Featured Poems
Listen and Read
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Should I have asked? I did love
when you reached across the wide,
circular table of the booth you let me have,
my books, my bits of paper,
curling off the edges like some
accountant who couldn’t afford office rent.
That long stretch to place my cup
was so I could see there was still beauty
in those breasts, that real blonde hair
so neatly tucked, saved for some right fellow,
some father for the two kids you had
sleeping in that rusted orange Ranchero
in the parking lot one day you came in just
to get your check and your engine’s hiccup
soothed. You showed them to me as if
to say, Do you know what you’d be asking if you ask?
your face pinched like a child’s, opening up
when it was just the carburetor stuck and you
the means to take them wherever it was you went.
They never even moved, that girl, that little man,
sleeping, bound, like pupae, in white blankets,
trusting dreams would set them free.
You kept my table for nothing
that long, poor winter of wild scribbling.
It was as if you understood that what I did
needed doing first. I remember rain
fell a lot; it was a fallen world. I even asked
around the way those who grow up with cattle will,
toeing the dirt, staring at the ground
as if a random boot scuff in the dust
might trace a rib or some other sign and found
you came from good stock, married wrong,
but held your own ground, fairly.
Mornings you came to bring my cup,
your eyes, open sky, one knee on the upholstered
seat, your arm grazing mine, electric, as you poured,
as into me, a taste of what could be.
And I, profoundly dumb, useless
with my papers, held up, in each hand,
that afternoon I figured out we would
stay, both of us, attendant to our stations.
Silenced, I watched the wind swinging, dead
cold out of the east, swaying metal signs along
the street, darkening the plate glass windows
so that I could see my face, lean, and staring back
knowing all that was written in that place was writ by rain.
-
I was already sick when I married and still believed
The doctors could cure me or she would, or all
The inexplicable suffering in the world would
Somehow add up in my head which I thought of then,
Romantically, as a room like Van Gogh’s little attic,
He mad and making there something redemptive.
We’d drive back and forth to Stanford loving the broad
Lakes of light on the foothills, tendrils of dark octopus
Clouds dragging the distance, some fog always there
And suggesting we were never far from the sea’s green
Breathing. Still, we could laugh until it hurt.
Though those years cost us everything. I left school.
She agreed children shouldn’t bear the absence a life
Of pilgrimage makes. There were times when I’d say
To myself, What’s going on? And my self wasn’t there
To answer because I was looking into her face that was
One of those fields, and, I these slivers of dusk falling
Into it, and, for a little while, I wasn’t scared. When they
Severed the muscles of my tongue, stretched and bolted
Them to the tip of my jaw, I lay in the back seat as we sliced
Home through the mists over Altamont Pass
And I thought, It isn’t an ear, but I’ve done it for love,
For the future I didn’t know is for everyone a needle’s eye
Of goodbyes we pass through, the healing just a long stitching
Up that for me didn’t work unless dumb animal acceptance
Is healing, and I think that it is. So it was right anyway,
And weren’t our hearts bells ringing? And the morphine
And wildflowers lighting the skies and the slopes
Brilliant blue and that wobbly yellow, a few blackbirds
Dropping through, could make me weep at them
And the largess of knowing her and the songs
She hummed, the hope that kept us going back.
It’s easy to imagine blood as a betrayal because
It runs easily, but how to say exactly what grew in place
Of the lost pieces? All I have to show is the simple fact of her
Threading a crowded hospital corridor, eyes that made me
Think of blackberries the birds had plucked,
She struggling toward me, my leaking bandage
Of a head, her arms full of flowers.
-
I do not like to love
A thing that goes.
Everything goes.
For a long while
I wouldn’t visit the niece
With hips she’d made too slim
To force a father’s glance
To fall away.
Forced now into a room
With friends she skitters, mute,
Eyes, sunk into her face like votive
Candles nearly spent, glassy,
Lit with panic.
The first time I saw
Her smallest version
Of herself, I could only
Press a twenty-dollar bill
Into her hand,
Though I admired her resolve,
Firmer than mine,
To say nothing, to leave.
It seemed something
Pressed from her eyes
In too rich a distillation, my eyes
Tearing involuntarily because
I didn’t embrace her,
Didn’t want to be the child
Who pets a wild thing to death.
At night, troubled hungry,
I move down the hall
Past the lasso of lamplight
Dropped over her shoulder,
A moth thrumming, mad,
Against the shade.
She sketches at her desk.
She looks up as if listening.
She has not seen me.
Her heart may fail her.
My heart may fail her.
I look away.
I won’t keep watch
While she goes on
With pinched face,
Erasing, erasing.
-
I thought it was a large moth, mistook it
For a portent of something special
In the wind:
A dusky desert brother
To the red darts usually seen.
It looked down on its luck,
Then up again, down,
Then, with a pirouetting loop,
Penned the air in a grand sweeping
Signature to the left.
Its is a rapier’s thrust, a phlebotomist’s
Needle probing before setting deep.
Its very name could be Sudden.
Like now,
In front of my window, it makes the sign
Of the cross then,
Heart the size of a pea,
It delves and it suckles,
Thistles of light where
The wings ought to go.
Where the heart goes. That quick.
That tentative. That sure.
-
Sometimes I waken early with a mind as slow
as an ice field breaking up after winter, a memory
moving out on each chunk of snow.
I go downtown to buy the silence
of waiters, the first lights of the city, the window
where I watch a sky painted today
with the gravity of rain. A man
standing on the sidewalk seems unable or unwilling
to move, the way standing in some museums
I've wanted to walk into the landscape
of a city but just stood there, knowing
it was enough to take that city
into me. A street magician is setting
up on the corner, checking his scarves
and his flowers, his coat of many colors.
He reminds me of the ventriloquist
the nuns hired once on the Feast
of the Transfiguration of Christ
to entertain the children of St. Theresa's—
the little flowers of Jesus of whom I was one.
He was an old man, an immigrant from Chile,
who could pass his spirit with ease into the body
of his lap companion. And when that wooden boy
sang a song of his homeland, of the devil's tails
that swept out over the roads as night
closed its circle, of a boy walking home
by the light of a lantern, light in his heart,
we felt his longing deepen its route
as it swept through us, until some cried
and we all applauded with abandon. I remember
the eyes of that boy, swiveling wildly
when his father stood up, tearing at his collar,
his eyes filling with surprise and curiosity
as he collapsed on the floor of his last performance,
the felt curtains scurrying closed. The whole
school knelt to say the rosary as, once only,
we had knelt when the President was killed
and the nuns wept openly. I wondered
what would become of that boy, lying
closed in a suitcase, the songs buried
in his heart. Even now, sometimes
when I close my eyes to this city
and what it has become, I hear a voice
full of hope and longing, a lantern
swinging toward me in the dark.
-
Terror of mice, distrusted and brooding.
Unwilling to bother to hide himself
In the half-dark settling over the yard,
He’ll stop, and clutching the fence top
With the cracked leather gloves of his hands,
Suck air through his teeth at the sight of me.
Thin tattered in the costume
Of an alcoholic clown, he can’t sit out the winter.
His is a lean anger, so much so I believe
That some evening should a fleck of grease travel
Up into my brain, and, I, to die in the wet grass
Under the cold insistence of stars,
He’d chew a hole, perhaps
In the soft fleshy spot under an armpit
And munch his good fortune with proper simplicity.
Sated, he’d sleep then with no dream of heaven.
Denied the lamb’s bleating heart, he perfects solitude,
Licks back the grief of the spleen and likes it.
Crazed with the stink of suburbs,
He hangs on and cares nothing for my admiration.
Sometimes, at night, head tipped back on the sofa,
Music coming to its expected end,
A velvet quiet bearing hard toward the center of things,
I think of him out there, snout low and scenting
For garbage or the stiff little carcass of a sparrow.
I go to bed and dream my dream,
The one where they cut my hair and clip my nails,
Dress me in a silken box, arranging my head
To face the east and the little hole of silence
They say is a star.