acknowledgments
Some of the poems in this book were previously published in the following magazines. I am grateful to the editors. Burial and Patience in
Solstice; Wedding Poem and Sharing with the Ants in
Timber; Feet in
Gabby; To My Best Friends Big Sister on the Academy of American Poets
Poem-A-Day; Ode to the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian and To the Puritan in Me in
American Poetry Review; Ode to the Mistake in
Forklift, Ohio; Becoming a Horse in the
Sun; Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands in
Exit 7; Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes in
Massachusetts Review; Ode to the Flute in
Nashville Review; Ode to Buttoning My Shirt in
Bombay Gin; Spoon in
Lit; Opening in
Oversound; Weeping in
Gulf Coast; Cmon! and Last Will and Testament in
Kinfolks: A Journal of Black Expression; Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude in
Waxwing; Ending the Estrangement in
Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian was included in
The Best American Poetry 2014. I am grateful to David Lehman and Terrance Hayes for that. I am grateful to a number of people whose fingerprints are all over these poems.
Among them are Curtis Bauer, Remica Bingham, Alex Chambers, Nandi Comer, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Victor Lau, Jennifer Leonard, Keith Leonard, Bryce Martin, Chris Mattingly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Michael Simmons, Dave Torneo, David Waters, and Simone White. I am grateful, too, to Stephanie Smith, whose eyes and ears and heart on and in these poems has been indispensable. Who, in fact, knew some of these poems might be of use before I did. Thank you. And to Aracelis Girmay and Patrick Rosal, boats and anchors in the deep water: always, thank you. And to the people who have listened to these poems at readings, and have thereby helped me to make them with the little sounds you did or didnt make: thank you.
Thank you to Tia Ari for sharing with us the beautiful painting on the cover. To Cave Canem. To the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. To the Vermont Studio Center. Thank you. Thank you to Ed Ochester for believing in this book.
Thank you to the Bloomington Community Orchard which is the ground from which so many of these poems grow. To the family that place has grown to be. Love, and thank you. And to YOU, reader: thanks!
to the fig tree on 9th and christian
Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did some crime or other the city they say is a lonely place until yes the sound of sweeping and a woman yes with a broom beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it and she has a hose too and so works hard rinsing and scrubbing the walk lest some poor sod slip on the silk of a fig and break his hip and not probably reach over to gobble up the perpetrator the light catches the veins in her hands when I ask about the tree they flutter in the air and she says take as much as you can help me so I load my pockets and mouth and she points to the step-ladder against the wall to mean more but I was without a sack so my meager plunder would have to suffice and an old woman whom gravity was pulling into the earth loosed one from a low slung branch and its eye wept like hers which she dabbed with a kerchief as she cleaved the fig with what remained of her teeth and soon there were eight or nine people gathered beneath the tree looking into it like a constellation pointing
do you see it and I am tall and so good for these things and a bald man even told me so when I grabbed three or four for him reaching into the giddy throngs of yellow-jackets sugar stoned which he only pointed to smiling and rubbing his stomach I mean he was really rubbing his stomach like there was a baby in there it was hot his head shone while he offered recipes to the group using words which I couldnt understand and besides I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling in my mouth pulling me down and down into the oldest countries of my body where I ate my first fig from the hand of a man who escaped his country by swimming through the night and maybe never said more than five words to me at once but gave me figs and a man on his way to work hops twice to reach at last his fig which he smiles at and calls baby,
cmere baby, he says and blows a kiss to the tree which everyone knows cannot grow this far north being Mediterranean and favoring the rocky, sunbaked soils of Jordan and Sicily but no one told the fig tree or the immigrants there is a way the fig tree grows in groves it wants, it seems, to hold us, yes I am anthropomorphizing goddammit I have twice in the last thirty seconds rubbed my sweaty forearm into someone elses sweaty shoulder gleeful eating out of each others hands on Christian St. in Philadelphia a city like most which has murdered its own people this is true we are feeding each other from a tree at the corner of Christian and 9th strangers maybe never again.
ode to the flute
A man sings by opening his mouth a man sings by opening his lungs by turning himself into air a flute can be made of a man nothing is explained a flute lays on its side and prays a wind might enter it and make of it at least a small final song
burial
Youre right, youre right, the fertilizers good it wasnt a gang of dullards came up with chucking a fish in the planting hole or some midwife got lucky with the placenta
oh, Ill plant a tree here! and a sudden flush of quince and jam enough for monthsyes, the magic dust our bodies become casts spells on the roots about which someone else could tell you the chemical processes, but its just magic to me, which is why a couple springs ago when first putting in my two bare root plum trees out back I took the jar which has become my fathers house, and lonely for him and hoping to coax him back for my mother as much as me, poured some of him in the planting holes and he dove in glad for the robust air, saddling a slight gust into my nose and mouth, chuckling as I coughed, but mostly he disappeared into the minor yawns in the earth into which I placed the trees, splaying wide their roots, casting the gray dust of my old man evenly throughout the hole, replacing then the clods of dense Indiana soil until the roots and my father were buried, watering it in all with one hand while holding the tree with the other straight as the flag to the nation of simple joy of which my father is now a naturalized citizen, waving the flag from his subterranean lair, the roots curled around him like shawls or jungle gyms, like hookahs or the arms of ancestors, before breast-stroking into the xylem, riding the elevator up through the cambium and into the leaves where, when you put your ear close enough, you can hear him whisper
good morning, where, if you close your eyes and push your face you can feel his stubbly jowls and good lord this year he was giddy at the first real fruit set and nestled into the 30 or 40 plums in the two trees, peering out from the sweet meat with his hands pressed against the purple skin like cathedral glass, and imagine his joy as the sun wizarded forth those abundant sugars and I plodded barefoot and prayerful at the first ripe plums swell and blush, almost weepy conjuring some surely ponderous verse to convey this bottomless grace, you know,
oh father oh father kind of stuff, hundreds of hot air balloons filling the sky in my chest, replacing his intubated body listing like a boat keel side up, replacing the steady stream of water from the one eye which his brother wiped before removing the tube, keeping his hand on the forehead until the last wind in his body wandered off, while my brother wailed like an animal, and my mother said, weeping,
