Dear JC

Now I know why I was a little unnerved,
spending time with you.
Your eyes are scissors and glue.
You may not harvest me
and then try to seduce me
by feeding me
my own creampuff snail toes
and Roman arches,
strangely lovely though they are.
Let our loving friendship be a living one.
I am not the Colosseum, exotic food
or your thousand eyed collage.

2009

I am pacing my whorehouse heart

The exit is barred. Its walls drip too bright
perfume in the parlor, musky Indian
sandalwood, something indefinably sour
in the halls. Every bedroom door is open.
As I pass, there I am again and again contorting
in the oddest shadow and redlight sheets, twisted
beneath legs clenched around necks, soles of feet
pressed together praying over backs
and sweating heads. The moans mine,
the deepest loneliness of pleasure, the sighs
as black as bottomless throbbing. Skin
slapping, suction sounds cradling shame
like a fatherless babe. I wonder how
to escape, why doorknobs lie
in corners, why windows are nailed,
how to tame the tongues of my body
lapping at flames in any eye that sees.
I would take the fire, if I could, and burn down
this house, spread ashes of desire across my face,
walk on knees through town and wail.

2007

Brother

I’m the one you used
to love when
you thought
I was you. I’m not
sorry for our fresh
duality. Growth
cannot undo itself.
Our father’s heart
burns in both
our chests.
And yes,
our mother’s too.
No wonder we
were doomed to part.
Two chambers
in a family juggling
bad blood.
I’m obsessed with red,
you with blue.
Or maybe the reverse.
Truth is we’re not
right or left,
brother, moving blood
is just what we do.
Whether you love
me or not, push
or pull, beaten
and beating,
I’m still you.

2011

Four colleagues

Spanish, Art,
English and Speech,
stood in a square clasping hands,
crisscrossing embraces,
celebrating the settling of Speech’s
long-coming, limb-lopping,
soul-stalking litigation: erased,
magically disintegrated, swallowed
by the void of the day’s new moon.
The science was easy to explain.
No one missed a beat: Yes, of course,
of course, removed by the waning moon!

Even the trees, mused English,
Even the trees come to mean.
Her peach tree, damaged by storm,
blown down years and years ago,
before her own near death collapse,
five years ago began to grow,
resurrected, new, sprouting two
upraised limbs and this year sunrise globes,
praising the sky for health, she said,
My Life! That tree is my life!
Art added: and two thighs…
Speech finished: giving birth…
And Spanish beamed: to five years of doctoral work!
A Roman numeral five! and a V for victory!

Their nonsense raised up gooseflesh,
made tired eyes gleam, passed
light to light on the high dry plains,
where squares aren’t meant to shine
and spin wild whirling spheres of
hope and living poetry, but do.

2008

Camping with my daughter and her friends

I. Jose shares over crackle and smoke

If I could design what I was
I’d be the coolest thing ever:
I’d have antlers and angel wings
and I’d be a gorilla.

II. Learning to see while they swim

Clouds billow up blues beyond tubes,
depths beyond canvas. How to hook
this space in the heart?
(Girls in bikinis squeal.)

III. Teenage boys and waterfowl banter

Dude! Dude! Dude! Dude!
Like! Like, Dude!
Not EVEN! What
EVER!

2010

Even though the captain says

we’re five minutes
ahead of schedule

the sky cannot drop me
soon enough into your arms.

The sun always shines here
above this vapor sea

above our dark flounder
above our never wings.

Upward when we first broke
through I pressed my face

against small pane to feel
light, the same light we greet

with feet on earth, through house
windows, bleary squares catching

and casting our every orange rising,
praying to each other’s warm smile.

Miles closer to the sun, I am
closer and closer to you,

landing somehow in midair
and somehow falling.

2008/2011

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