Catalina

Another on Katharine.

Catalina

My name sings in Spanish, but here
it stumbles on teeth and sticks in the nose. Katharine.
I am Queen of England and I must follow their ways
but my homeland lives in me, ringing in my veins.
I am fierce like my father and strong like my mother;
I am a Spanish Infanta, and even here I will not forget.

You may take my clothes and my language;
the dances I know, the songs I sing.
You may take my chambers and all my pretty things.
You take my body,
my servants,
my daughter,
my crown. But you cannot take
my blood.

I am Catalina;
Infanta of Castilla and Aragón, Spanish Ambassador;
Countess of Chester, Princess of Wales, and Queen of England,
and my blood still knows my name.

Katharine of the Pomegranate

On Katharine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife.  I don't know why the spacing gets all funny when I make the words smaller but I need the lines to be able to fit :/

Katharine of the Pomegranate


Ironic that my dresses are stitched with pomegranates
and I have only one child. Actually it is not fertility
that is the problem – I have had six children in all;
the hard part is keeping them alive.


I am weary of bleeding (blood as red as the petals
of unborn pomegranates); of being stretched and filled
with something that will not last. I am weary of pain.
I knew all of their names: three Henrys,
an Elizabeth, after mother, a Jane for sister,
and Mary, the one who lived.


Now I pray. My husband desires me not,
his attention already straying to my own maid (whose badge
is a falcon ripping seeds out of pomegranates). God
will not leave me like dear Arthur, my first and sweetest love,
or the father who forgot and abandoned me, or this half-violent man
who sees me only as means to an heir –
an heir I cannot provide.


These apples of Granada were supposed to bring
new life, but they mock me hollowly,
their seed-ripe insides drenching me with jealousy, for I am nothing
but a shell of a wife; moldy fruit tossed aside;
a pomegranate emptied.

Groom of the Stool

From my collection on Henry VIII.


Groom of the Stool

What an honour to be chosen to wipe a Royal Butt.
It affords a certain kind of intimacy, the privilege of touching
the King’s own person; facilitates
the telling of secrets while awaiting that last, final push;
makes me a man of power. No, perchance my duties
are not the most desirable in the court – I could have been
a groomsman, or test food for poison (dangerous but delicious
and no one has died for years),
or even help His Majesty put on his clothes.
They think my job disgusting (more than they can imagine, I’m sure)
but they know he tells me things.
I am second only to the King himself;
in fact, I have my own servant to empty the Stool
so I do not have to do it.

Perhaps I abuse my power – perhaps
it fills some hole to see them shrinking away from me,
anxious to befriend me yet afraid lest they offend me
and I demand the separation of their shoulders from their head.
But even if my title should in time come to mean
the foul stuff itself, I give no complaint,
for I am the King’s favourite;
his right-hand man
(literally).

Athanasia

This is one of my favorites in a long time :3

Athanasia

Science, that precise and wonderful religion,
has discovered one particular species of jellyfish,
alone out of all the organisms on the planet,
which is biologically capable
of living forever.

This little medusa, only four millimeters wide when grown,
begins as a bud on a polyp
before sprouting long tendrils of tentacles, thin and curling
as translucent spaghetti. He blooms
into a clear, sweet bell, lit from within
by a stomach like a brilliant red heart.

And then, when hungry or threatened
or maybe just tired,
he sucks himself inside out, down into that glowing fire,
and slurps threading arms back in,
and returns to infancy, attaching to the ocean floor
before branching out into a hundred new buds.

As a salamander fabricates limbs, this hallowed hydrozoan
can regenerate his entire body,
transubstantiating old cells
into new. He does this
indefinitely.

Oh, Abraham, father of all jellies, Cniderian king,
over and over you cloned yourself,
and your clones cloned, and your clones’ clones cloned,
begetting all of these otherworldly creatures,
these celestial beings.

And now,
your six-hundred-million-year-old cells
have turned back time, and you
are a child again.

Revelation

At death, the bowel and bladder release
and the soul flees the body
in that last long, tortured exhalation.
Death is not beautiful.

The sheets are washed one last time
and the body is stripped and cleaned,
hurriedly moved and refrigerated
before it freezes to smooth marble.

The myth of peacefulness is refuted
by eyelids pierced and tugged by stitches,
and perfect puttied cheeks, and fingers
strangely drained with skin sucked tight.

Bodies are cold and empty,
boxed up and hidden away, and maybe Heaven
is a human construction designed
to comfort – to keep lost souls alive –

and I guess Hell is nothing more
than our own justification of justice:
our self-righteous revelation in karma.
Let us warm ourselves at its flames.

Autumn

For Diane

It’s the little things that remember you’re gone.
Different writing on the calendar;
a desk too clean; pens in the jar
caps down instead of up.

It’s an inconvenience – too much unfinished
and no one can guess the riddle
of how you named your files.

The world misses you.
The sun slips away early and each brittle leaf
cracks sooner than before.

It’s not like you to leave
without saying
goodbye.

Demolition

I’m to write a poem about
A Very Small Object. It could be raindrops,
or freckles; a grain of sand or one
of salt. I could write
about mustard seeds that move mountains,
or splinters of gold in mud, or the oxygen hidden
in each breath (did you know that crystals of salt come naturally
in perfect cubes?)


It rained the day you left.
My eyes traced the constellations in your freckles
that I had memorized over spaghetti and wine:
the heart on your cheek.
A small rabbit on your shoulder.
The letter M.
You were a lost teenager again for a moment: then
you took your white umbrella and disappeared into the gloom.


I pray and not even anthills sprout legs
to twirl out of my way. You took me to church
but I couldn’t see past the curve of your knee; couldn’t hear more
than the quiet rhythm of your breaths. Outside,
the sun struck sparks of gold that landed in your hair.
You were high on Jesus, swollen with praise and bleached holy.
Oh supple supplication; oh heaven;
oh soft, silent skin.


I’m to write a poem
about something small: a breath, or a silence,
or the moment our love started to die (but I’m only pretending
I want you gone). And until you return, I will be building castles
out of salt;
marvels of terrace and window and corridor and stair
made out of bricks as small as sand,
each one engraved with your name.

Magnified

On General William Tecumseh Sherman

You must have been a great man indeed to merit
a 2,700 year old namesake.
Considering your policy of “scorching” the earth,
being memorialized with a stale-skinned redwood
snickers of irony.

Perhaps if your own arms measured six feet across
and your rough beard hovered
a hundred yards above the earth – perhaps then
you would deserve
such recognition.

But, my ruffle-haired friend, you were naught
but a general in a haughty army;
burning crops, slaughtering pigs,
and ripping Confederate train tracks apart,
searing and twisting their straight rails
into desolate neckties for trees.

Redemption

If you split my arm from shoulder to wrist,
the only thing that would pour out
would be not blood
but bubbling thick blackness.

Darkness has invaded
like a cancer that turned my insides to tar
and choked all the good out of me, turning my heart
solid and stiff as stone.

I am marked, like some forsaken Cain – cursed in life
yet not allowed to die. I mark myself in warning.
These are not scars but seams
to unzip and suck the evil out;
draining, draining,
until every limb
is wrung dry.

Who can bleach their hollow veins clean
or rinse each organ, scrubbing out its tubes?
I must bleed my blood back scarlet,
open arms like open faucets,
returning me to where I once began.

La Llorona

This was my "myth poem" for poetry class. Still needs some work but I like how it's coming.


La Llorona
(The Weeping Woman)


I.
The treachery of La Malinche was predicted
by an ancient Aztec goddess, draped in white,
who wandered the streets of Tenochtitlan, weeping for her children.
La Malinche (they called her Chingada because she fucked
them over) came later, a double agent who gave Cortés
Mexico and two little Cortseses, but when he left her
for a saucy española and threatened to take the children,
her god told her that one would return to destroy them
and she must drown her sons to save her people
(the ones she had already betrayed). Oh hijos míos.


Now she is La Llorona, snatching children
from riverbanks and dark streets, and every Latino
scrapes the sound of her screams from their ears,
praying, frantic, to be spared. Dios, mi Dios.


II.

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children during a psychotic episode.

The newspapers called you a monster.
Three small boys laid out on the bed, the baby beside them
(the oldest still in the bathtub). But I understand
what it’s like when demons live in your brain,
guarding the dark prison of your mind. I know what it’s like
to feel as though Satan’s teeth are buried in your ankle,
his weight dragging behind you, and to realize
you must do something to save those you love (or was it to save
yourself?) No, you were not a monster; the monster
only lurked within and owned you. Oh my sons.


Now you are La Llorona, ghost in manacles
and a stained white shift, crying tears of blood
for the children you did not want to let go.
You try but cannot join them. God, my God.


III.
Oh Llorona, Llorona; I out of all the world
will weep for you.

Colorblind

They say dogs see in black and white
(how they learned this I don’t know). Imagine
if one day their blindness was cured; if, one day,
the old movie reel of the world exploded
into bright blue and vivid green,
pink cheeks and brown hair, red sports cars
and starch-stiff navy uniforms.
What would they feel at first sight
of this new startling, brilliant, terrifying world?

Sometimes I wonder if we too
are blind; what rainbow lives
in the color we call purple; how much yellow
can be used to describe the sun.

Rocks and a Soft Place

As little girls, pajamaed and silly,
we traced letters on each other’s backs
and, laughing, tried to guess the words.
This touch requires as much
interpretation.

Your right hand is soft and your left leaves bruises;
only half your mouth smiles
and every other word
lands sharp.

I was not yours to take.

I say that every warm word was a lie
and that even the gentlest touch
was intended to harm. I say

that all your white was black painted over,
your tatter-coat temper disguised as a lamb –
all your darkness hidden from sight
like asphalt smoothed over with snow.

In an American Sitting Room

When we finish reading Eliot, she says
she wishes she could roll words into fatties
and smoke them. We chuckle, imagine.
“Man, I could smoke this shit all day.”

Later I dream of Poe’s pale hands
crumbling poetry over thin paper;
he pinches and asks for a light. Tendrils
of smoke rise from Whitman’s white beard
as he stands to oblige.
Longfellow reclines.
A young Dickinson in her shift
sits alone on a footstool, eclipsed
by Ms. Angelou’s wild smock.
Frost stokes the fire.

Poets savor silence, mouths warm
with the taste of their own words.

Fury

I am a flame
and you
are my teacher.

Show me how to leave
a log shrunken and lifeless;
hard ebony curved
and ridged; a carved
statue.

Watch me burn these wrists,
these slender fingers, sap
leaking like honeyed blood
which turns gold
and disappears.

(I can bleed a bone
black and empty
as broken pipes or a spine
with nothing
to fill it.)

I am a child and you
are my teacher. Tell me
why songbirds die
and why
leaves surrender. Show me

these broken wrists;
the fury of your song.

forsaken

the stout army of weeds
muscling up through cracks in the parking lot
of the factory that crumpled and left half the town
unanchored

the cry of a gull on a rainy day
or a teenage arm criss-crossed in red

a chair without his legs
a clock who lost his voice
a bird with broken wings

this is one taut, pregnant harpstring of silent desperation
and an unknown creek who wanders alone
and the raw wind of despair that blows at the end
of yet another weary day:

this is the death of an unborn child;
a cold sunrise on the ocean shore;
a bible with its pages torn;
the end of the final song.

Unanticipation

How strange it is that at night
light obscures instead of darkness.
Oh, to see the depths of the sky without
the fires which burn underneath.

The grass grows weary of straining upward
only to be chopped down again.
I will leave it long to anchor my hands
while the wild world whirls in its frantic dance.

The sounds the night makes are lovelier
than the violet-gold voice of a cello or
a horn’s clear note that makes your heart rise
and mash to the top of your chest.
I know there is nothing as beautiful
as the sweet sweeping song the solemn trees
would sing to each other over my head
if I only knew how to hear it.

Poem for a Manic God

I am a girl who lives in a world of extremes. My shrink
teases me because I can’t do anything in moderation.
I used to fight it, but I have decided I’d rather be
passionate than complacent; rather feel too much
than too little. So let me rage and weep and love hard;

let me scream in the rain, yelling curses at the black sky
while the sidewalk chews my knees. Sometimes I think
that God is a quasi-adult bipolar girl when he squeals
his lightning and laughs his thunder, or when he whistles
and trees break at the ankles and crash down. Sometimes

I think God is a little girl who nobody understands, who
wants to ruin the world but hides under blankets listening
to the demons who live and hiss in her ears, one small child
who has more anger than her body can hold and who
smashes things to pieces and then is scared of herself;

sometimes I think God must be bruised and hurt, and
too happy, but his finger pushes the clouds and the ice,
and sometimes he makes it rain and rain so that he and I
can both be happy, and happy, and sad, and angry,
alone with the furious earth.

Communication

One last psych reflection.



Communication

When they told me you would never speak,
all I wanted
was to hold your broken little X chromosome
in my hands; to give it to them
to stitch back together.

...I waited for your eyes to see me;
...waited for you to try to crawl. And weeks
...drifted through months
...and burrowed deep into years.

What makes a man a man? Is it
his swollen amygdala, lounging starboard
and sipping serotonin? His natural and genetic
inability to remember details? Or could it be
that violent, instable marriage of X and Y?

...And what makes a child a child?
...For mine did not learn or grow;
...mine lived in a dim, muffled world
...into which I could not see.

I guess you know by the way he closes doors,
and in the rhythm of his steps,
and the warm smell of his clothes; I guess
you read it in the cleft of his chin and in pondering
the stiff muscles of his thighs.

...It must be that silent love;
...the way your small body
...fits snug to mine; how you only smile
...the moment I say your name.

Evolution

Another psych reflection.


Evolution

What an amazing and fantastic thing
that men have grown wings.
I wonder what the man thought who first saw
the glistening silver snail track of river;
the startling stillness of stiff, fibrous clouds;
the expanse of hills creased and wrinkled
as our ever-expanding cerebral cortex. How did he feel
when he descended, suddenly stunningly aware
of the limitations of the ground?

The last time men had looked down from such height
must have been when Noah’s ship
settled at last on the tip of the highest peak, precarious
and perfectly balanced
as a weathervane. What delight
to watch the ocean draining slowly,
each pink morning revealing more
of the mountain’s naked side, of cracked trees;
new valleys and clean hills.

How incredible and beyond belief that men
have made marks upon the moon – that we
would even think of looking up
to imagine what lay beyond. Who first wondered
if there was something more than the far-flung sky,
something bigger than the distance between
our heads and that vast curved ceiling, something
that would prove our huge world smaller
than the most infinitesimal of cells?

Sometimes I dream of being up there,
motionless in the crashing silence, not breathing,
blood solid and every organ still. I hang
in the womb of claustrophobic black,
searching for distant pinpricks of light

like staring out the window of an airplane at night,
looking down at the carpet of stars.

Lament for a Man Named Henry

This was a poem I wrote as my chapter reflection for a psych class I took this summer. The chapter was about short-term memory (from Brain Rules) and the poem is about Henry Molaison.


Lament for a Man Named Henry

You know your name, but cannot find yourself
in any mirror. Perhaps something
in these wrinkled crosswords,
some magic in these rows and columns, makes
you a human again – that smooth-jawed man with kind eyes
who fixed things; the man
who put things back together.

But now you are a jigsaw puzzle, and they come
to jiggle the pieces;
to build pictures of the crevice of your mind,
the precipice off of which neurons hurl themselves
into oblivion; that black funnel which drops
names and faces and half-chewed food
through nothing to nothing,
which sucks your mind dry and empty
every twenty seconds.
They come to watch.

Take me through this dark jungle
of broken branches and cut wires. I want to see
the horizons of your mind and gaze across
the chasm into which each day disappears
silently and without pain. Here are
your worn brown couch and your comic books
and that bright blue bike that started it all.
I see your childhood; your growing up; then
nothing for fifty years.

Tell me what it’s like to meet the same man
over and over again; to know you have lost something
but not know what; to be tested and studied
again and again for decades; to know nothing
but who you once were. Tell me what it’s like

to have nowhere to be except where you are;
to deem every sunrise the most beautiful;
to raise hands and step into winter’s first snow –
in every small moment, you live.

As If They Were Birds

This is a revision of Hombre Fierro, in case it looks familiar.


As If They Were Birds

The general is as hard as his name;
Fierro – iron; and today
he has three hundred men to kill.
No, less than men –
colorados,
traitors.

Those who join him are given guns
and the others are set free in tens
to cross the corral
and climb a fence to safety.

A pistol in each hand,
he stands, feet apart,
and picks them off one by one:
uno por uno, like pájaros –
as if they were birds.

Afternoon illumines
a minefield of cadavers.
Three hundred becomes one hundred
becomes twenty, becomes five,
and the last man falls,
arms like twisted insect legs,
a bird with broken wings.

The Iron One will sleep well tonight
as the sun sets behind
three hundred traitors stacked Everest high,
built up into piles, of flesh, of hands;
(carne, manos;)
monuments to death.

And under a faceless moon
it is he who is silent and still
and the dead men
who, eyes open, limbs stiff,
are trapped, forever, in motion.

New Stuff

Wow, it's been a while since I've been here. And I've written some stuff that I really like :3 So get ready for a deluge, faithful nonexistent readers.