The Way It Was

you flow through the world

red earth, bicycle, dust

others flow alongside you

you intersect, wheels brush

elbows collide, one yells

one laughs, one pedals hard

rounds a bend, climbs a hill

you close your eyes, the voices

louder now, grit on your hands

pine needles, sap, an acorn

you peel & taste, you’re a crow

you’re a possum, a sand dune

a pocketful of bread crusts

lint-coated raisins, girl

Questions of Travel
by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

— For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

aren't waterfalls yet,

in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

they probably will be.

But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Where should we be today?

Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

in this strangest of theatres?

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life

in our bodies, we are determined to rush

to see the sun the other way around?

The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

inexplicable and impenetrable,

at any view,

instantly seen and always, always delightful?

Oh, must we dream our dreams

and have them, too?

And have we room

for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity

not to have seen the trees along this road,

really exaggerated in their beauty,

not to have seen them gesturing

like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

— Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

of disparate wooden clogs

carelessly clacking over 

a grease-stained filling-station floor.

(In another country the clogs would all be tested.

Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

— A pity not to have heard

the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

who sings above the broken gasoline pump

in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

three towers, five silver crosses.

— Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

blurr'dly and inconclusively,

on what connection can exist for centuries

between the crudest wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear

and, careful and finicky,

the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

— Never to have studied history in

the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.

— And never to have had to listen to rain

so much like politicians' speeches:

two hours of unrelenting oratory

and then a sudden golden silence

in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?"

When You Were Small

we played with stuffies — all alive

sentient, personalities, speech

when I last visited, you had given

nearly every stuffy away

you handed me a small box

inside were four bunnies & a sloth

oh, Slothie, what a favorite you were

along with Moosie & Alice the penguin

& her baby Pinky, Floppy Dog, Kitty

the terrible dog that barked

Aurora the otter, Buttery the turtle

pink & brown Teddies

one bunny called Rescue Bunny

because when we unpacked

my mother’s rabbit collection

he hid in the paper folds

he was nearly thrown away

after you left I would arrange them

across the mattress on the floor

where we both lay until you fell asleep

the sign of your falling asleep a snore

when snores stopped, you were gone
even asleep you moaned

& held me to keep me with you

when your grasp eased I could go

thrashing small child able to fill a bed

& now you sleep with none of us

steady breath, soft skin, body heat

now you’re there & I’m here

row of bunnies on your bed upstairs

Slothie seated against the pillows

today is the first day of fourth grade

you & Daddy will ride your bikes

you’ll tell him where he must turn around

you’ll arrive as you insist, alone

My Mother Looked Out in the Morning
by William Stafford

"Announced by an ax, Daniel Boone

opened the door" — the wild ones you told,
looking out from the timid person you were!

All was hard, clear sunlight, or else

dark shadow. You had never found
the way to live either one or the other,

But you always looked out, the fence

faithful, always to extend and
mean the understanding again,

And then the inner surprises,

the result of your wonder: a miracle! —
you were you, you were you, you were you.

Reversals live now, indoors and out,

where your children carry that house
and others, and are wise. You were simple —

Your stories ran wild: "Listen, Billy —
imagine the world. Make me real. Be my child."

680 Is a California Freeway

680 undocumented workers jailed by ICE in Mississippi

680 people don’t go home when their shift ends

680 people separated from family — partners, parents, children

workers at poultry factories, some of them chicken sexers?

how can this make anyone happy?

600 ICE workers uproot 680 poultry workers for lack of a piece of paper

680 more people in immigration-related custody

land of the free if you’re white & male & wear a uniform & carry a gun

home of the masculine ego, we kill Indians, we reject others

makes me grateful that three ancestor uncles were shot & scalped

although two out of the three had already fathered a family

I’m sure Indians shot & scalped women too

they also took them home & made them Indians

better or worse? is this one better?

or is this one? about the same?

Eugenio Montejo:

Only in isolation do we succeed in glimpsing the part of ourselves
which is intransferrible, and maybe, paradoxically, that is the only part

worth communicating to others. . . .

Lautreamont’s well-known aphorism: poetry should be made by all. The vast body of folklore seems to confirm the triumph of such multiple anonymous contributions. In this process, words become polished by rolling back and forth between people, like stones in a river, and the ones which endure turn out in the end to be the ones most valued by the collective soul. All that is true, with the proviso that we don’t forget that at every instant there existed a real person, that they were never mere teams, however numerous we believe these makers to be. Yes, poetry should be made by all, but fatally written by one alone.

White Birds

today the trees are filled with white birds

snowy egrets, great egrets — they’re all

great — two directly across the lake

though it might be they’re magnolia

another tree holds six or eight

wait, I’ll get the glasses — these two

are magnolia, & one’s a gap giving sky

two are silver fixtures on poles — east

though, in the wide branching yellow-green

pine the birds stand, not egrets —

prehistoric — one head down preening

two hunched backs, two dreaming

today’s birds are five wood storks

The Rooster’s Song

by Eugenio Montejo

                               to Adriano Gonzalez Leon

The song is outside the rooster:

it’s falling drop by drop into his body

now where he sleeps in the tree.

At night it falls, doesn’t stop falling

from the dark between his veins and wings.

Uncontainable, the song fills the rooster

as if he were a deep pitcher:

fills his feathers, his crest, his spurs

until its enormous cry overflows and rings out,

spills without pause across the world.

After the fanfare fades

silence encloses.

Once again the song is outside

scattered to the dark wind.

Inside the rooster are only entrails and sleep

and a small drop that falls to deep night

silently, to the tic-tac of stars.

— translated by Peter Boyle & Carol Peters