Aleña I will arrive tomorrow morning to your good
city like snapping
Chalk. Like snapping and I have chalked
My way into the subway where
Aleña, I feel migration
stronger than I have felt
Anything before. Stronger than I have felt
Or corduroy under the ocean.
Like that time we drowned your stuffed bears
Held their noses onetwothree in your saltwater fishbowl.
Out the window
A lone
North
Migrating
Goose.
Did you see it back then?
Do you see it now?
Aleña, please forgive my lack of words
The weather prolonged my return
Home: Aleña, and this scares me.
What have you made for dinner recently?
Do you still leave a plate?
On the table I place in defense,
Mother nature’s on a bender.
I was highway, high and on my way, when I saw for the first time
A car appreciating its right-left- brain split when it wraps its head around this:
A lightpost. Fendering close enough to spit
into the grand canyon as eagle spins
And causes a blender down there. Down where?
Just down. Cough syrup and soup
sloughed down a flaking throat. Now, Aleña, this is medicine:
It wasn’t right
To have left
Myself bending backwards
to obtuse. Bloating ego like fattening pigs be
headed
Like when I fought a bear that one time in alaska
With my bare
Thumb and the words I managed
to make through my teeth.
He got scared and took
Me and my head
With him back home to Belgium
Where we sat together and he taught me
about circadian rhythm.
There, even when I looked
outward I was really looking inward.
The bear taught me of mirrors
Like sheet-rain-really-rolling across my windshield
When I traveled across Ireland and its bubbling
Hills, staked the land as my land and declared this:
Progress. I tried crabwalking
Back from Greece, but I just found myself oily
And chomping pool cues in Brazil, contemplating
The undeniable:
Tombstones should be proportional
To the size of thumbs
And all the music I will never hear.
In Israel I found God
Or a man who called himself so and he told me he once played chess
Against Kurt Vonnegut in an airport. And Vonnegut he was all left:
He played lefty: and when he left
He left him with things to chew. And so I was left
In the brack woods,
The territory of bear,
Dreaming of figs with the shape of pear.
The times in the shower I sucked on plum cores,
Thought of all the civil wars.
Burning the buddha’s grass in backwoods
When I lost myself and the pocket
That held my moon
And time, too, but much later (Or was it before. I lost it so I can’t be certain) migrating north.
Oh we used to smoke
Those leaves oh so very often
Those days I put my truth up for adoption
Where in Mongolia I woke
In front of a pine circled by wolves.
That time I saw a car beheaded by a stop sign
Thrown by an ex-olympic javelinist
From forty meters and then it began to pour
Wiped away every game of hopscotch around the globe.
I’m sorry, Aleña,
Thats the dead skin I left in the drain.
In India I watered
Myself down and trickled lassi down my dogged/thirsty throat.
But Kostas who palms down storm
And drains fish from sea
for the poor
Tells me he is going to steal
the skeleton of his father’s father
And replace it with museum skeleton
The brontosaurus
All because he found it funny both
Had flat teeth.
And he was going to make brontosaurus broth
And slurp it on church steps
While chewing plum
And watching crowds boil to none.
It always comes down to the chew
Aleña. How well you cud along.
Aleña I have come to learn
That when strong rain speaks you listen
Aleña, my teeth are braver than me
Because they never back down
I could chew until I died
But maybe that’s why we grow
them. And sometimes when I sit
Here my legs move
On their own
Like clock and cicada and circadian rhythm
That time you
Felt through my gums to tell me I was teething
Like I was just beginning.
But I couldn’t tell where.
Alena all of these stories.
And my thumb is powerful
Aleña because it allows me to put my thoughts
To action
But my teeth are more powerful
Because they allow me to put thoughts
To words
And that’s how I can write to you.
And I should have written
So you could have written back
Look I listened
To my own metronome. A plum ripens
At some point, Aleña,
And despite the monsoons
I remained dry.
The nautilus in my stomach has all evaporated,
As well charity
Is on fire
I had swallowed a bear heart whole
Because he wished me to live
Instead of him in the cold.
I told him about you and he gave me all the money he had to get back.
I chomped back home, clawed with teeth through chalk.
A lone
Goose
Migrating
South
The peso congregations in my pocket have evacuated
Due to fire drill.
Peso congregations in pocket
Picket, like boycott, like girlcott. Me and that girl in first grade
Exchanging sticky hands
When I made plum juice
Outside my house the asphalt smoked too
Many Cubans my father burned below
The plum trees in my back
garden that wilted like rose. Unleavened bread. Unenlightened bread.
And you helped me replant them, Aleña.
Yours slanting right.
And they remind me
Aleña, of your posture
Underneath our kitchen windows
At sink:
Rubber gloves sheathed up your arms,
Sun striking placid on your face, like slumping
Into yourself: Aleña like you’re waiting for the seasons
To change, Aleña, you must wish for it.