Month: February 2012

tell me the hour isn’t late,
that the all-day, all-night

diner still serves what I crave.
The sky’s cloudy, marbled, shot through

with bits of emerald: the color of expensive
granite countertops, or the supple skin

of certain fish. Pebbly in places, like
day-old bread. This might be the hour

for some old-time miracle: say,
fish and loaves; or wine and water.

Birds twisting free from fire. This time,
console me. My losses, reconstitute.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The old man wants to know which of his daughters loves him the most.

Like robes of silk? like crackling fat? like sheets of hammered gold with garnet crusts?

Like steel vaults, like a suit of mail, like a dome’s marble pillars and carved doors?

Woe to the stammering one who cannot summon her parade of woodpeckers, her retinue of tumbling clowns.

Be careful: bottom-dwellers lurk in the mud, jealous of every bright bubble of original thought.

They’ll want to pull her down, cast her out, call her traitor, demoness, ingrate, stupid bitch.

They won’t remember it was her who lit the fire in the morning, put the pots to bed at night, filled the glass with water that the indifferent hand reached for and drank.

She fashions a gown out of discarded plastic. She gathers water in a sieve.

Her heart fills and fills with salt— fractals like quivering ribs in magicians’ parasols, each more beautiful than the last.

I won’t tell her that she’ll have her day.

But I watch for signs glimpsed from the high window: how the planets align, how trees cast their shadows along the broken boundary; how the wolves howl as they press closer to their prey.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

When the hero of a thousand journeys is born, part of her soul spirals into a plant that her mother has made to take root in the soil. A sunflower, perhaps. Or a sapling that grows rapidly into a tree, leaning and breaking into blossom against the wind. Between every journey is a threshold. Birds bring news of what comes next, flashing their breasts like pennants rouged with coral or smoke. The stalk bends and straightens. The flower follows the sun’s ascent. The child climbs trees, runs across the grass, hair flying behind her like a sheet of night. Milk in the glass still has the sheen of alabaster. She does not stand in the light of the refrigerator, shifting weight from one foot to the other, mouth sleepless with frustration or ache or hunger. In old stories, the elders speak of warriors with heart: nakem; of growing wiser as growing in heart. Perhaps, what they mean is that capacity not only to survive what gusts in to level us all— Admit we’ve traced the fragile vein in the leaf, in the flower; seen it pulsing at the base of each other’s throats.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

the crooner breathed from the vinyl record,
besame mucho; and a few more lines
in Spanish that I can’t remember, this song

that floated like a veil over the sound
of clinked highball glasses, musky
murmur from a living room packed

with couples in the days my parents
entertained— while I lay in bed
listening, and rain striped the window

behind the crocheted curtains. Getting up
to tiptoe to the bathroom, who did I see
pressed in the shadow of the potted plant,

against the lawyer’s breast? And that
plaint, that pleading: I know its color
now— the lilac shade of longing

that looks to slide into the arms
of evening, the way I want to feel
your lips linger, your tongue

shape itself to the ache of my mouth.
The way the syllable opens in mucho,
before trailing off into the night.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.