Substitution

When I'd misbehaved as child or broken 
a lamp or plate, my mother would say 
Do you want me
to return you to where you came from?
which made me stand stock still, squeeze
my brows together, confused from trying
to visualize what that might mean.
I'd heard whispers, jokes,
the kind that took one look at my dusky
skin and compared it to the fairer  
ones in school: You
must have been picked from the garbage
bin. You must have floated out
of the murky river.  
Whereas the Mayor's child was tucked
into bed at 8, but her nanny said
I could play
with her dolls if I liked,
until it was time for my parents to leave
the party. I combed their straight
yellow hair with my fingers 
and took one of them for a walk
around the pool. I opened up
the face of a peach
hibiscus and turned it
into a boat. I pushed
the changeling out to sea
and waved goodbye,
goodbye, goodbye. 

Déjà rêvé

"Déjà vu is French for already seen 
while déjà rêvé means
already dreamed."

Have I told you where I've just been
in a dream, one where my mother returns
after years of having lived a bohemian,
hippie life? When she shows up
on the doorstep, she is almost
unrecognizable: straight, dark hair
in a bob, round John Lennon glasses,
body-hugging turtleneck. She has on
what at first glance appears to be
skin-tight pants with psychedelic prints,
but on closer inspection is a full,
resplendent tattoo from the waist
down to her feet. I don't know
what to think, in fact I'm not sure
if she is a ghost of herself sent
to inform whoever cares to open 
the telegram that where she's gone,
no one can follow. Or that in this dream,
she will never die, never have to file
down the bunion on her right big toe 
in order to wear the bright red 
stilettos with the pouffy skirt.
Now she is leaning toward the silver
mirror, drawing a crimson bow
around her mouth. She picks up a pink
powder puff and feathers her neck.
She's taking so long to get ready,
whoever is waiting in the driveway
has become impatient and starts
honking the horn. But she's unhurried;
the old-fashioned desk clock tells
a time that never changes.

 

After suffering

“First, you must suffer for a thousand years.
Then you must renounce suffering
and dedicate yourself to joy.”
~ Richard Jones, “On Living”

The hour is late, or the hour
           begins all over again. The quiet

gives way to clamor, to one
          request then another; a little fire

to put out, some flood to staunch.
          Ripped hems to stitch, a pot to boil.

You scrape leavings into the compost
          bin, soap and rinse plates under cold

running water. The rule has always been
          duty first, pleasure later. When does

obligation loll back in its chair, eyes
          closed, drool at the corners of its mouth,

fed and finally satisfied? Can you
          take off your shoes, tiptoe away, slip

into a hammock in the garden? Whenever
          a curtain is drawn around any hard-won

solitude, it still feels so much harder
          to keep inside it than to break

the spell. Winter is always coming,
          and the mice can’t stop carrying away

the corn. In every gold-flecked bell
          that flowers, an agitation of wings.

The dung beetle climbs out of the corpse
          flower’s rotting inflorescence, hefting

panniers of spores. And there are so many
          sums to reconcile, columns to fill with ink,

ledgers to put in order. But one could stop
          to admire the cricket’s earnest if disjointed

music, the late pulsing flight of fireflies;
          a squirrel uncertain, twitching in the middle

of the path, temporarily distracted by nothing more
          than bars of honey-colored sunlight in the trees.


	

On the first or last day of the year,

it’s customary among many humans
to speak of wishes and write them down
on brightly colored strips of paper
which they’ll burn at the stroke of midnight.
Or, according to my daughter calling
from a tiny town in Portugal, they’ll put
twelve raisins on their tongue, one
for each month of the year. I forgot
to ask if you’re supposed to eat them
one by one; does chewing then
swallowing them together nix out
or amplify the extended release
features of all that good fortune
desired for the immediate future?
We believe mostly in the efficacy of will,
that there are still some things in the world
open to choice. Do you want the steak
dinner or the mushroom casserole,
the red or white wine to go with that?
Did you want to bring a child with you
over the border just to have her die
of hunger and neglect in the over-
crowded detention camp? Perhaps
this offends your sensibilities. Perhaps
it isn’t fair to consider the mundane
varieties of hunger equal to those
born in greater exigency. At the same
time, there are some things which exist
only as apparent example of their
lethality: take the manchineel tree, lush
and green and spreading, but toxic in all
its parts. Don’t touch the bark, don’t eat
the fruit though it looks like an adorable
miniature apple; don’t even breathe
the air immediately under it. This is
the very same fruit whose sap
Calusa warriors smeared on the tips
of arrows that killed conquistador
Juan Ponce de Leon in his attempt
to colonize Florida in 1521. He
probably didn’t know what gored him
in the thigh other than a sharp piece
of metal at the end of a shaft:
someone else’s will not to be so easily
made vassal, subaltern, subject.

Undercut

At the holiday party, two people 
arguing about whether you start to count 
the 12 days of Christmas on Christmas day itself, 
or the day after. I’d woken up that morning 
in a panic, after a dream that a whole 
handful of hair on the left side of my head
came out in my hand. It looked like I’d just
had an asymmetrical undercut, which  
was actually popular way back in Edwardian
times. In the dream I debated combing
the hair on the right side over the left,
or tying it up in a ponytail. It was as if
the cause of hair loss was not as urgent
as the way it might now present. I didn’t 
tell anyone about the dream until after
I’d had a shower; as a child, I was told
you never made such disclosures
until after a cleansing with water,
as if the steam and spray could wash
away the ominous. If thunder 
rumbling in the distance meant 
the gods were rolling marbles 
or bowling balls or playing 
one of their games whose stakes 
we could never know, why  
shouldn’t I connect the dots
from dream to habit to helpless
waking-walking without any map?
In another story, a man sells
his pocket watch and a woman 
imagines the feel of a tortoiseshell 
brush as she runs her fingers 
through locks no longer there. 

What we named and ate

De uvas a peras, meaning once 
      in a blue moon, or rarely. From
grapes to pears, then summer's harvest 
      gone. Only their bottled essence left 
to warm us in the doldrums of winter. 
      Uvas de la suerte: wine-red, eaten 
at midnight on New Year's Eve 
      for luck; a centerpiece of 12 
round fruits for a year of sweet 
      fortune. When I was young, 
mother peeled the skins 
      of grapes, sliced them in half 
to pick out the little pips. 
      Which is not to say that this
should be filed under the heading 
      of useless labors: how are we to know 
it wasn't what saved us from untimely 
      choking deaths? Ubas, we called them; 
from the Spanish, tongue that lay
      underneath so many of the words 
we used. Rarely did we think 
      of what names we must have given 
things before Magellan's galleons 
      sailed into our waters, naming 
the world he found there--- ours--- 
      as though he were some kind of god 
stumbling on a new paradise. And we,
      the unintelligible, background marks
on landscape; bright clustered noise 
      overhead, birds with colors rarer than
jewels, their songs that could stun
      unworthy listeners into stone.  
 

Prove your humanity,

 
  says the login recovery feature: 
      and gives you either a math problem 
or a picture sliced into grids. You 
   have to click on each square with a car 
      or traffic sign, as if it were a matter 
of eye to hand coordination. Of the four 
      virtues— temperance, prudence, 
fortitude, justice— which one best
   characterizes the hidden heart? And 
      is there a name for that condition
which makes you tremble more than just a little 
   before the unknown, which yet flutes itself 
      into a promise perhaps to love you back?  

Claim

In the overcrowded cafe, just as I
get up from the table to gather my books
and computer and put on my jacket, a couple
comes up to me and breathlessly the woman asks
Are you leaving? When I tell them I am, she
exclaims Oh good! then rapidly collects herself.
The man with her laughs and she offers
I didn’t mean that, slightly mortified. Oh yes
you did,
I laugh back. And I’ve been there
before, scanning the room for the empty seat,
angling my body toward the clearest opening
or shortest path leading to the exit or check-
out line. Whatever name you call it: selfishness,
the will to survive, an instinct for self-
preservation— you’ve got to admire the way
the gut kicks in and takes over. The way
something so sure about the situation
steps up, finds the words before you
can even think them; lays a claim,
moves in to make its presence known.

Landscape without gods

Once I had a sapphire set
     into a ring, a gold chain,

a locket of clamped tendrils  
     with a clasp. And you had a map

showing which parts of the hills
     your family once owned. Once

I had a spoon yoked to a fork,
     one case to house two appetites.

This is the way all things
     enchanted us until time

put them on a raft and pushed
     them into the bubbling current.

One cannot grow wise without living
     inside of history. One tries to feed

the fire which is always about to go
     out. Out in the fields, the dry,

crackling heads of sunflowers billow 
     like waves. We watch from the porch,

whittling what's left of morning
     into a sun we might raise like a flag.

We hide from clouds shaped like bulls
     or swans, trees in which souls are trapped.

Luminaria

The star of riches in shining on you
says the fortune cookie fortune, 

and I ponder the indefiniteness
cast on everything after the first 

preposition but stick it on the edge
of my computer anyway. In shining 

on me what? In shining on me, 
decides to pour forth a double 

dose of its gifts or decides plain 
shining is quite enough, thank you, 

you're welcome? In which of the many 
paper bag lanterns filled with sand 

and little votives lining the pathways 
around the square will I find that 

particular star with my name on it? 
The painter wrote un rocío de prismas 

sus encantos de mañanas plácidas 
por cien
 meaning he has faith 

in the tenancy of light beyond
a hundred mornings. And so perhaps

I should as well, for what difference
is there really between what flickers

so brightly but so far away and all
that we've gathered here, closer at hand? 


~ with a line from Armando Valero's "Soy" 
 
 

In response to Via Negativa: Preoccupied.