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.

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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.