you see a block
of light throw up
your hands and make
animals speak through
them

you see a pile
of debris you
better build a ship
with it and float
down to mexico

you see some empty
bottles fill them back
up slip music or
messages in them

you see a little
tonka truck you must
see a construction
yard and scaffolding
mounds of dirt

you see someone
making eyes at you
make eyes at you
too looking so good

trying to
understand.
The thing

I’ve found
the most
useful. I’ll

have everything
given to
it and it

will be
given to
everything.

In college the poems stopped rhyming and I was finding music in words themselves. During each of my classes I would write esoteric and grandiose phrases in my notebooks like, “So stand in its wake, awash with the melody, and breathe deeply the silence, the sound of something none of us can comprehend.” I made a document on my computer called “myinnerself.doc”, and collected and continued to write these phrases (The document is now 246 pages of sheer juvenile brilliance).

I finally took my first poetry class and then my senior year I took my first creative writing workshop. I had never showed anyone my poems in little bits as facebook statuses, and when people saw them they went over happily enough. We had to write a short story, a piece of sudden fiction, but I couldn’t think in strands that linear or well connected, so I wrote a prose poem about the sea (eyelashes, like anchors!) It felt natural and I felt talented. So I signed up for a poetry workshop, with a man named Jericho Brown.

Jericho Brown is a crazy man, the most intelligent, intuitive creature I’ve ever met. He made me read the first books of poetry I’d ever read. In his class we read nothing but first books, from Michael Dumanis’ My Soviet Union to Maurice Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions. I wanted to write a book of poems.

When the semester was ending and I was all set to graduate I found out that I was 2 credits shy of the minimum required to graduate. So I took an independent study with Jericho. I read more poetry and wrote more too. I also helped him put the final touches on his first book of poems, Please. Proofs would arrive and we’d argue about the cover design and the font, it was his child, his very first. I told him he’d be famous one day, and he is. He told me I had to apply to graduate school for poetry and so I did.

So I arrived to UCSD and my MFA, to my first two classes in one day with Michael Davidson and Rae Armantrout. I wasn’t an English major, I had never studied literature, and I had only just taken my first poetry workshop. I still felt talented, but I felt ignorant and I was and I am still. I just kept writing. I wrote a poem each day, and learned to see poems of the world. Poetry became habitual, the function of my body. Now, this comes and goes, that world can’t always be habituated, but I locate myself with poems.

I alternate. The time passing always leads me to wonder what’s left to be said, and just then I invent something to say. I’ve hardly even begun to try and have my poems published. The manuscript I am working on now explores the very same questions that I asked 10 years ago when I started writing poems. I find that I’m still sorting out that same New World of back then. My father and your father are dead and dying. But their bodies, for a time, will still grow hair. A full moon is audible on the sea at night. My father was a fisherman. My father was Portuguese. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother is still living, though she doesn’t understand poetry. I try telling her there is nothing to understand but she still says she doesn’t. I’d tell any child that poetry is a very simple thing and they’d agree. I wish I could tell my mom that I think of poetry just like this: a bird landing briefly in wet cement and then flying off.

Momma, I am a poet, more or less. If I said I was a little bird, I know you’d understand. I want to write myself a book of poems. I want to talk about hair and sea life and pieces of string. I’m sorry I want so much and do so little to actually make it happen. I know I have a way of making all of the things about me. I look down sometimes, and the world is hanging from my two feet. It’s hard to tell what isn’t mine or about me. But the poems aren’t about getting something right, they are just about trying to get something right. Just trying. Thinking about it another way. I’ll try.

***

Some day
one of us
will die
and leave
the other
living.

***

The wind teases
the swingset,
but why
are you
empty?

***

The moon
unfilled by
the silhouettes
of birds.

***

We’ll get
all glittery
and haunt
suburban households.

***

open the door. A naked

boy behind it

surprised each

time. In this dream

something occurs over

and over. Nothing

in that world’s

allowed to keep it

from repeating. No

one else is sleeping,

no one is awake.

I dreamt of being a rock,

good in that same way.

I woke up soft and human,

writing poems that I love.

up in space, down on earth

they held a prayer service

for astronauts. That same

day a boy sent Nasa

a bag full of rocks

for the pockets of future

astronauts, so they’d always fall

back to earth.