Before old people got boring

What stories did old people tell when they didn’t talk
about how movies changed our mating customs
and TV and computers made our faces go slack
or about when people actually listened at concerts
instead of recording with their phones, and nobody
dot-commed himself and if you saw somebody walking
alone talking to no one visible he was touched?

What did they talk about before they talked
about how letters were delivered by a neighbor
from a friend written weeks ago, or when to get
to the coast you rode in a chicken bus or on a mule
and it took three days, two weeks, six months
to get there, when you could get there, before
the place was ruined by too many cars and cooked
drugs and flavorless food, before the young
went away or stayed inside all day and got fat
playing video games?

What did they talk about before they talked
about how steamboats ruined the river, how
before the railroad everybody knew
everybody and back before the wheel made
everything easy men carrying rocks
built the pyramids and women carrying water
kept us alive and clean, back when it was dark
at night unless somebody had matches or flint,
in those old days when people made music
with two sticks and a hide and to talk to someone
you had to go find him and to go anywhere you
had to walk sometimes for days and nights
under stars you knew as your gods
and your friends?

What did old people talk about before they talked
about how new things came and changed how men
became men and women became women and children
were raised, how new things came and changed
how we measure time and virtue, and how when
people went away you never saw or heard from them
again until they came back, and your heart ached
with longing, in those days when people ate or felt
hungry, stayed healthy or died of the plague or the pox,
loved or were lonely, defeated their enemies and danced
in abundance or suffered in want and misery in that long
ago ninety-nine percent of human history when children
woke to the same bright sun and spent their days
looking at the same world and doing the same things
their grandparents and great grandparents had done?

Love, death, the moon, floods, fires, famines.
I’m just guessing here. Maybe they talked about where dawn
light on new grass goes, when it goes.
Or the woman waiting all night by the stone wall, on the moss
under the tree, and whose bones are these, scattered
in the poppies—could they be yours? Might they be mine?

After the Blow and What wears me down

After the blow

Cold, bright and windy. The alleys
whined all night like children, the dogs
howled like dogs. I got up early

and under the tent in the Plaza de la Paz
found quiet. I smelled the long tables
of books, stole glances at the two

women workers, earnest faces
puffed with sleep. One in the middle,
the other at the far end stacking.

I touched the books and forgot
the women and fell down the well
of too many unread pages

and the darkness of not enough
swallowed the last light
until despair at my own dear

romp and inadequate life
was interrupted by whispered
words out of rhythm, then louder

curses between the woman in the middle
and a bearded insomniac with a book held
high who claimed it was over-priced.

Their voices raised to shouts, first
his, then hers, then his again, louder.
Even as he walked away he yelled

over his shoulder. She gave it back good
as it came and by the time he stepped
out of the tent into into sunshine, they’d

called each other whores and demanded
the fucking of each others’ mothers.
Suddenly it was quieter than before

hundreds of books mute in the shade.
Both women bent their faces
over their desks. The only shopper

still there I waited not long enough
to ask the woman who’d been shouting
if she had any Bolaño stories. His character

Arturo Belano steals a lot of books
and that’s what popped into my head.
She pretended to be looking at papers

I asked again, this time intrigued
by the memory of her voice shouting
obscenities. I wanted to hear her say

those words again, to see her say
anything from such a pretty mouth.
She turned her still-flushed face toward

the far end of the tent and repeated
my question. No, the woman told her.
No, she repeated to me. I left

without a book. Even up the hill the wind
had ceased and finally the dogs slept.
I felt happy and wanted to lie down

too. I wondered about myself.
I liked the sound of my steps
in the cobbled alley heading home.

——————————————————————————-

what wears me down

is the holy
i need to protect
it gets me into holy wars
from time to time

or skirmishes

i met an old gringo on the way home
he wanted to do the old gringo dance
trying to figure me
place me

nice weather, he said

it always starts like that
like we’re on to something here, you and me
like lucky us — wink wink — big grin
like if back home they could see us now

standing in the warm sunshine in t-shirts

i hate that shit
i told him I like the weather in Montana
yeah but you have to admit
admit what?

you can’t complain about this — points at the sky

still that grin
i’m not here for the weather — okay?
he didn’t know what to say but tried again
on vacation?

you gotta hand it to him

no, i said
retired?
which is another sore spot
he could see in my face

i work, i said

you want a fuckin medal?
he didn’t say that but should have
and come to think of it, I do

want a fuckin medal

i’m writing poems, i say
more blank stare
i’m here to think and read and
yeah — whatever — you call that work?

also didn’t say that but might have

he shrugged
okay dude, cool
grinned again, carefully this time
stepped away, even waved

see you around, he said

i stared at the dry fountain
stepped into the shade
sat on a bench
reserved for tired old holy warriors

come to rest

Heat

Thanksgiving in Guanajuato, what would have been dad’s birthday, and a poem about heat . . . . .

Heat

In the minutes
after he died
his face yellow
eyes wide open
mouth wide open
a bonsai warrior
I put my hand
under my dad’s back
and felt what I thought
was the last of the decades of heat
he’d give me.

The sweat on his skin
cooled and I imagined
his voice: now
it’s yours

and his frozen face winked—
and I was afraid

until just days ago
more than a year later
a picture of his old self
unexpectedly appeared
on my computer
and I felt the warmth of his head
kissing his head
my cheek against the top of his head.

Somebody before him
gave it to him
his grandmother
and somebody before her
gave it to her
and my mind can’t imagine
so many people
so far back
passing on the heat
and now
as he said
as I imagined he said
heat on my hand
heat on my face
it’s mine.

In a Mexican prison reading Tolstoy

The prince mused on the nothingness of greatness
on the nothingness of a life no one can comprehend
and on the nothingness—still-more—of death, which
also can never be understood or explained by the living.

We asked the prisoners, thirty-five young men hunched
over papers with pencils, to write a list of things they wanted
to write about. Some wrote sentences: A poor family
without enough to eat saves money and takes a chance

and becomes a family that owns the best restaurants.
A boy learns to fly and soars off looking for his father, finds him
and tells him everything. Others write words: freedom, friendship
and terror—many write terror. What do these words mean to you?

I asked. Words are dots and sentences lines so meaning comes
from the story filling the spaces between. And we have to invent it.
The count said he made a bayonet charge and repulsed the French.
He’d so longed to do this and so regretted not having done it

that it seemed as he told the story that he must have. Who can know
in such confusion what happened and what did not, and how do we live
with the gaps, especially gaps filled with terror and confusion
without making up a story? To warm up they wrote letters asking

someone who hurt them for an apology. I was scared when you left.
I didn’t deserve that. I hoped and hoped. There was no one to take
care of me. Then they wrote letters of apology. Dear Mom, I’m sorry
for never listening, for taking drugs and for forgetting who loved me.

Life here is a box inside a box inside a box inside a giant prison,
so mainly what I know this week that I didn’t know last week
is how much more I don’t know. Early one morning, I saw
through the big steel doors the front desk man practicing

the hula hoop in the dark. There are more faces on the sidewalk
and subway than anyone can imagine, and that’s just one sidewalk
and one subway. Men have sat on this balcony above this street
for three hundred years with the same joy and dread, just a different

sleeping woman behind them and story to explain it all. I’m still
working on mine. The men in class tell me that behind bars
it’s possible to know both the depths of terror and to learn to love
life again. They stretch to tell me of the nothingness of the knowable

and the greatness of the unknowable. Their heads bow over
their pencils. Even the most solemn mystery in the world still happens
countless times a day and we are all mostly struck dumb and the cars
pass and at night we wait for sleep. In my dream I come from the edge

of the city that is not a city or the country. I come from rain pooled
in the street floating with filth to no one to take care of me.
They connect the dots, fill the spaces with stories they make up
or remember. How can I know so little of nothing? Like the prince,

I had no time to think, but ample time to say what others thought
or that once upon a time I might have thought but have not had time
to think about again because I’ve been too busy saying it. How
can everything turn so fast, from no possibility of happy

to suddenly the music or the turn of a woman or the shadow
on the wall, or the sky through the bars, yes that—and the world
seduces again regardless of the terror? They write Pierre’s questions:
All the things that happen, why? And to what end? All the suffering

and unfair death, why? They use words to imagine a future,
dare to dream it first, know freedom when it is gone, understand
safety in fear, friendship in distrust and one prisoner shows me
four pages he’s written listing all the cages we build for ourselves.

Some are helpful like marriage, he says. And some are not
like drug addiction. The prince looked up and for the first time
since Austerlitz he saw the lofty sky and something
that had been long slumbering awoke. I come from the edge

of the city that is not a city, a place I’ve invented. I come from rain
pooled in the street floating with filth to no one to take care.
On the rooftop of a hotel in a city far from home I have seen
blue sky behind maids hanging pretty white sheets in the wind.

Halloween before the election, two poems

Halloween before the election

What can we say to Confucius
who says if what’s said is not meant
then what must be done remains undone
or to the dear Diane Keaton
who asks the Godfather, Is it true?

How can it be that when candidates talk
they don’t mention the melting icecaps
or the countless measures of a good life
the richest country on the planet lags
behind Albania in? It’s awkward.
Do we ask? Do we want to know?

I’m amazed at how women like us
so much—their faces study and smile.
They deceive of course but their interest
is clear. Big gringos pass with big hats
and big bare feet in sandals or practical
walking shoes and day packs, jungle
leisure wardrobe. Oh well. Everybody
gets dressed in the morning and he’s
a lucky man the way she looks at him.
I wonder if he sees it. Who can tell
the truth? Or even see it walking there,
so close, every day, clear as air?

And how do we speak of the tender
light on a cloud or the savage urge
for blood or the dream in which the monster
has us by our throats, his breath a foul mist
as he asks, Who are you? And where
do you think you’re running to?

We’re good people, we say.
We don’t know, we say.
Please, we say

His laughter shakes our bones.
If only we’d made a little more money,
we think.

He wants the truth
but our tummies are full and we’ve forgotten.
I am me, we finally say, and I am running away!

It’s the best we can do and it’s not bad.
The monster eats us anyway.

——————————————————————————————–


Night of the living

Bells, bombs and songs battle in the alley
past the open door where Rosario leans
her hairnet-framed face over red meat
toward the shiny circle knife and re-touches
her eye makeup. A woman’s long legs, short
pants and high black boots—I didn’t see
her top half—step behind a barred gate
in the curved back of a stonewall pocked
with black wood beams and a long rope
hangs from a bell over a man with a ski pole
in one hand and the hand of a girl dressed
as the devil in the other. Night falls and bites
her lip, sparks the ring and silver black
curl and know-me-know-me-not shadows
lean toward memory and give me a hand
to balance old bones against the glance
of ghouls seeking treats. Painted faces sniff
the chase and bouquets of light and tapping
hooves beckon around the corner through
a crowd that packs flowers into the plaza.

And that’s just part of it. I buy beer and sit
on a stoop. Lit like day the alley smells of candles.
Seeds and petals shape colored skeletons
across the cobbles at my feet. If there’s a prettier
picture of death, I can’t imagine. I close my eyes
to the day of the dead and slip through a crack
and the music is my face, the stone my bones,
and the air suddenly something I swim in. It’s
warm, it’s clean, and I have nowhere I need to go.