Where you are

While you walk in another land—
where Besh o droM concerts are missed for taxes
and young men cancel their own birthday celebrations,
and tired aunts scold and bite after American sons
who leave old mothers dreaming of red fields and
dead fathers drinking, and grandmothers have removed
black scarves from their white heads to lie down to die—
you also walk around in my body.

Last night we met in my office head,
filled with white bed. I rearranged the gauze
curtains, hiding from shadows with papers.
Your Chakrasamvara teeth shone in the blue light,
waiting. In the corner of the alley attached,
a tall doll—Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince—
leaned, left behind by a retired colleague.
I saved him because I know what he means.

I also find you in this house where I’ve been
painting two worn rooms. Dreary antique whites
and greys slowly turning icy waterfall and
Tibetan white. I am tired of paint, of tedious blue tape.
So, I call you into the rooms, eating your apricot
spread on toast, or brushing your teeth.
Then I am brushing crisp skies to hold you,
to hold everything we will swallow and lose.

Thankfully, this morning, there you were
in my friend’s poem. My heart was not wrapped
in New Mexican corn but Hungarian head scarves,
smelling of our sex and breakfast, cottonwood
seed shells staining the bottoms of our bare feet.
I picked yours off with my teeth. The revolution
of red is always quietly here. Right here on the small
planet of our bed. It has to start somewhere.

2011

~With thanks to Stewart Warren’s “She Asks for a Poem”