Obscure Desire of Bourgeoisie

said the woman’s tote bag in the Tokyo train
on my way to Odaiba. And appropriately,
later on I’m sitting with a bacon burger looking out
the window of a Hawaiian sandwich shop,
admiring the world’s most colorful bridge,
thinking of home. My friends here
must be sick of it: “In my country…

we have a phrase for how we stay silent
and chow for a while when we are hungry
and food has just been served.”
Obscure for envy and homesickness
to get in bed like that. Meanwhile,
the hula music in the restaurant
seems to be singing a thousand unknown words,

all secretly meaning “vacation.”
So I stop writing for a moment
to take a picture already taken
by millions of other tourists. And now,
the bacon burger beckons. So excuse me,
I am hungry and I really just want to eat it.
That’s the best I can say.

Back

 

in the city that taught me longing,
I am across the student library,
where I spent a silent hour each day.

All nine floors of it smaller now, less wise,
as time does to every book and parent.
The credit card in my wallet

where my student ID used to be
with all the possible hollowness
of a filled space. Where air is,

surely, emptiness follows, whistling
the heart’s forgotten tunes like a flute.
That’s that. Empty. No true story

of how it was in my time. I just look
them in the eye—youthful strangers
entering the building, taking

their turn in the ride.
They’ve lined up long enough.
There’s the undecipherable magic

of schools: change
in small increments. Every season.
Every year. Soon enough we are

ghosts in the hall. The buildings and the professors
remain like historic terrain—mountains, valleys,
witnesses. And I say here I am, old institution, back

and answerless. Students walking
past. Here I am with the same cup ramen,
the same apple juice, speaking the language

of the habitual cigarette, on the same table
on which I first expected departure and longing
and undervalued their significance.

Here I am with my final report,
which is simple enough, on how it is
to be a little bit older and still learning,

a little more prepared to die.

For When the Heart Tears Into Itself

I don’t know when, nor am I meant to,
but there was a time when the remedy
was to sit down with the evening
and decipher the syllables in the sky.
But know that I am not making a wish.
I know the Old World has been shelved
by some nameless God of libraries.
Each small thing named and numbered.
Gone are the days one can trace a cloud
to the middle of a body of water
and feel the prescribed amount
of displacement. Even desertion
has been overcome. I did not ask
for this, but no use complaining.
What other way but to want what we have:
cruise ships, jets, and all the inherited
inventions made to enclose us together
in a single world. People no longer lost
nor powerless, only human, and therefore
silent in the courtroom of the possible world.
Because we know it will never be enough.
Whatever it is. Already there are machines
in the sky meddling with the code of stars.
There is the expanding universe, and the self,
willfully shrinking into the yearning grave.
There are sciences. And poems
about everything. This is the world
we have broken. Too easy to live
and die. To have, in the right books, answers
to questions that have never been asked. Yes.
That library is sinking into the core of the Earth
because its architect neglected the weight
of knowledge. That shuttle burst to flames, silent,
in cold, soundless space. And Yes,
goddamnit, that meaningless girl
in that meaningless story in that old book
loves you back. We are beyond the finish line now,
beyond the industrial beating of these old hearts
we’ve been born with—their unchanged engines
blowing the steam of century old questions,
asking the still-vast atmosphere
for all the old answers.

Escape

Before my brother was born
I was fourteen and dying;

attention kept me warm
and mother-loving and life

was the path of least risk.
It was the thrill of jaywalking

on a rainy school afternoon
on my way to speaking at length

with my books. I never learned
to call it escape until I discovered

yearning—had never consciously stepped
into that realm of myself

until I knew the thousand ways
one could hold a woman, or

the forgetfulness of our senses—
of scent and its unending journeys.

It was the moment my brother was born,
when there was no escape

for either of us anymore
that didn’t promise longing.

Welcome to this world, we said to him. Fare
well—as if we had launched a flock

of messenger birds, watching the hands
on our clocks until each squab

finds home again. Because how else
are we supposed to move

in this endless dance
but to scatter the self?  What other way

but to look out this window
at the little boy running

across the street in weightless July
with the rain and the dew and a smile

on his face as he slowly uncovers
the many prisons of love?

Day Before Leaving

Standing on the roofdeck,
there’s a specific angle
from which the sunset

frames Koganei into boxes
of glowing souls, too immersed
in lives of chores, homework,

passing out flyers for bars
in the quietest time of winter.
Mount Fuji stands far away,

but there it is. There,
behind the abandoned crane
assembling the district

piece by massive piece.
This is the ending day:
breath of fog floating,

merging with the clouds.
You could choose to think
of where they meet the sea—

when does one thing become
the next? What large part
of this living painting is water?

Until where is it horizon?
And the sky—it has always
and exactly been everywhere,

hasn’t it? In the corner
across the 7/11 is a bookstore.
The old Japanese man outside

who has built a life or two
on paperback and print
takes a drag from his cigarette,

tells himself it is good
to live long despite
—Despite. To live long

warms the heart,
even when the snow
does not arrive as scheduled.

Never did he say anything
about short lives. Just stood there
content to know what little

one can know, attempting only
to blow pleasure boats into the sky.
I suppose a life of books

can never be short. God’s shoebox
of trading cards can’t be too bad.
Good is the word he used for this:

once every five minutes
a train stops to pick up travelers—
people who want to move

and stop moving both at once.
It is dark now; and a woman
is on the speaker, departing

from her mouth are all
necessary courtesies of arrival.
An electronic chime comes on

with the notes of a song
all the city dwellers know.
Sakura they call it; and spring

is months away, the way
it should be. For now it is cold,
but it’s all good. All of it.

After You Jumped Out The Window

I remembered sixth grade:
school afternoon, the teacher’s mouth

open, leaking what I recall
only as gibberish. You tapped

my shoulder to ask me just how wet
vaginas got. I don’t know

what I told you; but we laughed
exactly the way two kids should

after discovering how they’re entitled
to the world’s every pleasure, every

height. Did you think the snow
would break your fall?

Does winter cease the flow
of womanly fluids

specifically in Canada?
High school for us ended

the brotherhood between pens
and phonebooks. Now I cannot know

the weather that took
your last breath. We only shared happiness,

which is sad, when you think about it.
But Adrian, even if your face

never frames itself in my head
when I have sex, whenever I order

a beer in a place colder than common,
I think of the goodness still promised

to both of us, and I remember
some old discoveries:

How true it is, dear friend,
that life happens so well—

how before we know it
we’ll be holding cocktails

in some placeless balcony, telling
each other how life is good

and so is sex; and how if you do it
well enough, it almost feels

like falling.

The Only Promise of Winter

Nothing reminds me more
of Japan. Only stepping
into a warm shower in winter,

balancing the heat knobs, looking
into the mirror—into the naked body
before cleansing; the stranger

that is the wet self; the blur
of steam washed away for clarity
of vision—of the light smoke

of forgetfulness, and then, of rediscovery—
and the startled animal in the mirror
only breathing and thinking

of the day ahead, of the impending swoosh
of the curtain, of the cold behind every door
opened into the next morning, of drying

the self to the silence
of the escaping steam,
conversing with itself.

The Puritan and the World

Stephen Dunn

If I wanted more
of one thing, it was clear
I’d have to give up
something of another–
a third glass of wine, say,
would mean no dessert,
not even an espresso.
Look, I’m beautiful,
the world would whisper,
no need for you or anyone
to be parsimonious,
I brim over
with phlox or hydrangea,
manatees and Holsteins,
the arbitrary, the disparate.

The world thought
I didn’t understand it,
but I did, knew that to parse
was to narrow
and to narrow was to live
one good way.
Awash with desire
I also knew a little was plenty
and more than I deserved.
And because I was guilty
long before any verdict,
my dreams unspeakable,
I hunkered down
and buttoned up,
ready to give the world,
if I had to give it anything,
no more than
a closed-mouth kiss.

It was late afternoon,
late summer, a lone scud
streaking the sky,
and from my porch
I watched it drift away
from the world, this world
now cozying up to me,
claiming it, too, loves limits,
and offering shorelines
and riverbanks as proof,
the sweet pressures of death,
all the ripenings
that make possible the delicious.

But what I was hearing
was further evidence
that the world loved the all
of itself ad nauseam,
and would always lack–
when it came to truth telling–
the necessary cruelties
of exclusion.
The world got quiet; I thought
I might have quieted it.

Then I remembered
those cloud berries I picked
last summer in Nova Scotia.
They were bitter, truly awful,
and ever since
something in me
wanted their beautiful name
repudiated, the world
held accountable. Why couldn’t
I just relax? Dusk now
was giving way to nightfall
and half-moon majesty,
and purple martins, in flight,
began to save us–
the good as well as the vile–
from an onslaught of mosquitos.

The world was showing off
again, and in the wake
of its grandeur I sensed
an honest complaint forming
in the shape of a question.
It would be about bitterness,
I was sure, and would want
to know how a man like me–
hairsplitter that I was,
corrector, ingrate–
hadn’t developed a taste for it.

Which wouldn’t be the first time
the world had turned on me.
I am my discriminations
(I would want to answer),
that’s how I discover
what I love (sometimes,
I’d want to add). Meanwhile,
one of those rogue winds,
sudden and without motive,
came up from nowhere,
toppling the empty trash cans,
rolling them into the street.
I confess to a small pleasure
in returning them to the curb,
securing their lids,
while the world–smug
as a rose garden or as anything
that’s never had to think about itself–
continued to spin and dazzle.

–
Early comment on the new Stephen Dunn: the Dunn of old (my personal preferred Dunn) is back!

How Did I Get Here?

Let’s not answer that question.
We are in the immediate café,
quieter than any library.
An unsaid agreement

of silence among the lonely.
The monsoon looking on,
banging on the glass windows
like an abandoned dog. Futile

to compete with its noise. So we pay
attention only to the coffee on our table
the smell of alimuom in a distant continent.
Oh, only we know of the land’s secret

breathing after the rain; even
their undiscovered mountains throb.
I must be one of many writers visiting
this place now, this origin of coffee; for it is warm

here, and public. Today is Tuesday
and the world outside is undressing
slowly with every drop of rain;
and we the willing

virgins, the way we keep
to our notebooks—to our faith
in weather and change.
Look, God is taking time

and doing nothing with it,
stirring in his coffee cup
another East Pacific wind,
another question of His: asking

us to sit down; strike
the ground of our hearts again;
dig ourselves further
into truer selves.

Conversing With The Evening:

I am thinking of fields again
and this country, on top
a mountain, overlooking

the Batangas valley.
There is the city.
There is the field.

I am pointing a heavy finger
from one light to the next—
a God discovering

the physics of creation
and its property of  growing
apart. I exhale

and only fog comes out.
I have lost the way
a God loses—one whose language

has died. Now, over there is a man,
and over there is the shore,
the rest of the world, and here

we are looking at a constellation
of distant lights,
comfortable in the make-belief

of having been unshakable
of having aged beyond it.