Explore Poems: The Mind

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

ice in the grass of want:

queen of leaf-

 rot, I’ve let go—

Let’s put on our childhood clothes
and walk the secret streets.
Let’s remember that in Finland
they…

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

I remember that jasmine bush. 

But I’d forgotten the yellow couch.

I can’t bear our small faces in the…

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

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.

I pestle sea rice

on the shore, mix with

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

This fickle…

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

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

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

so we commissioned a document
about sustenance and the city’s pores
metaphors of food and skin
for …

After reading my obituary
folks went to their local bookstores
looking for my books. For a few days…

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

only language 
can hold us together

i watch the women
bead their hair
each bead a word

braids becoming
sentences…

in the early twenties
a boat brought
my father to america
his first impressions
were spoken in spanish

years…

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

but things were
indescribably bad exactly…

an arrangement
of trained plucks
& then a full-palmed flood
of contented ones opens
into a siren that…

downturned toward the river
and slanted from a wiry arm,
life trickles into life, culminating
in the…