Excerpt from "America"

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

 

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

Cowboys and Fame

 

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