Submission to M.P.

below are two poems I submitted to a small press in Port Townsend, WA, where I lived for 2.5 years. "Someday" contains a minor revision:

Someday

What does it mean,
to you, she asks?

This reading into
you always do?

I'd been obsessed
with eternal return;
the idea came to me--
overwhelmed,
I stared into the uncanny,
swirling void,
before I knew there were words,
before I knew
I was not alone
there.

What does it mean?
Why the pursuit?

It doesn't mean anything,
but mind games,
and perhaps a little comfort
before I go to bed at night,
like warm milk and Valerian root,
or the prayers I would say as a boy
to that bearded thing--
and the ritual that went with it,
to fight off imagined hordes
of crawling insects
swelling up from the basement,
racing towards my bedroom:
to swallow me up and drag me
back with them, the rustling crunch
beneath me.

Just a little bit
before we sleep.

She's ok with neurons and chemistry;
I need this sacred geometry:
imagined circles
upon circles,
looping ever forward:
an expanding universe,
collapsing into itself
to expand again,
and so it goes.

I jump in memory time,
in backward loops
like Billy Pilgrim
only more mundane.

I have no other worlds to visit,
no future mes to see.

Only this life,
stretching backwards behind me,
a string from my birth,
I gather up from time to time,
and visit different spots along the way.

But more than that,
the chance to live again,
this self same life,
but better
bit by bit,
a little better.

I want to make a contribution
to the canon,
and someday will,
given my midnight
thought experiments;
but for now,
I don't have the vision for poems,
or the toughness for prose.

And problems arise,
as they are wont--
if I improve,
wouldn't everyone else,
with more to give
and more to see?
The mystics and visionaries,
the prophets and poets
and painters and saints?

But someday,
when Plath and Sexton haven't killed themselves,
when Kurt and Ernest don't put guns in their mouths,
when Fitzgerald doesn't drink himself to death,
when Hitler is nothing but a doddering old man
in threadbare pajamas muttering absurdities
to anyone who would listen (but no one does),
maybe then I'll find the poem inside,
give voice to it,
set it free.

Columbus

Tabonuco,
bought at the Bear Mountain Pow-wow
from the single Taino booth,
first thing I smelled,
that sweet wafting resin,
carried on the wind,
drawing me in.

Tabonuco
burnt in clay pots
as tribute to a past
I can't remember.

In the rain,
in Harriman,
I read about Columbus
and his account
of my people
as gregarious
as joyful
as generous.

So generous, in fact,
that his demands for tribute unmet,
he cut off their hands,
left them to bleed out
on the jungle floor.

We disdain Columbus
for what he did
to the North American Continent,
this half truth shared in classrooms,
forgetting
it wasn't the red man
but the brown
that Columbus first broke,
that joyful people
with insufficient offerings
and no longer hands
for giving.

I share those bloodlines:
my parents met, dated, married
in the Bronx,
like Sharks and Jets.

Tabonuco,
burnt in clay pots,
in tribute 
and mourning,
for a past I can’t remember.

Raised eating pasta
and red sauce,
sfogiatelle and crown roast
at Christ's Mass,
my white skin,
and the arias
that would float through our home
so many evenings.

Forgetting
an incompatible legacy,
that burns inside.