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”

thunderheads

i sat in the mercury café
(funny, at first i typed cage)
and it was full
of the cool people.
too many of them. none mine.
as my gps led me out of the congested city,
the interesting knot untied and dissolved.
clouds ate the frayed ends.
we were doing what hicks do, wit said,
watching dumb
as
clouds roll by

2011

To every one I tried to eat, I’m sorry

I have chased mountains
and quiet men, wolf women
and booky teachers:
Help me!

I’ve been every mother,
frowned
and stomped for silence
hoping it would
point.

Even so,
my throat’s
been
so thin nothing
could pass, my abdomen
immense
globe of hunger stretched
around boundless
ache.

Wandering ghost belly

No woodsy cabin or bear man
fed. No singing or dying
woman,
witch or nun could satisfy
with wands or words
or all the grief
I could eat.
I had it wrong.

Only when in uncalled dream
I found one hovering just above
no within
no as
(me) unadorned,
clear as ringing
goblet
casting
prism mandorlas
did lost paths merge.

My belly turned inside
outward,
swallowed me
along with the spinning
world
and everything
was perfect, of one
taste.

It fades, this flexibility.

Sometimes I walk
around allowing all
passage,
my human throat and belly
a ruse for the fact
that the path to this
much space was
never any
where or who
but here.

2011

song of a once sprinter

these legs remember fast
twitch, long gait, quick
thigh, piston yes,
toes earth,
heart sky, wide
gathering short burst,
arms reaching through
soulmade wind, hands
tunneling loose to
what is always up
ahead: unfillable
space burning
blue, my speed
just beyond
my teeth,
waiting
with no
string
but
joy

2009

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