Maybe its age
Maybe the years
I sit under the orchard
Counting the tears
At the bottom of the glass
Reconstructing,
Is it the Armenian in me?
{}
In dream, In paradise
In the blood
In the rolling thunder
between us
I remove the scarf
The air beneath your feet
The swords crossed in gripped hands
The blind wind of desolation
That pretends all mountains
Will crumble before
Its raging
In lemon-colored photographs
the wind blows whispers of wheat
through my ancestor’s hair
Before the rain
shoes untie themselves
and run from the children
that inhabited them
All is windless and sky
There is a roaring in the air
that chases our lives
into backyard shelters
while Eisenhower calms
the static air waves from a hospital bed
In the streets scarecrows
have lost their shadows
I see them make their way
to the next day
folding into Dali images
or the shadows of unread letters
trembling in the hands of winter trees
1920. His words stalk the silhouettes of Wall Street
a dark encumbering sea of desolate meanings
in shoes that refused to move the tumbling hopes
of the Republic
He looked for something
he forgot to remember
remembering only what to forget
A hypnotist’s oracular tongue
in a house ceasing to dream
A grift in a silk suit he held
the country’s heart with his “hollywood looks”
He counted words
daily in a different voices
memorized their bitter virtues
in the hours drunks lament
a childhood of broken mirrors
He charted maps across
a park of fallen trees
where premonitions poked
up from a gray earth
where the echoes of wrong
became right
His white hair a silk flag
his public saluted with reverence
blackened into a Tea Pot
assaulting the abstract democracy
his worshipers could no longer
drink from…He procured a girl
to bolster his innocence with faithful emotions…
His days began to winter
like his hair
into a snowfall of pigeons
on a park bench
in the dawn of 1922—San Francisco
his luck fell to its knees
in a plate of King Crabs and mistaken identities
still pawning America
little by little
into an empty room
of promises
for the price
of a lifetime
Armenia, Armenia!
Far from your red earth
my heart explodes scattering
white stones along the banks
of the Euphrates
to cover the eyes of the dead
I breathe
the fragrance of Ararat
through shoes of endless roads
and cities petrified into bitter stars
I hear my ancestors deafen
into snow
into a sudden breeze
across a desert of no return
I follow
their footsteps where blood
softens the ground
into a sea of wild flowers
I embrace
all strangers as I am a stranger
in a new land
and wings are within me
I find her absence mapped in lines on my hand.
The mirror never lets go.
I mistake my reflection for her shadow
and the trees move towards winter.
I keep her name beneath my tongue,
pace the avenues of the room
where her heartbeat echoes in the teeth
of the clock.
At the window I watch her face freeze
to the landscape, refusing to move
into the white glove of the moon.
Weeds stand erect
on the roadside
Through the squinting heat
of motel curtains
three-day stubble
of dreams close behind me
My shadow outruns me
only when I pass under a light
All these days
snapshots of the dead
in the lining of my coat
and what to show for it
My face contorts without command
My tendons like old gears grind
dry and flake away
A spider hides in my heart
sleepless working night & day
on the shelves of my spine
tending a menagerie of petrified wings
I try to name the unforeseen shadow
between words
but everything around
me grows smaller…
an empty boat on a silken sea
My memory is a cloud
through which the rain falls
on the edges of insomnia
Everything I consume
makes me thinner
During morning hours
he comes across the desert of my bed
his smile drips with tiny bones
his whispers offer everything but love
Standing in winter’s doorway
the Magician
does the same trick
over and over—-
he shakes an empty hand. . .
The Jack of Hearts recites
a sonnet without moving his lips
The deaf hang upside down
and ring like bells
A butterfly turns
darkness into a rainbow
Colored scarves dance
in a halo around the moon
A woman’s belly swells
with the song of a child. . .
and
he shakes the empty hand
he shakes the empty hand
Absence points me like a compass
through streets
where memory prowls the air
to keep the dark from dream
night seeks each muscle
a constant companion
between the sheets
I’m awakened at dawn
surprised to find my poems
roosting in the window
calling the wind to inhale their sail
My voice retreats into echoes
only stones understand
At noon I twist like a weather vane
over a blue dance floor
a man growing older
refolding the shape of his life
into the glass of the sea
The sun slows
and the boat begins
to drift as I take form
I guess no one
ever let’s anything go
without a fight
The warm tropical winds have finally
pushed a high pressure system
over the valley and suddenly
the idleness of February and March
shatter into telegraph rain
Weeding, spraying, planting, tying and suckering,
irrigating, tractoring under the ghost of the Great Bear
awakening
bumping his head
in the dark cave of stars
And each moring
through his transcendental cave
pokes the eyes of the Sun
woken earlier
on the gossip of birds
sitting in the black/blue
notes or a morning prayer
North coming
the sweetness of orange blossoms
cool evenings and summer mornings
Along the road
dawn pushes
through the orchard
barns fade red
through crooks of oak
An old man dawdles
in turnips forgetting his age
A cauldron sun nets the far hills
where vineyards roll down
into the machinery of earth
and night endures tireless faces
heated under the dead lake
of an enameled moon
Spiders weave webs
among the small fortunes of flowers
thinning the unsettled hills of suburbia
eating the dust of heaven
in corners that go nowhere
Under the city’s cinematic skies
rackets of labor drum
in a sandstone dusk
cold washes of beer
harbor the air of swamp coolers
Men line boulevards
lowering their hats and hands
like secret agents
Trees talk to air
and children wave ragged coats
to ships that go by
pulling the horizon behind them
Without hesitation something visible
shatters to the floor like a truth
waiting to be picked up and eaten
I imagine a wife
small farm
a cow full of milk
all day in the field
in the hive where a queen
in triumph directs the wind
pouring in overhead
Clouds edge the world
Birds on imaginary winds
with some vague urgency
of direction press forward
into rhythms of boredom
Their wings refuse to move
and the clock’s silence
is a white tablet hidden
beneath punctual tongues
Leaving this wonderland
is so hard
I lose everything
to dark bags of crows
trailing behind me
and their dreams are not
strong enough to endure
the distance between
breath and departure
Every passage is fossilized
Squalls of light perch like small packages
on a winter clothesline with bitter tongues
The shape of things to come
twists in the wind like a hanged man
Wearing through what I can not wee
each day dissolves
into fragments upon a butcher’s block
dragging me into its trance
I begin work
my terrors knotted
around my neck
like conquests
The road that has dragged me
this far still has my grin
on the bottom of its shoe
I collapse
like a puzzle
to fitted anyway
I choose.
Machines of war
shed their parts
and the world goes dark.
Threadbare on the outskirts,
a child bites knuckles,
finds no blood,
fills his stomach with cold fire,
hardens lips,
knots his throat into a truth–
a revelation.
Women on street corners
gather themselves
into bouquets of seedless sunflowers.
Someone is walking ahead of himself
waving his ragged coat to ships that go by
on the sea of his loneliness
Darkness unfolds an apricot sun
chilling edges into the color of brass
My expectations simmer
into tongues of dust
arranging themselves
into last night’s ashes
The sun erupts
with bleeding hands
I shrink from a day’s work
like a match that won’t light
The roads all came back
bringing with them
the gray weather of old coats
A flammable moon
wrinkles the landscape
into blacks and whites
Winter wanders in
on the breath of an empty page
From an old photograph
I listen to a black man
play clarinet to crows
silhouetted into musical notes
between telephone wires
My feet turn the earth
as I try to keep my head
from the wind’s inevitable noose
I count my failures
like loose change
or prayer beads,
reciting the liturgy
of empty spoons
and methods of sin
that are unexplained seeds
I would rather feed
to pigeons on a cold day,
listening to the wind
scissors through a cathedral
of dry leaves and over dark tables
of freshly plowed earth.
We cling so fiercely,
sacked in our flesh,
shapes who do not
own our shapes.
Black night.
I leave a foot in the door.
Dawn.
Children hold out their arms
to the slow return of light,
the wind, and whatever is coming
whatever is at hand.
I step outside
and inhale the earth
with its blue echoes.
I lift an orphan
from a crowd of crows
and carry her like an urn
of sweet water.
In the distance
the brown rhythms
of farm workers hunch
in a field of flowers
gather the last light
into the basket
of their arms.
I am worn from the inside
like a pocket. Wandering
in circles, I make dancers
of the birds,
weaving the wind
with wings and words
that refuse to shake
the earth from their skins.
Foot beats on the street
where memory hums to itself
on wet tires and in the dark rooms
of empty pockets where voices
slow through a sea of fogged windows
and into the next world.
Awakened, I crouch in a city of dry leaves,
hunched and hungry, unhurried, and drinking air.
An electrical fever of streetlights yellows
the weather; hours run like ink
into a hole beneath my feet.
The sun bullies up like a battered fighter, balancing
on the dull patience of a razor. This is how it goes
day to day; shadows sink into pavement, and the sky,
stiff as iron, is a knotted sheet each hand grapples for.
One day lends itself to the next. Workmen line boulevards
like prayer beads, awaiting the final justice
their lives have struggled to become. Above them the city rises
and the word is made flesh before the dust of day
settles like a prophet into the pit of my throat.
I bicycle winds whose echoes
mock silence with sawdust smiles. This is how it goes
in a life where love wakes behind doors it does not recognize,
tapping out random rhythms of loneliness
that sweep one hour into another. All around us
the landscape holds up straw arms and sings,
believing hands that once held stars
always lead to heaven.
To Donna
Where shadows fold one by one across a seamless sky,
I wait in the doorway for a new year
frozen by the wheels of the factory clock.
Wind whitens my ears into porcelain seashells
with words that are no longer necessary;
a promise drifts up in yesterday’s ashes
from the bottom of a 50 gallon drum;
I flip a coin in a climate that remains
fixed, foreign, and under glass.
Punctually, I desert any miracles by midday
for those less fortunate, and empty my pockets
slowly into the hands of a snowman.
I pack each reflection
balancing the horizon
as the invisible cold
warms slowly my face
from an endless field of poppies
I hide in the darkness
of your shadow
My arms reaching
into the distance of your sleep
Fingers walk along
the white rapids of sheets
surrounding the lazy freedom
of your body
I bend like paper
to ink this moment we are breathing
And in this moment
I find possibilities in the landscape
as we get older
like a farmer luminous at dawn’s light
knowing the waters in the furrows of his field
will last a lifetime
The broken stairs rise
for the moon to step
as you turned
and walked away
And there is little
to remember
among the omens
looking for your shape
among the broken hands
of statues holding
schedules of trains
in their timeless palms
I look for your likeness
in the frozen current
underwater where winter
swims up to catch its breath
My name disappears
whispering through cracks
in the wall
I never understood this hunger
diminishing life from its roots
like pages torn from a book
like the heart of a star
growing smaller
as I grow near
I have often dreamt
myself awake and bothersome
like dust in your eye
listening for the stale note
that calls my name
each morning from a doorway
that isn’t there
I know places
where cities of the heart
create themselves into the hours
and addictions of a day.
I know outside each door
a precipice waits
holdings its breath,
humbling feet and hands
to the fragrance
of what is unspoken.
Winter sinks into an unmade bed
unfastening her dark highway of hair
The last apples shiver like stars
in a sea of skeletal trees.
“Come,” said the Reaper,
“My hands are cold
and the world is still.”
Is he really
looking for diamonds
or just the next town
That was yesterday
I watch
how the earth
closes like a hand
around him
and leaves no trace
He shapes life
into the soles
of his shoes
whispering
to the road
like a pair of dice
Your delicate wingmarks
tell how days are made,
until the last one vanishes
into shadowy weather.
Your hair embroiders
the wind with kind words
and yesterday’s promises
hang by a thread
under the dark fist of a spider.
I touch the branches of a tree
like the keys of a piano,
arousing the leaves
into a green dance
in the palm of your hand.
As my words unlock
the letters of your name,
we eclipse
between folded hands
unable to hold
the dream we
keep reaching for.
My hands grumble with bread,
and I wonder if all children
disappearing between
the yellow lines of morning
go to the same place.
When it’s dark, feet bare as my own,
move towards a heaven
where water slips through my fingers
and love empties out of me
into wrinkled dunes of desert.
My tongue is dust. I answer
questions with it, so all can see
what it is made of.
Something invisible falls to the floor
to remind me of a way back. My legacy
weathers into fingerprints of sand,
and eyes burn a hole in the dark
that leads to the next dawn.
I hasten from a life of quick endings
learning to cultivate
what others leave behind.
My hands hold wind nightly,
like a prayer, expecting
no miracle or god to appear,
only the breath
I will be allowed to keep.
The day grows white with black looks.
A phantom wind bandages
the mouths of broken windows
with newspapers and leaves.
I dispatch messages, but only grass listens
before claiming a part of me.
Between breakfast headlines
and a bowl of grand illusions
I forgot how much I loved you
as you walked among the purple laughter
of thistles in a landscape where nothing
lasts forever. Here our words are unclouded;
they go on dancing after we have gone,
distilling dreams from the ashes of disbelievers.
Here among fallen school yards,
voices of children find our names
one by one
becoming their own.
From the orchard silhouettes
of night run from the dawn
The bat covers itself with wings
upside down
a dark fruit never picked
Voices from the field shift
from north to south
In the east a silver incandescence
in the dark begins to filter blue
Mountains appear
like ancient castles
in a vapor of blackness
Dreams ghost into high clouds
and preparations for morning
untied shoes and eyes shut with dream
Voices out of empty socks
hatch into visibility
Outside
lights fade into a blue wall
and the smell of coffee
on each breath
replaces a question
scratched into the path
of each calloused palm
I turn
to the silent growing
of seeds
no one hears
Under the rind of moon
a foghorn raises
the sun
to stuff me into my socks
twelve hours a day
leaving no proof
in the yard
Across the street a suit goes to work
In his pocket his final possession
gulps its breath
a morsel of faith
rises like steam
clutching a kingdom of keys
…at the curb a get a way car idles
I surrender to the passion
Between two branches
Listening to a flame
Choke in a lake of wax.
The sun sets on
What I have left of life.
A child glitters
From midnight windows
Behind my smile
The hard edge of hunger
Goes from my plate
To his and we pick the street clean.
I am an accomplice
To gulls, beating their wings,
Refusing to go south.
I watch the path in front of me
Vanish among the dry words
Of escaping leaves.
I think of you
bent over unlaced shoes
looking for your name
over a desert of daydreams.
Daily you devour
the distance you become.
“Dead, dead, dead, I’m dead,”
you said, humbled by glasswired windows
and a a world where earth and sky
have suddenly disappeared into thin air.
I watched you like a blindman search
for the fingerprints of a door
and come up empty. For a moment,
your eyes remembered the wholeness
of things before foghorns
evaporated a lifetime in a wink
of sound. Then you shriveled
into darkness, the moon’s
mute eye
like a shadow at dawn.
Loneliness is a conversation
hidden in his pocket
with letters of the Armenian alphabet.
Zaven distills September’s fruit
into decaying bouquets. His large hands
tremble with ingredients, a lost recipe
turning water into wine.
Where the laughter
of naked feet and dust create an ancient
village in the orange waters of an afternoon sun,
Zaven sings like a mother who buries her children young.
“Soon tomorrow will be yesterday,
and I will still remember,” he recites
to sleeping birds.
His words dance like feathers
in a prehistoric wind.
Where stone fences merge
into a wilderness of suburbia,
grandfather leans on the shadow
of a plunged spade, embracing
unchartered passages of wind.
Balancing thinly, he weaves
like needle and thread
through heads of cabbage,
heart-shaped tomatoes,
and green flags of young celery;
he is an ancient tongue
among deaf ears; he steps forward
before the day gathers
into a mortal echo
of uneaten fruit,
sowing himself among
the dark hands of water.
Walk away from glacial echoes
of tin cups
and star-shaped staircases
where second
crowd behind you
like pinpoints and periods
Inside my skull
a wind gallops overhead
pushing for an opening
like moths
beneath a rafter of obsidian
Through empty streets a new language
discovers with haste
identities forged in blue ink
Across vacant fields
winter covers itself
in white lace
Shadows approach
I emerge slowly
an alphabet of silence
clinging to the breaths of icicles
in
the cold gray
storm/clouds
whale like
smile some fever
of blue sky
two coins wheel
from a torn pocket
down the road
the sound a child hears
there is a north wind
that freezes the eye
into pinpoints
a fever knots the body
like a balloon
and crosstown
the factory whistle
blows early
silhouettes stitch the darkness
with quick needles of light
in a parade so routine
life wonders
if night can weave a cocoon
to warm the blood
until morning
now street lamps and neon
kick on, blinking momentarily,
with steady juice
buzzing magically
through a thousand wires
. . .I bury my fists into my jacket
frozen they sleep like stones
my breath steams the windows
where the broken hands of fathers
open empty tables, and the quiet whispers
of mothers nourish the dreams
of children with winter fires
and Spring
sometimes I am a desert
and wait for rain,
or lost travelers
stopping for sleep
I lived underground during the 1950’s
in the wake of my father’s habitual
and unknown rage to weave himself
through the stagnant air creating an alphabet
of icicles from the eave of his wooden tongue–
He struggled in a web of private conversations
and kept us silent with threats and abandonment–
orphaned to invisibility where dreams survived
on the urgency of boredom
‘
…..And being 10 years old I would slip
like a lizard into a pool of shadows
finding a pathway from his dark window
down the yellowy fragrance of a lemon tree
studded with thorns
and into my grandmother’s backyard garden
where imaginary winds dusted with sunlight
lingered beneath a veil of star-faced jasmine–
I listened to the growing of things
whose boundaries opened into wilderness
where the city stopped and farmland
spilled like ink over the landscape for miles
Screen doors swung easy like clockwork
in a trusting wind which seemed strange
on a planet where nightly
blue-collared fathers knee-deep in backyards
dug bomb-shelters after work and on weekends
with nightmare delusions of reddened skies
swallowed by mushroomed clouds
Families struggled sinking
silently into a lifetime of expectations
Their other selves left to keep appearances
a mirage of green lawns and a perfect death
No one really slept!
Buried up to their necks in schedules and telephones
watching children disappear into a blank margin
of no return …….across an outfield of timeless summers
forged with long hours and hunched backs
looking for work and the American grail
even on Sundays before dinners in copper-tinted rooms
tanned by the oily seasoning of garlic and lamb
where windows hung like portraits of hunger from far away lands
at 13 I heard schoolmates point in slow motion
at the Armenian in me and the invisibility that was visible
in a Kingdom where dreams survive on long tables of diplomacy
and reality speaks from the splintered lips of baseball bats
threatening the heroes of this poem
to bleach their dark skins white
…They called Armenians “Fresno Indians”
with our hollowed eyes and and eagle-beaked noses
but my grandmother said
“They called us starving black Armenians….first”
Those whose promises
promised nothing
in a land that genocided its natives
with no reservation
We were no strangers to genocide
fugitives of dust
we blurred into borders and brown-faced hills
to wait like grass for winter’s first rain
We survived the delirium of previous lives
as if some god had forgotten us
and ordered our children to bleed
our earth to be bitten and bled
We embraced life without a tear
our skins emerging from an undergrowth of syllables
unfolding from the simple grace all miracles grow
……..The ranches I knew as a boy have turned to salt
and winter like my grandmother’s unbunned white hair
haunts the ruins of broken mirrors
in empty stations looking for the river back to eden
praying for a melody on the green side of childhood . . . .
She assumes what is necessary for the moment
to shape what remains after death
having liveda life on the edge
now sits at an empty table
Her hands drink a headful of bad dreams
and everything that she was before
commands the wind
to sing in Armenian!
To Larry Levis
Street after street
I keep your death
between my teeth
its iced wing thaws into a sound
that turns a shoulder West
and chooses not to stop
The road calls
like a woman lifting
her arms to welcome the future
with an unbreakable embrace
Under candlelight you touch
her skin with swollen palms
stained black from picking grapes
in the San Joaquin
where halos of dust
hover from light to dark
until there are no shadows
from the heat’s trance
Here under green waves of grape leaves
we snapped rubied clusters
between thumb and knife
rescuing moments that were
fermenting with age
until words were no longer necessary
I catch your shadow ringed by stones
stepping from the vineyard
of your father’s farm
Thin shoulders shrug and pinch a smile
where the worn spots of earth
slowly fill in the roots of your breath
Overhead flutters of white doves
burst from a nearby barn
where I see you leaning from sunlight
your dark eyes child-like
and lamenting
Wildflowers, star thistles,
and late afternoon soften
under a child’s eye. Observer
she mimics sounds
of lifting birds, where rivers
vapor among the dark
and hunched backs of mountains.
Winter thaws in the mouths
of butterflies and bees
caught in frantic trance
they dance,
piercing
the faces of blossoms.
When stars turn to clear water
the child lets the water
carry her reflection past deep pools,
rock islands, trees arched
over a white passage thin enough
for a shadow to cross.
In her hair grow landscapes
of orphaned birds
too late to catch the wind.
She plants each
at dawn in the field
behind my eyes,
where horses
raise long necks
calling in darkness;
And the bending of the grass
Stills long enough for a portrait.
Life goes on
between scattered papers
fixed clocks and hands
with no smiles
Life goes into
separate moments
patiently waiting
for the hour
fictions are unmasked
with human touch
Down avenues of nightmare
the future sheds
its skin in public
when you least expect it
and a universe
passes
between us
without a word
The wind draws your laughter
between the branches
of a Judas tree
and waits for night to fall
my arms carve a circle
around cold shoulders
and the day falls into the sun
escaping shadows
honed by clock hands and light bulbs
A door opens and the world
walks in with lost feet
the rest are burning
like frightened children
nothing gets through
the hole in my eye
silhouettes seize names
along the brows of curtained windows
where betrayal is held
like a pair of dice
in the palm of a hand
clicking
as they roll
a coded testament
of what is to come
From a ballroom of empty chairs
I drift beneath watery hours
and unbuttoned passages
of smoke and jazz
stretched out before me
on notes of neon air
on the lips of those who drink laughter
from the mouth of a saxophone
and drum wings over quicksilver streets
Sparks leap from the tin can ashes of a nightmare
amusing children who crouch like spiders on sidewalks
listening to street messiahs
hallelujah in the early hours
reciting be-bop notes under the white lip
of a half-eaten moon