Tula. Chris Santiago

      1  Night Letter to Rilke

      2  Hele in C

      3  [Island without Ancestors]

      4  ultra / sound

      5  Still Life with Transduction

      6  Some Words

      7  Gloss

      8  [Nesology]

      1  Tula

      2  Tula

      3  Tula

      4  Tula

      5  Tula

      1  A Year in the Snow Country

      2  Where the Fathers Wait

      3  Hele

        Notes

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

      tu · la |'toōl

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      Nahuatl: near the cattails; ruined Toltec capital. Tall atlantes, sun-cut shields. God-nest. Birdsong. Mongolian: willow-banked tributary of the Orkhon. Baltic: unreachable, Russified to oblast. Ironworks. Hollow points. Music box gilt & nielloed with orchids, islands, passerines; tula-work. Chileno: slang for cock. Also nightshade, bellflower. Solfege: veil & a sixth. English: square-rigged for new continents. Almost marsh grass, ghosted to Caddo. Kotule: savanna tongue, rich in affix, in use by all generations. Sanskrit: Libra. Scales, stars above our son. Was the weight of will. Nahuatl from the Nahuatl for ‘what pleases the ear.’ Tagalog: an aporia. Mother tongue: a poem.

       Audiometry

      Because my son thinks I am a citadel—

      soundproof. A repository.

      Because horsing around at bedtime he pierced

      my cochlea with a pencil.

      The first time I saw the inner ear

      I thought it looked like a little life, thriving

      but not yet big enough

      for me to feel for it any kind of empathy.

      By what were such things fed?

      Would it overgrow its carapace

      & make of the body a coppered bell?

      And then I was sixteen & crossing

      Saint Paul with my father. A seashell

      in his pocket which for his own reasons

      he refuses to wear. He can’t hear

      the Chicano keeping pace behind us,

      lean & loose-limbed,

      clucking, “Gooks, gooks.”

      For years, he’d sat a little further from us

      each night at the dinner table

      hollowed out by the roll of stock tickers

      all through his graveyard hours.

      It’s a remarkable machine

      the nurse slides into my ear canal, built

      to detect lies & arrhythmia & the trembling

      of incalculable tranches of earth.

      I pulled his pace toward mine but declined

      to parse his solitude for him—planes

      of salt-haloed stone refusing

      to let footfalls cut to their holdings.

       Tula

       The linnet will be singing.

       A man will awaken on his deathbed,

       not yet cured.

      —LARRY LEVIS

      Blood stranger,

      we never met: you died so far away

      that here the moment

      hasn’t passed.

      An alien moon

      rises. Hearing

      birdsong in the forests of the dead

      you pin it

      in your mind’s ear:

      my inheritance

      redacted

      to a prosody; by flow & respiration

      stripped to contour,

      archipelago.

      Even your last wordless sounds

      are of that music my mother

      grieved in:

      I want

      to kiss you, to understand,

      but I have no body—

       The Poet’s Mother at Eleven, Killing a Chicken

      As for the bird, its pedigree

      was impeccable: rose-combed & indigenous

      cockfighting in its blood. My