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Rare and Commonplace Flowers
Where we ran wild
there are two
scars from the same
damned accident. The air
grows wide. The weeds
move with lily
and rose, hollyhock,
show the glim of
that white torso
you take to first
when you wake
alive with dreams
you will later pack
underground, with
the feathers, the Rottweiler,
the best-seller,
that bone. The past
is a sump, a hollow
really, a pot half-turned.
As for the tulip
isn’t it just
a void of sorts?
Without a real god,
only your earrings
stand guard
and in the end
there’s nothing
left to do
but lift
the garbage out
and burn
the burlap sack.
Stillness
Still. My palms sweat like tea glasses on the wicker table brought out
with the stories of lost uncles on Labor Day when no one here mentions
the four boys who beat that man up and left him to die in the bleached heat.
What talk there is—of basketball and trucks, a word or two about the war—
comes down to gratitude that Skip came back alive.
The only snake in the August garden, that unspoken question, How is she?
She’s dying, thank you, but not fast enough to save her posture, her teeth,
her eye for fashion, her sarcasm. I don’t add I miss them.
Never ask—can someone tell me how to lose the one they loved and hated
to love? How it felt to hold her chilly paw with their wet fingers?
What they said to strangers bringing food and flowers in the stillness after.
These poems originally appeared in the 11.1 (Fall 2006) issue of The 2River View.
Ghazal
I forgot her face the way men forget the moon.
So many veils, even the sky forgets the moon.
On my desk, a strand of her hair and Rilke’s poetry
illuminated by sunlight. Forget the moon!
She wore a purple cashmere shawl, and when it slipped
down her fine-boned shoulders, all men forgot the moon.
We walked barefoot from Ms. Soni's Guest House
to the mango tree of orange flesh that dared forget the moon.
And her voice sang for two dances in New Delhi—-
our last dance, and one alone to forget the moon.
I remember little—the way her mouth fit mine,
the strength of artists' hands, how to forget the moon.
Timotheos, what is the source of your sorrow?
Did you kiss the hollow night but forget the moon?
Zoology
As for servals, jackals, monkeys,
tigers, lions and baboons,
female chimps in heat
with genitals swollen like
pink balloons, elephants content
in their sad bags of skin, rhinos
set for dinner with their horns
and plates and lips, and the fishing cat
with eyes like Chuang Tzu's—-
all outdone! We humans,
caging our nakedness
in clothes, swearing our long fangs
left under some tree on the savanna, buried
in some closet at home, we—-
most unbelievable
spectacle of all.
These poems originally appeared in the 11.1 (Fall 2006) issue of The 2River View.
Arizona to Nevada: Crossing the Line
I’m astonished
flowers grow from rock.
I’ve seen them in Iceland:
Purple lupine clumped in a crevice.
How does this happen?
The same array unfolds
in Boulder City:
Another purple protrusion
inching its way
along the mountain tilt.
Below, on the two-lane highway,
cars, bottlenecked,
creep in pace.
Below that, the Hoover Dam
jammed the
Colorado River,
as early as the thirties,
bursting it
into an artificial flower
at the bottom of
Black Mountains’ vase.
Before that,
volcanoes sprouted
from Boulder City
leaving a bed
of gravel and sand
for the Colorado
to hose through
planting petals
glittering garnet and gold.
What will become of rock?
Of purple flowers
redeeming drivers,
hungry and drained?
Hanging Clothes
Mondays, my mother would heave
the creaking wicker basket
up the basement stairs
to the clotheslines outside,
wipe them clean,
then with wooden clothespins,
hang sheets—corners connecting—
my dad’s factory hankies, pillow cases, and shirts,
fastidiously pinning underpants on the inside line
to shy away from neighbors.
Clothes hung.
Years flap by, nearly ready
to take down and gather in a basket.
A load accomplished.
It all comes out in the wash—almost all—
except for the awkward haul of Alzheimer’s
she carries inside her cinderblock room
with the slim locker
that chokes her labeled clothes,
no longer able to breathe in the heat of the day.
From lawn chairs on the deck,
my t-shirts crisp
in the dry mouth of the wind
to stand straight as a movie screen
when I pull my childhood over my head
and, momentarily blindfolded,
glimpse spirits,
clothed in sheets and shirts,
fluttering and dancing
to the rhythm of the wind.
These poems originally appeared in the 11.1 (Fall 2006) issue of The 2River View.
Grackles
Autumn in the biome. Our yard busy with grackles landing around the feeder, their iridescent hoods a stylish variation that clerics strive for, eyes bright, insane, their crawk a throat made raw with singing notes too high. They’re stabbing yellow zoysia grass, hopping mad, glaring at chipmunks who have scampered under the drooping leaves of hosta lilies. A cardinal in the umbra of dried hydrangea blossoms, his redness the tongue naked to the air, loosened from its proper place in the heat of the mouth. A wet fear words its way among chickadees, titmice and nuthatches, the speckled lone woodpecker clinging to the edge of the feeder. They rise in a black cloud, the grackles, they’re done, they break up like flak, bit by bit and all around they fill the dusk with thin lament, and squirrels rush for cover.
Spare Parts
They must be good for something, like Homer's ready-cut hexameters, his ox-eyes and winey tide. There were scabs on Achilles' knee that you never heard about, Hamlet's stutter, Ophelia's infected toe. What if when Emma Bovary died, her jaw slack, what oozed out was servitude, sash, succor? All the wrong words you'd ever hear at the post office in Rouen. And the poet thinking of the tyrant's cockroach mustache, what if he picked a flea from Natalia's pudendum and said, grifter, gasp, Garibaldi? Always somewhere a crunch of tank treads. Why not strato-cumulus? Ambling across the noir screen, a boulevardier suddenly modern: Bite me! Try child's rictus, a joy pineal, the foot that Karloff dragged in The Tower of London.
Spraying the Chickens
It wasn't necessary back when the hen kept her chicks close and they pecked at her fecal droppings and they swallowed just the right kind of mother love, a touch of illness, a taste of their own blood, and they trembled in sleep. Those days you could eat them without a care. Maybe even find a dark spot near the pimply shoulder, a piece of quill, the memory of a certain kind of flapping. The farmer's wife wiped her hands on her apron after she put the naked thing in the oven and she wiped the dirt off potatoes and she cut the bread, and you were so happy and hungry you wanted to kiss her hands that kept layer upon layer of so much world intact. And if something of that got into your mouth, it was proof against the evil to come, the corruption of bodies. The cold touch of strangers.
These poems originally appeared in the 11.1 (Fall 2006) issue of The 2River View.
Dream of Mending
Last night I dreamt a live horse fell to pieces,
slowly, from my arms to the dusty ground.
It was all clean breaks, a puzzle of marrow
and red, with a strain of the neck toward sky.
And he had the steam-white blaze of the stallion
I once wished for on pink candles and smoke.
But he was not mine. And soon I woke, worried
my dog was ill—connecting dane to horse
as usual. Yet he was, and your car broke down
on the way home from my place, that same night.
In another dream I might have grappled
with stirrups, reins and fled, moved like lightning
from vet to mechanic. Those broken haunches
mended like the finest liquid bronze.
St. Fiacre (Retablos)
I
Patron saint for gardens cab drivers tile
and box makers Fiber optic flashes
of life after six seventy AD
Like comets just now burning out maybe
an inch or light year off Orion’s belt
With the touch of spade to soil
Toppling bushes mighty trees digging trenches
You are a meteor leaving craters to smoke
Like my mother once moist gloves in the garden
II
Morning glory impatiens four o’clocks
When younger my favorite flowers
like the dresses I even in school had to wear
were showy and dodge balls are drawn to lace
pink hearts and white tights like snails to beer
The front yard was my Sunday school
Apse the bed growing the strongest mint
Your ability to heal better than or imbuing
the aloe planted at the foot of my steps
III
That plant will not grow its ring as I’d hoped
around the umbrella tree but instead
climbs up drain pipes walks the steps.
When I look I can see you light streak
bundled among deeper purple leaves
And now outside the hands of God I planted
are cupped to catch the rain drops gild the veins
feed the parched galaxy of summertime roots
fingertips poised as though about to dig recreate
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
conjunct of Miletus and Front Street
he took you from the mountain and shouldn't
you be grateful, not searching those four corners
of the finished basement apartment,
leaving silent indentations on the soggy carpet,
dancing across the linoleum while he is office-gone.
he leaves you bundles of babies breath
every evening and though once you were courted
by bowed worshipers he tells you not to look
and you still don't.
tell him that it was your sisters who wove
those beads of suspicion through you,
made you search closets for old journals,
rolled joints and let them burn, lighting
bullet holes in paper, blistering those words
he'd never let slip even when sleeping.
it's too late. you've spilled the oil,
left marks in the shape of your fingers and toes
and he's stretched his wings and already gone
through the gasping window.
Eulogy I: Dulcinea
It starts the way all stories
start: the frenzy
in the kitchen,
the overturned Quaker
chair, the torn upholstery,
the skin on her lips
chapped and peeling,
the raspberry mark
at the base of her throat
a mirror of my own. They
were all in love with her.
I thought I might be missing
something.
She told me the gods
favored drunks
and children and the
chemical equation
for transmuting base
metals into golds,
one shoelace dragging
behind her across the crimson
shag carpet; she was an even,
could only take swallows in two,
eight, or fourteen.
When she took off
her stocking I could see
the ghost moth on her ankle.
Not a sparrow or a butterfly
but those white wings
pressed to the hot glass
of a bare light.
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
To return to what I was saying--
You are indulgent, your mother thinks, to waste
each day on the doctor’s couch?
The anti-heartbreak.
When her lower jaw began to protrude at a young age
I would have--had I been born--
done something for her.
If just to curb the physical anguish
of her bite. Awry
years before the surgery.
Let it go--
the somatizing tendency.
There is already a lifetime of room
(to feel)
in the mind.
--where else could she have discovered
her solid objects.
Focused on her single things.
The Sleepwalker’s Wife
Trying to crack a can of tuna against a bowl, stirring
a bay leaf in a broth
of iced tea mix, or searing baloney,
I watched him cook while he slept.
His midnight chopping--
onions brought him to tears like anyone else, I told him--
was a gift, a rare biological talent.
His knife’s blind seesawing
was not precise
and mostly added grooves to the marble island.
But he never slipped
or cut anything living. His eyes
were both staring and void,
each lid a woozy aperture
through which he must have seen
on some level--as the experts say--
what he was looking for.
To watch him make something awake
was not so different. The night he left,
I looked at the sink and cleaned
a few dishes for the encore supper.
How I must have slept through the bounce in our bed
as he got to his feet. The garage lifting into the world.
My oven full of rice burning.
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
The Princess Who Loved Insects
In the brief, beeless January sunlight
I climb, bareheaded, through the trees
to find a nest of caterpillars, fuzzy and striped
that I hide in my kimono sleeves.
My mother wails in the darkened house
because I won't shave my eyebrows
or blacken my teeth, am not anxious
about the sun. My father shakes his head, and sighs.
Other girls dance with the butterflies
who flutter through the gardens, brilliant,
but they fear the silkworms’ writhing,
who weave their clothing, silent.
In the sea a red dragon dances. No one sees
but me and my tiny allies.
I know each summer my feet grow
longer and more brown
as I watch the pupae harden,
split and glisten—
as I, too, wait to be wrapped, stilled,
in layers of silk.
Crane Wife
My husband, you have forgotten
how many bolts of cloth I wove for you,
the children I bore you, the nights
I lay by your side to warm you.
When you were poor, you gave all you had
to buy the life of a white crane.
You loved her then. And when
I came to you dressed in white,
you did not recognize me.
You agreed to be my husband, and all I asked
was for you not to look at me bathing,
when my true nature might be revealed.
(You would wake up with feathered
remnants on your hands and face,
rinsing them with cold water. Was this
a dream, you wondered.)
You have asked for more,
you have opened the closet door;
I flew away, a crane who had given you
her white glory, and you knew the cloth
to be the sacrifice of my own skin, my feather coat.
A thousand cranes descended on your hut,
crying with betrayal. You searched all of Japan for me
until you found a lake of cranes, those white ciphers,
cried your goodbyes, useless, now, with age.
You had the gift of my wings, knew the lift
of flight and the gentle neck. Now, old man,
remember, when you watch a flash in the sky,
remember me, remember
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
Out Running
Hot enough to taste
the air, something rotten, and the swell
of cut grass in my throat. By the log pile,
my urine soaked into the gravel. Dust covers
me, like the roadside
detritus, the severed claw absurdly clenched,
the tampon wrapped in plastic: dry,
waiting. There's yelling. It's two girls
bent over a porch rail.
What?
They yell again. What?
Don't stop, keep running.
OK.
One holds a rounded little
girl pot belly. One who turns
away will soon be lovely. Their kiddie pool
will take too long to fill, will,
abandoned, brim and trickle:
that all small bodies
could be filled and filled—-
when empty, flipped
to cover bald dirt.
Raccoon Decapitated Near Drainage Ditch
The blue blood hammers in my ears, then bubbles
thick into the dust. Stars poked in the broken
shell horizon spray above my head
as it rolls to rest, facing East.
The red taillights blink away.
There's silence
for the first time, and no breath, just the twin suns
of an oncoming truck breaking
over the rounded hillock
of my body. There, by the ditch, its honest
browns light up, now bronze, now amber, gold.
At once the full clean glory rushes past...
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
crossfire
the demons touch gently at first, sifting through who is who in the darkness, finding me wrapping their arms tightly about my chest so I can only breath in faint, rapid gasps their claws sink into the clefts between my ribs and I taste the iron under their nails, residue from working lucifer’s mercury mines they squeeze and squeeze but my ribs are too strong for them to break
under a thundersky a man comes next to me his face blank with after-sex calm he offers to send my demons away I tip my hat to him at least they’re my demons, I don’t own much else I limp off toward Tombstone, demons in tow, to finish the task of burying my wife, to finish the task of throwing one last handful of dirt on her coffin, to finish the task and ride out past the preacher, always to the west, always westward ho, toward the rumor of a great raging sea, where a man can lose himself in the scattered San Francisco sun and never have to look at his shadow for too long a time
leaving
cut holes in wrists and feet so that
the sun can shine through my limbs drive
a pencil into my side between
the second and third ribs
so that the sun comes into my soul
nights walking the sodden streets
my winter jacket’s hood raised as
a great venomless cobra
I have no venom
I have no blood
nothing left to bleed
I cross the seas at night
my legs telescoping rods
to the sea beds
stirring clouds of the
dead and powdered
I cross the African plains
and stop in the middle of the Nairobi
where man was born, where herds of wildebeest stare at me
where a great old silver lion pisses on my feet
how far does a man need to wander from himself
voice from an ancient lake burned away
beneath the grass plains same voice of hope
in the face of a disastrous life
tomorrow I will be someone else
tomorrow I will be someone else
and forget you my love
my love forget you
These poems originally appeared in the 10.4 (Summer 2006) issue of The 2River View.
