There was a time that was easeful to the mind.
You got on a train and there you were.
You went to work and there you were.
The architecture of the building was yours,
and the boss may have been exigent but he was yours.
Certainly the neighbors were yours, and the newspapers
were filled with you. If you liked art and books
they were always yours. If you liked sports,
the players and the coaches and the rules
were nothing but you at your golden best. 
If you were thoughtless, you could sit in an easy chair, 
knowing the TV would smile its gorgon smile 
and disgorge images of you and you and you. 
And your wife—who else could she be but yours 
in every turn of her apron, in every turn of her duster
on the banister, in every pliant turn in bed?
Thought, thought is the enemy, or the thought 
that represses a thought. To be self-conscious, 
to go through life assessing each habit, phrase, 
way of looking, to know that the neutral expression
on your face will always be misconstrued
as scornful or insufficiently respectful,
to avoid being the Other in the room,
to avoid saying the one thing that would surround you
in a fetid cloud of loathing, to have to think not to think!
Look at your hand—isn’t it changing from all
the repression? Look at your face—
that isn’t a five o’clock shadow 
but something deeper and more permanent, 
something—dare I say it?—darker, darker,
something you can never scrub off.

From Divine Fire, by David Woo, available here.

This poem appeared in Ron Charles’s Book Club for The Washington Post, which selected Divine Fire as one of the best poetry books of 2021.

All night I look at your face on the screen,
how each image flows from that October day
we met, a gap-toothed absence
under the scarlet maple. Masks to stop death
would cover your face by spring.
Masks you wore each autumn
crinkled with the intent to scare, a fear
you seduced with the crash of death-metal
guitars on a skateboarder’s curb.
Behind each mask you smiled into the fear,
knowing it the artist’s way, to transform
some somber chiaroscuro skull
into a Day-Glo self-portrait after Basquiat.
I knew a poet’s transformations, to break
my artifacts of despair, tipping the glass
pyramid of words into a plenitude
of shards. Were we so different?
By your 32nd year, you’d learned
enough of your own tenderness
to touch death with a silken glove,
caressing the neck of your sick cat
or your grandmother’s mortal hand.
You didn’t notice the real monster
lurking nearby, whose grim prophecy
swirled about you in the eddies
from red leaves. The last mask you wore
would be the one you’d take off,
revealing the face I’d glide to
and hold in constant refuge of love.
How I dip and dip my oars, never gaining
my mark inside the weeping, digital cloud.
But when I look up at the wall beyond the desk,
I arrive at my own eyes, tearless, rising
from our last bed. Your unseen brush
guides my face, blue with desire for you,
out of the darkness. Through the painting
I always reach your eyes, my love.

This poem first appeared in Poetry London.

“David,” by Eric Lisenbey (2020).

The years are fine with dust that settles in the eyes.
The stars are bound to gods from abandoned temples.
By night you fear the abdication of the sun.
By day you wear the light like a broken crown.

Silence, stillness, absence pass, pass and murmur
themselves into sound, and music is simple
on a tinkling harpsichord that troubles the ear
with the drone of a word no tongue can tell….

From Divine Fire, by David Woo, available here.

To read a portfolio of four poems, including the rest of this poem, go to The Georgia Review here.

From inside your headphones, behind the chirring decibels,
the white rumble of stars, syncopation of falling stars,
the artifice of a blue cosmos in illuminated water—

you are late for home, late for the mangoes and the rice.
Each movement you make parts another family’s serenity,
parts it and restores it to the clear, aside a pyramid of leaves….

From Divine Fire, by David Woo, available here.

To read the rest of the poem and David Woo’s description of what inspired it, go to the “In Their Own Words” feature at the Poetry Society of America’s website.

And strangers will arrive as they’ll depart, shaking your hand,
And friends will say, “Sorry,” and walk right through you,
And thought will slip through a sieve, honeyed with sadness.

And lovers will spin in the windows of a cinquefoil,
And minutes will stream like corpuscles through the streets
Until they’re caught in a frontage road labeled, “No Outlet.”

And dogs will listen for a master who’ll never return,
For a garage door to rise at the touch of a remote control,
For the latch to unlock and the presence of a god to enter in.

And a god will throw down a fog that clarifies, not obscures,
And leaves will grow clear and have no need to fall,
And a root-sphere will pulse in the clear ground, like a mind.

And your father will grow senile and fretful, and your mother
Will lose the strength to lift the side of her hand,
And the gravedigger will send a bill marked “Past Due.”

So why the outrage, why the dread, if the funeral is dark
As you willed it to be, and the stained glass luminous
With temporary light? Why not rest here, in the nave,

Where the living will pass by and murmur how rich
Your life was, after all, in the end? Say “I am poor,”
Show them the invisible patches in your black suit,

Ask them to praise your forgetfulness and make it last.

—David Woo

“Ballad of Infinite Forgetfulness” appeared in the collection of poems, The Eclipses.

[Read more…]

The sun is a Tudor arch sustaining the sky.
In a moment it will fall. Blackbirds
with crimson suns on their wings
squawk in protest, and my sister,
in lovely, billowy clothes from Anticipation,
picks a sky-blue cornflower that she’ll press
between pages of the O.E.D.

In the lightless vault of words
the petal tips will caress
an adjective from the Old French.

Now, as she strays through the field,
she asks me if she’s beginning to look like
Ophelia—she doesn’t know why,
she just imagines Ophelia long-haired
and pregnant—and I say, “No, no,
you’re a terrible singer and much too sane,”

and she pulls her ample sleeves
together in a solemn, mandarin way
and bows to the birds startling
the sky and bows to the dying sun
and bows to me, her younger brother,
who wants nothing more of the world
than to salt the stream before her
that she may float and float
and never drown.

—David Woo

“Salt” appeared in The New Yorker and in the collection of poems, The Eclipses.

You have invited some friends over for dinner,
and each of them has brought along one or two friends,
who each brought one or two more, until the room
is crowded and senseless,

and the roast is being hacked and impaled
on toothpicks as makeshift hors d’oeuvres,
and wine glasses blithely tossed into the fireplace,

and a drunken stranger is cavorting on a giant mobile
outside your bedroom window. By now you’ve given up

trying to control anyone. You lie in bed, listening
to the sounds of a party that is nonsensical to you
and brings you no pleasure. A police siren

comes closer and closer, then dopplers into silence.
The hydraulics of a bus sighs rudely. A washing machine
merges into a pack of feral dogs. I meant to ask you

a question at the party, but I see now that you’re tucked in,
except for the pajamas with bunny feet that peek out
from under the covers. How small you are, how helpless.

I kiss you goodnight, once on each eye, and wipe away
the last tears from your lifelong tantrum.
Then I close the door slowly, slowly,

to avoid making any noise.

—David Woo

This poem appears in David Woo’s book, Divine Fire, and first appeared in The New Republic.

If I built a stone wall, if I rebuilt a pre-modern wall
rebuilt for millennia, if my fingertips bled from asperities
exposed by capillary water uptake in ancient limestone,

if I sheltered within the niche I built in the wall, hewn
of tufa, neapolitan, classically pocked and ochred
and proofed against the elements with a bitter amalgam

of fermented cactus, if after all this drudgery the niche
was no larger than a womb in which I had folded myself
like a fetus fully configured, genitalia and cognition formed

and on proffer, as ever, borrowed thoughts, as ever,
on my mind, like the sweetly self-effacing letter Henry James
wrote to William—“when I image those resources of yours

in their large romanticism, I look out of my window
at my so rosy and so mulberried and so swarded garden
with a more consoled sense of its small contractedness”—

I would know only the annealed, the unconsoled surface
of my own contraction, how I abut it on all sides
and within, the same ophidian concretion ossifying

my blood on retinal disk as in clear cornea, as if
I were less pliantly alive, less snake than tesseral snake
on buried mosaic, proffering the first apple to someone,

a woman, a man, an ancestor, unseen because unexcavated.

—David Woo

This poem appears in David Woo’s Divine Fire and first appeared in The Threepenny Review.

Nothing’s new anymore. The vellum of a face
on which is written, “Forty years, half a century.”
I know that the volcano Laki caused a famine
in 1783, but I still haven’t seen Reykjavík.
I’m always in the same Zen garden trying to turn
the raked sand into an ocean. Why do I wonder
if I’ll ever be as elegant as the cheap Andean
handkerchief in my pocket? So many roses,
so little love. I stopped traveling, except in books.
Behind my father’s house is the bamboo grove
where he played. “You should observe
the faces of children,” Wittgenstein advised.
I think of you most on Saturday evenings,
after it’s rained, and the air in the garden is new.

—David Woo

This poem appears in David Woo’s book Divine Fire and first appeared in Raritan.

“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry.
Extinction is bliss for those who resent human life.
How else to be happy when a caul of anger
occludes the prospect of your faith? Better

to enfranchise corruption. Defile the good land.
Pray the Rapture saves your grandchildren
before the tipping globe melts. That ancient image
you worshiped, now haloed, now scimitared,

will strain through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal,
extruding some modish thing, spiteful, vain,
frontotemporally deranged. Tell yourself
He is the Man. Rejoice as He pries the world apart.

This is the end, you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance,
of amity, the last gasp of afflatus, of consequent sorrow.
Watch as He scythes the last wheat, which flies
like the severed heads of infidels. Then why does the bread

we break savor of no body but the embodied ghosts
of ancient grass? What infinity lives in the turning leaves
but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie? What life
basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?

The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or ensō on him who frees critical mass
from a nuclear drone. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.

—David Woo

This poem is one of two title poems in David Woo’s book Divine Fire and first appeared in The Asian American Literary Review.