A current warm

I was at sea once
afar off from the safety of shore
nothing but the gentle sloshing of black waves
and the tug of a small wind
to hear, and in the darkness
no ships passed.

At some point
a current, warm
began pushing me with an imperceptible breath
small but determined
it carried me in for a ways
until I could see just on the horizon
the faint glow of home.

But in my confusion I
swam against it and
now I
wetter and colder and
a little lower in the water,
the long night sits down beside.

Purchase of Wings

The streets of your city
are concrete and gritty
to the touch
The rules drive me crazy
and I've never cursed this much
but the railing is nice
a clever device for two lovers to lean on
and take in the night
the lights and the cars
and the sounds from the bars down below

Your beaches are pretty
the palm trees are really
alright
Combined with the water
the sun on the sand is
a sight
but the twinkling stars
and the sound of the heart
racing inches below where my head rests
is best
There's no lights and no words
only goodnights from birds where we lay

Then I wake up
make coffee
check messages
I can't believe that we made it a year
Was it the sunsets
or dancing
or Grand Marnier
that caused us all of these tears?
Either way it’s a wash
bittersweet is the cost
that we pay for the purchase of wings
made of string

We walk from the station
to our destination
single file
I'm wanting to hold you
I'm wanting to scold you
with a smile
But we hurry to part
then we delay the start of
the future that scares us to death
Now it finally came and I'm boarding the plane
with your memory still on my breath

Then I wake up
make coffee
check messages
I can't believe that we made it a year
How could the sunrise
and mountains
and Grand Marnier
cause us all of these tears?
Either way its a wash
bittersweet is the cost
that we pay for the purchase of wings 

Yeah I know it’s a loss
There’s no counting the cost
that we paid for the purchase of wings

made of string

The streets of this city
are concrete and gritty
to the touch
The rules drive me crazy
and I've never cursed this much

Boys secondhand pants

From a mother they came

to a mans son

Denim camouflage sheaths, for the two swords

of a boy

Legs that would carry him into battle with

lizards, spiders, girls, a fear of darkness and

even other boys.

Carefully stitched twice over by

likely

some other mother with weathered skin

and calloused fingers, in a noisy foreign factory

who smiled gently as she toiled, imagining her own boy

in the brand she couldn't afford to buy him.

Midway down, spacious spare pockets that would

inevitably

become airplane hangers, archaeological digs, boat slips, reptile internment facilities, holsters and

botanical gardens

and a cuff at the bottom

for lapping up the dust on the tops of mountains.

Who could ever know what is in store for

these cotton tools.

The running ladies of Myeonmok-dong

At quarter to eight in the morning in Seoul
there's a sound that is rather intriguing
a curious staccato that cuts through the bustle
created by leather fatiguing

Young women from Myeonmok, due east of the gate-
to Gimpo, just south of the Han
spent five minutes longer, perhaps than they should've
in putting their eyelashes on

So now they are racing to make it to stations
to clock in and sit and be functional
but busses and trains do not tolerate tardiness;
Korea's relentlessly punctual

Thus asphalt is clapping their flats on the sole
reminiscent of greenway applause
I do hope they make it in time to their office
avoiding potential faux pas

Magpies

 It's been a grey day in Gimpo

Even the 까치 were wearing scarves
and whistling in minor 7 flat 5ths

Yesterday I was thinking of ways to sass the hot midday sun
for the offense of forcing an outfit change.

"I've known you since you were this high!", I'd say
with my palm facing the earth somewhere around my thigh-

just because I was awake before sunrise.
Now I find myself wishing I hadn't been quite so quick to draw my sword

Not so very far to the northeast the Han trudges by
head down, arms full of groceries

paying no attention to passers-by
sharing the last light of late afternoon.

Seventy eight more hours.

Sister camera

On occasion, if she takes too long to compose herself

I find myself quarreling with her for the tardiness

    -as if I had somewhere to be.

Cut from the same cloth, her and eye

but with different scissors

Her intricacies and quirks occasionally stymie but

most of the time clop along

side by side with mine, a sort of menage-a-trois

Bonnie and Clyde and Yoshihisa Maitani

I pick the radio station and she minds the map.

Being my senior

she pretends to know best but

we both know the grim truth:

there's a reason we rely on each other.

People who live in glass houses should

open the shutters, I guess

Treaties

I have no right to hold you

     nor you, me

no birthright passage through

     your sea

There exist no treaties between the nations of your eyes

     and mine.

We are two planets

two bodies in space

rotating and

flopping wildly towards each other

an inexcusable collision

given the vastness of life

Still

what is it that coats your skin

what salt

on the rim of your transparent heart

that draws me in

mixes in my own watering mouth

and burns on the way down?

You don't belong to me

     as ever

Your arms are not

     my coat

to don when I am shivering.

In Dads absence

Immortalized in my memory as the transient smell of sweat and leather, he (my father) exists as a sort of paradox. I think of him as a giant in his pilot uniform; as a boy, anywhere we went in the world people knew him. I heard strangers excitedly call his name in myriad accents, in busy international terminals and rural gas stations alike. However I am also keenly aware of his many vexations, demons that hounded him mercilessly for most of his life. In the end I envied him, laying emaciated in bed and riddled with cancer, for his inability to supplicate them.

“Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” penned Matthew Arnold sometime around 1850. One hundred and forty-nine years later, this lyric from my favorite verse would parallel my most cherished experiences with dad. After my parents divorced, we were living in Fulton County, Pennsylvania with mom and he in Manila, Philippines. From time to time he would appear, and stay at his sisters sprawling log/ nursing home half an hour or so away from our trailer, and I would go join for a few days at a time. Inevitably sometime in the cool dead of night, after the dew had begun forming outside on the hood of the car, he- jetlagged and unable to sleep- would wake me up. I don't remember ever getting dressed, just that at some point we would be driving east on Route 70.

There were never any passenger cars on the road at that time save for ours, an older Buick dad would borrow from my Aunt with a sort of black corduroy upholstery and square chromed seatbelt buckles. We would drive in silence at first, as I gradually woke up in the front seat, and he would begin talking. Not like a teacher talks to a student, or like a mother talks, but like a man talks to another man at a campfire as it fades into the night. He would tell me great secret things, the preposterous and unimaginable secrets of life, as if I already knew them and he was just acknowledging the obvious.

I would listen wide-eyed. He told me of girlfriends he had wooed before meeting my mom, he told me to “treat niggers and retards and poor people the same as I would treat him”, he told me about the time he stole a chicken from a neighbors farm and plucked it and cooked it over a fire in an orange grove, and about the time he woke up in the cockpit and thought the full moon was another airplane heading straight at him. Sometimes he would say “shit” or “fucking”, and I would feel very grown up.

Eventually we would reach our destination, which was almost always Little Sandys 24-hour truck-stop in Hancock, Maryland. It is a greasy, crumb-covered, loathsome place, but at the time seemed cooler at least than the finest Michelin dining. We would park our sedan somewhere amongst the gargantuan idling semis, where fat men snored or bargained with prostitutes in their sleeper cabs, and walk in. Imagine how my chest swelled! Being born in the south dad loved grits, a trait I failed to acquire despite his repeated entreaties, so I would get an omelet. The grumpy, red-eyed aproned matriarch would bring him coffee and me hot chocolate in thick, heavy ceramic mugs with stain rings they had probably been serving in since the seventies.

After eating and making sure I saw him leave a few dollars tip, we would thank the lady and exit, pausing to sit on a bench by the door outside. Dad would smoke a cigarette and flick the butt what seemed to me like halfway across the parking lot, while bemoaning the latest cruelty inflicted by his latest girlfriend (undoubtedly in response to some unmentioned cruelty on his part) and we would drive home in silence. I don't ever remember going back to sleep.

The last time I saw him, he was mostly bedridden. His fourth wife, younger than I, was cleaning and feeding him daily. On one occasion he opened his eyes, and began describing in great detail an experience from decades earlier. He had been hired to fly cargo on a south-westerly route, and as such experienced a much longer than usual sunset from the altitude of 27,000 feet. As he told of skimming along the tops of the red clouds, his gray eyes watered and his lip quivered. “I never told anyone about that”, he said simply, his voice cracking.

It must have been beautiful.

Sooting

These days
I view my reflection with a certain misgiving
as a child
earnestly glaring at a shadow on their wall
waiting to see if it will suddenly arise
sprint across the room
and devour them

These days
the smoke sent up from my smoldering heart
filtering through the branches of my ribs
sooting the leaves
singes my eyes til I squeeze the lids
gasping

These days
the view of the ships from my stoop
and your slippers by the door
sparkles my good eye

Eastward

chrome
she stretches out
bespotted by shadows of clouds
how peculiarly light
how unwittingly unlike
the night which she wears
as a garment prepared
for a lover, transluscent
and shimmering
barely concealing her shape
her broad, fertile hips hewn by the moon
and breasts sculpted by tradewinds

in the vast
black unquenchable distance
out past
where the most reckless fishing men
pretend to have gone
starts her voice
low and pure
and just over
the whitecaps it glides
sweetly into the wid'ning eyes
into the throat and down through
taking hold
in the thickest part of
every man gazing eastward upon her
in each his own language