Navigating Ocean 

Last week I dropped in on Ocean Vuong.

I’d heard of him from somewhere, probably during

an accidental finding of a reading on a digital site.

Tonight, I've tracked him down on purpose.

He reads a poem from a volume in the manner,

he said, of his mother, in her voice, as if it was she

who wrote the poem. She didn’t.

Romance might say she had the poem in her,

and he simply fished it out. regardless,

who can dismiss the mother of the creator? Certainly not me.

He confesses that his mother is illiterate,–– 

but sweetly so, in the alto of his voice.

He explains that the war interrupted her education.

He says she works in a nail salon "as most Vietnamese women do"––

worked that way most of her life, believing her death was due

to inhaling the toxic chemicals of her profession.

We’ll negotiate prior to the purchase of this volume:

“Time Is A Mother” available only as a pre-order,

not due for release until April 5, 2022.

By then we’ll have come to an agreement, not over price, but to

acknowledge from reader to poet, that both are worthy.

 

 

                    -when the very old man walks / the 2nd poem-

he walks on brittle bone; short,

shuffling steps, but quickly paced, the hollow

caps of his knees bend awkwardly

adding a slight springing motion along the way.

his backbone is curved forward, his shoulders

compress the space between themselves

seeming to repel one another like magnetic

poles negative-to-negative, and his head

is held upright, straining under its own weight.

he won't have a dog alongside.

this is an observational phenomenon:

you will never see a very old man walking a dog.

his walk is solitary in its nature, and besides,

small dogs are quirky in their movements,

and large dogs easily overpower him.

the very old man walks to a place, a shortlist

in his thoughts which serves to remind him

he hasn't long to go before he's called to supper.

nothing it seems draws his attention, not even

the magnificent XtraMart across the street, glistening

in the way Heaven is perceived by the local congregation,

perfumed in (near) non-toxic household interior fragrances,

test-sprayed in the eyes of shackled animals, and

scented for a quick sniff to a firm decision.

see the old man walking, swaying his arms which bend

swaying at the elbows, the bone-weary 

left-right-left cadence,–– studied, disturbing, inevitable..

                   the new Pinsky

the new Pinsky arrives and all hell breaks loose.

my beauties form a tough horizontal line

elbowing their way for prime positions.–– once gained,

they don’t give-up without a fight.

if not for culling the line, the lamp at the table's edge,

like an ancient mariner, will drop to the maws of serpents and dragons.

last month a bruised and bloodied Plath, "The Collected Poems"

lost her place, and days later, Neruda's "20 Love Poems

and A Song Of Despair," left its slip of kisses and heartache

after years in good standing to a newcomer promising rejuvenation.

my beauties form a time-tested row, and not unlike the long-legged

Vegas showgirls, the closer you approach, the more time-tested they appear.

yes, my beauties !––  they too, have been around the block.

call me taskmaster, god of triage, a real cracker. my loves have work to do.

they come to me with the weight of the world exposing their spines

to eat me alive, and I love them all the more for it.

so, Mr. Pinsky, you outrageous smartypants, welcome to the line,

the backbone of my residence, and instigators of my craft, and

...watch y'r back. 

                

A white man's appreciation of "Reparations Now!" by Ashley M. Jones

Under a cloak of dry white

hands like to reach toward a foreign substance––

Opening the pages of a book. This one here

telling me what it wants, or at least what I think it wants.

Maybe it wants my understanding.

Maybe it wants me to recognize something beyond my self.

Maybe it wants a personal check.

Who’d I lynch in the dead of night under a cock-eyed Moon––

blow-up in church from Birmingham to Kingdom Come?

Tell me–– to whom did I place my bid with little more than cheap

money at the foot of the slaver's block?

I did not hang Mary Turner upside down 19 and done–– burn

her dress down to her skin, cut-out the child from her shattered

belly and stomp it dead as death should not become;

shoot Mary Turner more than once maybe fifty times more

when the first bullet hit couldn't find its way to kill her again, then

bury her with her unborn there at the site. This site. The site

of murder one. Two counts. Unresolved. The cloak of dry

white clings like an indelible afterthought.

This book. This one here.–– I don’t feel guilty. I don't have money

enough to make sense of restitution. I wasn’t alive on May 19 of 1918.

If I’m guilty at all, I’m only as guilty as sin.

 

-the sugar eaters-

1.

two brothers swirl across the slippery

scatter rugs of the house like whirlwinds

through a Dogpatch trailer park;

the ghost, howling from room to room,

the scissor-cut hem of its altered bedsheet, trailing.

the younger vampire follows dripping blood-
red from the rubbery fanged insert; its hands,
twisted claws as it growls like an animal. but the pink

ballerina sits on the couch without distraction

quietly peeling back the glitter of paper, releasing the sweet
aroma as she would the skin of a morning’s fruit.

the torn, silvery wraps of our goods,

strewn across the floors, tabletops

and the cushions of easy chairs, drift
upward in our wakes.

2.

our young mother sues for peace.
our young father threatens with baths,

neither recognizing their combined culpability.

grandmother prays the rosary,

her aged, agile thumb running
bead-over-bead ending in the distance
at the link of a nickel-plated crucifix.

grandfather rocks in his wooden chair
keeping time with the quickening

beat of his anxious heart and all, save

the ghost now gone.

Halloween / the early years

                 structures in common application

the scurrying centipede–– touch of adenine,

                    drizzle of guanine,

                    pinch of cytosine,

                    hint of thymine,

not far removed from the salt of man, scampers

mostly on a diagonal line–– doesn't turn on a dime,

and what's to be done is–– lead

the common swatter into it after determining

where the centipede will be at the moment of impact.

clean-up’s a breeze with a little spritz

of household bleach containing a salt of its own.

that would be: one atom each of

                    sodium,

                    chlorine and

                    oxygen.

Reading a poem

 
It’s Ross Gay
monologuing a white woman on Black
masculinity, and she's asking questions between accusations.
Seems a Black friend’s dating this particular white woman,
and it's boiled down to black and white as Ross sees it.
Ross says she says: “Ive seen you dance” to his Black friend,
and it wasn’t pretty.
Ross Gay has a Black friend who isn’t funky, who’s a bad
dancer dating a white woman who asks too many questions.

says:  you just as soon date a Black chick.
says:  just as soon eat pussy.

(I'm trying to understand the inclusion of this term as it's used here.

The juxtaposition of Black masculinity to eating pussy.

Is this still the needling white woman, or is Gay inserting

himself into the monologue?) Anyway,

after the reading I took to considering my history with
white women as a white man, the kinds of questions they’d ask
during certain contentious situations, of how I might’ve replied
to their findings, of how each of them stood their ground
to my counterattacks, but–– It’s not the same. It’s never the same.

Can’t be. It's boiled down to black and white.  But––

 
the unresolved situation regarding Ross Gay’s
"Black friend," and his caustically curious "white woman" would,
more likely than not, except for the pussy part, seem unfamiliar to me.