Category Archives: Uncategorized

119. Weeks in One Room

 

he died loose in town

short of air, a son and humility,

black hair sprayed on pavement.

 

metal aids gave back his breath

but took half his stomach in trade,

some old fungus, separate

leaves on the branch

off the trunk of his only body.

a worthwhile trade.

 

does he refigure birth

on this late cusp of rebirth

counting the son in a past life?

did he speak to angels?

he says no.  he heard

every word in spanish

the nurses, tv

but they weren’t speaking it.

he doesn’t either.

colors were dense,

saturated with fever, drugs

or else something, and

 every dark hispanic woman

was achingly beautiful.

because he said 

mexico

as a short cut to 

santa fe, 

they thought his head damaged.

they held him, held to him

the head of his own in some shock

for an extra week.

 

he thought he had it straight.

he is surprised to realize

he could have been so confused

in such a small space, one room.

but he notes all the space

held in time.

118. Long Hair

When I took 

what came to me 

I took 

Idaho pool halls with 

old men coughing phlegm 

and young men staring bullets

at serapes, bare feet,

at bracelets,

at our beer crossing the wood bar.

Neon flashed our long hair

into snakes of flying highways.

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took Quebec-quoi love songs in RV’s 

rocking under original tunes

 and the brown eyed boy 

thinking out loud in accented English

into my long hair,

limp from acrobatic highways.

 

When I took what came to me

I took 

bottle flies crawling corners

of bloodshot eyes beside ditches.

I took

thick fog holding my arms in gloom

under sequoia canopies.

I took fish

offered from withered hands 

under California cardboard. 

 

When I took 

what came to me

I took 

crowds behind glass under stars,

sweet smoke long in my lungs

 and a pull off Glen Fiddich,

overlooking unpaved highways

scratching and scraping their way.

I took 

red earth against my damp cheek

smelling of safety when I woke at dawn

beside graveyards prickling

the air with white stones. 

 

When I took what came to me, I took

what came, 

satiated by novas of my own 

flirtation, inhaling with abandon 

the exhaust 

of winding highways, 

clouds in my 

long hair.

117. In A Perfect World

 

When old women stop taking 

care of children and pets and 

grown boys and houses they may

notice the age of their hands and 

wonder why they look like the hands

of grandmothers when their minds 

are still young and harbor dreams.

 

When old women have no one 

to feed except themselves,

the mirror may become a study 

of how so many memories could fit 

into such a compact body, and shrinking.

 

When old women rest they may find

beauty in the strange rhythms

of a lifetime, though they may have 

composed a very different symphony 

in a perfect world.

116. Glad to be Within

All the hands, white on canyon walls, clap at dawn.

Something like the night-life of stuffed animals.

All the sand particles jump once, rattling together at full moon’s first light.

 

All day the white hands and the white sands are loose

with barely contained mirth.  

Rock joins in at night’s commencement, and water.  

Each plant shifts, snorts its amusement.  

Stone-animal outlines dip and grin, walking-around-animals pause to smile,

trying not to.

 

All the world is moving, moving, living.

 

All the world is glad to be within.

115. blindfolds

a man believes a ground war outdated, 

settling my senses into the melancholy 

of unnecessary and inevitable scars,

knowing nothing ends in the air 

because we are of earth.

 

this morning my boots plowed 

one path

through blizzard’s detritus, 

streets abandoned, wind alone.

a raven shouted into the silence, 

its word echoing between buildings.

this is how it was, I thought.

and this is how it is or will be because

only the faces change.

 

every day we blindfold ourselves, 

spin around in the dark

and claim then to know where we are.

perhaps we do.

we stand where we have always stood,

in ourselves and little wiser.

114. Driving to La Arena

One skull knocks against 

the door frame and both dogs

are on their feet, braced through 

arroyos of rocks climbing up 

tires, those aggressive new tires.

Water bags leap and

a cairn creeps past, a trail

spotted like footprints by hooves

of dry cattle crosses.

 

Ocotillo reach right in so

one dog snaps.

Creosote arms swing trying to

reach right in. One dog snaps

and my cigarette swerves.

A hawk spins, black

tips on blue sky like

periods allowed to 

soar across the page,

 

like following this track

nowhere.

 

Sand fills horizon lines with gold.

113. Racing Rotation

Racing Rotation

A bomber with four wing 

propellers lumbered over the pass, 

slid down the canyon, putting a hawk

back in the air.  Eyes shaded with 

a swollen hand, I watched it tilt

so the pilot and I could see

each others’ pale faces.

 

His shadow rippled over the waterhole,

kicking birds high.  

Rabbits ducked.

 

Shell casings litter this ground

where Indians once camped and line

shell trails to the Gulf, become

trails of the present

adding to the past 

for some unimagined future,

equal to rock cracked by fire

and dry bones,

flakes of flint.

 

In another lifetime I would be a pilot

of fighter jets tracing earth’s contours

at one hundred feet,

racing rotation.

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