Like dreams, poems manifest their own logic, the emotional content often telegraphed or displaced by image. In “Web at the Center of the World,” the images “occurred” the way ideas occur, in connection with the experience of actively seeing. I followed these to the implicit: The spider. Absent, though very much a presence in the poem, which is the web.

 

 

Grammar is a set of possibilities, and if we accept that poetic language is, as the philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva says, an “unsettling process”— if not the destruction of meaning— “broken” grammar is the free play that extends what is permissible. It conveys something other than knowledge, and correlates with the poet and the crises of her times. Its best practice is in the intersection of desire and beauty and meaning.

 

 

My mother used to always say: “You are samurai. Don’t you feel it?” The generations that come before rise and fall like tides within us. Bushidō, a reference to the educated warrior-poet ideal — the way of the samurai — informs my writing, my teaching, my fierce devotion to my sons. In its absence, that annihilation, the Occupation of the Other, is the Father who wills its surrender.

 

Like the samurai, the geisha also rises in me, often unintended. She includes the art, the practiced skills, the things I know to do and say as if instinctively to create the “floating world,” a world of pleasure; yet Ukiyo, its homophone, is also the “sorrowful world.”

 

 

Buddhism extends compassion to all sentient beings, and yet in many instances it has also provided an ideology for counter-forces to the State — inspiring peasant revolts, feudal struggles. To kill out of compassion, to prevent another from committing evil, for example, is justice. In this regard, violence has a practical nature.

 

But so much of the violence entrenched in our society is not practical. It is a mirror of human frailty. Of illness and addiction, of despair. Its agents are not self-aware. In the tenets of Buddhism it is held that the person who kills with selflessness, knowing that all is illusion, kills no one.

 

 

 

 

A line inside a line gives order

Axis. It stretches, fine as wisdom in the

smallest twig wrapped up in it. Clots of withered

earth and spit. The things we never see though

they are there to hold our plans in substance.

A tiny speck of something lately buzzing, dead,

laid out in threads that tend toward the vibrations.

A tiny head, a leg that’s missing one of six

Other webs that corner spaces

Only then the spider

 

 

 

 

 

We are skimming landscapes, a lap of magazines. The city quitting under hunched shoulders, its streets implied by signs, the grid. Bare trees hide nothing. Detritus of foam and fuel and wrappers. Shrouds of plastic in the cables. Carcasses of steel. We’re going nowhere. The traffic fences flight. The right of exit lost. The left of reason. We tour the last occasion of the rain. A forest dreaming winter. I press my hand to where a sparrow might have crashed into what to it had seemed transparence. Doors are suddenly flung open— a rush. I do not recognize my own reflection.

 

 

 

 

 

Each step I take in this approach

a foraging. The fizzled Coke

 

or sap

caught in her antennae

She does not fly—

 

nor bask

as she is wont

under the oak. Her

 

neighborhood distressed

One mullioned wing

disabled

 

in nectar lately sipped

Better to be dead,

I think she says:

 

her wings as thin

as colors of transcendence

fluttering

 

My fingers

in her dust—

 

 

 

 

 

The chair is waiting by the desk.

The room seems small, which enlarges me.

The green walls seem

acquainted with the cracks,

the dusty ledges, the freckled mud on glass.

The sun on brick, settling,

like an apology for leaving

A nest of moon, the fractured hip of it

 

What am I afraid of? Something

is about to happen, if

 

I let it. Wick the desk. Ravel me in light.

A basking. Fire me to fire that is sun, dying.

The light that burns until the thought ignites

is unimpeachable. Orange the trees.

Write, the chair says.

 

 

 

 

 

Neighbors on Sunday swept streets. A nuisance of raking. A car in a heap, crushed by a tree, up to its wheel-wells in water. A man and his son bagged debris. We talked on my walk to eyewitness the scene and he joked: What next? Volcanic

eruption, as bees from felled trees dislocated

 

as millions lost power. Elsewhere the trauma downed trees, the colors advancing, crawling in colors, red yellow green— tracked in the forecast to pass over islands at nightfall, the eye-

fall on maps on screens, in the brilliant colors of crawlspace. The landfall in

Hatteras, layered: Grey, oyster white, jade-green, roaring toward

wreckage in raw, six-foot waves. The rain inundating. The sea

wall crumbled to rock.

 

She choked Ocracoke. Cars submerged. Airports locked down, ahead of the storm's progression the federal emergency. Wind gusts and flooding. Coney Island. Jersey Shore

Viewers sent pictures and tweets. The boats on their backs

A history of bridges tumbled

 

We talked of the wind that riffled the trees, clipped branches— she was

chatty, he said, and I turned back to what I should get:

Batteries, water, canned food. What would I need besides these?

A pen in my hand. A poem in the darkness. Belief

I’ll see you in dreams.