musta lost ten pounds on that diet
got your new cowboy boots,
qué bruto, man, qué bárbaro ’mano—
hijole, today’s your big
day, guey—
and I march
like some pinche mazehual
up the steps of the templo mayor:
• • •
all the sacrificial class before me
sees the blood come down
and tells itself it’s paint:
those priests in black feathers
wait to cut out my heart, feed it
to the sungod mainframe.
But in eyedroop shuffle
of another 6:30, I have lost
my faith: birds
are buscando bronca
in every tree—I don’t believe
anymore, I don’t believe,
I’m not convinced
that the temple ever earned my heart,
that life isn’t better than this sacrifice,
that I am a slave to be butchered,
that I am born to die up there like my fathers
who built the temple with stones
on their backs:
I cannot believe
• • •
not for a minute
that I must submit
and only ever hope
to leave behind me
this poem.
Ditch Turtles
For Darrell Bourque
(Lafayette, Louisiana)
ten mile drive around blackened cane fields
empty now as country churches on Monday morning
after a hurricane, sweet frankincense ashes
sift down stubbled pews.
grayness to roadside coulees
where I’m watching for ditch turtles, splayed
in fertilized holy water, black as prayerbooks
scattered on the altar of the banks.
red tractors rust, abandoned now for a season, red
sugarcane trailers haul crops of dust, a share
of preening egrets. along the ditch red oaks
shade water gone blue
and gold with crankcase oil, sugar sap.
turtles mark the hours on this sundial prairie
with plainsong. bow their heads into this brightness,
fall open-armed as prophets before a burning bush.
there’s only so much heat a body can carry, only
so much light cold flesh can bear, their dark bowls
overturned still ask for alms. who knows what sacristies
within their heads contain
the secrets that make them frown and blink.
what memory of eggs is sacred? what psalm
of crackling crawfish shell, what testament of coming
close like clapping hands to mate, the clack
of hardshelled life abundant?
it’s 99 years of prayers for them: prayers to the culvert god,
to the canebrake god, to the mealworm god, the cloacal
sexual god, the field of fire god,
the boy with a croaker sack god, the truck tire mercy god,
the roving dog-pack god, raindrop god, sunrise god
to grant just one more hour of heat, one short century more
of warmth, one small well-fed holy life
of nothing much: just boredom, just April, just mud—please
more time.
The Duck
immense waves of flight
out from forests, out
from broken mirror beaver
ponds in frozen mountains,
they fled from ice storms coming—
their shadows fell across freeways
for days as I too migrated from frost
dropping downslope and west—
looking to rest under a forgotten sun.
end of the continent—
it wasn’t working. San Diego.
after this bad spell I had, after
one too many ghosts in my bed, you know
how you wake up some mornings with the smell of the
invisible on your fingers and the ruined broken plates
of your plans in the fireplace—
the first time I made these mistakes I was young
and poor—I was not young anymore
but still poor and still making the same bad
moves.
had enough for gas—drove
1,000 miles to the house
of a woman who knew me too well,
who stripped me naked, sank me
in a hot bath.
I hoped to find shelter
in the town where I’d died for a quarter century.
the water did not wash
away my sins.
she said: get
out. so I got out to see if my hometown
had anything as interesting as aspens, anything
as good as glacier water, as buffalo
churning violet prairie shadows.
down
to Mission Bay.
put the Club on the wheel
in case a vato from my old street
was out shopping for a snow-beat Jeep—
old body felt older watching
jog around the Bay—just me
and my rusted ankle twisted
by too many turns on Rocky trails,
my burning back, my stupid ideas
aching in my head.
marched away at my usual splendid pace,
feeling hideous.
you have to remind the body it exists
outside of moist night clenches and carnitas
in green salsa. it’s not all bad dreams,
lust and crouching near-sighted as a mole
over clacking plastic keys.
I blasted past
old men with walkers
those bastards
until my crunchy ankle
frictioned up a fire in the kindling of my leg
and dropped me trailing smoke
to a waterside rock in pissyellow sand—
landed, feet in seaweed,
and the smug old bastards
lapped me and hove away.
cool air felt wonderful:
a train rolling out of San Diego, going where
I always wanted to be—somewhere else—
sounded its long cry and faded north.
I walked to the water, soaked my feet.
OK,
not bad
I confessed—fish
fine as needles tried
to sew my toes together.
near the effluent pipe
that launched tampons,
teardrops and coffee into the sea
a duck.
just one.
a mallard.
a male.
half-bald.
ragged.
asleep.
I sat down, said “Hey.”
he jumped, looked at me.
Wack, he muttered.
Wack wack.
“I guess I’m all right,”
I said.
he looked back at me, clacked
his beak four times,
tucked his head
under his wing
and went back to sleep.
• • •
a windsurfer boomed past like a jet.
“What the hell!” I said.
Wack! he complained.
Wack wack.
“Damned idiot.”
Wack.
“Right?”
Wackwackwack.
our heads swiveled in unison
when the absurd slap of jogger shoes
went past us.
we watched them recede:
we lost interest at precisely the same moment
and turned back
to our meditations.
the wind ruffled his feathers.
the wind lifted my
hair.
me and the duck:
compadres.
suddenly,
I understood the winos
of my youth,
the filthy
old men
in the dntn plaza
where the fountains gurgled green
and sailors still called town
“Dago”
and marines rushed up Broadway
looking for hookers
and tattoos—
those old men shuffling
their vague plaza circuits
reeking of piss
and port, no cents
to catch a bus
out of there—tossing
stale rinds of last bread
to the birds
of the sidewalks,
holy feathered vermin,
all of them:
dead
those lonesome rummies
now, with all their beautiful pigeons,
swept up after sharing daylight
before winter got them—
old forgotten men
and their pals.
• • •
I couldn’t stay.
I didn’t know
where I had to get, but
I had to go
and never
come back.
Wack,
he said
when I called
“So long.”
I had miles to flee
before it snowed.
I left him
to rest
until
he too
rose
to his own
impossible
going.
Elk
elk
didn’t care
if that lover
left
or the bedroom
froze
and snow
didn’t care
just rang
its aching bells
through aspens
nine miles
below the glacier
all that autumn
all their bugling
those antlers
clacked wooden
echoed
like broken chairs
in a kitchen
abandoned
La cara perdida
Es invierno
Y te escribo a través
De este silencio eterno.
Si pudieras ver lo que he dejado
Bajo el cielito negro
De este llano. Tres poemas
Amargas. Mil figurinas
De plomo. Mi nombre.
Fotografias
De un vestido
Azul. Y
Tu cara.
Soy un hombre sincero
De donde mueren las palmas
Mi infancia fue
Un jardín de fuego.
Y ¿Tú? ¿Qué
Supiste de mí?
Antes de tocarte la cara
La perdí.
There Is a Town in Mexico
For Kim Stafford
There is a town in Mexico
where no one ever dies, and those who have
passed on pass back through
the cottonwood square where alamos trees
are whitewashed halfway up
their trunks, and those few awkward dead
the world coughs up stop
by a bench where my grandfather sits
at a black typewriter and a stack
of oystershell colored sheets. “Name,”
he says as he rolls the page
with that ancient sound, that machine
of poetry and dreams taking its morning taste
of forever. And those inarticulate dead
who made it through mango trees, agaves spiked
a dusty jade, past snapping turtles
in the huerta’s bog, scratch their heads,
try to remember their names. Any name
will do. My grandfather, for example,
calls John the Baptist “Juanito.” Zapata
never comes to town, or he’d get a name as well.
The dead call themselves their own true names:
Honeysuckle, Hummingbird, Wind,
Coyote, Blue Deer. My grandfather types.
Once they sign the page, these few
scoop a drink from the cool stone
fountain, shade their eyes, and stare
at all those shiny
forgotten coins.
Song of Praise
For Cinderella
One spring I happened
to read a high meadow
laid out in stanzas
of wild
flowers,
Their many names a poem
written in gold-burned grass:
lupine, foxglove, columbine,
the tawny soft footprints
of lions.
This page of blossoms laughed in wind—
one thousand bees
about their business
bumbled in tumbling light: sun
that morning snuck
from pine boughs, yellow as pollen,
rose like chimney smoke
from naked beams of ghost cabins, abandoned
to morning glories, weathered gray
from decades of snow. Crows
walked the light struck
train tracks
vivid as twin rivers
of dimes. But sunlight
is what I’m trying to explain. How
it whispered, how its glow
was sweet as combs within the hive,
how it fell
across the bellies
of streams
back-stroking
downhill to somnolent plains.
Brightness
that shook out the weave of the wind,
light that tumbled in coinage of green,
down trembling wild apple, that beat with
the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves,
split open like pillows to spill
dayfeathers
over bluejays, magpies,
haunches of restless bull elks. It’s
the sunlight
so rich you could lift it
in a tin cup—fill it with sky—take a swallow
of glowing and sing.
And the squirrels
were shouting hosanna. And
the eagles were shouting hosanna. And
the lioness, blessing
the field with her shadow
paused there, sniffed,
raised a paw as she silently
sang her hosanna.
Peaks clutched their capes of May snow.
Lakes opened eyelash of pines.
Moon faded pale as a snail shell.
The pages of morning were turning, you see.
And the point of all
of this, the point
of this poem, that light,
light of the Rockies—heron blue, silver
as ice, green
as a hillside of sweetgrass
mountain grape and holly—
that arose with a sigh
was only one half
of the day
I find
in your aspen grove
eyes.
Love Song
For Cinderella
When I have gone to snow
On the far side of the hill
And this evil age takes breath
To hunt sweet flesh of poetry
Where will you go
When I have gone to snow
On the far side of the hill
What Zapata will ride thunder
Up the alleys of this city
Shooting from the hip
To defend you
Woman, I will lay these lines around you
I will paint your tongue with songs
When I have gone to snow
On the far side of the hill
&nbs
p; As every child will
What new man will light his bones
Into a bonfire for you
What new man will come
To keep you warm
Definition
Illegal Alien, adj. / n.
A term by which
An invading colonial force
Vilifies
Indigenous cultures
By identifying them as
An invading colonial force.
Bravo 88
For Pam and Bill
July in the Sonoran Desert. The Jeep is dying.
So is the first marriage. Both
spew oil, poisoned fluids
on the hardpan. Both wrecks
ready for the scrapyard.
And here comes a fat Chevy
tow-rig, muscling up from wobbly
water-mirages on the blacktop:
driver has Red Man tatters threaded
between his teeth and his gut
hangs out a torn shirt, burned
crimson and spotted
with spit that flies
straight as tasers when the wind
don’t hit. “You call me
Bravo,” he says, and
peering in the open maw of the Jeep and
the wife standing ten feet away,
adds: “This here
don’t look too god for you,
buddy. No
it do not.”
Lying underneath, busted windshield glass and pebbles
pocking his back he says: “You wanna come
home with me tonight? Spend the night?
I got seven rooms. I got
a spare. Got a bed and a couch.
Got my dad in there. It ain’t much I got
but it’s a house.”
We imagine chainsaws and
human sacrifice. The wife
backs deeper into the desert. Away.
Bravo
is not hurt.