Three poems

Nothing here today that doesn’t exist yesterday.

Noise exists 

as music or chaos.

Depends where you stand

which changes always. Things 

change, like who you are with and 

why. He says he learns in part what 

it means to be a       man. I change where I stand. 

Questions he poses I counter. That’s the thing, what it means

to be, that we can look at. What it means. An old thing, and examined. 

He says thank you. I say thank you, and believe him because not believing 

him is no different in the end. That’s the thing worth talking about now and in the past 

and future. In the simultaneity of all things happening, we direct our gaze somewhere, right? 

I still live (t)here      

I live for a decade close 

to the six-unit building 

where my antecessors 

(bisnonna, bisnonno)

live upon arrival, at the turn 

of the 20th century.

Sicilian cafe nearby

looks odd,    evidence 

of some Italians    in what’s now

the 83rd Precinct    is once

the 18th Ward    of Brooklyn, 

is earlier     little town

in the woods   or   heavy woods

depending on your source. 

Do my antecessors know   

that the 83rd Precinct

grants them whiteness within 

one generation? Is that what they seek

when they leave Regalbuto?

The great wooden horse

becomes flesh in the new world.

Where the sky can clear, when clear

Lose language and religion. Again. 

Lose memory and medicine 

and gain  America. Worth millions more 

than your grandmother’s ash,

a white-lined highway bought

by selling ethnicity’s dirt roads. 

Try via sky via sea 

but I can’t refill my mouth 

with lost dialect. 

Can’t be new. Nothing new. 

Surely my ancestors’ antecessors 

travel,  change 

words that always exist 

in Persia, in Egypt.

This quarter-inch of privilege. This skin

sunning on a rooftop near Avola on the southern coast of Sicily

drinking juice of wide green lemons picked in the yard, 

salting the water the salt needed in that heat. 

Gazing at something new, this rocky busted road. 

Not new. The furniture I lay on is Ikea. The sea I swim in:Mediterranean or Ionian. There’s no clear border.