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.

-The twilight zone-

The crazy mathematics goes this way:

If two locomotives approach each other on the same track

But only close the distance by half, then half of that,

Then half again and so on, the locomotives will never collide.

Two young women held hands.

A man clasped his hands behind his head

To cradle it from impact.

The "Windows On The World" busboy made a parachute

Of his smoldering shirt and stopwatches were locked

At eleven seconds.

Had the fallen closed the distance by half, then half of that,

Then half again and so on,––

Had the two young women holding hands applied

The benefit of this calculus to this day they’d be falling.

                   Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize didn’t change my life, but

I was watching the game on television in the top of the 5th

during a rain delay when out of nowhere I was informed that

Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for literature.

my thoughts immediately turned to my friend, unknown, unpublished, starving

in Cholula, and writing the best poems of his weary life in postwar Mexico.

here’s one José sent to me last month:

"the sun, she sets

over the pueblo

and the donkey,

he drinks

from the shallow

pan where

the broken

tractor, it leaks

and my dog, he howls

at the sun

too stupid to know

it isn’t the moon."

now there's a damn righteous poem right there if you ask me.

anyway, I like that Dylan won the Nobel Prize.

I was there, in Newport in '65 when he moaned, electrically charged:

"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more."

I neither booed nor cheered being too drunk on yards of beer, but

what it says is.. I've got skin in the game. but, christ.

It’s been over two hours and damn!

the tarp still covers the infield at Fenway.

          -Lady Madonna comes to Newport-

           she lives in southeastern Florida where it’s warm ––

           in December.

           sounds like a long distance.

           but she visits me on Thanksgiving weekend because, well,––

           what the hell, she’s visiting her family up here, anyway.

           so I book an early afternoon lunch in Newport; a dining room

           at an Inn of outstanding repute overlooking the North Atlantic.

           the afternoon skies are overcast, but the light’s translucent here in paradise.

           the seascape is stepping into its winter portal.

           the frontage to the water clings to a rolling green and the rocky cliff's

           at land's end seem stable enough to hold us for another few hundred years.

           but as we sit at our table (by a window with an ocean view)

           she tells me: "the atmosphere up here is bleak”.

           I'm more than marginally annoyed with her assessment

           but find it common among people who dwell in warm climates.
           maybe they should just stay put. but–– she's a loved one.

           so we lunch in Newport under overcast skies without enough outside sunshine

           to please her and after lunch we have drinks at the bar.

           she's fucked-up with her regional findings,–– but

           she shimmy's like the bushy head of a watered palm-tree.

          (I have the needle-tipped whiskers of an old harbor seal)

           I should count my blessings in good fortune.

           Lady's a jazz vocalist ––

           the front-girl with a band.

           and ––

           she's a board-certified, published "Healer".

           the broken-hearted are drawn to her and.. 

           And –– she heals them!

           become unbroken my lovelies.

           she’s Lady Madonna in Newport and she tells me paradise is bleak.

           

birthday blues / pianissimo and languendo /  8.22.

Damn.  was it birthday time already?

my son!.. mea culpa! mea maxima culpa!

sure, I can be faulted, but in my defense

time zips along without hand-written notifications.

and wouldn't you know that on your special day

the orange-tinted lunatic was threatening the airwaves,

Los Angeles was under fire and needed a drink,

Afghanistan was a bloody, dusty mess, (unlike last year,

you know, all grassy, fragrant and cheerful)

and I hear through the grapevine that republican

knuckleheads were scheming an initiative to pollute

the atmosphere of Venus!

what a whacky buncha cocoanuts. I mean,

the place is pretty much screwed as it is, right?

well, what's left for me to say?.. guilty!

#birthday #piano #languendo #pizza

                   Bruegelville

there’s a blue, red-trimmed chancery cursive

neon sign high above the curtain. the sign’s perfect;

a perfectly glowing neon sign which would look good

hanging behind the bar in any downstairs rumpus room,

not one intermittently flawed, buzzing letter,

the first clue that this was going be a bad dream.

the curtain opens to turmoil.

dense, frantic crowds fill the arena, and

protruding from the water, a fish-head swallows

what appears to be the mechanical leg of a whole man!

below, there's something which appears to be pole fishing into

what could be interpreted as the iris of an eye, filled with horrified folks,

and toward the upper left of the arena there’s an ornament of sorts

stuffed with tortured, naked figures hanging from an inverted cone

bending by the weight of it, and this mesmerizing unpleasantness

sits atop a huge goo-goo eyed head regurgitating human and animal life!    

the dream’s soundless, but I’m sure there’s screaming.

a central figure of a woman is seen running, stage left,

who has sacked what appears to be kitchenware, which

could be classified as: "her own", "looting", or "the spoils of war".

most disturbingly, near dead center, a bare-ass woman,

bends at the waist, carrying a boat upon her back–– 

she's grasping the port-side top rail with her left hand and in her right,

a worrisome type of what is later defined as a constipation tool. 

the boat's a sort-of smack, keel-less, perhaps a small troop carrier, four combatants

on board, and all four tucked inside a bubble sitting amidships,–– and she's pooping                                  with the aid of the intrusive constipation tool, dark, defensive waist-matter upon

the townsfolk below, who are storming the gates of the stone fortress!  meanwhile,

toward the right of the arena, we find a 16th century colander (no holes, yet) of armed

soldiers, who appear to be fending off "we the people" under a flaming sky, then

upward still, the burning's complete with frightening Whoville-type creatures,

and one of them is doing handstands upon the skeletal remains of the fortress!

I’m at the edge of reason, but

I awaken to 21st century aroma therapy and the scent of pancakes.

     

                  

                   the visitor

departing on the westbound train 

I remain noncommittal

so there's not much to unpack.

they’re old friends,

now on South University, first floor,

higher ceilings, and easier access to work

as I've been informed with their invitation.

I’m on top of my game rearranging the contents

of a temporary space with an aptitude at making

adjustments to stabilize a shifting point of view.

geography took the measure of us,–– the years

punctuating the measure on their arrival at the depot.

her hair is tightly cropped, greying

in arcs behind her ears. he wears

a powder blue, open-collared oxford.

three days to the eastbound train.

dinner's at six in the small

dining room just off the kitchen.

a young, dry red is poured by her husband

with a sincere sense of hospitality and the sound

of her voice is gracious and lovely, still.

it's three of us at the table who are older,

three of us who have decades of stories to tell.

genuine contentment surrounds the table

and surely they'll ask me to stay another day.