It’s because I have no choice and I think a true artist should always have that as an answer. If you know why you paint, well, maybe you’re not driven by painting and waking up and have to face the empty canvas. So if you don’t know, it’s much better than if you know.
[...]
Give me 3 oranges and give me 2 towers and life would be beautiful.
-Philippe Petit
I just casually found out that a poet failed to do her homework. Ishle Yi Park’s Signs of God ends on a fantastic verse about a tight rope walker, Pierre Petit who crossed the Twin Towers in 1976. the problem? Pierre Petit was a photographer who died in 1906. it was Philippe Petit who was the tight rope walker.
less egregious error: Ishle said 1976 when it was really 1974. who does her fact checking???
I’m outraged for 2 reasons – simply changing Pierre to Philippe would have had no impact on the poem (other than making it correct). also, Signs of God was the reason I went out of my way (and believe me when I say out of my way — I was in contact with PoetCD for almost 6 weeks) to buy Ishle’s CD. I feel duped.
last Friday, I held a writing exercise. the students were given a random line from Agha Shahid Ali and had to use it as their first line. 1 student started saying, man, you’re making my head hurt. my response? that feeling is called thinking. sorry to make you think, you know, in a classroom. for the record, his poem was pretty damned good, especially for a 10 minute write. also for the record, I’ll be reworking my attempt at the writing exercise into a full fledged genu-ine poem.
When we lived in New York,
we suffered 3 digit summers.
We’d walk shirtless, shoeless, naked through the street;
only the brown of our skin could survive the heat.
Coming back to that old place,
I stopped on the stairs
where we used to piss away the day
back when my father was jobless
and I was schooless
except for what I saw on television.
Maybe it was the delirium of August
but I saw a ghost appear on either side of me.
They were flimsy in the doldrum winds,
shaky like cereal box holograms
but seemed more real
than even the photographs we used to have.
The ghost of my father drank the dregs of a Marlboro
like it was water from the tap
while my younger self sat downwind,
silent as he struggled to hold his breath.
The sky was marless.
No clouds to shift from horizon to horizon.
The glare of the sun so great
it loomed like a cornea instead of an iris,
refusing to acknowledge the passage of time
because they were the Pillars of Hercules.
Their feat of strength their ability
to stand without words, without touching, for centuries.
There was my chance to change that.
I would be the 1 to topple these pillars
and all I had to do was talk to a ghost.
I spoke like it was a confession,
like we were alone in church together,
the Father and the Son.
I told him I cheated on Calculus
because I was too afraid to admit I couldn’t do it on my own.
He managed to slip words
between the balls of smoke in his mouth
and they were: Use. Another. Karma.
I told him I was responsible for the holes in the walls.
I used to get so depressed that I got angry
and nothing was a faster fix than my fists.
He pushed smoke through his nose.
He looked like a Chinese dragon.
He said, Use. Another. Karma.
I told him I lied. Caught in the shockwave
of a falling trade center, I didn’t call home
not because I couldn’t find a phone
but because I didn’t think he’d remember
where I was supposed to be in the middle of the day.
Burnt to the filter,
he closed his eyes and whispered,
Use. Another. Karma.
What the fuck does that mean!?
He stifled what was left of his cigarette on the ground,
left it, and caught a bumble bee in his hands.
He said: do you see what I’ve got?
He only knows flowers and honey.
Sin is a 3 letter word to him.
My father clapped his hands together
and I expected to hear the crush of a tiny skeleton pulverized
by the hands that used to feed me. He offered
an upturned palm to me and, for a minute,
I convinced myself that he hadn’t finished
his cigarette, that the thing caught between the thunder
in his hands was the filter, not a living animal,
because all there was brushed into the side
of his skin was a fine yellow powder
until I found the spot of blood
on his mound of Venus where the bee
had stung him, trying to escape.
Here. You can have his karma.
She radiates like a box of match heads.
He slumps, pot bellied as an eighth note, says
I know all about Distance; he and I
got history. He’s been harassing my family
since he was inches. My great grandmother
knew him better than the hydraulics
of her prearranged lover. She’d teeter
instead of run until her bound feet came unspun
and she’d have to wait for the men in her life
to retrieve her.
Distance met my grandmother when he graduated
to miles. She was blinded by the bursting bombs
that stomped her way by rank and by file
but the heat that smelted her village to fire
also welded magnets into her backside.
She portended the 2nd wave under her skin
and kept running until the tingling subsided.
When he met my mother, Distance was disguised
as a foreigner with an accent that fell flat on its face.
He seduced her to jet over 14 timezones
to a place so far from rice gruel and rickshaws
that any further would have been easier
to cross at Angel Island.
The Pablo Neruda girl leans in close, says
not all distances get bigger as they get longer.
The closer she whispers to his nose
we get without kissing, the harder my heart beats.
When we were in Miss Guthrie’s class
and had to orchestrate bridges from toothpicks
and mini marshmallows, mine always came out
looking like tepees strung up along fault lines.
The Bengali girl and I would reach into the bag
at the same time and I would always concede.
I’d have way too many toothpicks and nowhere
to stick them (story of my life).
That time I couldn’t see you for tofurkey
and stuffing because Mattappan was too far
from Waltham, I searched for beautiful
on flickr, hoping to find a picture
of the tiny bumps on the back of your neck
where your spine tried to spell kiss me HERE
in Braille. Instead, I got back sunsets and Mona Lisa,
dandelions, violets, and some guy’s 2 nieces.
Someone blogged, Bridges are beautiful,
explaining that suspension cables are like
the 100 shattered arms of the Bodhisattva of Compassion
who holds up humanity against falling.
I registered a fake email address just so
I could call him a freak.
It wasn’t until my commute crossed Rockaway Pond
that I found the majesty God or someone
orchestrated into bridges. I watched cars
drive along the ridges of the waves due to perspective
and the sun crawl up the arches of the Crossbay Bridge
like it was Stonehenge. I can’t imagine how no one’s
ever stopped in the middle of traffic
just to take in the view.
Oaken
for Gwendolyn Brooks
commissioned by Dean of Students
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2008
Up ahead, a traffic light flickers to red.
Cars lined up like army ants
are stopped, gridlocked, and dead.
On 41st street and Lex, to Nuyorican vets,
it’s the same, I’ve seen it:
touristas sweat, summer sun’s more flame
than wick and suits stretch their legs
beneath mahogany desks.
Some young buck sits behind the wheel
of a vehicle trucking 1/4 inch steel.
Trucking metal scraps, he steals
bites from a hero from his favorite bodega,
his radio blasting Nina Sky y Noreaga.
Shadow stepping to the beat on the breaks,
he’s totally tone deaf but at least he’s got the lyrics.
Boricua, morena. Dominicano, Colombiano.
Boricua, morena. Cubano, Mexicano.
Oye mi canto.
Suddenly, something’s out of its place;
he’s bumping but it’s not from the base.
Beneath the skin of the street,
asphalt and concrete, a steam pipe leaks,
shrieks like a banshee
then blows. All that pressure,
it’s a bomb he’s idling on, no joke.
Shrapnel explodes, leaves a crater
like a meteor hit but really the Earth just split,
spit steam so high that the clouds got wet.
He turns to the lady who’s hitching a ride,
says, all this metal’s just a magnet for the heat.
Dear Lord in Heaven, please protect me.
We’ve got to jump, ok? 1 … 2 … 3 …
When prayers are spoken,
gotta be rooted, solid, and oaken,
cause God don’t take bills or tokens
tossed only when things are broken.
No one comes to his aid; he’s the closest thing
anyone’s seen to the plague in modern day,
today. His skin’s dripping in strings;
he’s more humid than human,
and it’s hard to believe but when
it’s 400 degrees, even when water can burn
till you bleed. His last words to a stranger
standing by were, Please, promise me
I’m not going to die.
Wait. Rewind to back when he was 9,
dressed in the blue of New York’s finest.
He stood tall with his cuffs and his shield
while his friends ran pass plays on the field.
By 16, he was a leader of men,
shooting platoons commands,
earned the rank of Sgt. Major, Marines.
He walked the Brooklyn beat but wasn’t
fresh meat from the gangs, too much love
for his moms to disrespect the cross on his neck.
When prayers are spoken,
gotta be rooted, solid, and oaken,
cause God don’t take bills or tokens
tossed only when things are broken.
Now, weeks have gone by. He’s lost
too much time, drugged under a coma,
laying mind silent to spare him
the trauma while nurses scrub the dead skin
from the live. His face is divided, stitched together
from different parts of his body and it’s getting
harder to spot the silver from the cloudy
cause his doctor says he might have to lose
an arm or a leg to stop the spread of infection.
His mom’s shaking her head; she has to
OK the operation.
But she’s keeping the faith in the name
of the Christian; 1 thing she knows for certain:
there’s only 1 life, 1 love, so there
can only be 1 king. Infinite times wiser
than Solomon, wouldn’t put her baby to the saw
without opening extra doors; calls this
a random act of purpose. Hurting this bad,
she’s crying cause she can’t take
her son’s pain away. Not another sheep
from the fold, she’s a mother Mary full blown,
carries the strength of Job in her soul.
Convinced the prayer offered in faith
can make the sick person well,
can save the sinner from hell,
can keep the falling from becoming the fell.
She’s singing, We shall,
we shall overcome
to no one in the halls, she’s all
alone; still, her voice can rival
an entire choir of angels. She’s the reason
we need to believe in less science and
more miracles.
When prayers are spoken,
gotta be rooted, solid, and oaken,
cause God don’t take bills or tokens
tossed only when things are broken.
We played to 21 in the years before
we were old enough to want to lie and say
we were 21. Our blackboard education
made us drones, so all we wanted
was motion and momentum. We played
handball every minute we could, up until
the 2nd bell and we flew through
the stairwells like swallows riding updrafts.
We played in the rain, around the puddles
when they were small and in them
when they were warm. We played
in the snow and loved how it recorded
our footfalls after. We played the way our
immigrant Post Office parents worked:
in the rain and in the snow. We paid
junkies to park their cars at odd angles
so we could play by headlights at night.
We wanted motion after gridlocked classrooms,
after lectures that read like sermons, and we found it
on the handball courts. We found handball
courts wherever we wanted, along the broadsides
of schools with our bookbags or our imaginations
for boundaries. We played games in narrow
hallways, mashing knuckles against walls
and walker bys. We were killers of the schoolyard,
coming back from recess with jeans
ripped at the knees, serrated skin, but smiles
in our eyes. We wanted momentum; we wanted
proof that our bodies had physics inside them.
We knew our ratchet and catch bones had gear shifts
the way we switched up the tempo, played Chinese
or American, alternating the rules of the game
according to our bicultural identities. Those
were the good days when everyone was
given do overs because it meant the games
were just longer. We played games to 50,
to 500. In the dangling twilight, we wanted our
games to be as long as our shadows. We wanted
motion and momentum and we never wanted it to
stop.
In the night time of shut eyes
there’s this static
like an Earth’s worth
of crickets crouching
in an apple orchard
asking questions about
the color of the leaves
and the writing on the trees
and the smell of cinnamon in the air.
I don’t know how
I survived the noise.
When she used to sleep beside me
was the only time I knew the shame
of noise, how it came
like the motor of a car idling
to keep the windshield from frosting.
She survived those times
but how, I keep wondering.
It’s the details I’m blind about:
how long ago, who saw first,
which side of your bed,
percocet or pocket knife,
what did you leave behind?
I won’t invent your story
though I know so little
it’s embarrassing.
The ponytail and threadbare plaid said
you were an easy friend
to make. The poetry was B-rated
but it was ours.
Halloweens were when
I saw you the most alive.
You confided in me once,
out of convenience or trust.
It was the weight,
the luckless go nowhere dates,
the surgery that might
have killed you anyway.
I won’t pretend I know
your tell tale heart,
the pounding that pushed you.
I’ll leave the King of Cups unshuffled.
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