The chrysalis comes in grey
matter, some lines of white
to tell the rest of me when
tearing starts.

She sways and watches the dark waters
Her lighthearted hums brings grief to the ears
Beautiful, piercing the silence of the night
Agony riveting like the pain of broken bones

Nothing, I see
But,
dandelion blush and smoky Bardot eyes of western wind. Nothing, but McDonalds and cluster flies…

Our time is asynchronous
We have a new favorite pharmacy
A ribbon-cutting you can’t miss! It’s
illegal
to feel

His footprints are still there to see
on the stone on the Mount of Olives
where he pushed off, like a power forward
rising to the rebound, to ascend.

time in hospitals is not linear.
the past and future lives of patients
dangle
by wires and rolling IV carts,
souls spread thin beneath bleached sheets.

When in the rainless weeks of summer the mulch pile dried,
and worms we hooked for bait would burrow
deeper than our reaching fingers could grope,
we’d sweep with bare feet the hay fields for grasshoppers…

Serenity before dawn’s waking human world disrupts pristine Creation. I and my companion share psalms we read aloud, a sacred veil ensuring inner peace. With opened hearts we rise as sparks in spans of history…

There are those who live
between the lines of life
who once were my story
but came not to fit,
not them in mine
nor me in theirs;

will we ever know ourselves as well
as we know the radish we pull from the garden bed?
know our readiness as its, as it bulges at the surface dirt
with rusty shoulders that promise spicy delight?

A paper Burger King Crown,
Lunch with mom in the park,

She adjusts it over and over,
But it never fits right upon your head.

When I arrived home from the hospital,
there was a gift box at my doorstep
from my daughter, who recently moved away.

the winter-bare forsythia is so many
arrows of neglect, bundled;
the light, quilted, a question.

Skin stippled with drops from the emerald canopy
quietly content with the other,
no need to speak over
the rustling soundtrack of ironwood sway.

I lied when I said he’d been clean for a year.
It made a better story:
Addict resisting the call of meth,
riding the wave when the desire hit,
how big he felt—and bigger.

This morning I wanted
there to be eyes watching
out for us, something somewhere

caring that we died,

I am sure that everyone in my familia really enjoys flan.
But not me.
May I please taste the glazed churro,
the timeless cochito (con café and cream) or the delicate
tres leche cake.

You want my love but don’t want my pain,
My sunshine, but not my rain.
Can’t you see how that’s driving me insane?

The first time I saw St. Peter’s
magnificent marble and lack of time-
pieces, I dismayed my travel

partner with an obvious observation;
a trifling truism: that it reminded me of a casino
welcoming the hopeful riff-raff

reaching across, hand into the blackberry bush,
a walk from where we were down to the sea,
a small bay, of pebbles & the incoming swell of the water,
listening for the rhythm, as if it might be the key to writing

How can something
come out of nothing,
let alone the universe?

But that is what contemporary
theory of cosmology proclaims—

Seeing blurred writing
on an abstract painting
brings me right back

to begging you to teach me
to read before I went to school

…skyward, lying on our backs listening for rainfall,
lying, we the ones of loitering, of settling into the longing for dreams to overtake us,
asking if anything could overtake us,
this overwhelming desire, this yearning for…

I have been watching White Christmas for 65 years so
tonight, the first film shot in VistaVision and Technicolor
rolls onto my tv screen; but the evening news, with far more
advanced tools, has begun to seep into my holiday films …