Poetry

I’m reading Zami in my girlfriend’s bed. It’s the first time I’ve read it in a long time, and will be her first time if she reads it like I told her to. She got it at the library after I found it and I said, 

Driving in the American West, reading Celan
and the Mahabharata. After the war,
Arjuna drops the bow forged by Brahma back
into the ocean, relinquishing it

Night’s endlessness taps at the mind,
my jet lag a constant drip down the windows.
Because I am here for a month, a girl returned
to her mother, I let myself go soft

What about the man who cannot touch 
anyone without them morphing 
into the only woman he loved and lost? Not recklessly,
but like a river diverted by a stone’s weight, 

Nothing can stop the dogs
from barking, not even

the moon’s new dress.
 

To win a free mattress, lovers must sleep 
hidden and apart behind a wall to discern 
each other by the cadence of their breath. 

this heart, its caverns of somewhere laughter, its waking craters, 
its forest of knives. Dilate its thin pulsing complicities

He loves those first hours after she comes back.

I remain this tender, yearning 
to mend the flattened red wingage of every lantern 
fly that lingers on the stranger’s heels.

a lot of talk about peace is talk about talks
and talks about the size 
or shape of tables