Frank Lima

Patchouli

it’s only that I think of you

as a wagon

or a mule with legs that

point to the stars

or a soft language

waiting to stroke a mirror

in a swamp

everyday is a new instrument

lavishly completed

like a part-time cane

the language of night is a prosperous sheet

full of delicate assumptions

the language of night is fragile

like a warm net full of rumors

I want to give you a box of signatures

that include all my perfect moments

Frank Lima

Gerard Malanga, LeRoi Jones, David Shapiro, Bill Berkson, Frank Lima, 

and Frank O’Hara at Wagner College, 1962. Photo: by William T. Wo

Questions and Answers

My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: 
We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of 
Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. 
For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths 

When they are to express something unutterable. 
But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a 
Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, 
The boundless ones in moments of doubts. 

If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor, 
Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more 
Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day 
Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that 'we must write 

Every day,' but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will
Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most 
Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you. 
So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart, 

For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest 
Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of 
Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last 
Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on 

Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries
To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some 
Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange 
Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was 

What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the 
Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of 
Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without 
Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart. 

8.3.03

Frank Lima

    

Wynn ChamberlainPoets Dressed and Undressed': 

Joe Brainard, Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima ( standing ).

BRIGHT BLUE SELF-PORTRAIT 

I thank the spiders' webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with 
Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction 
Between night and day or love and hate. 
No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to 

Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them 
Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they 
Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French 
Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate 

the forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming 
Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There 
Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the 
Little red schoolhouse where all this began. 

Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have. 
I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I 
Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen 
Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west. 

Don't forget, my early life will be yours, too, 
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice, 
The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss 
We leave behind.

Frank Lima

 

Haiku

I

The lights are out

The cats are hungry

The room is full of gangsters

II

The dishes are dirty

The icebox is empty

I dream of celery and a compass

III

The roof is upstairs

The window next door

A guitar in the shower

IV

The hours disappear in my room

Where is my blue pistol

The door-god is knocking.

 

Frank Lima

 “01.03.2000,”

I found the words in a box and became recklessly enamored with

Them. As I watched, they blew smoke rings into my sacramental

Face. I was a blind old man, unzipping my life before them and

Trembling at the touch of cold marble. My fingers were once wild

Pigeons perched on the statues and I would sacrifice my soul for the

Erotic stillness of yesterday. The words would arrive through the nail

Holes in the century wearing the flickering faces of the past. I fit myself

Into anyone that will have me, who will shoot at me with the hours of a

Wheelchair. When will I stop looking over my shoulder in the subway?

I collected the tickets at the door, and made it perfectly clear that 

Writing is as lonely as a pile of discarded shoes. Heaven is wingless and

Far away and there are no books that mention your name or mine.

Frank Lima

Alex Katz. Frank and Sheyla Lima (1964)

With popping antennae ringlets

                    you looked like

                        a praying mantis

                          cold cream & turban

                                science fiction gleam

                   as real

          as cancer

            spreading

               stuffed-tits-and-rag-guts

                          yawning

                            brillo-crotch

                               that stunk

                                   all over me

             playing

                 Johnny-on-the-pony

                                   on me

                                                indoors

Terrance Hayes

Maybe I was too hard on Derek Walcott.
In preschool while I lay on a nylon cot
In a church basement staring at God knows
What, I was not asleep when the old deacon
Snuck downstairs to let the two sisters
Watching us lay hands against his advances.
His crown was haloed in gray, but eyebrows
And eyelashes swirled black as calligraphy
Around his gaze. “Cut it out,” I’d hear the girl
With plump, plum lips say. He wore a silver
Bracelet, he spoke with a radiant sway,
Everywhere he was known to pray a prayer
So blood-filled & persuasive some listeners
Were said to fever, kneel, beg, break, levitate.

Terrance Hayes

AMERICAN SONNET FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN

Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye Lavette,
Blowfish, briar bushes, Bubbas, Buckras,
Archie Bunkers, bullhorns, bullwhips, bullets,
All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lillies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.

Richard Blanco

Como tu/Like you/Like me

 {for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation's immigrants}

^{. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .}

^{. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .}

^{—Roque Dalton, Como tú}

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

Richard Blanco

Maybe

             for Craig 

Maybe it was the billboards promising 
paradise, maybe those fifty-nine miles 
with your hand in mine, maybe my sexy 
roadster, the top down, maybe the wind 
fingering your hair, sun on your thighs 
and bare chest, maybe it was just the ride 
over the sea split in two by the highway 
to Key Largo, or the idea of Key Largo. 
Maybe I was finally in the right place 
at the right time with the right person. 
Maybe there'd finally be a house, a dog 
named Chu, a lawn to mow, neighbors, 
dinner parties, and you forever obsessed 
with crossword puzzles and Carl Young, 
reading in the dark by the moonlight, 
at my bedside every night. Maybe. Maybe 
it was the clouds paused at the horizon, 
the blinding fields of golden sawgrass, 
the mangrove islands tangled, inseparable 
as we might be. Maybe I should've said 
something, promised you something, 
asked you to stay a while, maybe. 

Richard Blanco

 

El Florida Room

Not a study or a den, but El Florida 
as my mother called it, a pretty name 
for the room with the prettiest view 
of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up 
against the windows, the tepid breeze 
laden with the brown-sugar scent 
of loquats drifting in from the yard. 

Not a sunroom, but where the sun 
both rose and set, all day the shadows 
of banana trees fan-dancing across 
the floor, and if it rained, it rained 
the loudest, like marbles plunking 
across the roof under constant threat 
of coconuts ready to fall from the sky. 

Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where 
I sat alone for hours with butterflies 
frozen on the polyester curtains 
and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels, 
clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed 
blue and gray, gazing from behind 
the glass doors of the wall cabinet. 

Not a tv room, but where I watched 
Creature Feature as a boy, clinging 
to my brother, safe from vampires 
in the same sofa where I fell in love 
with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo 
watching westerns, or pitying women 
crying in telenovelas with my Abuela. 

Not a family room, but the room where 
my father twirled his hair while listening 
to eight-tracks of Elvis, read Nietzsche 
and Kant a few months before he died, 
where my mother learned to dance alone 
as she swept, and I learned salsa pressed 
against my Tía Julia's enormous breasts. 

At the edge of the city, in the company 
of crickets, beside the empty clothesline, 
telephone wires, and the moon, tonight 
my life is an old friend sitting with me 
not in the living room, but in the light 
of El Florida, as quiet and necessary 
as any star shining above it.

Richard Blanco

 

Mango Number 61

Pescado grande was number 14, while pescado chico, was number 12; dinero, money, was number 10. This was la charada, the sacred and obsessive numerology my abuela used to predict lottery numbers or winning trifectas at the dog track. The grocery stores and pawn shops on Flagler street handed out complementary wallet-size cards printed with the entire charada, numbers 1 through 100: number 70 was coco, number 89 was melón and number 61 was mango. Mango was Mrs. Pike, the last americana on the block with the best mango tree in the neighborhood. Mamá would coerce her in granting us picking rights–after all, los americanos don’t eat mango, she’d reason. Mango was fruit wrapped in brown paper bags, hidden like ripening secrets in the kitchen oven. Mango was the perfect house warming gift and a marmalade dessert with thick slices of cream cheese at birthday dinners and Thanksgiving. Mangos, watching like amber cat’s eyes. Mangos, perfectly still in their speckled maroon shells like giant unhatched eggs. Number 48 was cucaracha, number 36 was bodega, but mango was my uncle’s bodega, where everyone spoke only loud Spanish, the precious gold fruit towering in tres-por-un-peso pyramids. Mango was mango shakes made with milk, sugar and a pinch of salt–my grandfather’s treat at the 8th street market after baseball practice. Number 60 was sol, number 18 was palma, but mango was my father and I under the largest shade tree at the edges of Tamiami park. Mango was abuela and I hunched over the counter covered with the Spanish newspaper, devouring the dissected flesh of the fruit slithering like molten gold through our fingers, the nectar cascading from our binging chins, abuela consumed in her rapture and convinced that I absolutely loved mangos. Those messy mangos. Number 79 was cubano–us, and number 93 was revolución, though I always thought it should be 58, the actual year of the revolution–the reason why, I’m told, we live so obsessively and nostalgically eating number 61’s, mangos, here in number 87, América.

 

Ilya Kaminsky

 

Translation is the art of failure
-Umberto Eco

Poetry is what is lost in translation
-Frost

Poetry is what is found in translation
-Octavio Paz

Every great age of poetry is the great age of translation
-Pound

Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated.
-Shakespeare

Alice Notley

 

Sonnet

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,

Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic

Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.

He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write

And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic

Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.

She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered

He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation

Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills

Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's

               heart fluttered

And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,

               "But I still have some of the pills."

Clark Coolidge

Legacy of the Plug
 
The pup is gone    want an amoeba?
or an orange thing?    a “schizophrenic”?
it’s marginal but we’ll play along
the same vocabulary only fun this time

I saw the roaring rush past the clock towers
not even the starlings tried to hold on
a breach of flying objects just the same
to end it all you drop    understand?

Tape ripped from the sides of scrapers with resounding smack
they developed special lamps from the building fund
after supper we made a little model to help us
think it’s all vanilla or nougat at this point?

These light boxes kept on strafing our neighborhood
father came out all struck dumb from the bushes
he was a replacement we realized after
the habitual bulks had been hauled away at last

We made our peace with the director of the piece
a professional masochist named Rama Lama Dingdong
then the credits caught fire lighting the beach
goodbye to anything within reach

Clark Coolidge

The Plush of a Negative Cat

Blackened fingers on the sterling rug
and you'll find frottage by the stump
it's Hans Dustin and too many other Hoffmans
all gaga or got lemon verbena mainly
imagine all this waiting on one tortured sickness
zoomer babies without the frame
the title the madness in a boobie's eyes
scusa? too much rosemary in the window
sparks from Saratoga the scriptures snowing
I'll never be able to read without turpentine
without stopping to dry my eyes
Saint Bartholomew and the Oobleck standing
hard by Barstow and still pushing

Clark Coolidge

 

Blues for Alice

When you get in on a try you never learn it back

umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world

in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail

bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without

travail of the tale, the one you longing live

and singing burn

 

It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out

or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .

and other riskier small day and fain would be

of the soap a sky dares

 

                                               but we remand,

that we a clasp of the silence you and I, all of

tiny sphering rates back, I say to told wall, back

and back and leave my edge, and add an L

 

Night is so enclosed we’ll never turn its page

its eye, can be mine will be yours, to see all the people

the underneath livid reaching part and past of the lying buildings

the overreacher stops and starts, at in his head, in

in her rhythm

that knowledge is past all of us, so we flare and tap

and top it right up, constant engage and flap in on

keeping pace, our whelming rift, and soil and gleam

and give back the voice, like those eary dead

 

Step down off our whelm lessons and shortly fired

enter the bristle strum of Corrosion Kingdom

where the last comes by first ever ring, every

race through that tunnel of sun drop and pencil

in the margins of a flare, of higher wish than dare,

the stroked calmings of a line will spin and chime

in blue quicks of a dream blues, the chores

of those whispering gone crenulations

 

To meet a care is to dial redeem

and we limp in the time sound balms

so out of kilter is my name in the sun, and I win

in the moon and you sing in that other spelling of win

the way a blue is never singular

Clark Coolidge

                                       watercolor on paper by Edith Schloss

But It Says Nothing

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet

as if to say nothing moves me. Then

there is the chair. And one speaks of

the chair sitting at the table.

Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.

The object is a piece of thing before. One

shifts in a chair and opens the talk.

And the time it says nothing one moves.

The table is too long as the wall. Not

a thing but it stays and one opens

as a mouth will begin. Speaking of

the table, nothing but to avoid that of

the wall. One could return over and over

to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.

Least ways it says nothing. And the

thing is, it stays still before

speaking of. The object of nothing, even

speech.