My sister and I scattered the ashes in
Bariloche. We climbed the slope with the
box in a backpack. It rattled like wood and
gravel. There were lakes everywhere. The
mountains beyond. Then the wind came.
Most of them landed in a treetop. Then we
took the ski lift down, ate chocolate.
Sometimes joy and pain arrive together. I
open the Iliad, see poplars and poppies. A
woman shoos a fly as her son sleeps.
Someone looks up at the stars. After nine
years of war, glimmers of a life everyone
wants back. This is my dad in the crown of
a pine as the force of the wind bears some
of him out to the lakes and stones.
as when the south
and north winds grapple for a forest in the mountains
they shake the ash trees and the soft-barked dogwood
the oaks lurch this way and that
colliding and breaking their branches
it’s a sound from another world
The spear of Ajax enters through the nipple.
The body comes down like a poplar born on
the banks of a lagoon. A carpenter fells it
and cuts its boughs to make a wheel. The
trunk lies prostrate, drying on the shore. He
came to war unmarried, the young son of
Telamon. His mother, a shepherdess,
birthed him on the riverbank when she
brought the sheep down from the hills. She
named him Simeoisios like the river.
Suddenly he appears and is lost among two
hundred forty dead, but his river name rises
from the mouth. There’s effort and delay in
the life he lives with his parents, the
marriage he doesn’t have, the bank where
he was born. The poem tries to keep him
there a little longer. It can’t. Now the
foaming river is a still pool and his soft,
damp torso a dry trunk. This is the glimmer
and the song of the glimmer. The spear of
Ajax entered through the nipple and exited
the shoulder blade. The darkness caught in
his eyes as he ran.
as a fish
rises from the sea with a single leap snatched up by wind
it lands in the seaweed’s fingers
and vanishes into the waves
as the gleaming surf
ignites and snuffs in silence
when the water senses wind’s arrival dreams of storms
great waves hang soundless
they don’t know where to fall
until a wind comes and makes its decision
A voice says now like the wind howling in
the water’s ears. The spirits of the cows and
fish, the stubborn mosquito. The horse’s
verve, the lion’s irreversible leap. Thumos,
breath, heart, vitality. Life condensed in the
chest, a force at the mouth of the stomach.
The space where I feel pleasure, wonder,
where I suffer, or joy lingers for a while.
The voice says now like a gust filling the
lungs. The air that slipped out through my
parents’ teeth. Me leaving home like
running in a nightmare, breath calling on
the phone. Falling in love. Dad, drunk,
yanking out cables, dancing like a madman
with my sister and me by the hand. The
furor of soldiers with their heads aflame.
