Daniel Owen
ME AND CALIFORNIA SITTIN’ IN A TREE
I.
In my send is my hening,
in my sedge is my kenning, Drinking
one morning from an amnesiac’s well
By the waters of huichin by the memorious blue
sun of the burnt American’s world language, by its unflappable
lungflute, its poison footfell-haven—Yesterday’s news becomes
tomorrow’s symptom, fodder, flair for
hysterics gives you something to get behind, a believe-in at
whatever coast the heavenly bodies stay in orbit, in place, out
of sight, out the folds of night’s
robes like blood-hungry bedbugs who make common
cause with the sewer-poets of
Paris to demolish the sun — here, we train
desire as an entirely material arena, it’s
breadth and penetration that of radio signals
II.
Eat and drink, laugh and sing for tomorrow
For pace and for string
for breath and for line
These setbacks called decisions, called misprision,
called historical process, day in and day out as
if a raincoat, gift us a list
a Clump of veils-between-worlds where
We just imitate shit we love with words and call it a day, maybe play or lose
Marbles or canons or cannons or canyons or carbles, cockles,
cocker spaniels, ckckkkk,
ccckkkkk or warbles anyway upon alighting from
The 52 AC Transit bus in my university-owned-and-operated housing complex the other day I
saw a Great Russian Poet hunched in the bushes
Sighing breezily, briskly, sweetly,
disconsolately, wisely,
tiredly, shrewdly an American
spirit’s smoke into the tired air —
she smoked lazily dazedly faintly
daintily brutally unabashedly
secretly sheepishly creepily
repeatedly favorably mortally
fortuitously sordidly morbidly
forbiddingly Lorcaishly tortuously
inexplicably fixedly riskily
taxingly wackily lackadaisically
accessibly obsessively irrepressibly
fantastically lavishly masterfully —
Anyway there she is smoking in the manicured bushes of the university housing complex
Ash the moon would envy so gray,
so bright, so between day and night, (“antara ada dengan tiada”)
By the bus stop by the fence that separates the company town
from the train tracks that separate residential
from industrial zone
from the freeway from the Bay that leaks out
into the particularly palpable Endlessnesses of
the Pacific out past the bridges and foggy hills yonder
And my eyes climb over the wall
to find their thought in sound
(Salt in shells, ocean-speak,
translation sleaze)
O there’s a vaporous way
Of knowing about such things (and a
condensing one of saying) As the cresting
dome of killing and
Dying in a name the state will come to
Claim in this country it’s now
Eddying, gathering in husked
Breath as does the cockroach
As does the squirrel, the donkey, Struggle
To not pin the tail on the
named point besides the content, the way
things happen, or don’t, for
instance
III.
Once I lived in a place and was there all the time
Salt in wounds and ooze in
Wine cups all along, keyword with no melody
Like daily pills repeat, feedings in
A context (“at least no one
Is keeping me alive,” &c.) where
The winter magnolias blossom pink in fulsome February sun
pink and fat of course Because of
all the candy eaten during the war and all
The candy factories blasting full steam ahead and
All the sugar plantations, the cane, the
coolies, the indentured, the enslaved even now unspoken or
whispered in
all that sweetness under the sun
And here we
Uncomposed loosely
(in its death bets, debt threats,
sweat depths)
Meant
Living like a fly for the buzz, wisteria, turkey’s wattle, blameless trees
with tongues
with tongues forked and licketysplit to the pushpop name of Almighty
with bald gums all along
with stargazers’ law books
with a hook and a reed
When the visible acts like a menu and
All that array of broken ankles
where the memorable has holes in its reaching through
entwine — it’s A shrug and a
plug and a tug and a drug and a fug and a rug and a hug not
one may surmise
of resignation
but of wonder
BELOW EITHER
the past the words skip town with. pretty
words. as in very much so. high decibel
like a hole in the tree. a hollow. a hasp. the
air in a hasp. an asshole in living color. and we no longer
know the meaning of hasp. alone and rejoinedered
at the itchy elbows.
underneath the cream undulant nevermores
give the promise of ruin. sweat, scent. faint
nothings. a president takes even the name for
the bodies of the killed from our usage. cleans the tongue with
a spaceship rhythm. now is all polite. on the backside
of the coin. the bumpy, abraded flesh. raw.
chicken skin, freezer burn. ask
politely to publish your trash along with others’
trash. a democratic movement. sad
bowel. animaniac on repeat as though the clock
were a scroll. hollowed innards, deep tone. the absolute
tiniest itty-bitty memory of all. what could have
been said swallowed up by the cats. who lick
their scruff. on heaps of stone. they face the storm.
taken by hands the species of an historical moment
warms into moisture. Like the afterglow
of a snowball. damp as a birth. like a like. seams
of an afterwards. worms eat well at the all-
nighter. at the alter. welt of the handsome hand,
the nearest.
Daniel Owen is a poet, editor, and translator between Indonesian and English. Recent poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Two Lines. His translation of Afrizal Malna's Document Shredding Museum was published by World Poetry Books in 2024, and his translation of Malna's The Running Century is forthcoming from Reading Sideways Press. Daniel edits and designs books and participates in many processes of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and is a PhD candidate in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.
