Poetry

The witching hour

4 a.m. is the hour of lost epochs, the
skipped layer of fossils, the
uncanny valley of time zones.

That vacuum of questions you’d had as a child
wondering what would happen if
you simply fell into outer space?

4 a.m. is the footprint of an unknown traveler
who obviously strode in a blackish gait,
with his hat pulled down low.

And all around, as the tendrils of secrets
curled gleefully, there existed one second
where nobody took a single breath.

---

Impressions of Bogota

I can see the seams where village quilt  concludes and urban build begins. 
It’s frayed poetically, a relic of our sins: the guilt of bloodshed. 

It screams like graffiti, sprayed across the brows of flowers, and they wilt. 

The people speak in tongues I’ve never tasted. I’m enamored by the shapes their faces take, 
solemn, knowing, cautious. No words are wasted, for, to them, they’re still at war. 

I make like the opaque sky, foreign questions paced. 

Mountains break from soil cages, rising with a raging will. I’m not dead yet, 
they contend, just like their men, disguising cynicism. As if we could forget
the souls who toiled for such modernizing.

---

Vienna (1)

I heard

Schumann, chasing words around the room. 
The flesh of a chord
like a pointed sword
Your notes, ageless and urgent. 
Your fingers the tomb for a wasted bloom. 
Each page a chaste, emergent choice;
your “inside voice”.

I saw

Crows’ feet, first,
a burst of cracked glass across your temple
reflective of the years
branching, from roots to your ears. 

Tossed, youthful shoulders, but also—
etched lines of labor, a sketch of
something lost, truthful, older. 

Your dimple, a sporadic visitor
sought like a natural gas, and drowned
in a blue-eyed impasse. What’s this?

You never looked beautiful before
I heard all of that. 

---

Vienna (2)

Certain things I wish to unrecall
like if they happened, but not to me—longing
that, hatefully, they’ll nestle in the faith
of another girl, and feast upon her wrongs,
her guilts. When nighttime lopes along

she’ll turn and toss, trying to escape
while peacefully I’ll slumber, sunk so deep
it’ll hardly look like sleep, but an oblivious
death of knowing. In the girl I’ll steep
my judgments (in the dark about the heap

of unsaid words damming up her tongue
—a traffic jam of queries).

When we are past, where do memories lie?
Are they etched in corpses, taking shape of
knitted brows, knotted wrists, crooked
scars of old resentment? When I die,
will they pen my body like a book?

---

Vienna (3)  

Monday afternoon. Our bleary trio
stumbles on the cobblestones, sienna-
colored flats of Stephenplatz, neo-
classicism crafts a dazed Vienna. 

Not sure what we’re looking for. Raised
domes of oxidation interject
like commas in a rusty urban phrase. 
Roaming past the windows that reflect

limoncello scents, Bavarian diners,
piccante pesto—three mouths newly home
to residential flavors. We graze at finer
restaurants, savor architecture, comb

the streets for hidden beauty, feet unfazed
by free-Masonic mazes. Sometimes Davin
walks between us, and once we’ve gone a ways
it alternates, because we tend to have in

mind no method, anything is fine. 
Two of us drink wine and colors wake,
hum with secrets. Candles line
Baroque cathedrals. Frescoes take

our breaths as casual souvenirs. Lost
in Austria, we find and understand 
the synonyms of drunken laughter. I hear
a 30-something Beethoven command

charisma from the ink, a grown-up child
reminding us to tease the sober facts
and mourn the silly lies that keep us wild
for the salt of life, that arbitrary tax. 

---

Pasta after college

Two-twenty a.m. in my childhood home.
I’m twenty-two, eating cold pasta in the kitchen, the kind
my dad used to make for picnics.
Olive oil, salt, basil, mix.

Dad’s “insurance onion” watches me from the counter.
Maybe we’ll use it tomorrow, I mean, today,
it’s all the same. Everything is gray but
the glint of the fork, a sign of life as it sways
between dish and mouth,

conveying the countdown to spring break,
scraped knees, and
not knowing what love is.
Sometimes, we’re in the time zone of many years ago.

---

Questions for Icarus

Which punishment was worse? 
The Cretan prison, whose walls conveyed 
a maze of sketches, father time inert, or lack of will to listen,
and, risen, drowned ambition? 

Would you rather see the Grecians leak a mile below
into the streets like honey? 
Crowns of kings, once golden—incidental? 
Would the glow of hierarchy pale? 

Do your wings afford a sense of power worth the poison
sweat that starts to pour towards Balkan shore,
desire burning hot like that of boys in desperate 
need of freedom? 

Do you soar so far above you cannot reconcile
my grief? My joy, its thief; my squandered child.

---

What silence does 

Here is what it does. 

It lingers south of consciousness, and patiently it cowers
at unassuming hours. 
It fills your mouth with stammers, stutters, 
stares which taste of flowers blossoming 
from stems of admiration.  

It slithers and purloins your precious words, resulting 
in a mortified collision of tongue and vision. 
Egos scurry towards some semblance of diction
yet imprecision often paints a truer illustration. 

It sneaks in wait of ambush, when you 
laugh too loudly, sing an obligated tune, or something juvenile. 
Then, with half the sound and effort, its quiet moon
bequeathes a silly smile, whose sensation 
provides the words you’d never dream of saying. 

Suddenly, his armor is decaying
and here he is, in lovely hesitation. 

---

奶奶

What a character! The story starts
when brush and paper part. Begin the stroke—
no hesitation, please, a melted middle
accentuates the flow of drawn Chinese. 
Thin out your touch; this character must end
before the ink can penetrate my heart. 

You’re sixty now, but in your heart of hearts,
you’re seventeen. It’s not too late to start
another language. Knowing there’s no end
To memorizing characters, you stroke
the spines of ancient proverbs, pray Chinese
might compromise, might meet you in the middle

For now you’re seventy, and still your middle
child stays a spouse. He gave his heart
to Asian heritage, to olive kids, Chinese
holidays, to ginger, chives, to start
a dynasty of traveling, a stroke
whose tip begins in Taipei. Now it ends

in New York City. Eighty years, the end
of learning tongues with ease; you thought the middle
would be the hardest part. Don’t have a stroke
if Dad transcribes his grief into his heart. 
Besides, you’re never too advanced to start 
rewriting half your will in learned Chinese. 

But that’s the funny thing about Chinese. 
Your newest hobby never puts an end
to all your problems. Cancer treatment starts
its own translation: one whose molten middle
finger grips the pen, and now your heart
is branded with that fateless fucking stroke

of luck. So start again, a shaky stroke
from left to right. But this time in Chinese
Tell us how you lived your life. A heart
that’s fifty cannot celebrate the end
lest eighty years remind us of the middle. 
Hurry now, the brush is drowning. Start

the final stroke. And when you reach the end,
renounce Chinese that you might save your middle
child’s fragile heart. I’ll help you start. 

---

Grace

Two years are passed since thieves we entertained 
whose pointed beak and lustful fingers yearned.
A garden gone, and concrete in its place
the August afternoon when lovers learned
that wilted seasons annually return.

Two years: how many futile coffee cups
have sill and lip befriended, what of pages
bent to savor meaning, what of lashes
which in faces’ oceans drowned—contagious,
flows the meted grief in glorious stages.

What of holding hate, and sharing winters.
Attempts at saving snowflakes (wet results).
No proof but choked up voices saying grace.