Poems

You say your parents’ house is golubói,
but all I see are azure bungalows.
When you write to me about toská, I know
that all I feel is yearning. When with joy
I speak to you, and rádost’ moves my tongue,
Saxon pebbles fill my mouth, and Normans
steal your words and conquer every sense.
I am too old, even though I am young,
to grow a different tongue. Still, we speak,
and when you talk I follow the music in it.
I’ve learned to hum along, and Chekhov’s wit
or Pushkin’s wonderment will sometimes peek
through fumbled fields of Russian consonants —
and then, we smile, in native innocence.

Like in a storybook
I lose myself,
and find an apple tree
on a meadow-shore.

Up top, I pluck an apple.
Below, grass sways with shadows
of wind-dancing apple branches
tapping a gray-worn trellis.

A far off farmhouse sets out west,
and I climb to meet the hills,
an apple core
draped in dappled dusk.

The jay cocks its eye in the live oak scrub,
glints of thunderheads
in a tumbled jasper stare,
bounces off the branch,
dives up and plunges
through gloss-dark leaves,
twisting paint-tipped ailerons
    to stroke the air —
 
 
         I hold my breath and hit the bite
         of Barton Springs, a shivering plunge
         into the amber echo-world
                        beneath —
 
 
Feathers catch heat-
ripples, trilling
cicada scales
crescendo into double-tongued
              fermatas —
 
 
         My arms pull back the amniotic
         currents, elodea ropes; 
         sunk jade feathers
         wave where salamander feather-
         gills move slowly 
                   in the deep —
 
 
The hammered bronze
              water beats —
 
 
         I breach,
         dripping crystal in my hair,
         underwater bass-thumps
         transmuted into high-harmonic
         syllables as sun-shards
                   glance the surface —
 
 
The jay glides
as summer breathes
              on new wet skin —
 
 
         and I
 
                        breathe in.

A god has many ways. A god is blue,
and rises early, but by evening fades.
At dawn, unfurling in a layer of dew,
it flaunts its vibrant hue among the blades
of grass, calling the moths and things that crawl
to taste its nectar, drink its violet shades.

A god’s a furious thing, but starts out small.
Its chemistry is hunger; as it grows,
restless, never sated, blooming terrible
and bright, it eats, until in gasping throes
it leaves just embers. Offer up a prayer —
honor the dying god that faintly glows.

A god’s that thing that bathes in wisps of hair,
eats silverfish, and whispers in empty rooms.
Its many eyes are whorls of dust that stare
at you uneasily. It weaves on looms
of insect dreams, drawing its spindly shuttle,
hanging mandalas in angled glooms.

A god is many, limitless, and subtle.
In the corner of a curious eye
it slashes the sky, or dances across a puddle.
It laughs in swift suggestions — a dragonfly,
an iridescent beetle, painted brightly
in translucent ink that fades when dry.

A god is almost nothing. A god falls lightly,
tumbles like the world, refracts its wonder.
A glassy marble, surface shimmering slightly,
twirling dreamlike through the infinite air,
it dives into nirvana as it passes
from one glistening life into another.

I’ve never seen a lizard.
I don’t believe in whales.
The evidence is missing;
they’re both just fairytales.

I doubt that there are monkeys,
and loons must be a joke.
There’s no such thing as pangolins:
they’re just an artichoke.

And zebras — are you kidding?
They’re horses, only fake.
Who thought we’d fall for kangaroos?
And what the f#@!’s a snake?