Three Poems

Evening comes without seeing light again. Between you and a window:
The beige Lego-maze of offices, people whose names you don’t know.
You should be addressing inefficiencies in online processes,
Mastering multichannel, getting serious about small business,
You have created a spreadsheet with thirteen tabs,
The manager is giving you hell, ordering sushi, cancelling cabs.
The senior partner calls from Newark, ‘Thanks team,’ (his thin
Voice purrs, he is sipping something), ‘let’s make it a win-win.’
But in the morning, brushing his new teeth, looking out into the snow’s
Huge act of world-effacement, its lethargy, he knows:
Things are illiquid, freezing up. Light is abortive
On the greyscale Park. It’s time to short the fucking market.
In Chennai, meanwhile, a man is waiting for your analysis,
Eating his breakfast of microwaved dal and mini-idlis,
Checking the cricket scores on his computer, reading Thoreau,
Wondering what New York looks like at night, in snow.
He is applying to Columbia, NYU Stern, and Stanford GSB.
He thinks of going abroad as an attempt to live deliberately,
Imagining the well-stacked fires in iron-fenced Victorians,
The senior partner’s grace under pressure, his Emersonian
Turn of phrase, the summers spent sailing, the long reaches
Of sand threaded with grass on Cape Cod beaches.

2.2

Yes, the hipsters crumble their kouign-amann in San Francisco,
Fog lifts away like garage doors, MacBooks get going.
A girl with drug sores rocks by a steamed-up Bikram studio.
Women pour milk on Kashi for the men from Tinder in the Mission,
Wondering if they didn’t come because of the Last Words or the sertraline.
Or maybe it is just what happens when you get older or heartbroken.
And the flamers in the Castro from last night order oat pancakes,
Bacon crisp in a cross, white lozenge of butter, dispelling headaches,
While the pastry chef folds cinnamon into tres leches cakes.
Su-Yen pauses lordly before he crosses, reproving his owner
With a shake of his standard-size poodle head at each corner,
His jaw primitive and cautious (cave!) as the mosaic dog in Pompeii.
And you ease out behind huge Ray-Bans, counting the avenues
Of rubbery ficus trees, past ox-tongue taquerias,
Into the tangle of collapsible concrete freeways.
Grey coaches carry hooded children south to the Valley,
A coder who grew up in a car in Hawaii is drinking a Snapple,
A quant checks the calories on a granola puck and checks Facebook.
So no one sees the sparrowhawk stall in the outside lane.
And he is himself surprised by the deer in the windscreen,
The plump bunny rump, the hooves in child’s pose. Balasana.
It took the car out in the early hours. On the seat
The bored drool of its jaw, the crushed pearlescent teeth
Turned to the side, like someone whimpering at sleep.

4.3

Tears and liver spots on the back of the hand,
The comfort again and again of writing something fictional down.
All cancers were once benign,
Then the DNA forgets its prosody
And cells divide interminably:
The raddled beauty of doggerel.
Stained under a microscope,
An ovary is Venice at sunset,
‘Too beautiful to be painted’ said Monet.
Midas-touched sperm, bulging and fanning.