Explore Poems: Doubt & Contemplation

Look at a painting of sky. Look 
a long time and notice one thing.
How someone’s wet eye stares back
like…

You are pursuing a feeling like the dust
In the voice of Bob Kaufman plus the mud
Of the most fertile…

Handcuffed in daylight walking through air
today the subject imagined a near future
where other subjects…

I pestle sea rice

on the shore, mix with

shipwreck’s pitch.       Black damper, sun-baked.

This fickle…

The dream came weeks after I visited The Beautiful Captive, a solo exhibition by an Alexandrian artist. In an installation exploring enactments of domesticity, two goldfish were meant to be floating mindlessly around a glass bowl but upon looking closely, I noticed one of them had stopped moving. When I inquired, I was told the fish had died unexpectedly that morning, and that the assistant curator was on her way to the gallery with a replacement. Can I make you some tea while the new fish gets here?A red velvet curtain hung inches above a fireplace with a beige marble mantel, a vase carrying two birds of paradise crowning one side, emptiness the other.In the hearth not fire, but a belly of glass.At his talk that evening, the artist did mention Magritte, but did not say the looping goldfish were stand-ins for fire. I might have read that later, in the curatorial statement.In an old photograph (Geneva, c. 1993?) not one but two bees are trapped in a glass cup turned upside down—how did my father manage that? It was a game we played after we ate, as the light packed its things. When I could no longer see their honey stripes, or my mother’s orange lips, I knew it was night.diary excerpts [weeks preceding dream]No noteworthy dreams.No punctuation.Notes for my obituary: Survived by dust. No cats. Green milk. She always unlocked the door with the wrong key first. Kept her skin on a hanger as she slept. She was two women. One bird of paradise. One ran out.Not again—the dream of wearing glass gloves I can’t take off. Nails painted red. Like flame in ice.Now I cannot clean the house.

What can you really do in it?
Condense the metaphor further?
Glimpse God beyond the atom?
It isn’t a question…

It was a shit shift.
            You served a salmon roll
                         to someone allergic.

Sat with simultaneous eight-tops,
            you cursed your lack of an addy. The boss

ice in the grass of want:

queen of leaf-

 rot, I’ve let go—

The cloud casts a shadow on the mountain. 
A sentence comes like code, long after
the image, which is …

i will die this month. how
i do not know. still there
is much work to be done. i
am afraid not for myself…

It came with the East Hollywood rental place: that novelty
polypropylene doormat screen-printed

in…

keeps waking me, even though it’s nowhere
near monsoon. At two in the morning,
and for every hour after…

Like most people, I have not known
what to do with the stones handed
to me. I fold newspapers into …

I don’t want to say
things were indescribably
bad exactly

but things were
indescribably bad exactly…

Not an optimist. I lie awake at night and say the name
of everyone on the block and for three blocks …

A man sits across from me, patterned silk padlock
at his neck and orders us whatever
people drink from…

I had a fellowship but lived poorly
On cheap beer and penny candy.
Later, a career of killing time.
But…

the song of the frogs
shakes the head up better is
the song of the coldest snow stepped is
the song of …

Most days my mind wants to wander, ring a bluebell in summer, eat melon with hot pepper. My mind wears…