Simone Weil 54

“Love took my hand and smiling did reply, / 'Who made the eyes but I?'” The palm at the end of the mind stands outside my window; men climb, take machetes to its coconuts. One cut a spoon out of the coconut's crown and handed it to my son. He ate its meat. Yesterday, our other daughter watched; there was no meat, but she took our word. Bananas come in hands; beneath them a heavy heart. The forces of creation aren't unseen, though we fail in our attention. To attend is to love, but not to want. Love apart from blood is syllable and sound. I love what I am unlike. 

Simone Weil 53

This bread really had the taste of bread. After the wisteria gardens and the baths came the best cold beer I've ever drunk. The bath-house sat beside a bridge over a narrow river somewhere in Japan. The image is all contingency. My former student's wife is dying in a narrow hospital room; she and he and their three children smile for the camera. I asked after his family at a conference; he leaned over my table under the dull lights, and told me. Another friend came by. I understood their common sadness. The other day I rode my bike south on Kahekili; the north-facing lane was clogged for miles up the coast: dramatic irony without the drama. But Weil writes that great drama contains no movement. Y. lies on her bed, smiling and breathing. Attend to the breath. Listen to it go out and in.

Simone Weil 52

Scapegoat and lamb. In the Manchester tram a teenager screams obscenities at an immigrant who is not one. There's a quiet woman behind the phone that records it. Everyone in the car remains quiet, except when a baby's involved. “No one in the park speaks English.” A friend in Florida said she didn't study Spanish because she thought people wanted their own language in the elevator. Reduction into stock answers; there's not much soup there, save what runs off a stone. “They're afraid,” they voted Remain. What remains of the day is a baby-faced thug and his ugly words. I cue up the short video from Puff N' Stuff, around the corner from Turnham Green's tube stop; there's Mrs. Sethe, and here's her address. Other shopkeepers were less friendly to Americans. It was autumn, 2002. At the corner florist shop, the tulips were so vivid they nearly sang. 

Simone Weil 51

A page covered with pencil strokes is not a more beautiful object than the universe; but it is an object cut to our measure. Bryant cuts Radhika's hair, whose orange ends fall on white tile. She and her sister are cut from the same cloth, pushing that metaphor from blood to fabric. Sangha brings me the ginger cat, but she wanders away. If universe is dogma, the pencil cuts with more minute precision. A screeching myna and the gospel-singing thrush run counter-point. What we do while the world ends is our business, not the world's. A saw re-sounds across the condo's green lawn, bleeds into traffic sounds from the highway. At 7 years of age, he says, he thought the world was out to destroy him. Felt it most keenly at 4 a.m. when he ate Frosted Flakes with his dad, then returned to bed. The first version of this poem was about a post-Holocaust sculpture of shit. To each turd its own podium. So particular, and yet so true. What I cannot smell shall give me hope.

Simone Weil 50

The eye of the soul is this attention. An early morning downpour is ordinary; Donald Trump is banal. I keep writing inside a container-paragraph's four walls. The girls run up our stairs in sun hats, imagining they're immigrants trying to break through. The glass in condos frees us to imagine transparency, if we can afford a studio with ocean-view. There's the word “love” again, emblazoned in the ad; love is a view of an incessant blue sky, but it will cost you. The windows don't open; they turn ocean into show. Trump stands on a Scottish golf course, bagpipers standing at attention behind him. The Chieftain of no we can't, of henna hackles tweet!

Simone Weil 49

This stick separates me from things, but with it I transpose vision into touch, touch into topography. To stick means to stay, to be affixed to. So I'm separate from what sticks to me, this mask that opens my face like morning blinds. Or if not my face, that tender space between rib and muscle that seismographs feeling. If I touch you with my stick, I can't say whom you resemble. When I say my daughter has a sister, your first question is: “do they look alike?” Brother falls away, as do I. My nose bleeds, not my lines. “He was not blood” means you don't see eye to eye. It means I don't know their history, though my neighbor (whom I hardly know) asks me with such urgency. (Just curious.) What sticks to the real is more obscure: cat scratching for a ping pong ball in the dark.

Simone Weil 48

Every separation represents a bond. Your meditations' obscurity lies not in history, my friend says, but in your memory of it. Self-separation precedes the act of memoir, muscle pulled from bone. Our friend with Parkinson's buys pot from a dealer, then takes it legally to ease his chronic pain. Such are our laws. I remember Freddie Gray, dying in the police van of a broken neck. I won't remember the officers acquitted of killing him. Failure to remember is sometimes an ethical act, but only if you know what you're undoing. Tapestries of dissent cover holes punched in the dry wall. If you take my skin, you get my emptiness. On Bishop Street, a homeless man yelled at a shopkeeper: “I will rip off all your skin and stuff it in my shoes.” The shopkeeper pounded at his phone. Beauty's purpose is to mask our pain. A boy with brain cancer chooses a Batman mask: he loves to watch him beat up the Joker and the Penguin.