America

America the footsteps of  your ghosts are white stones weighting my center

America the old girls’ campus in the heart of Oakland where I teach

         Grows quiet as glass marbles rolling between my feet

I pick one up, I say It’s pretty

          And my students laugh, cheering Welcome to America

I have no one to look to this summer, I light a candle, burn the proposedly holy wood

And God does not come when summoned

Just the scent of   bonfire in my hair

Gold light flooding the bay window sure as a divination

America I divine nothing

In the other country, my parents wear their silence like silk robes each morning, devoted to the terrible sun

Day after day, I weep on the phone, saying  Even the classroom is a prison

          And still my father insists But it is good to become an American

And so I cement my semantics

I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country

         After saying I love

I rinse my aquiline face, wring my language for fear

I feared what had happened in your forest, the words that pursued the soft silk of spiders

The verbs were naturalize, charge, reside

The nouns were clematis, alien, hibiscus

America I arrived to inhabit the realm of  your language

         I came to worry your words

What you offered is a vintage apartment, an audience for poems

         Pills the color of dusk

         To swallow so as not to collapse when I read the poem about my uncle

The reading of  which I owe him, to everyone who antecedes me

No, I mean who haunts me

The haunting of  which is a voice

The West is too young to be haunted, an ex-lover assures

Still, every night I listen to your voice scraping against my walls

And in the mornings, trivial offerings on my pillows

          I pick the spiders from my bed, flush their curled transparence down the drain

America I don’t know what to make of  my ordinary cruelty

          Or my newly bourgeois pain

Venom lacing each crack of  the historic apartment

          Venom lacing the porcelain plates we hand out at parties

In the hallway I let someone touch me under my mask

          Three fingers in my mouth

          My back pushed against the door, the cold sink

The mind plays where it leads, a dark hour, the weight of a body on indigo tiles

America the scale says not thin enough

America my lawyer suggests to keep quiet about certain things

          About you and me

So I write in my notebook your name, I write Country of

America I have no cowboy

And I have no fame

All I gather is the scratching of ink against paper, the laugh of a skeptic

There are nights we hear something likened to fireworks lighting up the humid campus

And my students cheer, they laugh Welcome to America

Later in the empty corridor, the disembodied voice of my uncle

Saying        The classroom is not a prison

Saying        Go, go home now and so I go

Past vetiver and cedar, past eucalyptus declaring the shoreline

Until I shiver on the soft-stoned coast on which my father once lay

          And I proclaim what he did, I say This land is my  fate

America who am I becoming here with you

          If I wander the same as without you, barely visible amid your indigenous trees