1
The clouds were in a hurry
over Alexander Village while we sat
with Abdul at his rum shop, the two
Cuban doctors, the customs officer
and myself with generous Abdul—
his family running things.
We drank bottles of vodka as the day
passed from pure brightness to pink to
dark blue, a kind of summit
of relaxation. The world could be called easy.

2
I feel we could fly like cattle
egrets, a wave of white taking
off together, alighting together,
white washing the green green.

3
Alone with the mind, I cannot
wait for an end, a questionable end,
thinking out the path, working
out the path on the way, silent.
The clouds were in a hurry, yes, I remember.
This is this, the mind. But there is life.

      Guyana, 1995

             At The Last
                  (suddenly, I am looking at someone else, and you are looking)
When you whisper the name
Socrates , I say who? though I know
Plato had him saying many things.
And when you say, somewhat
dramatically, Derrida, I might reply
what? but lightly, because sound
is meaning—I beg you
understand, but you've already
vanished into the Marmara Sea
and I only think to say this
while being engulfed by the hills.
A line is drawn in the ancient
earth. People stand around
like students: asking questions
not listening. Above them,
the weather hangs as laughter
hangs and all of that history
between is compressed, no one
speaks the same language,
you keep on vanishing, flames
lick and lick and lick

      Istanbul, 1998

I am walking across the Leidesplein
and I am carrying a black bag, the wind
is blowing but it is not raining. I have
a black bag and am wearing a black
jacket. At Overtoom, I stop in a café
but I am not being followed. I kill
the beer and catch the 12 just in time,
the last 12 to Bos En Lommer,
and have no time for anything but
her (some her, you needn't
know who) or parting from her; she
with short hair because this is Europe,
hundreds of years of sky and weather painting this
kiss, as a greeting or as a parting
three times, alternating cheeks, because
this is that part of Europe, buildings bounding
out of black canals and everything cobbled:
well, I imagine this happening. I move the bag
from one hand to the other one
as I walk. I might look vaguely
like van Gogh so no one notices.
The black collar of the black jacket
is turned up and I step out
onto Bos En Lommer with the black
bag. There is no reason to follow
me, though it is somehow fun to think
so, and I might say, mysteriously,
this is about money, and it might be true.
I might also say that I carried
the black bag, inside another bag, from
Istanbul, or that I am toying with driving
this bag to Spain, and am waiting for
a message to do just that, but it's all
very innocent, really, believe me.
Someone might be suspicious when
at the second café I leave in
a fashion that says local and regular
and key into an abandoned school around
the corner on Kijkduinstraat though this
is all child's play because it's late and I have
already thought of “her” and mentioned
the movement of the bag. I work alone,
it's unusually late, and
dark and the wind is blowing.
            It's hard work this, lonely work.
This place needs more curtains is what I am
thinking and briefly considering the accumulation
around me, instinctive accumulation, but
I know it's a bad thing: anything that does
not fit into the black bag is not coming with
me when I get the call, when I slip out maybe
in the night slipping the keys into the box
and rounding the corner and maybe being
seen off by her, or greeted by
her. You don't know.

      Amsterdam, 1999

I am at work, doing what I do, what I am supposed to do: teach, enlighten, whatever.
A student asks a question: I am looking right into her (his?) eyes, nodding, saying uh
hum but I have no idea what she (he?) has just said because I am not listening because I
have met this woman who now lives in my head and I can't even close my eyes
without seeing her eyes and so in class we're talking about poetry or bibliography or
memoir, whatever, and I'm looking at them, their faces but I am not, definitely seeing
them because right then it's all about her, my head, her in my head and my heart is
pounding and we're kissing, wow are we kissing, so this student asks a question and
I say maybe rather concernedly ahh ha but really all I am seeing are this woman's eye
lashes smack right there in front of me these eye lashes go from atlantic brown to
lines of blonde that define blonde to a burnishing white that then shoot out into whatever space surrounds
her and wow we are kissing and I think the next time I see her which I
hope is very very soon I am going to look right at first those eyes then those eye lashes
and I am going to kiss her. Oh! So it looks like to my students right now that I am
very interested in annotation or tricks in narration or enjambed lines or whatever but
really I am in the world of her eye lashes and OK her entire face and I am sure
that I could enter a lash that hair follicle and trace that brilliance to blonde
to brown to bulbous root and feel it growing there in the skin of her lid
in my head and wow my heart has been pumping in this way all day
and I want to tell them my students that it is
very important to read yes to think yes to become enlightened but also it is
imperative to acknowledge the whiteness at the tip of emotion
which is a physical reality because all of our hearts are pounding
aren't they aren't we all alive in this way and isn't it impossible
not to try to articulate at least privately what it is and I realize that
I am not talking aloud when a student asks when is this due
and I say next week next week while I am kissing this woman this
woman and I kissing which is today's lesson tonight's lesson and this
is what I do, enlighten, impart wisdom, foster an environment
in which we all learn, whatever this light flashes and burns.

      Athens, 2000

Let's start w/ the scene
when you return to the bridge
to discover the truck has been broken into
and all your shit stolen, then the “possible
answers” scene, and if time permits, right up to
these lines [note revision]:
            F: I want to live inside this line
                    your neck your eyes your lips
            S: I know
            F: Don't misunderstand—
                    every little cloud flits away—
                    anything that means anything—
                    plunge me into that sweet trouble
            S: We've grown close we cannot be
                    closer—
                            I'll miss you
It's the terrible tooth ache your tongue
keeps searching out, you're poor, you're far from able
to get to a dentist, say, and all the better things
you can think of spending money on
come to mind anyway helplessly
oh but cripplingly, and this is the point—
your heart is felt pounding in that tooth—
this comes through
as you say good-bye
            or good night
be ready for either.
Think: love story . But don't ignore the complexities
of the story of character, your character developing:
you're a drunk but I don't want to be able to tell, you
drive a truck, it isn't yours. Your suit is too clean for our
first scene so we'll re-shoot. Which, while we're on it,
when you're naked in “possible answers,” I need you to walk
as if you were wearing the suit as it is now, clean, but of course
you will not ever. Think: I'm wearing that suit as you walk
and say these [note revision]:
            F: Life is a strange and difficult thing
                    strange and complex
                    allow me to say such obvious things
                    when they seem so true as now
                    indeed there are many many things
                    I should love to explain
It's when the fucker (or fuckers) has taken
your entire music collection, just made the whole thing vanish
from your life, the one material thing that matters
in this fucked up world—this should be read on your face, this should
come back to the viewers—and it's when you put her [S] on a bus leaving
the fucked up town you'll stay in forever: The End. We need to read
this in your eyes…and remember: at the center, this is a comedy. No one
dies. Work with me.

      Athens, 2000

At 86 th and 3 rd teenagers, a regular gaggle
of Youth laughed and fought and cried
and kissed and it was around 9 p.m.
on a Friday night and they were painfully
beautiful though they kept needing
the store front reflections and each other
to tell themselves so. “What's next?”
they kept asking “What are we doing?”
but they were doing it right there around
86th and 3rd and what's next is something
they don't really want to know
because it's too much and too soon and what
will one day be reflected will not be
as nearly beautiful no not nearly as lovely
as all this emotion on a Friday night
the weekend ready to be wasted before them
given back to them in a store window
one day. I think that I was never a teenager.
Where was I? I wish the question were larger
somehow. I was in the world of a snow globe
which sits on top of the TV something like eight
thousand miles away in the Pacific, just above
the equator. The snow globe is of the southern tip
of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty:
a submerged two-dimensional brownness that allows
the flakes like white boulders to flurry and settle
into a dusting. The TV was on, my side of the world
was turned into its darkest while their side
flickered and glowed, the Towers flickered
and fell, my eyes flicked to the globe to the TV
to the globe. I lifted it, shook it once.

      New York—Majuro, 2001

There was a moment, very late into the party
in the yard between the door and the lagoon
when the host reached a sort of drunken
epiphany of performance by singing a song
about (while simultaneously drinking) tequila
then puking into his beer, still playing, even
adding a little verse about puking. He possessed
a certain lucid state despite or because of
the drunkenness. Glorious! Then the next day
he experienced a real physical train wreck
which put him in the hospital on valium and oxygen
during which he puked, a little more
painfully this time, and very much alone.
But the song! Glorious!

      Majuro, 2002

I like reading months-old magazines
For the “news” and I like to do this
On an island far away from where
The news happened. A warm climate,
Plenty of time to go fishing and still
Do a good job at work. I like working
Where people still read and maybe even write
Poetry and there is a slow and easy sense
That creation is happening and that it makes
A difference, first for the creator and then
Perhaps others. Is this not risky or “new”?
What else? I like community sports leagues
For the same reason I like my job and I like
Small towns for the same reason I like islands.
None of this requires metaphor though I do
Find it delicious to swim in the very un ironic
Attempts we of the Capitol Atoll make to make
Present some experience, handicrafting our way
Through the hours with first one word then
Another then many one over then under the next
And what lovely and delicious purpose we might
Find for it all, maybe, maybe now but ok maybe
Months or years from now and all of it part of
The fantastic story made of distance as in reverie
As in unreal as in the fish that broke free of us.
Because maybe we are sometimes drifting in
The pass and maybe it is someone else's boat we float
Upon and we have our lines down deep deep deep
And the sun is burning down and leaving us
For a while and this too means something—
Because it could mean something and also it simply is.

      Majuro, 2003

In the tiniest of tide pools
is reflected the faintest
of stars in a night with no more
moon. I am thinking of words
something along these lines
in the dark, caught by this
little glint, little real image,
when the darkest girl, the mother
of our child, says “the ocean is
eating the island we stand on.”
After a pause punctuated by the ocean
eating away, she asks “are the words
I say broken?” and because we are
shadows in the Earth's shadow
and it is enough to just think
I say not at all.

      Kidenen, 2005

I have had your papers, “essays” in this folder.
In this folder are your words
            & no matter how much you may have wanted
            them to
                    they may not have said it
                            whatever your it is.
On the morning of my birthday—
            watching television about video games
                    and 1980 and Atari,
            Actovision, Intellovision (remember those?)
                    unsold & buried in the mid-80s in
            the New Mexican desert television
                    about America about us,
            & having a pipe, I worry a little
about your little words
                    because I care
            which is a little
            annoying
                    because you may not
                                    care.
It appears my 25 month old son
            has drawn a clown nose in profile
                    or it is a snail battling
                                    a steep grade or
                    it could be a fist in a glove
                                    like a word
                                    struggling to say…
He has drawn it & other hieroglyph
            on your papers
            over your essays.
            What I am suggesting is that
                    you study those markings
                                    & intuit
                                    & consider
                                    & articulate to yourself
                    an argument of evaluation.
Or not, as you're inclined
            to say, it's my birthday
            and I'm takin' it easy.

                                    Johnstown, 2007