Another collection from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author I couldn’t understand. I was just reading words and couldn’t make sense of the poems. My poetry reading is not improving. I love the typesetting though.

When he does his taxes,
He finds charges for things
He didn’t sign up for.
No chance to read about penalties and
Interest rates.
He didn’t sign up for life’s contract.

Would he initial
“I agree” after reading life’s
Terms?
Promising him a chance to

Stroll, sprint, and trot on a star. Flowers, honey, an unlimited chance to walk in a meadow of peace like the one at Yosemite, a crack-house pile of money each day and
Straight A’s.

The penalties are spelled out in a font so tiny as
To be unreadable.
Would the fines be: “Hurt Heartache Tragedy Grief”?

He’s had his share yet lives like a prince
Or at least as a court member.
He remembers
The beauty now dust
Who could not
Bring children to full term.
He and she were educated.
Read books and turned
Them over to Science,
Where they floated in jars.
She became The Cat Lady
And gave each cat those
Stillborn children’s names.

Were his genes to blame?
Do miscarriages run in families?
Is that what his mother meant when
She said, “A lot of your brothers and sisters didn’t make it”?
He woke one night to find her lying on the living-room floor.
He thought that she was dead.
When his stepfather called 911, he could not say “miscarriage.”
He said “misfortune.”

One day, he felt excruciating
Pressure on his back; the Doctor said,
“The Baron has been riding you. You hurt
Every time he grins. He’s always thirsty,
Which explains your dehydration.
He likes the Bayou and hates deserts.”

For a while, he found desert life agreeable.
The burden on his back ceased.
He dreamed of a nude woman with a Benin face.
An orange-headed condor with black wings
Was lifting
Her to one of those California skies, the color
Of robins’ eggs.
This scene occurred above Big Sur.

Desert life was cheap.
He raised prize cacti and explored cliff dwellings, but he ached for the city. On his heart is a street directory. That’s where their survivor found him, her voices in tow. She taught him why some people subject to foul whispers get mad when you praise their gifts.
The chatter that berates them spends more time with them than you.

Out here, smiling climbers
Take selfies when they
Reach the summits of mountains.

But Guilt Mountain?
It has no top.

Ishmael Reed

Mỗi lần mở lên điện thoại, anh nhìn thấy em. Tấm ảnh anh chụp em vào dịp Tết vừa qua. Em mặc chiếc áo dài nhã nhặn và nở nụ cười thiết tha trông thật dễ thương. Mỗi lần ngắm nhìn em, anh muốn hát lên: “Càng nhìn em yêu em hơn và yêu em mãi / Dù phút êm đềm xa xưa nay đã đi vào quên lãng”.

Cố nhạc sĩ Lam Phương viết thật thấm. Giờ đây những tiếng êm đềm đã thay bằng những lời chua chát. Tuy nhiên, anh không trách em. Ngược lại anh thấu hiểu được tấm lòng của em. Mười mấy năm qua em luôn lo lắng cho gia đình từ mẹ già đến con thơ và cả anh. Cả anh và em phải lăn lộn với công ăn việc làm và còn phải chăm sóc cho đàn con của chúng ta. Từ thằng lớn đến thằng bé, mỗi thằng có mỗi thách thức riêng. Lý trí của anh không mạnh mẽ bằng em. Anh dễ dàng bị phiền não trong công việc và con cái nhưng anh luôn có em làm nơi nương tựa tinh thần. Không có em sát cánh anh không biết có còn đứng vững hay không.

Có lẽ những gì anh muốn nói em nghe cũng đã nhàm chán. Em muốn thấy được những hành động thực tế chứ không cần nghe những lời nói từ đáy lòng. Dù sao đi nữa anh luôn tôn trọng và cần có em trong đời sống. Đời anh mà thiếu em như cây thiếu nước, như nhà thiếu nóc, như hủ tiếu thiếu nước lèo, như bánh bèo thiếu nước mắm, như thịt bò nhúng giấm thiếu mắm nêm. Lâu lắm rồi không được ăn thịt bò nhúng giấm chấm mắm nêm cũng tại con quỷ gout.

Đùa tí cho vui thôi. Anh đã muốn viết xuống bài này lâu rồi nhưng giờ mới có cơ hội.Chỉ hy vọng em hiểu được lòng anh.

Reading Jorie Graham’s collection is like pouring water on a duck’s head. Nothing stuck. Graham is a professor at Harvard University and winner of the Pulitzer Prize; therefore, not understanding her work is my own fault.

What language did the angel speak

My most private language

Was the angel fluent

Nuances were lost

Where did the angel come from

The ground

Did you consider yourself a woman or a child before this

Yes

And after

Yes

What was the tenor of your joy then

Choiceless

Did it hurt

Forever

Did you feel rewarded

I hallelujah I assented

How did it feel

Cold blood on the cock of God

Whose blood

My blood

Gabrielle Bates

Read it but didn’t get it. The collection was hard for me to understand with the exception of “Still Life with SARS-CoV-2”:

and then what
and then
what, what
then

If your name will ever not be
gravel in my mouth, I wonder.

A is how public alphabets begin.
A is what I write at the top of your letters.

[Happy Anniversary] A-
[Happy New Year] A-

As a child I was forced
to make a show of saying

I love you, day after day
to a woman with cruel blue eyes.

Now, I say it to you,
and you say it to me.

What a marriage ending looks like
I saw up close before puberty-

financial stress, infidelity-
I do, I do. I do, I do, I do, I do-

I hear myself say I’m married to a room,
and in the room, am the most startled.

I attend a monthly dinner alone
(by which I mean without you)

where people share hot tips
for how to be less in debt

then get drunk on wine and convince me
to buy things I don’t need.

Growing up, I associated guilt
with wanting anything

except books; good books were safe
if used, if read more than once.

Language was a rewarded vice,
and the Good Book best of all

to be caught eyeing,
though dangerous in its own ways

with its impossible orders like
Walk as a child of light.

To want light. I tried. I did.
My trying has cursed me more than anything.

You say I should be more selfish with my time
because you don’t know the hours

I photograph myself
naked to share with no one.

I’m sorry. I love you. I’m a creature
most at home

replenishing my venom under rock.
The entire days of silence:

this is how I knew we could work.
Of all I could seduce, only you could I imagine

crawling over, crawling beneath
for close to a century, curious.

Gabrielle Bates

He didn’t want to tell me. He almost didn’t.
It was luck much more than gut that made me ask.
A beer opened an hour earlier than usual,
the desire for conversation. There was no sense in me
that he was in some sort of aftermath.
He said, when I asked, I had a bad day,
or, I had a weird day, I can’t remember.
I saw a dog, he said. I was on the train.
A man with a dog on a leash. The man ran and made it
but the dog hesitated outside, and the doors closed—
no, not on his neck-on the leash, trapping it.
The man was inside, and the dog was outside on the platform.
The button beside the door, ringed in light, blinked.
The man was shouting now, hitting the button,
all else silent, the befuddlement
of dog pulled along, the pace slow until it wasn’t.
The tunnel the train must pass through leaving the station
is a perfectly calibrated, unforgiving fit.
The dog had a color and a size I don’t know,
so it comes to me as legion.
Large. Small. Fur long, or short. White, or gray.
But the man always looks the same.
As I held him against me in our kitchen,
the moment sharpened my eyes. How easily
I could imagine a version of our lives
in which he kept all his suffering secret from me.
I saw the beer on the counter. I saw myself drink it.
When we went to bed, I stared at the back of his head
split between compassion and fury. My nails
gently scratching up his arm, up and down, up and down,
the blade without which the guillotine is nothing.

Gabrielle Bates

i gave mine away—
not all, but the greater portion,
some would say. i gave
away the ready claim
to goodness, to purpose. i gave
away mary, sarai,
and isis. i gave away
necessity and invention.
i gave away a whole
holiday, but i kept billie.
i gave away the chance to try
and fail to have it all. i gave
away the one thing
that makes some men
pay. i gave away the pedestal,
the bouquet. i gave away
nel wright, but i kept sula
peace. i gave away
the fine-tooth comb, but
kept the oyster knife. i gave
away the first word
the new mouth forms, the easiest
to parlay across so many
languages. escaping
the maw, i gave away
the power to hold—and be held
in—sway, but i kept
cho, parton, finney, chapman,
and tomei. i gave away the eve
who left the garden
that day, but kept the cool,
green, shady, fruitless,
fruitful stay, the evening
that did not fall
away

Evie Shockley

I love her opening poem titled “I Was Minor” and I thought I was in for a treat. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many of her poems from this collection. It’s my own fault—not the author. I am still learning to read poetry.