“Broken Wing,” “No donations here,” and “White Walls”
Hopelessness—caked in dirt
and tossed aside,
like the bird
with a broken wing
“Sonnet for Interesting Times,” “Mutual Observation,” and “The Meantime”
You may wonder who will reach
down to perform the necessary miracle,
and when and what: the white bandage,
pristine; the laying on of hands; the soup
and sleep and bread and bed.
“What Stays,” “Elfie’s Other Life,” and “Crow‘s Message”
This morning I woke to slow rain,
and remembered waking with you
sprawled across my bed in a toccata
of bones muscles skin and breath.
“A Swan,” “Lips,” “I Saw You Crying”
A swan,
His neck a staircase into
The white clouds,
Wings, oars
Of silk,
Toiling
Against
The waves of
Water…
“The Room Next Door” and “Bright Red Gloves”
The first time Elizabeth jumped, James was on the ground with a tarp; /
they were in different worlds and the two had never met.
“No one understands me,” Elizabeth said. She was lying /
on the floor of her pink-striped bedroom and was talking to the ceiling.
“Impatient,” “Last Week,” and “Now It Is a Requiem”
Leaving the hospital, she said:
“Today, everyone looks like something I ate.”
Right now? I asked, scanning the parking lot.
“Yes. And everyone throughout my life.”
I thought so. Most of the meat
Loaf I digested resembled
My eighth-grade class.
“UAV,” “a boat tows a floating billboard,” and “Week 20”
O phalanx of clouds,
formed against your own shadow,
diorama of the maxim that armies,
like lovers, come in pairs—
promulgate now in bulleted wisps,
conformist’s dark room dripping in chemical
& negative & clothes-pinned evidence
“Snake in Our Midst,” ” House of Mirrors,” and “Entwined”
on the sunbaked
patio, a little girl,
discovers a snake
sunning itself
on a boulder
she runs into
the house
jubilantly reports
the presence…
“Origins All the Time,” “Two Faces,” and “Arguing Again”
I’m so sorry you don’t have the vision
I have. Like when Lesbia
showed me the new Cure cassette in ‘92
I was able to pick out
what would be the most popular songs
in two seconds.
“Shades of Red,” ” Indigo, Turmeric,” and “Out of Nowhere”
color
came to me suddenly
not blood, but red, reddish
and burning. Only
at first abrupt,
like a punch line, a
jawbone or
hallway carved
“The Sky a Flawless Blue,” “When your Muse has Left the Building,” and “My Own Little Beast”
The sky, a flawless blue,
the kind of California day,
that gets under your skin.
Scaffolds holding up the heavens
stretching against celestial infinity.
Is there a placeholder for me
in that expanse?
“I am the Tortoise,” “Greenland Isn’t Green,” and “Eating at Al Capone’s Soup Kitchen”
Flamingoes all pink and proud
at the Junior Museum & Zoo.
Kids & grandparents all aflutter
flocking to public feeding time
in a fluff-and-strut club of cute.
“Étude 128,” “Étude 143,” and “Interval 404”
no music, only the daylight, the green
of the trees growing, so fresh and bright,
imagine a leaf, a single one of them
held to your cheek, in its chill,
its refusal of heat, this early in the year,
the stars so far from here, the birds
in their lightness going about their business
“What Remains” and “A Hole In Her Head”
Discarded on the train tracks,
a crushed bag of potato chips,
bright red label glaring.
Two bus drivers linger
by their idling vehicles—
one bends to his lighter,
the wreath of smoke
drifting briefly
“A Purple Orchid,” “Poem for The Pink Petal Dragons,” and “At The Cusp of Autumn: Where Do Geese & Husband Go?”
Evelyn’s caramel colored
fingertips rub center of an orchid.
Soft saturated purple petals
awaken her eyes, like discovering
carving of ancient writings.
The Nile River on cave walls.
“Not Drowning,” “Solstice,” and “Magi-Conomy”
Are you listening? I have access
to all the words, at least
hypothetically. Language, emotion,
cognition commingles in combinations
infinite, experiments replicable,
but only barely, in theory
“Like Lost Dogs,” “Solitude at Midnight,” and “Eden’s End”
Walking at dusk again,
and stray lines tap
on my mind’s window,
looking for a poem.
“Spring is a Good Season for Reconciliation,” “Where Were You,” and “The Thing That Remains”
The moment we turn the corner,
a cold front hits,
a carpet of chilly air
unrolled at our feet.
I pull my cardigan tightly
around my chest, hold it closed.
“Summer Music, For my Father,” “Caught,” and “Color as Language”
The setting:
Notes in a measure of motion
with dissonant zinc-white daylight splashing
and dancing upon the path
as the horizon softens to a bluer hue, and vanishes
“No X-Men in LA” and “Missing Rehoboth”
Where are you? the seven-year-old in me
asks as I watch the screen fill
with frenetic red and orange,
billowing gray, curtained black.
Storm, come and still the winds.
Jean Gray, divert the water.
“Disappearing Home,” “Shopping With My Mother,” and “A Little Fiction”
We scooped up the baby,
ramrodded the four year old,
imprisoned the two gray tabbies,
locked them all in the ‘77
white LTD with the green vinyl interior
left to me by my mother upon her death.
“Polyglotony,” “Quadrophonic,” and “Photogenia”
Disrupting the murmuring stillness,
the nasally whine of a two-stroke motor,
hedge trimmers whipsawing
weeds framing sidewalk, infiltrating
“Starting from the Middle,” “Heap of a Human,” and “First Love After”
Life came out of me
a gush of red
Moon-pale I waited those eternal
stretched seconds
for my
arms to be filled
with you.
“A Quiet Black Wedding,” “The Broken must find the Broken ,” and “So Many Lengths of Time”
These arguments, the silences, were all a slow release
a practice run to make the death of us
this love we had, a little easier to finish.
We have come apart, the skin of us slide
to be faceless, naked, the bones of us stand free