From “The Question"

So why, then, did you leave the village
Of your childhood?

Why did you opt for a gray and brutalist zone
Devoted to might and money
Unless you wanted some?
Why else?
In the airport restaurants you smell shit,
And in the motel fabrics
Sex and smoke make you gag.

Restless business men, too many of them,
Blink into machines they carry on the planes.

Discarded anti-depressants
Are replaced by vodka and cranberry.

They call women by their wives’ names.
They have medicinal eyes
That can’t cure anyone.
You go up to 33,000 feet

With an abject army of travelers

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Did you leave in order to retrieve
These little bits of experience
And add them to your secret cache?
So you could bring them back
And give a lecture on what you discovered:
That specks of the lost
Can only be identified as “lost.”

Why didn’t you just stay home?



from “Far and Away”

10.

The city is a desert with water on every side
And strong working people
Pushing along.
Soon I will be one of them.
X forgave Peter three times three
Then went into a nearby garden to cry.
A rejected gesture turns to syrup.
It has a sickening taste
And its color is maroon.
It is a substance you carry around like an island.
I told you love produces more love
Until it is marooned in its own dark hands.
Then it knows something.

23.

In the milk and meat factory
Where hide and curd are also made, there hangs a heart.

I think it’s an udder as puffy and pink as a lady’s slipper.
This dark red object is hooked and hard.

Is it real or d—d?

One, I am sure it is made of a cow.
Two, I am sure it represents sacrifice.
But there is no three to what I know.
Because the spirit keeps its distance
From such a place and blows in the lots outside.

Ma knew I was lost.
Both good and evil are capacities
You can access by mistake because the two look alike.
I couldn’t decide.
So she made me labor in the factory.

Slaves can’t make choices
Therefore they are free.
This is called “the little way.”
Every survivor has a slave in their river.
And a section they ran from.

Faces of babies gaze up from under.
It’s the population we sense
When we go in the river. Not royalty
Unless one rotten with water
But a slave left over from the will to work.

A person turned into a tool bent to a hard surface.
History glued to spirit every time.

From The Lyrics, copyright 2007 by Fanny Howe. All rights reserved.