In Tahoma’s Shadow (Exquisite Disarray Publishing). “Whidbey Island” was reprinted in Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press). “After Darwish,” “Inventory,” and “The Poem Is a Letter Opener” were reprinted in The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process (University of Michigan Press). “Looking at the Romans” was reprinted on Poetry Daily. “Brown Refrigerator” was reprinted on Verse Daily.
I am indebted to the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Pacific Lutheran University. Last but nowhere least, my thanks to the good people of Sarabande Books for their continuing support of my work.
I
TARP
I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
ON GARDENS
When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
travelling back to the Latin
of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words
that would have meant something
to the friar, walking among the village girls
as though in a field of flowers, knowing
that fucking was one way of having
a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow
falling, which means that every
angry thought is as short-lived as a match.
The night is its own white garden:
snow on the fence, snow on the tree
stump, snow on the azalea bushes,
their leaves hanging down like green
bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair
to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics
of a garden, but somewhere between
what the eye sees and what the mind thinks
is the world, landscapes mangled
into sentences, one color read into rage.
When the neighbors complained
the roots of our cypress were buckling
their lot, my landlord cut the tree down.
I didn’t know a living thing three stories high
could be so silent, until it was gone.
Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light
in the windows, as though every sheet
of glass was having a migraine.
When I think about that grandmother
whose name I don’t even know, I think of
what it would mean to make a garden
that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas
of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.
Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks
placed on a plane of raked gravel,
the stray leaves cleared away every hour.
If you look at the word garden
deep enough, you see it blossoming
in an enclosure meant to keep out history
and disorder. Like the neighbors wanting
to keep the cypress out. Like the monks
arranging the stones into an image
of serenity. When the snow stops, I walk to see
the quiet that has colonized everything.
The main street is asleep, except for the bus
that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.
There
