Weeping Fig

Spiraled
Ficus Benjamina,
I imagine your roots
A fisted knot, pushing
Against walls of ornate
Pot, unable to outgrow it, unable
To live outdoors. Still, you push
Out leaves on dying twigs,
Drop them, crispened
Handkerchiefs.

Meditation on white until the waiter dropped a saucy fork

I never wear white or when I
do, it is with vigilant
suspicion of small

hands smeared
with jelly, paint or random
child-loved condiments.

I erased white
from my wardrobe
when I gave birth.

Nearly fifteen years
of colored clothing and
lately, mostly brown

and black. Why?
What turn has brought
me down

to muted hue,
or hue’s lack?
But today—divorce,

fathers far away,
three children gone
for days—has brought me

white!  All day in white!
Woven light
cool cotton blouse,

buttoned bright summer, sheer
over flesh and self-conscious
underthings.  White

as baptism for the living
and dead, white as a virgin’s wedding
gown, white as a sadhu’s ash-

smeared head. O! The righteousness
of white! The innocence!  I feel
reborn!  Until

now:  two
hours from midnight,
my short shoulder sleeve splashed

red.  Red!  My mother always
said it was my true
color.

Small Town, Wide Range

Brush.
Its name its natural landmark:
Fields of undifferentiated sage
Whose pungent shadows

Stoically quake in ammoniacal air,
Wrap around calculated corners
Of feedlots and whispering cornfields,
Not daring to grow along herbicidal sidewalks.

People are born, grow old, and die here.
Running, then walking, then wheeling and finally
Wheeled around their last days in one of a dozen sterile
Hallways heralded by this home of nursing homes.

People come to Brush to die, just ask longtime locals
Or restless folk seeking teaching experience
Before they move on, back to cities or mountain hamlets
More brilliant for the existence of Brush.

I have not come here to die, but to live in hushed streets,
Empty after dark, where windows blaze blue
And small town sky stars yield to American Idol’s.
Where are the poems hiding? I didn’t want to find them, at first.

It was easier to find a poem in Crested Butte
Or Red Feather Lakes. Even their names are poems.
There, poems yodel from pine needles, dawdle
In strobed dapple of aspen leaf shadows, jaunt

Across meadows with proud antlers, sparkle
Off spectacular peaks, tremble in our knees.
But we are not a hamlet nestled in the cupped hands
Of mountains.  Our poems lie low to the ground, strangled

In language unspoken in Vail, Aspen, Boulder, whose travelers,
If they linger, if monolingual, hear a mumbled muddy Nothing
On our littered river trail. Their adrenaline loving fingers demand:
Where is rock climbing, white water, white slope?  West of here,

We say, and they go home. You have to live here a while to see
Where poems hide. And even then, you have to polish your own
Damned dullness before they shine. I know. Cupped in crooked
Knuckled sagebrush sleeps a dusty wood, a hapless, unhurried,

Bird-loved river. Flat, sandy, downright swampy when you walk
Along it in places. Between quiet columns of mullein wait
Drab flat stones, cheerful lost paint balls, grey goose feathers
And rusted bullet casings. I’m no hunter.

I gather these poems in my pockets, place them, priceless
In the hands of my young boys, who, respectively, skip, pop,
Ruffle and arrange like silos these forgotten leavings, finding
Their final use: joy.

Earth holding earth

My young daughter asked me on a cliff edge
what happens when we die. People believe
many things, I said. That we fly off as spirits
to God, or are reborn to live a new life,
but the only thing I know for sure
is that we go back to the earth,
like the log we found becoming dirt,
like the little trees sprouting from its core.
I don’t want to become leaves and soil, she cried.
And I cried, rocking her in my arms, earth already falling through.

When I sit quietly and you

When I sit quietly and you
aren’t there so rush in suddenly, more,
nothing is quiet in my heart, or the quiet is so large

it pushes water from me
in a resounding wave of joy:  I won’t
tell you.  It is mine. Telling sucks the wave back to sea.

I would rather feed you
what the wave does to me. Kiss it
upon your shoulder in a grocery store, share it

in the larger bite,
breathe it upon your cheek at night
this wave that carries me always to your shore.

Carry me at your hip

A long strapped
Soft leather purse,
Or Guatemalan fabric bag.
Whatever you prefer.
I’d even be blood red
Polyvinyl Beijo* for you.

Reach into me
For keys.
This one opens
Your backdoor eyes.
This one
Your front door smile
This one
Your Cadillac heart.
Maybe pink. Guzzler
Of liquid word dreams.

Lay me down
In the passenger’s seat.
Drive slow,
All around
the town of Fort Metaphor
and Outer Suburban Simile.
You, the mayor
Of polysyllabic mystery
Inspiring your holy citizenry.

There’s a mirror in me.
Here, study
Your pores.
Shake the cold
From your hair.
Glide this shine
On your lips
And speak.

*Bay-ZHOO: 1. A kiss  2. a lawful kiss, never worth as much as a stolen one 3. handbags designed by one mother for other mothers, many with a singular pearlescent finish.

Dedication Prayer

May any good that walks
through the three
doors of me

walk toward
your three doors.
And yours.  And yours.

Once we leap over
stones of who we were,
are, or could be,

burn through clouds
of clench, shove and sleep,
may we quickly wake

the inter-nestled light
of our three prism bodies
where we are less than one,

more than three.

~with thanks to T.W.R., who taught me

Pronunciation and Conjugation Lesson

Volver means to return,
to come back.

Don’t drawl it with an American v:
vawl-ver, like revolver.

Or the Hungarian v:
Wole-wear, though this makes me kiss you.

The v is a soft, almost b,
the love child of b and v.

Top teeth on lower lip,
yet lips together,

say it: bowl-bear,
soft bowl, soft bear with a rolled r.

Vuelve means you (formal) return,
or yearns: (beloved, please) return.

Say bwail-bay, bwhale-bay
Go easy on the (wh)y.

Vuelve , mi amor.
Vuelve the way you do.

Vuelve, vuelve,
with your eyes

like a starved bear’s
looking for spilled seeds,

licking them from
the soft bowl of me,

volviendo,
returning.

May 2009

because we grow up and down

A woman
dreamed
of no one
needing her
breasts or
words or
wetness and
the dream drove
beneath her,
a blind root
feeding
the fruit
she gave.

another love song

That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all.
I drop the shawl.  Turn
from the window, my water
eyes to yours, and speak, tell you
what you missed, my arms,
downed, lamplit, reaching around,
palms cradling the bald velvet
of your head. I will roll
my silence toward your dark
question, a shining ball.
I am Lady Lazarus, come back
from the dead to tell you:
there are no words at all
in the mermaid song
you’ve strummed in me,
how you give me fins
in a black sea, become
shore to my drowning.
Come, walk near the waves.
I will roll your trousers,
kiss your legs, save you.

With love to Eliot and Plath