Questions for a Pumpkin

Do your seeds sing a slick song?

Are you aware you are
both food and lantern?

And home?

Do you dream of hundreds of tongues
searching the cheeks of a huge mouth?

Or of wingless albino bats trembling
in a wet cave, upside down?

If a woman entered you at will, a kept woman,
would he carve windows of ears, nose and eyes,
a doorway of a crooked-toothed smile?

Would she become a candle in your belly,
throw herself in a flickering dance
to light his way home?

Can you accommodate two?

Or love?

Would it hurt, would you mind,
if she bakes and scrapes
the innards of your entrances,
blends in eggs, sugar, milk, cinnamon,
rolls a crust, pours you in,
eats you, her home, with him?

Bridge

At thirteen, the stubborn plastic tube
of childhood ear infections had to be removed.

In its wake, the healed hole did not close,
stole bird wind and breath hymns. Instead,

he learned to drum blast beats, buzz rolls,
crash and snare. He learned the muted world,

to turn without fanfare or shame
his better ear toward a quiet voice.

If we had known how easy healing could be
without major surgery, we’d have done it sooner.

With simple tool, a doctor roughed the edges
of the perforation, made a bleeding wound

of tympanum, and with a common hole punch,
cut a dot of paper thin as cigarette skin.

When she placed it on the ragged hole,
it became a bridge for blood, for hope,

for cells to build themselves a road
over the small chasm. Sound began to cross

at once. Driving home, the radio rushed him.
Overcome, he dialed down brass and bass,

like a solitary monk who hasn’t seen a friend
in years first bows from the neck, the waist,

then holds him at arms’ length
before the caught breath, the full embrace.

Toward You

A Christmas cactus burns
seven fuchsia blossoms
toward a northern window.
On the other side,
the dim room inspires
only one bud, still tight,
the last to let go.

Here I am, blue out of season.
How many blooms do you see, love?
On the dark side, a tense fist.
You, my light, my southern exposure
know me better than this.
I can’t help myself. I turn.
Open all my hands.

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The Dead One

Find the dead one within.
If you are lost enough, you can revive her.
She soon will be your boat
off the island, your dodgy water.
Drink rain from her rotten mouth.
Teach her to talk, to sing
your mother’s favorite songs.
The dead one’s desire: your compass.
Carry her on your back
until she finds your legs.
Teach her how to flirt with love
by playing the unsuspecting girl.
Dress up to make it real.
She will chop your wood,
dance you ‘round and through the fire,
drop you in the river tied together.
Breathe air into the mutual drowning.
Dream her lost history.
Give up your plans.
Begin flowering.

with gratitude to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Swiss Army Man

Anatomy of a Mason Jar

First you were for cucumbers,
Bread and butter pickles I taught
Him to love, their yellow
Stain brightening egg salad.

Or was it beets, the obscene
Lolling eyeballs of earth. Red.
Your glass a lantern full
Of cloved, impossible sight.

It doesn’t matter. Rusted ring, lid lost,
You have outlasted better glasses
In the cabinet, crystal goblets,
Cheap tumblers, stately beer pints.

Our finest, my pride,
For serving guests wine despite
Hard water marks on your shoulders,
Mineral threads along your neck.

Humble belly of water, tattooed
Name in raised script, you are the vessel
At my bedside, the three a.m.
Wide mouth kiss against parched lips.

Settling back into the down,
When he hands you to me
In the prairie dark of dawn,
You are his clear promise.

Burning Books with Jack

When he threw Amor Fati
into flames, friends and poets gasped.

White book! Heads shook.

I ran to find mine bubble wrapped
in a briefcase, amateur sky
with all the colors in it.

ah jumped in after Jack like a sigh,
and Danny’s script, wanting nothing more
than for words to say nothing,

burn, be nothing with his.
Glowing gold pages turned with the stick

of an acolyte. Spent light!

Unreadable ash
made of us and especially
Jack gibbering joy-scat

to the earless moon, hands
grasping at the halo like a drowning man,
fingers coming up empty and fool.

2017

Three and a Half Years after the Death of a Guerita

There is no time
to spend with you today,
lover of all things Latin
(especialmente the men),
except in songs that we once
heard together and sang.
Remember how our sister-sound
would mesh, two voices
from our mother’s throat?
We made one sound
of her parted flesh, a boat
with two sails blown full.

On this Day of the Dead I wear
your black peacoat, its pockets
finally emptied of your things:
old tissues, El Salvador keychain,
plastic packet of gum with foil
burst open over two empty wells.

There are many ways to hold lost hands.
Hold the things they held.

For two years, I touched the tissues,
the ones you worried chemo fear into.
They finally fell apart. I chewed stale gum.
I can’t recall—are these gloves yours?
I forget what you wore even as I wear it.
Your hands are cold.

Do you remember how
the grave digger surfed the water
in your Illinois grave? Oh, the March rain!
You—in walnut casket and concrete vault,
your faux gold name plate crushed
under his boot—were the board.
He rode you. Wow, look at the buoyancy,
he said in wonder, arms out for balance.
I was glad Mom had left; thought
Shakespeare would have loved this script.
I grinned. That lovable fool,

I shoveled along with him. Good worker,
he said, while I tucked you in from the edge
of the hole, slid and fell and stood and threw in
a foot of dirt. Aguas, aguas, I heard you say,
Careful, careful. Water gurgled and
sucked at clumps with thirsty slurps.
I couldn’t bring myself to stand
on your body, twice-boxed.
It would have made the work easier.

I didn’t clean my black boots a year,
whacked the clay-rich clods into a plastic pail
now lost somewhere in the basement.
I had meant to wet and sculpt of them
a headless goddess like the ones
you made in college, recuerdes?

Why do I save these odd mementos?
What good is it to clutch what enclosed you?
It only makes me sad, and, shhhh, relevado,
when I forget their context, when I forget
the way you filled your clothes, when I lose
the mud that holds you, waterproofed.

Saving and losing you, over and over:
such strange ointment, mi manita.

2007-2016

Translations, for my mother:

guerita: a white girl beloved of Latinos
especialmente: especially
aguas, aguas: literally waters, waters, but figuratively, move easy like water, be careful. Becca’s husband said this as she wheeled around her IV rack at her first chemo. She translated the words for me at the time so I would understand he didn’t literally mean waters, waters
recuerdes: remember?
relevado: relieved
mi manita: short for hermanita, little sister, it is especially a term of endearment for a sister for whom one’s love goes deeper than blood.

Middle School Football

Our sons, their plastic shoulders dream
Of manhood. Each time a body falls
And a groan rises up like a man,
And the body is rolled or limps off field,
Holding a stomach, a wobbled leg,
There is a mother somewhere.
Maybe her eyes water, too.

2016

Pre-Inaugural Dream

Sugar weak, core and limbs
radiating with it, I woke in the
dark first hours of January 20th
having just dreamed of living
in a small mountain town,
perhaps something like Crestone,
where people stopped to talk
on dirt streets, share food, laugh,
linger near the new art installation:
two bushes whose lowest branches
were trimmed just enough
to allow us to crawl beneath
on our bellies, get caught on
a few twigs, a few leaves,
feel our breath speed,
a vague dread rise. Stuck once
or twice, I paused to notice
the beautiful tangle above,
the calculated trimming.
It was only a bush. I was small
enough to pass. I stood.
Before me were two doors.
Like exit signs, the words
WOMEN over the left,
MEN over the right.
Hard as a mannequin,
I passed through WOMEN.
On the other side, my youngest son
sat on a bench, studying leaves
he had plucked from the shrub.
Rosemary, perhaps, or sage.
I felt lucky to live in a town
where art was the place to enact
and defeat fear, not the pillow,
the walking into the day.

20 January 2017
after reading before bed, “A Trump Attack on the Arts would be More than Just Symbolic”