Inside all day. Rosalie’s gone
to monastery. On most mornings yellow
makes the air look new but today
it’s thunder gray, Packers on the radio, and cold
blows in the open doors that look out
over the old city. Ate chicken
and ji-tomate for lunch. (Who knew?
Turns out the pendejo Spanish stole
the fruit and changed the name.) Finished
Gone with the Wind and can’t believe
I care about stupid, selfish, evil
Scarlet but I do. I want Rhett to love
her again. I want Mellie and Bonnie
alive. I want somebody to care. I want
what’s done to be undone. I want kindness
and no regrets. I don’t like the insane.
I want the bad calls reversed. I want
all the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten
Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands. I want the spot
out, too. I want it gone. Don’t you?

In praise of firing squads

All the men and women who stood freezing
or sweating tied to poles, trees or against plaster walls
next to mass graves and waited to be shot

only for being who they are—or at least for being
who somebody thought they were—what did they think?
Probably not that they were the luckiest people on earth

to have killers who lined them so carefully under the bright sun
or soft moon, in the rain or snow or dusty wind, aimed at them
down barrels of guns and said yes, him, yes, her.

Is there a more honest way to be killed? Is there a better
death than at the hands of an enemy who chooses you,
looks at you, shoots? Imagine those who die when the drones

strike or backpacks explode the subway or cluster bombs
fall from planes too high to see? Death cracks the air
like lightening. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,

walking on the wrong side of the wrong street. Even your own death
has nothing to do with you and nothing to do with your killers sometimes
home already fixing dinner for their children. Yours is an execution

without perverse play or frenzy or paperwork. No killer
remembers. Somebody was the target but not particularly
you. Young men who dream of killing their enemies,

do they dream of this? Young women who dream of warriors,
do they dream of this? In the countless ways we dream
our own good demise, do we ever dream of this? None of us

die as virgins anymore, sacrificed on pyramids, chosen
for our virtue, our blood dripping down the stone steps,
the sky filled with the holy smoke of our flesh to make our killers

feel something human, know something big is happening
when a young girl gives her life to the gods. Now we may as well
be calves slaughtered behind the shed. But even they

are chosen, stuck, bled, cleaned, and after the killing,
the killers wash their hands before they eat, give thanks
for the blood, thanks for the meat.

Still here and the crowd goes crazy

I haven’t a story in my head and enjoy that.
Luís says the average Mexican doesn’t know
the names of birds. They are spooky or magic
or a nuisance but they don’t have names. Somewhere
somebody has scored a goal. I can hear the radio
man shout GOOOOOOOOOOOOOL through an open
window. A man in the alley sings to sell propane,
his voice echoes up countless stone stairs
to the houses on the hill and harmonizes. Raised in
dry Montana, Anna writes that when it rains in Wisconsin,
its rains like in a movie—so much water falling so fast.
Mary Louise says when it rains in Paris, it is a movie.
Church bells ring here all the time. It would be lonely
if they suddenly stopped. This morning I woke grumpy
with a to-do list in my head. I remembered my mom
and how precariously she clings to life, and I thought:
“Oh christ, all I need is for Mom to die now.”
Yesterday, the sun in my eyes, I rolled my ankle
on the curb and almost fell. The alley too narrow,
the car too fast, I would have been hit but caught
a signpost with my hand and stayed alive. To keep
from thinking, I quickly ducked through an open
door off the sidewalk into a brightly-lit gymnasium
and watched a women’s basketball game. I sat down
in the stands and immediately was irritated by one
of the officials. A half minute before I’d barely
avoided death and now I steamed at how the ref
blew his whistle too often and too loud. The sound hurt
my ears and he loved too much making all the women
stop playing and look while he waved his arms and made
another absurd call. In a war he’d be a sadist colonel.
Today I’m sitting on a wrought iron bench in the semi-
shade up the hill in another cobbled alley I’ve never
seen. A dog barks. My mom is still alive. A bell tolls
nearby then a second from the other side of town. Some-
body scores another goal and the radio announcer lets
it rip—GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
he sings again, and I know there’s an end but not yet—
maybe not even today. It’s noon. We’re all still here
and the crowd goes crazy.

If we were both
hanging from a cliff
by one hand
you’d tell me how scary
it is to be hanging
from a cliff
by one hand
and we’d talk about
how it makes you feel
and how your hand
hurts
and how the sun
is setting.

I’d be wondering
how long
I could endure
and we’d talk
about how long you thought
you could endure
and then
you’d tell me everything
you learned
about enduring
as long as you have.

I’d listen and watch
night fall
and a light go on
as you suddenly noticed
me hanging
and praised my heroic endurance
and said how ashamed
you felt
to have talked
so long
when I was suffering too.

I’d say that’s okay
and you’d say it isn’t
and I’d say okay
it isn’t
and you’d laugh
and we’d both be silent
hanging
in the dark.

Then
just when I’d think
my hand could not hold on
another moment
you’d find a ledge
yes, you
to put your feet on
and I don’t know how
but you’d help me find it too.

We’d let ourselves down
together
and stand safely
on the ledge
under the stars.

After a while we’d sit
lie down
sleep
and when we woke
we’d kiss each others hands.

Then one of us would make
a good meal
chicken with spice
rice
Chicken Nicaragua
or something
and as the sun came up
we’d eat on our ledge
dangling our legs.

———————————————————————————-
You may astound her

The wife of a friend
passes the half fountain
a colored fish
swimming from window to window
while you’re inside a dream
of a skinny dark girl
whose face matches the ache
and pleasure of desire.

We want and not
hurt and feel this way
then that
do and feel another way
think maybe
do something else
feel something else as well.

Does it all come down
to that?

Faces pass blank
through car windows
holes of grief filled with music and water
and women on the sidewalk
wear just the right thing
to feel just the right way
and help you feel it too.

Take a walk, bake some bread
conquer Asia
you may astound her.
Drink out of the jug
make plenty of noise.
What will your new shape
effect today?

Solicitations, broken bones
a dollar, a poem.

———————————————————————————

The Purpose of Kissing

Ever notice how the smallest
words uttered between lovers
are attached to boulders
too high up the mountain
to see? A syllable
can shake one loose and send
it tumbling to crush flesh and bone
and the lives of children.

Think of it like this: lovers
hold tiny detonation devices
on their tongues, hot invisible
wires attached to distant charges
strategically placed.

But if that is true, then how
do they breathe? How do
they speak at all?

Maybe like this: First
we look into each other’s
eyes and slowly our faces
approach until we touch
our lover’s most dangerous place
with our most dangerous place.

We kiss to breathe. We
kiss to talk.

If we’re still alive, we
kiss some more.

———————————————————————-
Hey

What if there were two
of you, or three, and I
could dress you all
to undress you all, or watch
you hike your skirts and show
your thighs, all six of them
for me to dive among?

When I burst I’d make sparkles
and when you burst, all three
of you, I’d rise to fall into the moon.

Or so you’d say for you’d forget me.

I’d settle there and shine and see
you wear me pretty in your hair.

——————————————————————————————————-

Today in Three Parts

Morning over the mountains lights a deer
and from the porch I woof to perk up the dog.
I like to watch him look—his normally twitchy
self stands statue still—eyes, ears, muscles
aimed a hundred yards across the grassy
shade to the yellow deer. He stands that way
for a long time, until the deer moves away
behind the shed. My wife is inside behind me
her Buddhist buds whispering a dharma talk,
eyes closed and turned from the window. I woke
after a dream in which I was tete-a-tete
with the lovely visiting President of Argentina.
We talked about the unintentionally funny
things we’ve said while speaking a language not
our own—she was tilting her forehead to touch mine,
looking over her lashes into my eyes,
her hot South American breath on my cheeks
and when I woke my naked wife was squatting
next to the bed, her white skin pretty
in the light, her body a teenage virgin still,
forty years since, searching her bags
for a headache pill.

I wanted to take her by the hand and lead
her down the stairs and bend her over the kitchen
counter, rub olive oil on her thighs
and flanks, but she rummaged with a face so close
to suffering I wondered what she’d think if she knew
what I was thinking. No, I didn’t. I felt
her in my body so strongly I had to turn
away and stare at dawn in the hollow and listen
to her bare feet slide across the floor
to the stairs and down where she was silent.
I waited and followed and made her coffee but barely
looked so clearly her oil gleaming skin
was in my mind. She took the coffee, thanked
me, closed her eyes and reclined back
into her dharma.

Later we walked a muddy trail pocked
with bear prints clear as cartoon tracks
heading up the trail with us. We were following
the bear and didn’t want to, so turned toward
the ridge on a hard grassy trail and walked
in not-quite-bliss, not-quite-ignorance.
Shadow brindled sunlight past pines
and her headache was long gone. I watched
her walk and told her my dream, my almost
lover, her forehead, her breath, our laughter.

——————————————————————————————
Vertigo

In the time it takes to watch
her pass, I smell her with my eyes,
feel the comet craving burn
and make my skin melt into hers.

Something in me dares the grave,
the thrill and crash, no sleepy
fade, her cliff that begs me jump and fly
—what a life, what a death to try.

————————————————————————————

Been back in Guanajuato for a week and managed to lie awake some nights listening to the roar of the Cervantino festival rising up out of the bowl of this city until about 4 in the morning when it was replaced by the sound of the students upstairs coming home to party on the roof. I love earplugs. Also I managed one long poem, and the short one that follows.

You’d like this place but that’s easy

What I’m struggling with is the shadow
of the hummingbird blowing backward
and the feel of men blasting rock for silver
a mile below. Tonight a Polish band plays
two-hundred-year-old music and mines
have built palaces here for twice
that long. The problem with happiness
is the grouch in my head. Last night
dreams blew in my window and left
a strange smell.

Each stone in the five-story wall is different:
flat, round, any odd shape laid on the next,
one confusing day after another, in no deliberate
pattern except up, the top stones mortared
by grandsons of men who built the base,
each with marvelous feelings I don’t care about.
The result is beauty.

Pipes jut out at random and clusters
of pebbles are jammed between boulders
and balconies are held up by the bones
of old trees. Then the round or squared
holes, domed shapes of black air
or shiny glass, some barred, framed
by stone, stucco, old brick or combinations,
and I’m only seeing the thirteen windows
in the towering wall across the plaza.
How can I feel it all?

I could spend a lifetime on just one rock.
I could finger its texture, hold its weight
like a peach but no matter how deeply
I breathe, how wide I try to see, the whole
wall breaks my heart. How can I not be irritated
by that? And what difference does feeling make
to the simplest mystery? Walkers pass from shade
to shadow, church bells ring for the millionth time
and girls’ bodies beckon tomorrow with the coiled
energy of a crowd of boys. If I had an idea
I’d forget it.

The man who cut my hair today
has cut hair for sixty years.
A boy chases pigeons like the man
with the hipster hat strides into his own dream.
A young woman with bare shoulders can’t
decide if she’s prey or predator.
I have to lose to feel but one daughter flies
to Paris, writes she’s trying to be brave
every second. One roots in Wisconsin
dirt, and in Montana another sings
of war with the blues. Feelings tumble like sand
and that’s how I know time. Each grain
another chance for courage. Some days
the best I can do is slide too, smell chorizo.
Some days the best I can do is walk home.

———————————————————————————————————

Here’s a Montana poem, more on the above theme, it seems….perhaps this more elegant in its simplicity. And the poem is indebted to Roberto Bolaño for its best line:

Some Days

High gray sky and snow
dusts the flanks of mountains
too big to look at
for long. The air
stings my lungs.
Shouldn’t it be diluted?
With what? June ten
and winter’s in the air.
Tomorrow might be so hot
I’ll need to curl
in the grass and pant
a dream of water.
Some days nothing hurts
and some my words
are the demented strut
of dumb birds in moonlight.

Cheese Days

Some of us are preachers
went to kindergarten
played fifth-grade baseball
doctors and mechanics
snuck out at night to steal
danced and fell in love
others still pirates and pimps
cars tomatoes beer or kisses
often with the wrong person
behind the tennis courts.
Years ago for ten minutes
in the morning in homeroom
we sat next to each other
and made each other laugh.
At Cheese Days that’s enough.
Who knew?

From our new homes we look
out our windows at strange
cities forests lakes farms
mountains but at Cheese Days
we come from the eyes of old
friends and our gathered
children, from their surging
and how it peels us with joy
and intoxicating dread. We
love the old who scared us
and even the spaces the lost
make. We cry to see our grown
children laugh and laugh
to see in the certainty of their
beautiful bodies their babies
that will take our place. We
haven’t forgotten wandering
thickets or pulling our hair
jumping off bridges driving
mad nights looking for lovers
we never found or running
from spouses we did or even
our own hateful hearts but
the shoulders of the dead
squeeze among us and the shadows
of who we were who we wanted
and wanted to be are welcome
too—we drink with them
under the tents on the town
square as the sky darkens
and the lights turn on
for Cheese Days.

The houses and yards are smaller
the gardens and trucks bigger
and more people limp and kill
themselves with booze than we
remember. Dead birds appear
magically in the high school
and madness is ten thousand
pounds of cheese noodles.
All weekend sex wafts up
from the golf course and
the black river makes us ache
for something at the edge
of our well-lighted minds.
Despite the season we smell
panicky gusts of autumn
the bones of winter stars
desire in melting snow. If
we close our eyes spring
sunshine makes our legs
strong again.

On the last evening in the high
balm of late summer on the edges
of the town square our moon
hearts grow round and we tell
stories of our lives we never knew.
The beer is cold curds fresh
and over our shoulder the old
courthouse rises weighty
and weightless and glowing
like another pretty ghost
while we breathe the sweet
air of our bodies and laugh
harder than we’ve laughed
in a long time knowing
it all ends too soon scattered
with the crowd buried
with the dead tomorrow
when Cheese Days ends.

—————————————————————————–

Los Ansianos

Today town is upside down
dogs bark in the bowl corona
tables are tipped tourists
with binoculars squint round
hills covered with straight lines
Picasso city colored blood
burnt orange yellow turquoise
old stone brick and the mystery
of ten thousand windows
tunnels and mine shafts
dug by gold and dust covered
men standing statue still
all day long for pesos.

What does it do to the eye
to follow a curved ally
toward music that opens
into a cobbled plaza spaced
with couples in purple
dusk dancing in fine suits
and dresses—none
under seventy years old?

Slow motion, a mime
of passion, is that the long
and the short of it? How
does that account for beauty?
For the way a couple dozen
old people coupled up in good
shoes holding hands with serious
faces step to music and take
away your breath?

Like lions their old
bodies chase game
through tall grass
too full now to smile
they know what the young
can never that this
is all there is who
now chase shadows
all day make love
until dawn then roar
up from the bay
crush homes and roam
streets in celebration
and not know the slow
the limp the trickle
the inevitable ebb
and glorious sleep.

What makes beauty
is what we cannot see
but imagine in hints
of coyness of dash
and flirt— lives on fire
and the charred bones
they dance on—city
of mystery they built
night blankets old heat
the dead that dance
at their side in their arms
how bright the dark
how invisible it glows
as the plaza turns cold.

Research

The distance between
my nose and the wall
is four feet three inches
according to this tape
plus the width of my thumb
which measures
a certain distance
nobody is certain of.

———————————————————————–

Birds

Sometimes I think I should know
the names of all the birds
I see in the trees in the morning.

Then I wonder what language
I should know them in.
Maybe English and maybe

all of the languages.
There’s no limit to what I think
I should know.

So I stand as still as dirt
and close my eyes and feel
my heart and breathe their talk

to hear their song today.
Tomorrow,
I’ll forget everything.

The wind’s a terror, the light outside
too bright to feel but doom, and here stone
columns rise to carved dome ceilings that don’t fall
for no reason I know and let down light
in pillars of dust from who knows where.
An old woman in a black shawl kneels
under Christ sagging on the cross, his kelly
green skirt covers his suffering flesh and high
an angel statue looks like a Roman soldier.
Peace is easy in all this space—or if not,
good manners might hide my carnivorous
heart. The old woman lifts her gray
head and moving lips to the tortured Christ,
the prick, I think, surprising myself, his life
and death a Hollywood tragedy: He dies, but no—
he’s back! And like a good gangster
lives in the biggest house and keeps
his mouth shut. Of course he resisted
in the desert, he already knew he was bound
for glory. The story confounds lives
languishing unnoticed except by death
or invention, how to lose—or win—for no reason,
how to suffer without fantastic dreams, or hang
bleeding from a cross, or grow old alone.
The woman noses as-yet unresurrected
flowers at God’s feet as a young one slides in close
to me, all flesh and breath to say her prayers. I glut
my sorrow on the rose of her skin, deep
and black as night, until she slips off the pew
onto her knees. A place makes us know everything
or think we do so we come to new a place
to know we don’t. Two Japanese women tiptoe past,
pause, turn like deer. And I—at the curve
of their skirts—feel my heart turn bat cave,
my big puff of ambition only that. Do I want to die
with a kiss and a lie, or watching my enemy
taste my brave blood? A thief in the street, I’m here
to count my treasure, calculate this light, this tomb.
How many baptized here are buried here? How
many breaths do I have to take before I breathe
the dust of someone I once loved? Blessed
with glimpses of fairies and trolls, we’re a crowd
of apple-minded horses stomping
and shivering out of the wind. Doves
coo from the cupola, and the giant doors
behind me let in a blast of traffic and the biting whirr
of saw blades. Under trees I know, there’s shade
as deep as stone and wider than whatever it is
I’ve fallen through. The old woman presses
her face against the stone floor and my cheek
feels cold. Miracle enough. I close my eyes
as the beauty beside me rustles to stand,
her clothing opening and closing past manners
to the only prayer I know.

Richard Hugo wrote a lot of letter poems. All I’ve managed to write are note poems. I posted a couple to Joanna last week, and here’s a broken pentameter to Phil.

Phil–

I’m back
from five weeks of this and that

ready
to run with you if you are man

enough.
I look the same as always, maybe

fatter
sadder and gray, and a little more

peculiar
as my genitalia have grown freakishly

large.
Besides that, it’s my new lapis

dorsal
fin that makes me look different

from last
time we ran together. Hope

you’re well.
I rode my bike around your house

the other
day. It’s so big the ride

took most
of an afternoon. You must be glad

to have
it done. Now for the living,

always
the hard part and sometimes fun.

Also
with the builders gone there might be more

sex.
(Not enough, of course, but prospects

or even
the thought when prospects are slim will often

do.)
I speak from experience on the Great Plains

I’ve crossed
a hundred times—write it on my tombstone

—the hot,
the cold, the dry, and then a flash flood

washes
us away. This year my dad died,

your mom,
Rosalie’s too, and not fast

enough
mine we hope is on her way.

Hey
there’s no escape just ride it out

until
the water laps slowly against

the hills
the old beach and there you are

naked
a pup waking in a strange land.

The sun
is out, you’re blind, your knees are shot

but what
the hell I’m back from far and don’t

mean
to leave an odd note—who does?—

just want
to know if you can run this week.

The leaves
are turning, there’s smoke in the air, it’s August.

Call me.