Inside your afterword

for Stewart Warren

Where poems are a dark house on a mesa.
This room gibbous lit over banked fire.
This one dawn, and dawn and dawn.
The basement: full sun through thick aspen,
flicking light pins down a pencil thin
stream cut through ancient concrete.

The doors have no handles or locks, but swing
if I barely lean.
Some squeak. Others revolve in whispers.

Where is the floor? And how
did the quetzal find me here?
Around its leg a metal tag,
engraved Atogaki.

I hold on. We lift up.
All the windows open.
The rooftops are gone.

2011

Though he has a replacement

He is still playing the guitar.
The thinnest string broke

Two days ago. Low tunes
Thread slow through

My hands forgetting
Words, and silence

Sings the sixth
String in me.

2008/2011

lunch poem

Liberate me from the screen
fluorescent dream of office living.

Take their eyes off me
as I eat or try to fall asleep
reliving the eloquence and
stumbling, sometimes stunned
speech teaching wrenches from me—
they do not know how deep.

Show me how to eat this bamboo shoot
with more than teeth and speed.

Hold my hand and point.
Help me see the poem in my fortune
cookie: All personal breakthroughs
begin with a change in beliefs.

2008

If we forget there is work to be done

And only notice the other’s irises widening bluish green
in light and the swirls of grooves on our finger tips
playing hairs like spinning albums through the hours
of morning, we hear a song perpendicular to the hum
of computers or the scribbling of pens. It is the song

of what we become in the heat of now. Senses
feed each other the way violet onions feed hot
oil, the way the scent of this plump potted basil
at the head of our red bed reaches through music sent
from your hands through wood and strings, the way

chilied chocolate rockets the tips of our tongues out
through Spanish red wine wider than our own cells,
the way fried potatoes, blood and sun peppers
kiss slivered onion skin, and salmon lingers on
salty lips and drifts across our silken chocolate

tongues a layered song I would love to hum
but only write in words instead. Our eyes are rayed
with the thrill of this dance and bright notes spin
off lashes and teeth a joy about which we don’t speak
to send it further in our chests and eased breaths, prayed

deep. Without saying so, we know: this is our real work.

2009

This body is not ALL THAT, though

It houses all it tends to think
I am. Hungry belly, heavy lids,
Tired breasts, a behind
That could be bigger but isn’t,
Comfortably forty. Forty years!
This body’s four decades of
Little deaths, this body a blue-
Print for cells who very kindly
Continue to replicate to replace
What is lost as I die every day,
Though today have forgotten
To fill a few finer lines. It’s ok.
They don’t ask for reward
Or accolades. They just live
For me, give me a chance
To think about the texture
Of wood, the sound of my son
Breathing. When the day comes
My cells stop thinking, they
Won’t be making meaning
Anymore, they won’t mean
Anything when I walk out.
They won’t even be a door.
Truth is, I am the door.
My body just happened
To pass through.

29 April 2011

choosing hazelnut creamer 14 years later and suddenly

hazelnut coffee
thin windowed basement in you
whispering thick loss

for a

tweeze

I bring travel tweezers downstairs from his bathroom to return

to my wallet’s zippered coin purse for emergency rear view mirror
tweezing. I never know when my eyebrows will sprout black secrets.

I stop to check my email first, read an inbox poem about white horizons,

follow a link through Roethke on cliches, to one about a mother who can’t stay,
or even say, enough already, quiet please, I’ve nothing to do with nonsense poetry.

I notice my left hand, silver tweezers still half pinched, poised to pluck.

becoming colorado plainsong

I never meant to stay so long, friends,

but while I’m here
I’ll let this sky
carve of me
a wide

bowl

holding nothing
with room enough
for every little thing.

It is possible my children will burn

It is possible my children will burn
my journals, my life’s mess, full

as they are of horrible confessions
and scratched out words. Perhaps

this is best, that they have their own
ideas of me, rather than my ideas

of myself. Both are just as dim
and broken, iridescent and flash.

Memories, propped up things
in dusty light and fingerless black.

in Disney World, waiting for nigiri, sipping Ichiban, enduring karaoke

On a stage
two children
sing
we
are
the champ-
ions
off key,
and finally
there is
authenticity
in this too
perfect world
built for them
and their parents’
money.

2010