgotten for thirty years:
a coat marked down and down again,
coat in a color not from the desert
of subtleties my mother favored
but somewhere between magenta and mauve—
but coat in her size, and so she bought it.
Finding her in a crowd, you found yourself
facing spring come before its time.
Yesterday she died.
She couldn’t lift a spoon to the watery winter light
of eastern Washington. Azalea,
if only she could see you now,
the pink of your magnificence
like some ruffled thing thrown on
in your rush to extend a sympathy
so far beyond the pink of flushed and fevered,
it’s—what is the word for such ragged,
joy-riddled gauds of grief?
VI. The Death of Demeter
From a distance, a woman’s life is nothing
a glass of ice water losing its edge.
I should know, Daughter. I spent the night
in a graveyard, behind a tombstone,
trying to stay cold. The trees
that wouldn’t stop whispering—
they’re nothing but chairs and tables
dying not to become tables and chairs.
A tree cries out to be covered with leaves?
A deep breath of dirt fills the lungs.
Permit me to propose a few things.
I don’t want my soul to find its body.
VII. The School for the Dead
The blackboard’s endless night,
a constellation of chalk dust unnamed—
through the classroom window, I saw a map
pulled down like a window shade:
continents pushed apart, an ocean
blotting out names with tears.
South America and Africa no longer nestled
like spoons in a silver drawer.
The lost mitten of Greenland froze
to the Arctic Circle, the empty space
called Canada yawned. The new pupil,
my mother, hunched in a desk too small,
waiting for her daughter the professor
to begin the obedience lesson:
how to lie down. How to roll over
in the grave. How to play dead.
VIII. Nocturne for Female Voice
I walk the old street at night, the way I always did,
I heard my dead mother say.
Why didn’t you come? I had to talk to a tree.
I talked to dogs—they bark at anything,
even a ghost. You shiver, Daughter,
but know nothing of the cold.
Tumbleweeds roll into town as if they owned it,
night shrouds me in darkness, wind wraps me in dust—
where’s your coat? You’ve been to Rome
with a man you weren’t married to,
and now you know ruins? If the body is a temple,
as the nuns tried to teach you long ago,
it collapses on itself, bringing down the mind.
The vacant lot at the end of your childhood—
which of us rules it now? I lower myself
to the puncture-vine, the weed I warned you
never to step on. I prostrate myself
the way you coax something to grow
in the desert of the past. Its pale star
blooms a week and then bears fruit.
It survives by causing pain.
I walk our street at night, the way I always did.
Why didn’t you come? I had to bark at a tree.
I howled like a dog.
IX. The Library of the Dead
Deep in the shelves of shadows,
I closed the book I hadn’t read.
Who wanted for food
when you could smuggle something
snatched from the jaws of the vending machine
into the library of the dead?
Down on my shoulder came a hand:
my late mother’s, turned to ash.
In the house where she died,
we would sit, not speaking,
even in eternity: she had her book
and pressed one upon me, companionably.
Everything had shrunk
to fit in a suitcase when I left.
The past had been ironed flat,
a thousand leaves starched and pinned
to a cottonwood just a shade of its former self,
the only sound its rustle, industrious,
leaves turning waxen, unread—
though no shelf lay empty
in the library of the dead.
Beauty in its winter slippers
approached us by degrees
on the gravel path. We were
hitching a ride out; had been hitching.
Our suitcase freighted with a few
gardening tools lifted from the shed
while the old man, old enough,
looked away. He who
went fishing at night (so he said)
carrying in his pail
a nest of tiny flame.
We were headed, headed out, we
were going in a direction.
No tricks
or intrigue, just a noisy
ineptness.
If that’s a word. Beauty, dipped
in resin beneath its shag,
was always ready with the right
curse to recite to
our nature. It is
in us, it is,
in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man
looked away. Song of
experience.
There were treads in the snow.
We waited for our hitch.
There were train tracks which
stung with clods of this region’s
rare clay.
We were boys, boyish, almost girls.
Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled.
Incrimination called to us
from the city and its fog-blacked lake,
called to us from the salvaged farms beyond the lake,
from the wilds beyond that.
Guilty was good.
When I get the call about my brother,
I’m on a stopped train leaving town
& the news packs into me—freight—
though it’s him on the other end
now, saying finefine—
Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away
from the hair on the floor of his house
& how it got there Monday,
but my one heart falls
like a sad, fat persimmon
dropped by the hand of the Turczyn’s old tree.
I want to sleep. I do not want to sleep. See,
one day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good
I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland,
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier, & their teeth
flash in the night, oh, body.
Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.
Whole years will be spent, underneath these impossible stars,
when dirt’s the only animal who will sleep with you
& touch you with
its mouth.
I sit on the tracks,
a hundred feet from
earth, fifty from the
water. Gerald is
inching toward me
as grim, slow, and
determined as a
season, because he
has no trade and wants
none. It’s been nine months
since I last listened
to his fate, but I
know what he will say:
he’s the fire hydrant
of the underdog.
When he reaches my
point above the creek,
he sits down without
salutation, and
spits profoundly out
past the edge, and peeks
for meaning in the
ripple it brings. He
scowls. He speaks: when you
walk down any street
you see nothing but
coagulations
of shit and vomit,
and I’m sick of it.
I suggest suicide;
he prefers murder,
and spits again for
the sake of all the
great devout losers.
A conductor’s horn
concerto breaks the
air, and we, two doomed
pennies on the track,
shove off and somersault
like anesthetized
fleas, ruffling the
ideal locomotive
poised on the water
with our light, dry bodies.
Gerald shouts
terrifically as
he sails downstream like
a young man with a
destination. I
swim toward shore as
fast as my boots will
allow; as always,
neglecting to drown.
live life as a stranger. Disappear
into frequent invention, depending
on the district, wherever you get off
the train. For a night, take the name
of the person who’d say yes to that
offer, that overture, the invitation to
kiss that mouth, sit on that lap. Assume
the name of whoever has the skill to
slip from the warm side of the sleeping
stranger, dress in the hallway of the
hotel. This is a city where people
know the price of everything, and
know that some of the best things
still come free. In one guise: shed
all that shame. In another: flaunt the
plumage you’ve never allowed
yourself to leverage. Danger will
always be outweighed by education,
even if conjured by a lie. Remember:
go home while it’s still dark. Don’t
invite anyone back. And, once inside,
take off the mask. These inventions
are the art of a kind of citizenship,
and they do not last. In the end, it
might mean nothing beyond further
fortifying the walls, crystallizing
the questioned, tested autonomy,
ratifying the fact that nothing will be
as secret, as satisfying, as the work
you do alone in your room.
The river is a fish
and my tongue
is white paper
you draw
your hand on
and the sounds
keys make
on the waist
of a janitor
in an empty building
on the night of your birth
when the moon was
a live bird pinned
to a girl’s chest
and the color
of a beat-up door
that hides a paint chipped
life where we lick the throats
of passing trains
and wear bright pills
over our faces
like ghost masks
and move the tiny ghosts
that live in us
like dominos.
Paradise lies beneath the feet of your mother. A verse I’ve heard recited so frequently I do not know if it is scripture or hadith.
Hadith, meaning traditions of the prophet, are always accompanied by a careful oral lineage of who said what to whom, and who heard who say they heard what. Usually back to one of the prophet’s wives who heard the prophet say it.
The veil also between what you want to see and cannot see, what you wish to have heard but did not hear.
In butoh the dancers are rendered in white smoke, ghosts traversing the stage-as-womb, moving so slowly you do not even know they are there.
If paradise lies beneath the feet of my mother then how will I find my way inside unless she admits me.
Now I look at each face, each body, as it moves around the subway platform, down the stairs and around the platform, onto trains, off of them.
After my aunt Chand-mumani’s death I thought of them each as flames, in each the body is combusting, burning up the fuel of the soul.
Michelle after giving birth walked around the city imagining everyone glistening, bordered in amniotic grit.
But is it really like Fanny writes, the body only a car the soul is driving.
Or something of us sunk into the matter of the body, part of us actually flesh, inseparable from it and upon death, truly dispersed, smoke.
The body of the prophet’s wife always between us. Who said what.
In which case there really is something to grieve at death: that the soul is wind, not immortal.
A middle-aged woman, in the seat in front of me on the train, wearing a green puffy winter jacket. Her hair, though pulled back, frizzy and unkempt.
It’s the unkempt I feel tenderness towards.
Have always felt about myself a messiness, an awkwardness, an ugliness.
As a child, such an envy of birds, of graceful slopes, of muscular boys.
In the train rushing above ground at125th Street. Thinking about stumbling.
House by house, walking down this street or the other one. Going into the library, going into the school.
Where every middle-aged woman is my mother.
Waiting to be trusted with the truth.
I have nearly as much silver in my hair as she does.
Any pronoun here can be misread. He can mean you can mean I.
An odd list of things I want to do in the next five years: study butoh. Write an autobiography. Go back toParis. Get lost somewhere I haven’t been.
Also begin to say it.
Marco and I moved to Marble Hill in the summer of 2006.
Let me tell you a story about a city that floats onto the ocean. Opposite of Atlantis which fell into the sea or Cascadia which threatens to rise back out of it.
Marble Hill, a real hill, perched at the northernmost tip ofManhattanIsland, a promontory out into the conjunction of the Hudson River andSpuyten Duyvil Creek.
The wind is an instrument, its own section of the sky orchestra.
Today I read of a Turkish mullah who is canceling 800 different hadith regarding treatment of women found now or believed at least to be untrue.
Untrue is it.
Untrue the laws that were graven in fire or graven in stone.
Says the Quran, “This is the Book. In it there is no doubt.”
All for a belief that a human animal is a wicked one and requires a law.
Which requires if not actual violence then at least the threat of it.
At least fury.
Here in Marble Hill you are where you aren’t.
Orchestral the river that curves and curves north of the island.
Ships bound for the upper east side fromAlbanyhave a harder and harder time negotiating the torturous and twisting Spuyten Duyvil.
So a canal is blasted through and what was once the northern tip ofManhattanbecame an island.
Walking across one of the bridges inParisI came to a place called Les Mauvaises Garçons. Being afraid to enter I crossed the street to another tavern.
I stayed for three hours.
Radiant with traffic, the streets do not remember the gone.
The pillar at the Place de Bastille does not put back brick or bar.
Ten miles out of Chartres nothing but grain across and gray above a dark raven emerges screaming from the fields.
These thoughts are nothing, following one after the other.
Somali lesbians scheduled for their execution. Two boys in Iran convicted of drunken and lewd behavior and hanged for it. Boys. 16 and 18. There was video footage of the actual hanging on the internet.
I watched it myself.
“You wear your fingers down copying sacred texts,” sang Lalla, “but still the rage inside you has no way to leave.”
The Arabic line “This is the Book. In it there is no doubt” can also be read as “This is, no doubt, the Book . . . ”
Dear mother, there is a folder of my loose poems lost somewhere during the summer of 2006 when I traveled between Pennsylvania, New York City, Virginia, Maine, and your house in Buffalo. There was a letter inside the folder to you.
Though I’ve looked and looked and failed to find it, I am sure it is still in the house in Buffalo somewhere. An envelope with a folder inside. Inside the folder loose poems. Tucked into poems, there was a letter.
The veil between what you want to see and what you cannot see.
Emily Dickinson sent her first letter to Thomas Higginson unsigned. She included with the unsigned letter a smaller sealed envelope in which there was a calling card upon which she had written her name.
When Colin Powell spoke at the UN about the invasion of Iraq, workers were asked to hang a black drape over Picasso’s Guernica.
Which would have otherwise been in the background, surrounding him, as he spoke.
There is a body and a boy between you and utterance, the boy you were who could never speak.
Bright red bracelet of time.
“Fury,” is how Galway Kinnell explained Dickinson’s intent in writing her poems.
Poetry and fury in the time of war. Civil War for her.
What is my war? Not the one you think.
I won’t say.
Constant state, sure as the white noise on the television after the station has gone off the air.
But who goes off the air any more.
And whose air.
Come to Marble Hill then.
Each night sleep is pierced by someone outside gunning their car engine over and over again before driving off.
A car alarm or two.
There is a streetlight outside the window that shines into the bedroom, bright as the moon but more orange.
Orange like the saffron scarf I wore to Tokudo.—”leaving home.” When Ansho became a monk and took a new name.
The day I sat down next to a young man with a sweet smile. A gardener. Name of Marco.
The train runs the next block over. We are on the second floor so hear it if we really pay attention.
By now its rumble on the tracks, the chiming when the doors are about to close, are on the order of background noise.
I have not yet learned how to sleep through the night.
Marble Hill was an island for twenty years before the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, still running, underground below 228th Street, was filled in and joined to the mainland.
The city itself, my life, that first butoh performance I saw.
A man with such slow and intense movements, so internal.
You hardly knew he had moved at all and suddenly he was all the way across the stage, contorted, holding a glass bowl aloft in which a fish swam.
None of which you had even noticed was on the stage.
Once a Day Poetry 