Six Poems

There are all kinds of pirates


The sky isn’t. The traintracks
& forest of beards sprouting.
The bear doesn’t fit in the door.
I’ve lost my sandals & glasses
& broken into my own house.
I’ve piled most of the barnyard
between bread & given my friends
the sandwich. To be inside
wherever you travel remains
inside. I carry a continent
in a suitcase. The other animals
spilling out of the artists’ building.
There are ways the university
eats. The museum. The people.
If you cannot walk don’t let them
stop you. If the world weren’t
beautiful. There is a mandolin
deep inside you. Laughing.

An Architecture


I’m going to wander through Tivoli
with a polaroid on my shirt.
It is grapefruit colored,
the entire day is pencil-drawn.
Grass grows around us,
we do not fear it.
There is a small fire
in a tea cup. We walk through
an afternoon. A river.
Sometimes rain.
I held a child that fell.
I hear singing at night.
Trees on the bottom
& trees on the top.
Trees on the bottom
& trees on the top.

Modern Language


The peasants are injured.
A pocket of water clusters
at the back of my neck
& as it bursts & trickles.
The nurses’ unfamiliar hats.
I cannot leave this
even to wash myself.
The wine has been opened.
There is a tower, three
trees & the grains smile
& attempt speech, birdsong
& the way the cat might
try to speak to the birds.
I’ll deliver the great lectures
wearing boots & undergarments.
I’ll teach in this building
until they start taking it apart
looking for me.

Sin rodeos


It is winter enough
to see the phone pole lights
again & again diminish.
I know my hat.
I can wish for a risotto
without complications.
The kitchen music
& its aftermath.
It is hard to keep my son’s
earliest smile. Museum
glass. You must be broken
to make something.
I’m shoving a mattress
into a wine bottle.
The whiteness of the poets.
Translating whiteness
of European men. Again
telling us it transforms them
& how lucky we all are. Sleep
happens to us as small airplanes.
In Rosario, calle San Luis,
you can get anything.
How the world torments you,
feta cheese, ladybugs.

Bocanada


Night’s slideshow happens around us.
Party noises somewhere in the house.
Cutting holes in the floor
is no way to explain the neighbors.
Becoming an adult means staring
at each other with extremely serious
faces. Some jazz. Somewhere
inside my face these moments
vanish even as I narrate each footstep
towards the college pond.
And a war somewhere else
is fought according to each smirk.
This is how she will leave me.

Paseando por La Aduana


Blueblack night above shore.
The stars are cigarettes
walking lazily with each other
by the river, itself Fernet y coca
half-sleep in half-light.
An arm around shoulders
or hips, or fingertouches
the reeds a breeze in heavy air.
It is beautiful to be a city at night.
These cobblestones, street lamps.
All of the people it holds
& how it allows them
to find each other.