*Bio adapted from Academy of American Poets. Poems used with permission. Images of Tess painted by Alfredo Arreguin.
During the Montenegrin Poetry Reading
Mira, like a white goddess, is translating
so my left ear is a cave near Kotor
where the sea lashes and rakes
the iron darkness inside
the black mountains.
Young and old, the poets
are letting us know this sweltering night,
under a bridge near a river outside
Karver Bookstore at the beginning of July,
belongs to them. They
clear away debris
about politicians and personal suffering,
these gladiators of desire
and doubt, whose candor has roiled
me like a child shaking stolen beer to foam
the genie of the moment out of
its bottle. The
poets’ truth-wrought poems dragging it
out of me, that
confession--that I didn’t have children
probably because in some clear corner I knew I would have left
them
to join these poets half a world away who, in their language
that is able to break stones, have broken me open
like a melon. Instead
of children, I leave my small dog, quivering
as I touched her on the nose, to let her know it’s
me, the one who is always leaving her, yes
I’m going, and for
her I have no language with
which to reassure her I’m coming
back, no—what’s the use to pretend I’m
a good mistress to her, she who would never
leave me, she who looks for me everywhere
I am not, until I return.
I should feel guilty
but the Montenegrin poets have taken false guilt off
the table. I’ve been
swallowed by a cosmic
sneer, with an entire country behind it where
each day it occurs to them how many are still missing
in that recent past of war and havoc.
Nothing to do but shut the gate behind me
and not look back where my scent
even now is fading from the grass. Nostalgia
for myself won’t be tolerated here. I’m just a beast
who, if my dog were a person, would give me a pat
on the head and say something stupid like: Good dog.
I
Have Never Wanted to March
or
wear an epaulet. Once I walked
in
a hometown parade to celebrate
a
salmon derby. I was seven, my hair in
pigtails,
a steel flasher strapped diagonally
across
my chest bandolier-style
(in
Catalan bandolera from banda––band
of
people–and bandoler meaning bandit).
My
black bandit boots were rubber
because
here on the flanks of the Olympics
it
always rains on our parades.
I
believe I pushed a doll buggy.
I
believe all parades, especially military
parades,
could be improved if
the
soldiers wore bandoliers made to
attract
fish,
and if each soldier pushed a doll buggy
inside
which were real-seeming babies,
their
all-seeing doll-eyes open
to
reflect the flight of birds, of balloons
escaped
from the hands of children to
hover
over the town—higher than flags, higher
than
minarets and steeples.
What
soldier could forget
collateral damage with those baby faces
locked
to their chin straps? It is
conceivable
soldiers would resist
pushing
doll buggies. Bending over
might
spoil the rigidity of their marching.
What
about a manual exhorting the patriotic
duty
of pushing doll buggies? Treatises
on
the symbolic meaning would need to be
written.
Hollywood writers might be of use.
Poets
and historians could collaborate,
reminding
the marchers of chariots, of
Trojan
horses, of rickshaws, of any wheeled
conveyance
ever pulled, pushed or driven
in
the service of humankind.
I
would like, for instance, to appear
in
the next parade as a Trojan horse. When
they
open me I’ll be seven years old.
There
will be at least seven of me
inside
me, for effect, and because it’s
a
mystical number. I won’t understand
much
about war, in any case—especially
its
good reasons. I’ll just want to be pushed
over
some border into enemy territory, and
when
no one’s thinking anything except: what
a pretty horse! I’ll throw open
myself
like
a flank and climb out, all
seven
of me, like a many-legged spider
of
myself. I’ll speak only
in
poetry, my second language, because it
is
beautifully made for exploring the miraculous
ordinary
event––in which an alchemy
of
words agrees to apprentice itself to the possible
as
it evades the impossible. Also poetry
doesn’t
pretend to know answers and speaks best
in
questions, the way children do
who
want to know everything, and don’t believe
only
what they’re told. I’ll be seven
unruly
children when they open me up,
and
I’ll invite the children of the appointed enemy
to
climb into my horse for a ride. We’ll be secret
together,
the way words are
the
moment before they are spoken—
those
Trojan horses of silence, looking for a border
to
roll across like oversized toys
manned
by serious children—until one horse
has
been pushed back and forth
with
its contraband of mutually pirated children
so
many times it will be clear to any adult watching
this
unseemly display, that enemy territory
is
everywhere when anyone’s child is at stake, when
the
language of governments is reduced to ultimatums,
when
it wants to wear epaulets
and
to march without
Its
doll buggy.
But
maybe and edict or two could be made
by
one child-ventriloquist through the mouth
of
the horse, proposing that the advent of atrocities
be
forestalled by much snorting, neighing, prancing and
tail
swishing—by long, exhausted parades
of
reciprocal child-hostages who may be
rescued
only in the language of poetry
which
insists on being lucid
and
mysterious at once, like a child’s hand
appearing
from under the tail
of
the horse, blindly waiving to make sure that anyone
lined
up along the street does not submit entirely
to
the illusion of their absence, their
ever-squandered
innocence, their hyper-responsive
minds
in which a ladybug would actually fly away,
with
only its tiny flammable wings,
to
save its children from the burning house.
