from “The Disinherited”

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The Secret of Nerval

The painter took me onward,
to a place where the streets became narrower
and more gloomy.
We came upon a house,
at the end of a series of houses,
and in that house a room
near the end of a hallway.
Past genocides and heroin deals
that fill the whole horizon,
past wainscoting and holy basil,
past scanty clumps of date palms.
Past madness and rivers and rotten teeth
and catacombs and white cubes and
and marionettes. Past redemption.
In this delightful place, whose
exquisitely carved windows
look out over the caliche,
I lost my European hair.

The Air-Loom Gang

The oil below kept us all from sleeping for years.
But now we walk still under the crab-woods
hand in hand, our bodies forming an annulus
at the end of the world— this love was a fluid venture
through which the Oko flowed.

Off the coast finch red kellies sway in the darkness,
light reflecting off dull steel. With this stuff
going on some of them don’t go back to nature.
They just rot in fields, or in cars in the jungle.
They just sit there a long time.

When my uncle died my father wore
a red string on his left wrist for two years.
When I was laid up there in the house
I heard a song. Fat leopards lay by me;
I heard a leopard song in the belly night.

The oil that was hidden in houses
is now in fat leopards. I found
a whistle in the arapaima’s belly.
I found my grandmother’s ring
in the black caiman’s jaws.

The arapaima’s song told of flying air looms
pumping oil through rigs of tubing into the ground.
This ground we walk on sopped dreams up
so we could hear the leopard talk through
the crush of roughnecks in the moon pool.

The moon pool roughnecks told of the
goddess who turns you
into a pink lily if you touch the moon.
Spud date approaching they dig deep in
the brine pool.

But after all this, who can resist
a penitent dog leg? The rumor that cleft
through was that the season called for more bones,
more bones—and in the end they delivered.