Irreplaceable Plates
Statistically, I will outlive you.
This makes me want to throw irreplaceable plates against the driveway.
Behind many extant serious love poems
you’ll find a serious love poet
ejaculating into a ficus pot.
Whether you wanted him there or not.
Always straining to make the sea sound
sexual in a new way.
Or else grabbing a fruit with thin, violable skin.
In the serious love poem, the beloved
never gets to see
how she’s set her face inside the peep-hole board
on the groaning pier.
So little of her is required
to appear.
I am the wife
& yet also the poet
for whom none of this has been previously scripted.
Historically, we have been written
into increasingly violent waves.
The shatterer. The wrecker.
The devastator.
If I called the sea, casually,
a cruel mistress, who would question it?
Of course she is,
you’d nod, I’d nod,
out of practice, out of history.
Who would be the first to break out
the pipes & jig a jig
when it’s all our faces will turn
grey with shadows under the upraised sea,
flexed just like the muscle man
the poet painted next to me.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
O Patriarca
O Patriarca, species jequitibá-rosa or jequitibá-branco.
O Patriarca, The Patriarch.
O, fine dinnerplate mouth to make
such a walkaday article.
O — in my language, invocation.
///
The specialist’s lexicon for the jequitibá-branco
is braced with greco-roman x-es:
axial, adaxial, apex, calyx —
I can’t
use these.
///
The bark, as I interpret it,
is chaotic & self-possessed.
Buds resemble shallow
spoons, the burst flowers white moon
jellies in drift.
I’ve seen pictures of its insides: honey
embellished with anxious red pockets of sap.
Or sometimes only honey,
calm as the inside of any deserted holy site.
///
O Patriarca, imprecisely
between 600 & 3000 years old. Whole gods
come & go
while my inner dramaturg tears her hair —
what shoes should have been worn to his birth?
///
No point of entry feels right.
///
I will say anything
to euphemize murdered.
I will say an animal is simply a thing
whose breathing mechanism is apparent.
///
O Patriarca, Miguel Alfredo, our family’s patriarch,
who in 1939, then, ceased to be an animal.
And, so too,
his son, a great-uncle
whose name [forgive me, uncle]
I’ll need reminding of.
///
Salim.
Means wholeness, health.
To be safe.
Why name anything?
///
Great-grandfather, great uncle, you are
this story’s petticoat. What can I say? We’ve all fallen
as only we could have fallen over it.
I am here. I fold in the light.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Made Up
A New Englander, I should be better at trees. Oak leaves are long, blunt; maple are squat & sharp, birch is the one with papery white bark. Sometimes I can recognize an elm just by observing the way another person’s face creases in delight & sadness, like being reunited with an old friend by chance in the hospital’s most serious ward.
Where I grew up, Braintree, never sounded odd until I moved away & had to say it often. I grew up with people whose families arrived on the Mayflower. Once I asked Em what that meant to her while we burned coils of magnesium in hot white dishes. “Lots of people have died in my living room,” she said.
As far as I am aware, the boat we came on is called the Yiddish for How It Did Not— Even With Our Luck — Sink. We are related to no one you’d know, unless you believe Micha who says we’re cousins to Charlie Chaplin (we’re not.)
One time at Plimoth Plantation a Wampanoag historical interpreter told us the meaning of his role’s name, then asked my mom what the name on her tag, Marlynn, meant. “Oh, my parents made it up,” she said, her cheeks pink & impish lanterns. He looked at her in improvised shock with a side of pity.
But to be invented; what strange joy. To step off a poor boat & decide to be made entirely of new sound. One’s own incantation. Lev thought what the hell, I’m Louis now. A distant cousin married a man named Zeus Honickman. We’re all related to Bobby Freedom.
Language can tell us a lot about a people; what they value, what they would destroy. A few words that didn’t appear in English until English lodged itself here: to colonize, squalor, allspice, weeping willow.