Teaching Whitman at an All-Boys School

I try to tell them, the boys,
To know yourself is to complicate yourself
Their delicate right to identity, their
Stubborn, perfect sense of self.

I show them Whitman,
Some articulate fool,
They understand the ego but not
The multitudes

From the walls of my high school,
I don’t remember Milozs’ poetry
But I have always remembered his name

As a teacher, it is hard
To determine what is enough
Here the boys are,

Here I am
Have I reached you?
From many opposite ends of the earth
We collide on small roads
With too thin concrete
Some of us are wearing shoes

Some of us wear our pain
Where our plain faces in broad daylight
Pucker and grin and hope to fathom

The difference in ourselves
As courage

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Tsuru // For Gianna

If in order to weigh down paper
You need a glass orb
Then have a tree for a bird
Some dew for a moss
Desert is just sand without the heat
The night a different shade
You say cranes are good omens
That fly with a straight neck
But what if I’m afraid to?
What if the papers are blank
And the mines empty?
The trees are felled for open space
We require things to be useful

I will host their mating dance in the yard
The yard an open marsh
The marsh a mess of papers
The papers stick to cold wet walls
An epic
The hero discovers empty tombs at every turn
Yet somehow knows the truth
The truth the texture at the time
It’s not the smooth of living

The bramble of debris that make a nest
Some rotten molten ore hits air
Like the small splash of a shell cracking
The hour when light goes
We all breathe out together

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Walking to the Station

I counted the pigeons that moved in my wake
I had forgotten
I had the power to frighten, or else
to illustrate a fearful object.
Something that feels so small,
So briefly representative?
A branch in migratory flight

I had survived them cutting him open,
stitching him back up,
the newborn ritual of detachment,
the life ritual of
never going back.
I had never known grit to be
the smallness of a day
but here I am         inside of it