Two Poems
Reading The Illiad
The sons of the sons of the sons
go on fighting the sons of the sons of other sons
or even the same sons
and it is forever and it is now
in these lines with their long vowels we will only hear
in echoes in the names we learned as children
for cartoonish gods and tender parts of our own
anatomy—a rubbery tug in back of the ankle—
but still the language surviving
improbably down these thousands of years
to this early spring morning with some of its trees
slipping new leaves through light wind
and the bare locust still black and unmoving
as the Styx, as the river
of absence. And the killing surviving
within that unmoving river of language
we enter at any point
to find the filthy darkness cowling across
an almost anonymous pair of eyes, the bronze armor
leadening to earth as though death
entered us first as speech, as though it were given
to us at birth with these signs
we cluster out of the air or trace so carefully
over ruled lines. So that it lives in us
as a precision or practice, with the clouded
exactness of memory,
and we grow toward it
as if the river should flow to its source,
or as when a tree, some giant fir, falls
on a mountainside after a blizzard has fastened
over its branches—the wind grinds it
until the great roots start to shiver—and the snow
once weighting the branches resurrects in a cloud
that seconds the storm, that bodies the air.
Sleep Disorder
The edges filling in
like a city that’s sinking,
a city that’s been lost
to its own element
and has found another,
less hospitable but not
out of the question. And when
the doctor shone the spectrum
directly into my eye
I could see
the capillaries forking lightning
about the retina,
shredding up the blood sky.
For days the images
reversing themselves back there
had been puckering away
from the center
like spacetime sinkholing
near a massive planet. Afterwards,
walking through Koreatown,
dodging in the shadows
because all light pained,
up-to-down signs
in a language of keyholes,
places for dumplings and
little bowls of sea-tasting cabbage—
you put it in your mouth
because any wave runs till it breaks.