of the face, otherwise subsumed
by filigree of blue tendrils. My gypsy soul—out
of which I reach for words to
carry my life and the lives of those I love—
gazes like a fountain of wonder from every corner
where your brush touches down. You know
that the soul of a poet, like blue gentian
growing alone in the forest, should never be
lifted from its incubation of shade. Providing
against this, you hide the stem, the long pedestal
of neck Modigliani might have exposed. Your life’s work
forbids the soul-death of any living thing—so we are joined
in our reaching and finding, our having slept
under the same stars, wandering the fields
of our ever-emerging imaginations,
as if our vagabond natures could exact something
precious from air itself. Your poetry—of strokes,
of line and color—un-words me, stammers me
into myself like laughter in rain, so I am
lifted by your intensity out of self, by
gratitude. In every painting you bestow a democracy
of means as we gaze, remaking the world as
accessible and renewing to even the poorest of us.
What can a poet give in return—I who suffer often
the condition of word-poverty in the universe
of the ready-made?
Waterborne moonlight can lave a shore. It’s
yours. Candles lit in a circle charm
and protect. I give them to you. The sky-white bay
below my window. All yours—with its ocean liners,
cruise ships, tug boats and skiffs. They are to dream
on. May a halo of hummingbirds attend you
on your walks so you’ll be recognized
instantly as a deity from the Administration of
Delight for the Banishment of Misery. While I’m
at it, wouldn’t you like a few golden eggs that won’t
bother to hatch? And a bunch of blue grapes picked
by hands from your birthplace, Morelia? I’ll also
empty my sack of about-to-be-dreams near
the basement wall that is your easel. There is
no last thing I wouldn’t give you, my friend
and collaborator in the offices of Mysteries Unlimited.
This poem, like your portrait of me, can never
end or be finished, only pause, waiting to be seen
back into our precious continuing lives
made of light, of air.
for Alfredo Arreguin
on the gift of his portrait of me
RIGHT-MINDED PERSON
Most of her stories are about
getting her way, so after even ten
minutes with her you feel
you’ve gotten the upper hand
in your own life. You’d be exhausted
from taking her stick to the world
and hearing it whimper that way,
whack! whack! on its big
her-way butt. She has purpose and
moxie. Her head rises up like
a hen looking for the next thing
to peck. How I love those bull’s-eye
moments when at least one person
is up to the task. But that’s the trouble
with hen-yard justice and the rectitude
that runs it. Someone
could always show up with an axe.
I’d always walk away from
these sessions like a woman
in the ’50s caught out in her rollers and
hairnet—unprepared, mortified—
her bingo stare magnetized to my
wire-sprung curls. That woman trounced
everything in and out of sight. But
if she had dreams, I never
heard of it.
IN THE TOO-BRIGHT CAFÉ
The men are comparing
killing methods for moles.
I’m ashamed to say my ears
prick up. Moles have tunneled
into my potato patch, erecting
fluffy earth-filtered cathedrals
both sides of the fence. What
are they up to down there
with my baby eye-sprouted
potatoes? They could be cousins,
potatoes and moles, each turning
the earth’s darkness into something
edible or a way to thieve what light
is always holding back. Once I caught
my yard-help stomping the dirt
over their openings like putting out
underground fire. Gas. The collaborators
in eradication are pumping it into
tunnels as they drink black coffee
and tuck into eggs over-easy
with hash browns—“burn ’em!”
Pellets, some kind of poison.
salsa and Tabasco. Are they
sending down heat-
seeking devices? Just don’t
say “dynamite,” I’m begging.
A voice by the window claims
he heard of a guy who hooked
up a loudspeaker and piped in
so many decibels the moles popped
up like mushrooms, and you didn’t
have to pick them off with your
shotgun because they just kept
running. The men are laughing
by now and I’m thinking: they’re
just talking, right? That merry
cash register by the door
is ushering a regular out, allowing
the moles a brief reprieve. The men
wave their friend onto the street
as I holster my purse. My sympathies
buzz the enormous windows like
doomed flies, those reverberating
in plain sight in the corners
where darkness will fall
and everyone above ground will
have gone somewhere to sleep
this all off. Me? I’m opening
a little café-of-the-mind where
moles can talk to flies. Intricate
labyrinths under the apple trees
and glassed-in fantasies of escape
at head-high altitudes. Moles paddling
through earth or flies foozling the air
over steak on a campfire near
the ocean. Moles will claim daylight
oxygen overrated—preferring air
filtered by darkness on the run. Flies
utter “What cute snouts you have!”
and moles have to consider life
with wings. By the time I get
home they’ve unionized and are
working out maternity leave and
pensions. Above it all, elk antlers
wait for tinsel and mistletoe, or
tune in to moles going on and on,
rhapsodic about ants after rain. But
because I’m the Boss, I interrupt
at the top of my smart-ass Boss-voice:
“Hey, how about a little respect!
Whose café is this anyhow?”
iv
If your time to die has come
and you die—very well!
If your time to die has come
and you don’t—
all the better!
SENGAI GIBON
LET’S STORE THESE HOURS
while you are with us, but not
like a memory that says something
important is over so we look over our
shoulders to figure out what. No, let’s store
your presence in our blood and breath
so when we step, you step, and we never
get to any future which puts even one of us
out of sight. Let’s take hands
&nb
sp; just to make sure. And if anybody stumbles,
we’ll all stumble onto our knees
like a sudden joint prayer. You’re cracking jokes
the whole time like always
because always is a safety zone
you carry us to when the health headlines
undermine the candelabra of the moment.
Come into our ancient cave of delight
and let us scrawl onto your heart
the graffiti of angels who favor bison and deer—
those earth signs by which any future welcome
might embrace you as tenderly
as we do. Because we are helpless with you
to hold back the days and hours
sweeping over us like a magician’s cape.
You let us be helpless together—which
is a special gift that takes down
the night sky, like a woman taking in her wash
at dawn, spilling starlight from shirttails
and sleeves, into the dew-struck grass.
For that you will never leave us. For that
these words turn up their palms in supplication
and innocence. And to receive,
as the sea-air of words does,
every nuance of your only-ness among us.
for Jim Fisher
SEASON OF BURNT-OUT CANDELABRAS
The sunken blossoms have melted
from the rhododendrons as surely as wax,
leaving ragged claws
the garden books advise to “snap
off.” I could do this all day
—the narcotic jerk of my wrist,
the sticky juice of beauty come and
gone accumulating on fingertips,
its debris tossed to the ground like
ridiculous party hats crushed
while a lot of somebodies got drunk
and danced all night.
My hands flick stem to stem until
memories fumble my labyrinths, my
caves and alcoves. Way back
in there I remember a woman who was
gorgeous and young, who let an old man
take her to bed. She wanted to experience
everything from the inside out, and
probably there was a little alcohol
in the mix to help ambition along.
This man had a brain like Grand Central
Station, unbelievable traffic coming
and going. He was courtly, a gentleman.
She considered she was sacrificing herself
on behalf of experience, that kind of glib,
young notion. He was a great kisser,
putting everything that was slipping
elsewhere right up front so promise
crashed through to a whole other dimension
where you didn’t really care if it ever
got satisfied. What a surprise! She wasn’t alone
as with some of that young stuff, panting
past her like locomotives, who
left the station empty and in aftermath
leaped out of bed for a smoke. Her sweet
old man took his time. Before sex they
would have a great meal at a great restaurant
she couldn’t afford. Candles would have been
lit. Music of the sultry twenties tumbled
over them like fountains alone under stars,
say in some Italian piazza at midnight,
though that phrase would never have occurred
to her then, since she hadn’t been to Italy. You
could say this experience was like visiting
an exotic off-the-map island with room enough for
just two bodies. If he wanted rejuvenation,
she was sure he got it. And she?
She felt that kind of old that savors everything
to the last. They threw their bodies away
while they accomplished all this, and that young
alabaster cocoon of hers with skin a challenge
to velvet, became something transparent,
like the idea of never-being-old. They met
a few times like this until his reason for
being in that city took him out of even
her country and to where it was unlikely they’d
ever meet again. But somewhere now, with
age-spotted hands like mine, she could be
tossing the gaudy aftermath of rhododendron
blossoms to the plush of lawn, hauling him back
from whatever death he must surely
have had while we were both busy throwing
ourselves away on others, becoming those old
soul types who ripen young, maybe as an
unforeseen consequence of being quenched
and revived too often, before they know
much about life. It’s only luck
I lived long enough to understand who
in that fated pair was doing the sacrificing.
THE BRANCHES OF THE MAPLE
have stepped back from
their white dimension, their beauty
of barren thatch forfeit to a rim of snow
holding on by its clutch
of cold. Rain in the night
changed all that, took
the laden slopes of evergreen
boughs as challenge. Seldom do
they bend so penitently
as they did this winter. Released
by downpour
they arc again toward
sky. My getting-younger
seventy-year-old friend has
returned from Burma, teaching
English to young monks. He sends
a photo of them smiling, says
they are “poor,” knowing the word’s
injury revised by their
delight-quotient beaming
out into the universe.
Gazing at them, the single bough
of my unburdened heart sloughs off
its snow.
for Lage Carlson
YET TO BE BORN WEATHER
From inside the drought
it’s all we think of. Low
hanging puffy clouds,
promissory but secret
in plain sight—like
the pregnant teenager
buying Milky Ways at the grocery,
pretending to just be
getting fat.
With the weight of it,
we also are yet to be born. We
yearn and get a fever for equivalents,
suffer midnight hungers, then toss
all night trying to carry a dream
of rain into morning. Thirst allows
wild things to be called up by
the tame. Birds flock to the birdbath,
deer nose the trough left under
the apple trees. The chipmunk
scribbles itself down
the hemlock
to the half-buried tea cup
we filled from the faucet. As long
as the reservoir holds out
we can spray the inverted stars
of rhododendron petals.
We are like school buildings
closed in summer and not
reopened in September. Where
are our children’s excited
voices? Where the ringing
of bells through packed
corridors? How can we be
so full and empty
at once? Trees
that endured many things
turn brown. Yet a glossy green
taunts from native salal
living on ocean fog. We
murmur like two gray voices
reduced to one injunction, both
noun and verb: rain!
We live only in the future now
like the ever-yielding moon
and the light-giving dying
of stars.
I
WANT TO BE LOVED LIKE SOMEBODY’S BELOVED DOG IN AMERICA
—those you see let run, let cavort on golf courses,
ears flapping—papillons, breed painted
by the masters, gazing up
like cherubs at their overstuffed mistresses
in the lounging days of other lost
empires. Bounding past flags, they orbit
the solitary figure they possess, swirl
the green knoll, not led or managed, tethered
or commanded. I know they are
fed by hand on a lap as they age; palms up
the moist offerings arrive. They pick
and choose, leaving something behind
to indicate they are aware of bounty, of the bounty
bestowed upon them, the love with its lap,
its pamper and cloy, the voice above them
at a height like a wooden flute riffling the universe—to
soothe, to mollify a beloved glance among
comets and dying suns. Theirs not to be
held like coyote or slow-eyed wolf
at the rim of the fire-circle, but
invited in, tempted by the half-picked
carcass, delivered from snarl and tear,
approach and withdraw. Still, wildness
confuses my tameness. If I scorn,
you supplicate. If I cower, you assume
my past was of the usual brutal sort that leaves
my like—abandoned. If so, let me
be abandoned in America, then sucked up
by the greed of guilt. Pull down from the high shelf
the one thousandth variety of Bison Mixed with
Chickpeas. Oh, America, allow me one day
of your righteous disdain
of poverty. I have a longing, a passion
to belong to something heedless and full
of mock-conscience. I might design a few
domestic habits to let it seem
I’m adjusting. You wanted a slave, a heel-licker,
and to enter the house first
with masterful stride. But I changed
all that with your beneficent rescue
of me—my pleading gaze,
as if worship came naturally to me, whereas
it plunders me, scrapes and hollows me out. What
had I hoped for in this intimate duet
to which I proffer only the arsenal of teeth
and primitive memories of a hunger
that knows how to tear
life out by the throat? And I gave that up,
for you? Caress me, my Lilliputian centaur.
I have a much-delayed appointment
with adoration, with the mercy
of your half-baked causes. Let me scratch out my
little-American-dog-will, leaving you
my rhinestone collar that used to casually strike