Gloria - My favorite warlord

MY FAVORITE WARLORD MY FAVORITE WARLORD EUGENE GLORIA PENGUIN POETS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Books 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright Eugene Gloria, 2012 All rights reserved constitute an extension of this copyright page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Gloria, Eugene. My favorite warlord / Eugene Gloria. p. cm.(Penguin poets) Poems.

ISBN: 978-1-101-58489-7 I. Title. PS3557.L6485M9 2012 811.54dc23 2012004340 Printed in the United States of America Set in Bembo Designed by Ginger Legato Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON For my mother and father PART 1 WATER The street when I was five was a deep, wide river coursing through a shimmering city. I had no need for proper shoes, no need for long pants. I didnt yet know how to make conclusions and say, Lifes like this You could say I was baptized by a red circle at the center of my foreheada constellation of tiny scabs, federated by Mercurochrome. Why the dots on my forehead? And why, you might ask, did I want to cross the glistening street? I had crossed my brother and in his anger he chucked the whiskbroom; its edge-tip handle smacked my forehead. I was five, my brother was fifteen. What was he doing washing his body at the spigot behind the house? I caught him bathing not in the shower where he shouldve been, but alone in the small yard, a tin can in his hand, dousing his head with water.

Why did I laugh when I saw him? What did I know about anything? Was this the beginning of my brothers rage? Was this the birth of water? The cool drink an old woman wanted and I, instead of directing her to the kitchen where a pitcher of water was chilling in the icebox, led her to the spigot out back. There is no story here. No melody to this song; only a street and what punishment metes to the one who wants what he knows he cannot have. And the water? The whole expanse of it was only a street I wanted to cross. HERE, ON EARTH Imagine the pleasure inside this storm, the foam rush from rain gutters. Imagine yourself here, inside a restaurant on an unlit street.

Say it is a bad neighborhood even after the rain. Take the immigrant face of our waiter who is also the proprietor. Say: Peter, its been weeks. Weve come to eat. Weve been hankering for your pho. 1 appetizer; my wife, the no. 3. 3.

For our entres, the no. 38 and the no. 30. The booths here are lit by bright faces: Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, and Filipino. Hundreds of years on their faces! Schoolteachers, witnesses of terror, readers of Chekhov, office clerks with inner lives. Then the bottle-blond salaryman in a dress shirt with silver cuff links moseys in to pick up his takeout order.

He is tall and pockmarked like my father; he could almost be my father except for the dyed blond hair. Over the no. 1 and no. 3 appetizers, we are speculating, my wife and I, where the salaryman comes from Manila or Saigon? Oh, but here comes Peter with our orders of steaming bowls of pho. Our faces shining like klieg lights. Inside this booth, my moon face is a lantern in the mainstream lengthening, lengthening.

Here, on earth we are curtained by rain. A subset in the far corners floating toward the center. We are an island in landlocked America. We are Thai, Filipino, and Vietnamese. We are, all of us, post exotics. APPLE My people are never the same in memory.

They are the dead come back for a picnic, a table set with plates of sliced apples. I am there somewhere hidden in a tree. In my luckless twenties, still raw from heart break and prone to constant hard-ons, I watched through an open window a woman, middle-aged, naked except for her utilitarian bra and panties. Her hair teased like a hive of cotton candy, eyelids a heavy purple coat. I could almost smell hervivid as my first kiss: Maile L. who had in her mouth some cinnamon Red Hots.

The womans lipstick was thick like car wax red and cheap in a dime-store way. She was fixing to go to work at some diner. I was then a college intern for the lame duck from my district. I was eager for everything I imagined this woman could teach me. This was in the city of Cain where we kept the doors unlocked for alien thoughts to enter. If she were the first woman, would that make me the snake? See, the snake in the garden was a real smoothy with a killer pickup line.

Me, I was just a salamander on a leaf. This, before I learned my left from my right, Rilke from Roethke, Keats from Yeats. And many more years followed when I didnt understand a thing completely. Memory is another name for ghosts and their awful hunger. PSALM OF MYSELF The moon is the mind of Buddha. The rabbit in the moon is a story.

Says so here in my book. My book is the necessary nothing celebrating the fortieth anniversary of a nonevent. In the free market there are maxims to live by: The consumer isnt a moron. She is your wife. In the gift economy a trellis of vines is a splendid thing. Walk under it, et cetera.

Who am I to tell you my story when I am no taller than the trees or hills or other humans? That I am as tenuous as our rabbit sleeping away his days; that he and I are frail leaves floating along the same river. What was it Whitman meant when he said, I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars? Forty years ago in the middle of June, a flood of white light bathed an airport runway. Forty years ago, the moon still awaited its birth.