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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

When Alexander the Great was in his twenties, he wanted to conquer Asia. I just wanted to write really good sentences and paragraphs. We’re all odd in our own way. Some oddness make us richer than others, hence Alexander’s palaces. Anyway, If EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW I LEARNED IN TEGUCIGALPA, the poem I posted two days ago, is what I call a “sitting around” poem, here are four more:

Morning in San Fernando

Wind blew hard through the night.
Every stone in the plaza floor makes
a shadow in this low light. Rosalie
saw an orange bird in an orange tree.
I dreamed I saw yellow flickers between
leaf shadows falling across this table.
A young woman walks past, one
shoulder bare to the morning air.
The wind mixed me up. The jazz CD
skips, the coffee’s cold, the toast is
wood. In my dream I kept falling
and falling. She looks as if she’s thinks
she’s alone, or still asleep. A sparrow
is hopping on the table next to mine.
I was falling into my own head, scared
and waiting to crash. Behind her is a man
with a beard carrying a flute in a case
or maybe it’s a piccolo. (What do I
know?) She’s touching, touching,
touching her hair. In the morning
everybody has plans. Orange awning,
white plaster building, blue columns.
Hers are to slip through a chink in the wall,
climb a dozen stone steps, turn left into
an alley so narrow they carved the walls
round to let burrows pass. The man
with the beard blinks when he sees
the girl, or maybe he’s seeing someone
else. Mine are to meet a man I’ve never
met at the fountain behind me eight hours
from now. A line of brown wooden doors
opens neatly into the plaza. Everything
decent and good is what it is for no other
reason than that. Sleep ended early. Even
banal plans have room for adventure.
The man I’m supposed to meet
is a writer. He’s a gringo, he told me
on the phone. He has gray hair, mostly,
and glasses. They finally turned off
the skipping jazz and the silence
sounds familiar. There is no end
to the fall or the dream. Maybe the man
I’m supposed to meet is me.

————————————————————————–

Bust out

Ever want to tilt your head,
see under buildings or through
walls and girls’ clothes because
you know something’s there
but you’re not seeing it?

You sit in the shadow of the church
your head heavy and heart lazy
and your belly too big for proper
vistas. You haven’t seen color
in weeks until a man steps across

the street holding a tray piled
with pink and yellow food glowing
in a spot of sun and moved
to action, a pursuit of truth, you sprint
across the park and superman

off a stone wall, dive and fall
belly first to land on the tray
on top of the man, who crashes
on the sidewalk and all the pretty
food is smashed. You’re a little

hurt and the man is bleeding
from his lip, moaning and messy
and everyone’s shouting. Hands
lift and toss you back so your head

flops and bumps the wall
hard and the sky is terribly blue.
A magpie perched on a wire
winks. What does the world
look like now?

————————————————————————-

I sit above the city

on seventy-six white
stone steps and high above
a gust catches a hummingbird
between the towers, tosses
it backward across the sky
past the statue of the boy
who charged the fort, a flat
rock on his back to stop
arrows, a torch to burn
the gates, break the siege
and chase away the Spanish.

I’ve been awake since
early. A moment ago
I watched my wife walk
far below in a cobbled
ally with her green bag
to buy a chicken for dinner.
Not the one I heard
a moment ago when I closed
my eyes to better hear
but a cold, plucked bird
from the meat store.

Across the stairs wider
than any stairs—higher
than any stairs—I’ve ever
seen or sat on, a pigeon
perches on a steeple column
in the shade of the towers.
Behind it, blue sky and sunlight
make the cathedral glow gold.
The bells ring and ring,
and later, they ring again.
Who knows why?

Closer, I watch an ant
zigzag down the stone
wall next to me. It
turns here and there
and back again, head
down and down until
it arrives safely at the top
of the seventy-six steps
where I sit. When I was a boy,
I was fascinated by how ants
walked on walls without
falling and boys became
heroes. I still am.

—————————————————————————–

Bushes Cut to Look Like Seuss Trees

Bushes cut to look like Seuss trees
the puddle sky orange and children leaping
for strings of pretty flags make him think
the past is a cartoon, the future a clean
well-lighted room with nobody in it.

A puff of breath in the cold, sex but no lover
or the other way around, a box with wind in it.
What flowers grow? Same as behind the fountain.
Yellow, pink, white, red and blood red,
the color he loves most.

None of this is happening—or more
than he can conceive. Maybe he’s still asleep.
A woman lifts her baby’s face and kisses
whispers. The child closes his eyes, drools.
She wipes its chin with a blanket. He spent

the early morning very happy in his sleep
and woke to a woman sliding into bed
felt ready on her skin but
rolled off to wash and when he returned he tried
and she tried but he couldn’t.

She held him anyway and he felt grace.
Awake only fifteen minutes and so much
had happened.
What would the rest
of the day bring? Another invention

a stroll through a fissure in the wall, a tilt
of his mind toward death, a bite to eat
he hoped, and now this woman, her baby
the Seuss bushes, flowers, children leaping
for strings of flags in sunlight.

Here are three poems that came from notes I wrote while at my friend’s place along Mill Creek in Paradise Valley, Montana.

At Mill Creek Last May

Shot the head off a pigeon and felt terrible about it.
Went to buy whiskey.
Drank red wine and ate.
Drank whiskey and read.
Smoked a cigar.
Answered some emails.
Got two rejections from editors.
Listened to the water.
Wondered stuff about who I am.
Women with their bodies, they need to take great care.
Rolled with the dog on the front lawn.
Ate yogurt and drank coffee on the foot bridge.
Full moon and the race runs deep.
Meadow lights up like her eyes.
High clouds don’t move.
Water again, still more, lucky more.
Gravel’s yellow under headlights.
I converse with a great-horned owl.
When I stop, he keeps speaking.

Mortality or Another Dog Sonnet

Watching the dog made alert
by groundhogs, I’ve forgotten
I am lost between trees and water
and sky. He’s lying by the log

where they hide
distracted by falling cotton,
by the chime of wind
the applause of rushing water

scattered ravens on the grass
and a hundred bits of scent
swirling past in air
he lifts his nose to breathe.

He gets up and lopes back to me.
He doesn’t know he’s beautiful.

———————————————————————–

Sometimes Sonnet

Sometimes the water in the race
turns to blood, all the blood
in all the people who ever lived
in this valley.

The breeze blowing
the leaves of the cottonwood
and box elder is the breath
of everybody who has ever breathed,

and the leaves dancing all the dancers
who have ever danced and the birds
singing are all the singers singing
all the songs ever sung.

I particularly feel this now
as I write this poem.

When my dad was a boy, he told us he used to visit his aunt Winnifred in Brooklyn. Winnifred had been married numerous times but she wasn’t married then. She was living with a retired merchant marine with a round belly and a lot of tattoos named Uncle Henry. Winnifred used to require that my dad, around age 8, 9, or 10, and Uncle Henry sit with her around a table in the dark kitchen while she called out to the dead. She wouldn’t allow Uncle Henry to speak because he wasn’t a believer, and she wouldn’t allow my dad to speak because his voice hadn’t changed yet. These were her rules. My dad died in August 2011, and his visits to me have been in poems.

How many

have died
in pits
in caves
under fire
or snow
or like
my dad
in bed
gasping
at dawn?

All of them.

I’ll die
like them—
another
who loved
the light
and watched
the dark
who woke
today
to a voice
he loved.

I’m helpless
despite
everything
I’ve read.

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