Who

Some people fall in love only once
and some never, and some like Elizabeth Taylor
or my Great Aunt Edna with a parade of lovers—
a wood cutter to whom she whispered into his sawdust
beard, I’m a plant and your kisses the rain, a dough-handed baker
whose warm bread made her cry
a merchant marine with a tattooed belly who woke
nightly trembling and gasping into her ear.
And some fall in love
with the same person over and over
for decades, and each time say the same
common, sacred things.

What

The workers at the post office
in Addis Ababa
can’t take my daughter’s letter
to her friend in Kyrgyzstan
because they say they don’t know
where that country is.
She shows them a map
but still they shake their heads.

When

In the morning with coffee and the evening under
a half moon and when we’re born and when
we wake in the middle of the night and don’t know
where we are. When the bus drops us off where two dirt
roads cross in the jungle and it rains and we sing
until the bus finally comes and we climb wet and steaming
through the door and settle on top of our bags and sleep.
When we get where we’re going and before we get there
when we’re hungry and thirsty and tired and can’t sleep
and we look down and see dolphins next to the boat
or the light in the water the color of sky past snow-covered fir.
When we see our children born and our parents die
and we lay the ashes of a child in a grave and later laugh
and look at beautiful women and eat dessert. When the beer
is gone and the band has finished playing and we walk home
through a maze of alleys and up and down a thousand stairs
to lie finally in our beds and listen to the breath of a buffalo
outside our tent or our window, or the voice of a dead boy
or the wind, the unending wind.

Where

After pointing to the closest trotting
street dog and asking the closest person
where that dog is going
hundreds of times in various Honduran towns
during a six-year research period
and never getting another answer other than a shrug
my scientist brother concludes that nobody knows
where the hundreds of thousands of Honduran
streets dogs are going.

Why

Because our lovers are strong and kind
and because they are cruel and weak and because we are everything
they are including jealous & thrilled & disgusted
& scared, and when we love
we feel all those things and also happy
& sad but despite our confusion
we know why we suffer
why we die, why we eat and sleep and why
we wake and what we mean
when we say the common, sacred
things we say.

———————————————————————————————–

Baby Horses

We walked the mountain behind
our house and watched horse
heads bob up the brushy draw
and past them an old stone city
piled up the far side of the valley
under a pretty blue sky. She asked
where the baby horses are and we
felt breeze on our skin, the sun
on our skin, heard the echo of boys
laughing on the cliff behind us
and a man shout ándale at a burro
across the hill. The walk had opened
something like a new room in an old
house, like breath again after a while
without breathing. Who we’d be
when we felt new air filling the space
thrilled us. The light, the looking
the horses grazing their way up the draw
dun backs and sorrel heads showing
above the cactus and curve of the grass .
We saw no colts but I watched
and waited because as you said
for no reason that I could find
any reason to disagree, there are always
baby horses somewhere.
.

two poems:

What People I Know Have Done This Week

Paint tree trunks white,
cut stones for street cobbles,
boil beans, shoot
pigs and hang the legs,

paint pictures of sad
naked women, dream
of snow, spar
in the park and lie

on the grass, pour
lines of chalk
to keep cockroaches out,
kiss lovers, weld axles,

play Bach on the cello,
remember the war,
kill rivals in a play,
bury them, sing,

fix the leak, weep,
pay off gangsters,
play soccer,
get drunk,

dance in the dark
with flashlights,
hang flags,
bang drums,

toss bombs,
ring bells, parade
for the Virgin,
and fix the leak again.

It’s enough to make me want to do
something like that too.

——————————————————————————————————-

The mystical we are born to

At first it almost makes sense.
You walk in a forest
pink with budding oaks
on a trail lit by dappled sunlight.
Pine needles smell of summer
the blackcaps are ripe
the sky blue and the trail ankle-deep
in orange maple leaves.
You walk with those you love
and sometimes by yourself
across an endless white meadow
where a big bird dipping to catch a rabbit
has left wing marks on the snow.

You see a deer carcass and the prints
of all the animals that have come to feast
the infinite patterns of sky touching clouds
hills, trees, grass, and water.

You are curious about the news
then you aren’t anymore.
You feel too cold and too hot and just right sometimes
happy and sad and nothing as well.

You dream you are swimming
or flying; you dream you speak Chinese
or the language of fish
you dream the kiss of lovers
and your children’s faces.
You hold your father’s fat thumb
your mother’s long fingers
your wife’s soft palm
feel the tiny grasping hands of your children
their slippery mouths on your cheek
and when you look they’re wandering
with books and fly rods
cell phones and nice boots
away with lovers of their own
until the fog swallows their thin white necks
and long bare legs.

You call your dog
and he walks with you
happy, then another, different dog
also happy, but when the sun sets
you’re alone and don’t remember
which way to go.
A bird calls from a thicket of prickly ash
and across a marsh that smells like a woman
through dry stone canyons
that fill your lungs with hope
past the edges of Northwoods lakes
and the ghostly squeak of oarlocks
you follow the bird’s strange call
through the night.

Near dawn you stand by the sea
no bird, wet feet
and think of sirens and free will
wonder if they both lead to doom and laugh
because you can’t think of one thing
that doesn’t and you laugh again
as you look across the water
at the shape of the sky around one more cloud
you’ve never seen before.

You don’t know where you are
but you always knew you’d get here—
yet who could imagine it would be like this?
With that pale blush and those pastels
and this new sweet air on your skin?
You remember hoping
you’d have something to show for it all
but that was a long time ago
and now there’s nobody here
to show anything to.

As if it all hasn’t been strange enough
your mother’s face rises
behind the sinking moon.
Well? she asks
in that way she shows
delight and concern
and you walk in deeper
feel the water rise past your knees
waist, chest, and stop at your neck.

You’re light now
your feet bob on the sand
and you have nothing to be afraid of.
It’s been a trek, you finally say
and try to smile.
Are you warm enough? she asks.
Yes, you say
it’s cold, you say
but not too terribly cold.
You stand and bob and look
where the water meets the sky
how the light grows
and the breeze carries the smell
of distant lands, and try to remember
what it was
you ever loved more than this.

Are you hurt? she asks.
Do you need a rest?
Can I make you some soup?
Do you feel sad?
Will you tell me your dream?

Make sure to say yes
to everything.
Everything she asks
everything she doesn’t .
And remember to let out the bubble
of gratitude holding you up
and when you do
water will swell over your chin.
You’ll taste the salt
feel the brief sting of fear
as your feet lift off the sand
and the last of the stars in your beloved sky
blur and blink out.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I wasn’t thinking about Pearl Harbor Day when I wrote this, but Pearl Harbor Day seems an apt day to have finished it.

Questions on a beautiful morning

The jangle of my bones, the kindness
of sunshine and the relief of shade,
that lovely line
where both offer pleasure—

the bakery air and bread hot
through the bag, people nodding
good morning, stepping aside,
giving up their seat, the joyful

dance of the personal with the social,
at least until the thugs come—
for don’t they always?—with their drooling lips and thick

fingers on triggers and flat
crazy eyes and engorged pricks
sticking out of their pants
to ruin a beautiful morning?

Who are these innocents
who say the world changed
on that day, and from what cradle
did they raise their milky gaze?

Doesn’t somebody always
eventually come to smash the bread
and turn the shadows rank with fear
the sunshine bright with blood?

Haven’t there always been bad boys
(and girls to love them—
sometimes with great tenderness)
to toss the babies joyfully in the air

and catch them on their swords?
Didn’t the Cheyenne sleeping
at Sand Creek know this? Don’t big
winds clear all happy streets

from time to time, turn proud
people into quivering hunks of raped
and dying, stacks of headless trunks,
or self-loathing survivors

who duck around the corner
of what just a moment ago
was a pleasant morning in My Lai?
Aren’t the thugs this very minute

making plans to unleash dawn raids,
drop a big bomb for their gods,
give each other medals? When
the Zetas arrive, won’t we see

their guns and pay their fees
and hope to survive until they’re gone?
And if we do, when we do, after
that long wait, may our children’s

children know this clear light,
the benevolent possibilities of dawn,
like they’ve always known the monster
under their own warm beds.

———————————————————————————————————

A few more questions I have

Do we need the young dying
(virgins to the corn god)
so we can savor our tortillas?

Why is the sunset redder, the air
sweeter, the neighborhood just plain
friendlier when we think somebody is dying
for us?

Do we need the maimed
& dead to give our un-dead
un-maimed days meaning?

Isn’t that why they say Christ
was nailed to the cross?

To make our lives
mean something?

What?

And if our lives already mean something
because Christ died for us
why did the kid from the Bitterroot
have to die in Iraq
for us too?

Is there a set number of people
we need to kill
or do we need to keep killing
people forever?

If I refuse to believe sacrificing a virgin
on a pyramid, Christ on a cross
or a kid from the Bitterroot
makes my life better
is my life worse?

Or am I just being stubborn?

(Who am I to rebel against
what people, as long as there have been people
believe?)

If all men
as my daughter says
(even Roman soldiers, Aztecs priests and Iraqis)
look more human and vulnerable eating soup
shouldn’t we make more of it?

Before dawn, you greet hotel maids
chatting music, step around dog shit
on the clean cobbled walk past garbage
trucks and taxis in the cold. After
a long night of righteous missiles
over the holy land, the last echo of ¡puta
madre! has dissolved down the block
and the fairy glow of streetlights guides
you toward a paling sky, Cinco de Mayo
and coffee.

Still squinting from the Santa Martha
bus, you walk into the shade past armed
guards on broken chairs and the same
one who blocked your way to leave that first
afternoon, said it’s too late, you’ll have to stay
the night inside. Remember the dark
in your throat, the sudden glint in his eye,
a prison joke. Ha-ha.

Hunched over pencils, beige-clad men
turn their attentive faces you won’t have
enough time to get to know. Your afternoons
fill with the broad light on a hundred Rivera
murals, the glow of surrealist women
at Chapultepec, the dapple through trees
in the Condesa, watching Obama win
on plasma TV, three-course lunches at clean
shadowed counters just one sane step
out of the glare. You blow your mind wondering
how many minds the Cathedral’s enormity
has blown before yours, and did all those people
also walk out the back door, cross the street
and buy their first suit for their living mother’s
funeral? Your wife suggests you bought it
for your own. You climb curving hotel
steps past a wide glass floor lit
from below and posted with potted plants
squeeze in the dim elevator with Italians
close your eyes and savor the top of a pretty
woman’s dark head. All that so you know
you’ll never remember their names: Oscar,
Luís, Perpetuidad and three dozen more.
While walking long prison hallways past men
selling food, smoking, playing handball
against concrete walls, standing, laughing
or squatting with hands covering their faces
you know you’ve only dipped your toes
and stared over yet another endless sea.

But what more can you do? Raised
a thousand miles from the ocean, at twenty
you wrote your first poem stunned by sparkle
and how the same water touching your feet
touched every shore on earth, the prows
of Greek and Viking ships, and all the feet
of all the people who stood and stared
since the beginning of time. Wow, you
thought. Wow.

Your still saying it. Remember the cab
in the rain, the drops on the glass bend light
and time, one block after another, this strange
unending city fills the creeks and bathes the plains
of your dry old mind. Wet pavement wafts
through the cracks and your mouth waters
at the thought of your wife happy after a week
at the monastery. You remember the Bar Odessa
and your younger self at the Café La Blanca
touched by the beauty and her note
you began another story—maybe the first
decent story you ever wrote and pure
imitation. You lean your head on cool glass
watch couples stroll the Alameda dangling
cigarettes and jewelry, sex and spring—well
you’re making that up, but why not—
which leads you to think of pyramids
built without wheels or beasts, the city floating
on a lake—how many stones carried from where
to fill it?—and that’s only what happens
in the cab to the hotel.

What with light might we imagine? When
a storm blows in at night and clouds explode
the sky, this monster city turns ancient village
and shudders until morning. A little girl stomps
through alley puddles chasing pigeons. She
doesn’t tire; she never will. A square-headed
boy joins her more interested in feeding
than stomping. Each day new shadows slant
across this stone into night, then it’s dawn
again for a thousand years. Is there more miracle
than children growing into men and women?
Don’t forget the righteous rage and white light
of bombs every night somewhere in the world
even as, especially as you watch morning
find its way past the brick dome over your bed
to bathe her skin in yellow. And in the newest
darkness, as far as you know the last you’ll ever
see, names gone, remember the lay of light
through bars onto baskets of purple garlic.