That night the goddess sat beneath
a pomegranate tree. Its new leaves
stroked her shoulder, the hands
of an uncertain novice lover. Cradling
the multi-faced sphere of the fruit
was almost like holding a baby in her arms,
a sickly creature with a neck too delicate
to hold the weight of thought. Here
is where its closed eyes would have been,
the tiny nose, the bruise
of a mouth.
               Hunger
strikes in the pre-dawn hour, and she takes
her child and splits its skin to taste
the sweet red seeds of growing life.
Juice spills onto her dress. The fruit
is sour, pinpricks on her tongue. At last
she, slightly sated, sleeps. But when the sun
jolts her into the misty-dusty morning
she discovers the green rind, the shriveled
un-pink pith. Even the spill did not leave a stain:
this young blood is colorless.

After hours the portal
starts pressing in: lintel sinks
to meet the threshold, doorjambs
try to rub up against each other.
I am caught in the jaws of this night,
held in between its glistening, stained
teeth weighing down my shoulder, thrusting
my hips forward. The keys
suspended from my hand dance like a jingling
scrap of silvered sliver-candy on the tongue
of this hole. It is late, almost sunrise, time
to go and sleep. The sidewalks are too narrow
for me to slither past the shuttered carts
of fruit vendors, so I step down. The cobbles
totter me, I wobble when I walk, click with the heels
of my tall shoes that are trying to scream,
“fuck me! “, but all they do is hoarsely whisper
“I need a bed for the night, my feet are swollen
from standing and shifting, I am tired, tired” tired
of not sleeping, of sleeping in doorways,
of being devoured by the mouth of the night,
gnawed by the jaws of moths that only come out
in these glow-in-the dark hours. Tired of the
mottled, muttering fingers of old men, of pleasing
swaggering young boys with unwashed
hair. At home, I draw myself a bath. The bulb
on the low ceiling scatters worms of light
recoiling from the aqua tiles. In the white palm
of the tub, the water has stripped away a line
in the enamel, blazed a blue-green path
between the faucet and the drain. This snake is rough
against my calf. I kneel and try to peel an orange: scaly skin
slips off into the ocean at my knees. One burning
ball is rising and the other sets: the fruit rests
like a new-hatched serpent
in my hand, quivers and slips
into the suds; the sun
is coming up, prying its yellow fingers
past the matte glass, the dusty blinds.
I close my eyes. My body
and the water swap degrees of heat (I lose,
it gains), I melt into this mess
of soap and sweat and oranges and morning.

It had been weeks since my hands
had held each other. The crushed grass
under my palms had begun to straighten
itself. I was unable to sleep. I rode
the counter-intuitive fast-quickening Ferris wheel
of the clock. The whole crowd
of us synchronized our heartbeats,
spent a day slumped as though each
had tried to dive into an obtuse
painted corner of the polygonal room.
This toppled fair-ride held us.
The world tumbled down under my eyelids.

Pourquoi es-tu si triste?
Pure, quiet: your sea tries—
why are you so sad?

Tu ne dis rien...
Two need rain,
you say nothing

Laissez-moi, tu me reponds.
Lose me in the mer-pond,
leave me, you answer.

Leave me.

How slow the hoof-beats of these horses,
How dim the light these streetlamps spill
I trust the kindness of these strangers
And let them take me where they will.

It’s cold, I’m sleepy, and the carriage
Rattles and jostles through the night,
Swerves sharply, tosses up my body
Towards a star’s slim ray of light,

The swaying of my tired head and
The gentle ice of strangers’ hands.
The silhouettes of smoky fir-trees
Of yet unseen, untraveled lands.

What sort of people hang unlaundered
letters to dry between two potted plants
in the dining room? Each has two holes
and little ties of yarn.
I cover my notebook with my body,
try to think myself naked and more transparent
than glass—I even magnify
the words, shout them through
my pores, my hair.
The steaming cup before me and I
can do anything but drink. Trying to talk to you, I start
leaving the first letters out of words—
first in writing, where I can add them
later, Then my mouth begins to lose its sounds—full to ull to l; all
I can be is silent. You are still
at the back of my mind,
Viking your way up the East River
to the rotting pier where we meditated
upon the disaster.

This is a poem that I wrote on August 1st. I was sitting in the dining room with Natashia and John. John was playing really depressing songs on his guitar, and the mood that they were putting me in—rather melancholy, but not deeply or personally sad, was a pretty good writing sort of mood. I had been drinking tea and had picked up a pen. First I drew an abstract design on my leg, then I began carving word into my styrofoam cup. Then I got my notebook and began to write.

First I used the verbal images that had been piling up in my mind while I was sitting there. The “Happy Birthday” sign gave birth two the first four lines of the poem. Then Adrian walked by and looked over my shoulder, and I bent the corner of the page over so that he wouldn’t read what I had written, since it did not feel finished enough to show anyone yet. I took that idea and turned it into a metaphor for fearing to reveal what it is that I truly want to say, and developed that idea for a few lines. Once that thought had exhausted itself, I went back to the cup for inspiration and put in the phrase “anything but drink:, which was itself a reference to what I was doing—sitting and waiting for the tea to cool, biting the rim, using my nails to carve words and designs into the sides. While I was writing this, I kept leaving the first letters off my words, so I decided to put that in the poem, too, so I embellished upon that for a while. When that idea had played itself out, I looked back at the older things in my notebook, and found a note to myself about using the word “Viking” as a verb, along with a few associated images, which I decided to incorporate. The thought of Vikings brought me to rivers, to New York, whish reminded me of rollerblading along the river with my friend Meagan. We did that a few times right after September 11th, and we also took a yoga class on one of the piers, and I put that image in, too, because it seemed to work. perhaps I had thought of this because I had seen a documentary about They Might Be Giants earlier that day which kept mentioning September 10th, 2001.

As you can see, this poem was just a way to unload my brain. Not all of my poems come this way. Often, I work from a few related images, or a phrase. Sometimes I have a specific idea of what I want to say, though that is often harder. Sometimes I just describe a real or imagined scene from my life. I suppose this poem was a mixture of these different sources, which is why it came out so chaotic.

If I had not explained all of this to you, I could have tried to edit it, discovered or imposed some sort of a unifying theme, pulled it together and made it work. If I had not immediately written down where exactly each line came from, I would soon have forgotten, and probably fallen into believing that I had worked towards some single effect. But, since I walked you through the entire process, I can’t use this poem. It doesn’t feel real to me anymore, and I don’t suppose it could feel real to any of you.

That’s why I was so hesitant to read all of my poems for this presentation. Because we have all been living in such close contact with each other—seeing the same things, openly discussing the same ideas, talking about our thoughts all the time, I was afraid that all of the things I had written would become as transparent as the one I just explained, because these thoughts, images, and ideas would be recognizable. Though that wouldn’t really allow you to make any conjectures about me (because, as I illustrated in the poem I just dissected, the relation of what I say to real, current events in my life is sketchy at best), I feel that it would just compromise the quality of the poem. This may sound silly and romantic, but I sort of believe that a poem should somehow transcend real life, do something more than just rehash a few mundane feelings or events. And if you see the source of an idea, that idea becomes less original, in my eyes.