Remainder
You left me a lucky street to work in,
this historic district with pro forma
moss between shifted brick.
Movement without looking:
where memory folds
into the architecture both of
cinder-block and hours.
Each in ten years of day is
a transparent pane tinted
with your filament..
I pass through the neighborhood park
often under the footbridge
with its reliefs, its mice, its mass of birds.
moving on two places,
foot on brick and years.
You are every bird
under the bridge,
their hauntings of noise,
and the flock when it moves.
If I could pluck one out in midflight,
grasp it biting and slapping me
I might stop replacing vision
with memory for a moment,
see the street as feral and elusive
as the beginning, distracted with
scrapings in the dormer.
I lingered once for
hours past midnight;
when crickets retook
their human voices
to talk among themselves
Borrachera
1.
The Datura opens here.
It’s easy to love
all those names;
dhatur, dhattura,
white thorn-apple,
moonflower, locoweed in Los Angeles,
kanak and unmatt,
toloache, datura-
blanca, burundanga and
borrachero, and to
say each one
as long as it will stay in the mouth.
I’ve been a little drunk myself
even before I swallowed
(jimson-weed and Jamestown weed, as well)
the sharp seeds;
just spoke them slowly, like chewing.
2
On the lawn, a
shoot’s slow roar of growth
has become a tree,
spread uncurling
branches hung with flowers.
They tangled every jogger through Sunset Junction.
Long blossoms,
bell shapes of
oblique white,
their day-color.
It’s a “tree”, it’s a “flower,”
one when it’s not the other, a
bell when not a flower,
a plant and
also (I read) medicine, and poison, and more.
There’s a name for all of it.
.
At night it isn’t a tree or flower..
Stalk and verdure vanish in the dark.
The flowers lose their bodies
in a mass of white fire,
phosphorescence
alight midair
3.
And now day.
I set datura here,
as if it were a shoot
and this paper a lawn,
set by the gate for emphasis.
The flowering of the page.
It can’t keep still.
On heavy roots, it manages
escapes,
slips from its plot to
bud and flourish,
burn, wilt, always
elsewhere.
I have it right
beside the front gate;
all mine,
offering nothing.
A flower flowers;
here is beauty, take some.
I have been a little maddened–
sat under it for a night and then another
to put my arms around fire, for.
some wider kind of having.
That’s no way of having anything:
This grasping was a failure.
I repeated it every time I spoke the name
hoping I could shape flora
with sound in the hollow of my throat.
It came to be better taken in
to chew the leaves,
swallow hard-edged seeds.
My spine in an upward twist
blood like fire down a hall,
glowing with it.
An assignation:
the datura has me by the flesh,
It does what it wants with me.
Andrew Aulino began spending time in with San Bernadino, Riverside, and Irvine during his early years in the Southwestern United States. He became familiar Inland Empire during many trips spent crossing California with family. He expanded this familiarity living in Los Angeles, where he retains personal ties. He currently lives in Sacramento.
Inlandia: A Literary Journey 