Diviner also divining and so virgula divina, to locate,

intuit, foretell, foreshadow:

over the Flushing tarmac and concrete, over

the Unisphere and Kosciuszko,

my Grandmother Ghost and Mother Spirit

mingle into the egalitarian air and hover above

me in my lecture hall where I belong

speaking of and to foreign bodies

— Branded and Ablaze —

•••

The Nest in Winter

In the father’s shadowy hoard

pillows belch feathers across

mattress and floors:

what was an oriental rug, now

a carpet of scat, gone-astray socks,

calendars from rescue shelters

angling for checks.

There’s nothing to toss

among the vivid tethers to

Mother. Maybe my mother, maybe Father’s.

There’s no margarine container

any less pathetic than

a netsuke from Kyoto;

no expired sardine tin less urgent

than a dozen aerograms; no

receipt less intimate

than their honeymoon photo

snapped in the local aquarium.

The adult daughter takes in

the spew,

pabulum that a bird feeds its nestling.

•••

After Words for Ava

Off the Haiku beach,

that shoreline of sugarcane ash

where Grandma gave birth to Mama,

I snorkel and hear an iambic whoosh

I imagine as the sound of death but really

it’s my breath while spying a triggerfish

humuhumunukunukuapua‘a

—later I will hear the sound again

this time the whooshing in utero

of the daughter of my daughter,

the most outlandish and earthly

foreign body

whom we will call Ava—

•••

Nitro

More on Japanese Poetics

Downcast

my body is a reed

torn at the root—

at a current’s notice

I’d acquiesce—I think

—ONO NO KOMACHI (mid-ninth century)

I want arousal. I want to place the craft of poetry back where it belongs: that is, not just party to the mind, but a thing coursing throughout the body. Riotous and iambic. Other times, faint.

PLAYING

For Brain Fever, I wrote “Luminous Vapours,” a short essay on word play. I wanted to speak about paronomasia, that fancy term for puns. Both English and Japanese traditions have influenced my sensibility not just for the jazziness of play, but more, because I love how multiple meanings can give way to a bit of unconscious material. In revision I like to pressure a word to detonate its denotations: alarm, both an anxious awareness of danger and a kind of clock; also, alarm is a noun and a verb. So, to place the image of an alarm clock by the bed is to suggest an emotional alarm. Words can be as unstable as nitroglycerin.