Useless Bay, August
I saw the twin towers in the American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, copyright 1985. Black and white lower Manhattan skyline illustrating cityscape. Strangely, I felt something. Probably just homesickness for New York, that cityscape I lay claim to with its altered crown, though my attachment is mostly at street level. The fruit carts in Chinatown – loose heaps of lychees, their brown and puzzled skin. I was on my way to look up compassion: “n. The deep feeling of sharing the suffering of another, together with the inclination to give aid or show support or to show mercy.”
:: ::
into the voices from the sea by which I mean across the oil fields away from the sky toward the voices into the weapons away from the sea into my city with all the unknowing into my hatred away from my body into your body with these words from these fields with these weapons away from the voices into the altars towards the screen
to your lover towards your lover into your lover across my lover with all intentions beyond my tooth into your eye above all the bodies besides the breathing next to the singing away from the signing away from the singing across the fields into your city with our streets with my not knowing with my sheltered from your shattered into our gaping into our gagging into our bodies into our words into
:: ::
After that, it being hit by a car, I held the swallow in my hands and felt more immediately sorrowful for its death than for all the people dying every day as reported on the news. But I do often think about the young Koreans hostages captured in Afghanistan last month, those Christian women who thought they were right to travel into a war zone in order to convert…an overripe fruit bleeds – a fish’s gill slices – a small bird shuts its eye… American missionaries swarmed Korea in the 19th century and I could start the unending litany of all the ways Christianity has fucked the world over but
:: ::
and all that raveled this
peculiar light roused
this amended body less
fish I gape wide-mouthed
sudden sun perplexing rest
at the pelvis yet at the wrist
:: ::
I do often think about surviving imprisonment – how I would save one matchstick every day, and afterwards writing a book, remembering each day from each matchstick. This is a story I heard once. There is too much romantic in me but I have always been afraid of torture. My government held Jose Padilla in solitary confinement for three years and also tortured him, this cracking his mind wide open like a possum’s body smeared across a country road.
this amended body less
at the pelvis yet at the wrist
into the folding-cum-error
a field and painted mirror
I do not watch movies with rape scenes and torture scenes but this is a true fact. Finally, the scientists discovered that fish feel pain. Their being clubbed on the head by boys out for fun. This, they feel. So I am getting clubbed on the head, gills pierced by air. Fishes do bleed. Bleeding into another, loosening the sense of I –
