waiting (outside the same cafe where i wrote my mother’s funeral poem)
across the street, two men
argue over the ubermensch,
and a cricket hops brokenly
cross paving stones. from
the corner, scrying: how long
have we sung summer songs
and dreamt of october? running
yellows as they slip to fall,
sometimes it feels
like putting a bandaid
on a bleeder, not tying it off
with knots-in-silk. surgeons
would know these things,
but it is too late
to catch the sun heading
already south, and south
again. across the street,
two women argue
over love & champagne.
the cricket is gone. a maple
tree sighs sickening
as it sleeps in an ocean
breeze, and finally
october yawns & stretches.
drifting
it is august in earnest.
yesterday was almost
autumn, yet here we are again,
dripping. the sticky blueness
of these last few holdout days
clings to the streets like gauze.
by a series of unfortunate
coincidents, i
am thinking of laboratories,
of thinning lines of blood, of my
mother’s dead white hands.
the walls of her hospital room
were that same sticky un-sterile blue,
like an oil painting of some South sea.
it is not the same blue of puddled
dress they found me
in before they called the paramedics
at summer’s end the year of her death;
no, it is deeper and better
for drowning. most seasons i
don’t believe in faith,
but i thank god on august days
for ambles along the river,
for his rich earthy browns.
Between May and December (II)
The fifteenth. Almost too early to be called morning.
A last wide-eyed breath, oxygen
lines not enough to pull life
down into lungs riddled with what is no longer lung,
nolonger her.
There are no witnesses except the roses
beginning just to bud. He plants a miniature, pink,
in the side bed she had wrested from dust.
Her side of the bed lies cold, stretches
south. The phone rings again,
and again and again. He isn’t
told the day they put her in the ground.
Her carefully tended gardens bloom
once more, fade. The pink thrives
in caked mud through hottest summer,
slight scent of cloying memory.
September brings the burden of storms,
hurricanes. The side bed is awash,
and he is hundreds of miles away.
Wrapped in cold stone,
she can’t hear the wind as it cries.
First frost comes late, softly.
The twenty-fifth, Christmas morning,
a single blighted bud nearing
crimson
has risen shyly against the
white of Decembergrass, but
he doesn’t make it in time to see.
Re-Drawing a Portrait Once Painted on Plywood
A lone housefly myopically crawls
up pale-peeling kitchen walls, entropy
in quotidian microcosms that
screams of a stiletto- hardness
tattooed in both prismic eyes. It
belays the soundful softness
of rounded thighs and arms
of the woman at the table,
the smoke of her solitary
cigarette winding like
lust toward the fluorescence
overhead. There is sex
in this as in everything.
Even death. An unwinding
of flesh into the universe
that birthed it, entropy
again. Or perhaps simply
childhood timelines
tangled with tangential
tomorrows and the
exorcism-autopsy
of memory, a stillframe
of this solitary instant, yellow
and blue, aborted phosphorescent
remembering.
death of a houseplant (Rowdy’s Revenge)
photo courtesy of Josue O. Colop
.
Beside the chair
of sweatstained red
where I watch the city’s
freckling swelter
on sticky noon
Tuesdays, a lily
lies dying. Nothing
noticeable, mind;
a faint fading into
the badly primed
walls; a slow
yellow march
into composted
tomorrows. Wilted,
ailurophilic leaves
pulled floorward
by a gravity that could
kill us all. A lily lies
dying, and no amount
of hydrostatic
pressure-infused dew-
drawn drippings
can save it nor sweet
lullaby reverse the
slow spiral
down. A lily
lies dying; a lone brave
blossom lifts its
lily-head above the decay,
perches birdlike
poised for bloom,
an unfurling of pale
trumpets some unknown
dawn from now,
a defiant farewell.
when rivers die
When
rivers die,
there is
a silence
of stones.
Like all good pall-
bearers, they
carry the weight
down low, standing
straight while
the lament goes on for
miles.
The sun
unfolds
across old stretch
marks in soft mud. Slow.
Time breathes out
a dirge in oxidized
inspirations,
gasps a
violet ending.
Sentinel cancer,
the wise acridness
of dried riverbones
exposed
to eyes
that do not blink.
Slow.
A despair in sepia.
All graces
abandoned,
broken glass
dropped in faded weeds.
Brittle; brutal. Quiet.
None know her
suffering. None
can say
if she cried
out
at the last.
When
rivers die,
there is
a silence
of stones.
They keep watch
over what was,
blessing
each raindrop
in their stolid way,
dreaming
of waterfall
caresses.
purple
purple
is not only the color
flashing in front
of death and draped
over mourning; it’s the tone
of bruised cheeks against
angry layered blushes; it’s
a favorite of my grandmother’s
though she may not
remember
my name when i bring
it to her in puzzle
pieces and
teddy bears
but
it’s also
the color of the orchid
you brought me
with your chapped
heart over
a year ago,
now
in bloom
for the first time
as if to say
let bygones utterly
be
gone and
love
joyfully
flower.
once upon a time
you were my muse
and i was your poet;
i saw the rhythms of your soul:
they raced with me across a beach,
laughing.
so when you tentatively
held out your fingers, i
took them as a lifeline,
shut my lids to the
wounds of this world,
found a brighter self in your
ocean-eyes. but like children we
swam too far out,
past the point where our toes
touched land, lost
our footing and ourselves and
somehow you found me facedown
on my kitchen floor,
sunk down in tears and pain,
not the girl you had
fallen in love with, not
even really
a girl at all.
in the darkness
you rubbed dry your eyes;
you shook yourself off;
you locked doors all around me,
blind to the reality that i
was already prisoner inside this
skin, and you, you walked out
under crying skies but
walked free nevertheless,
taking my heart with you,
leaving me to drown alone.
unnatural
three days ago in a southern town
which never saw snow, two inches
fell through the bewilderment of
a false spring; a young mother
devoured the bodies of her-not-quite-still
pups and the chanak screamed into the void
left by a depleted heart,
his eyes the milky color of guilt unborn.
*”chanak” (also tyanak, tianak) is a creature from Filipino folklore, which, according to some, represents the malicious spirit of aborted infants and is said to prey on birthing mothers/newborn babies.
hubris
a word for heroes and tragedies,
life-breadths hanging by the thread of
destiny’s blade, epic history
and the plight of demi-gods.
but also a word for mice, 2 maybe
3 days old, still blind to the world’s beauty,
eyes squeezed shut
even though they don’t know, they
can’t know i won’t let them know
that they will never see a sunrise, a single
blade of grass.
each death a grain of sand
weighing against me in a mirrored hourglass
on the nights when i cannot sleep;
each death a wave that breaks,
and is gone.
unsounded lyric
Irrevocable
the sound of something dying deep inside me;
a dark rhythm, insistent
pounding of silence
that reads
lasciate ogne speranza,
one language not enough
to assuage
the piece of me
that now lies quiet
on a crag of sunburnt earth
close to the divine.
What remains
rages, essence and flame
spiraled higher because
I still breathe,
hardly knowing how but
I dance
barefoot
over mirror-shards
of who I have been,
defy you
to define me,
pick out the parts of my
blood,
the promise and power I alone
hold
for as long as I restrain
my doubt, refrain
from turning my head and
tripping
over might-have-beens.
anesthetic
green and wet
and incongruent,
the smell of untame clover
permeates a crying earth,
a skin already saturated
with oversweet good-byes.
overgrown, overcast,
the world outside my window
soothes the rough edges of me
in soft viridian coolness,
numbs my sunburnt soul.
and yet, and yet,
the roots go deeper than this,
trawl back through yesterdays
and a hurt not yet assuaged,
tendrils draw further in,
pry apart dark soils, stones and disillusions,
encircle the core of me
and gently
squeeze.
translate this
In my dream,
vultures big as wild turkeys
sat hunched on empty trees
and watched me
draw my own
death in bold
true lines, painstakingly.
Funny;
I went to sleep
hearing rain-wet magnolias,
not the clamoring of decay.
negation
On a day two days after Palm Sunday,
there were no births, and,
therefore,
no deaths.
Instead I sat at my cold aluminum desk
and threw out words like pennies,
watched through grudged windows
the skeletons of trees endure.
