Beggared
for Lydia Alina Stefanescu
There is a poem in the unfinished
cereal, another in the rust-lipped rims
of an open truck bed, the first beg
of a stanza in the jazz-brush drizzle
on your death’s anniversary.
The poem needs a hand to hold it
close and I am all head
with no hands to fete
the wine-kissed tablecloth, a foot’s sudden
soot-print, loosestrife drying near
this simple ink pen.
If there is a lyric
in fallen nest, it is the bird
one keeps being
without us.
And how to grasp the gap
between sirens as it surges into formal
constraint, dividing rescue from
the worst we can imagine.
When horror is done,
how can I poem to know
what I’ll never believe?
You are gone.
Peonies astound the lawn.
In Case Sanda Ungureanu Comes Over
for secret Romanians
On the patio, a fresh pinafore of crepe myrtle
dust. I tell the puddle to return to the cloud;
I sweep the gray cement steps we can’t enchant into elm arms.
In this battle where gaze is blasphemous,
there is a Bucharest plaza
where my father
courts Sanda Ungureanu, who is not yet
the love of Ion P. Coulianu’s life, not yet the wake of his flight
to Chicago. His unsolved murder
lies in wait.
See, we Romanians have a thing for fate–
the dictatorship of secrets spills like ashes from an urn;
and we of the dangerous silence smudge
soot on our foreheads, know each other
by ash prints, find ourselves in dark
fingermarks
we can’t forget.
Inside our minds hides the brain
of secret police.
And I would do anything to unknow the exile
of an Alabama night, the teascape of lost linden, a slurp of ciorba, raw silk
of Patsy Cline karaoaked in Romanian accent, an old man declaiming the
broken heart of Paul Celan, a knife to mirror self on the edge
of this terror. Give me a nude shoulder, the least perfect breast
to cut these milk teeth. Give me plums, sheepskin drums,
a fist of garlic flower blooming from the grave
that keeps its bones home.
