ON UTOPIA PARKWAY

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay,

from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside

to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets

I take to work. The front yard of roses —

did I write their names down correctly? —

Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale.

Q31 bus, among the words I hear are

Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated,

Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not

physically well, a poor man, arrested

on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose,

on the street, held, choked, left unconscious,

still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation

administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death,

according to the autopsy report, a homicide —

rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins,

by employees of the Agency’s contractor,

isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence

explains, but, merely, legally justified means

of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway

was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house.

He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine

on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater

he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state

set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines

the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace,

the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression

of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual.

In what place, the Federal Reserve’s

monetary spigots and banks’ access

to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce

the market’s decline — in what places, violations

of which forms of which eternal laws?

Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place?

On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike,

in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy

blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed

and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.

On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City by Sherman Alexie

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look,

look at all the history, that house

on the hill there is over two hundred years old, '

as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned

little more about American history during my few days

back East than what I expected and far less

of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older

than the corners of the house that sits

museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, '

the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? '

and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break

her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds

on my little reservation out West

and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, '

I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit

about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories

around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born

and before his grandparents' grandparents were born.

I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,

because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters

and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.'

But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden

Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted

that I thought to bring her an orange juice

back from the food car. I respect elders

of every color. All I really did was eat

my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi

and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out

The Wave After Wave is One Wave Never Tiring by Tracy K. Smith

Light atop the water

The from in the water

The afterimage of water

Standing falling risen

Over and again

Freedom is labor

To labor at oneself

To keep what is earned

To disappear reemerge

Plunging and carried

Lightness and burden

The smallest waves shingle in

Are tugged back to surge

To rise to be swallowed

And remain

They are wet in the sand

Spreading in and down

Dark center of the old stain

The wave after wave is one wave never tiring

Freedom is fearson

A nut drops onto fallen leaves

And my heart leaps

What approaches through

This ringing in the trees

And what warning does it carry

From the sea?

What time is made of - Ed Madden

The daylily, one bright bloom

out near the road: a day.
Cicada husk on the back wall,

near the leaky faucet.

A car, a wake of dust

settling across the grass,

the dry lawn.

What a blackbird sounds like,

or crickets ticking.

A crop duster measures the fields.

The buzzer on the microwave—

let it cool a bit, so he can eat it.

What a blackbird sounds like.

Four channels, maybe five—

trying to find something he’ll watch,

a cooking show, or Victory Television—

This is not the throne of rejection, this is

the throne of grace. Are you willing

to get on your knees and tell him

what your needs are?

The first cold month, I kept

a candle burning all day, a ritual.

The air outside is a scrim

of gnats at your face.

Brown water funnels into a culvert

at the road, brown water flowing out.

My father coughing, drops his cigarette,

it rolls beneath the wheelchair,

bright bloom on the carport.

What a cricket sounds like.

The daylily here, then not.

"The Chairs No One Sits In https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/51803/the-chairs-that-no-one-sits-in

"Here, Bullet": https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-14245_HERE-BULLET

https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/a-poem-for-europa

"In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa" by Ada Limon

Arching under the night sky inky with black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know, we pin quick wishes on stars. From earth, we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe, expert and evident. Still, there are mysteries below our sky: the whale song, the songbird singing its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree. We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow. And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water, each drop of rain, each rivulet, each pulse, each vein. O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas. We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.

"Memorial" by Amanda Gorman

When we tell a story,

We are living

Memory:

In ancient Greece, the Muses, the dainty-footed daughters of Memory, were thought to inspire artists. It isn't knowing, but remembering, that makes us create. This would explain why so much greater art arises from trauma, nostalgia, or testimony.

But why alliteration?

Why the pulsing percussion, the string of syllables?

It is the poet who pounds the past back into you.

The poet transcends "telling" or "performing" a story & instead remembers it, touches, tastes, traps its vastness.

Only now can Memory, previously marooned, find safe harbor within us.

Feel all these tales crushing our famished mouth.

"The Hurt Locker" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54141/the-hurt-locker