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.