Month: November 2012

in leaves, it’s time to clap two
pieces of wood together.

Keep an eye on the fire, raising both
hands over your head; turn one knee out
while resting the sole of the foot

on the inside of the calf. Imagine
what it takes to stay breathing like that,
how to store up heat for a whole season.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

All night, he said, I’d thrashed and snarled
thick bits of indecipherable language through
clenched teeth; and even after he’d shifted
my unconscious, evidently dreaming body
into another position, whatever its source
would start me up again— In the morning,
limbs aching as if from deep muscle strain,
I tell him I’m still trying to remember,
reluctant to name the same old ghosts
that have come here again to haunt me—
First, the boy my mother hired from down
the street to cut the grass and scrub
the floors, and how he slit gladiolus stems
and yellow snapdragon throats in the garden
from boredom, before turning to me to say
he’d show me how to play doctor; then,
not long after, the uncle whose unexpected
fingers broke into my afternoon naps—
How could you remember something like this,
they said to me years later, implying lies,
invention, refusing to believe a three-
year-old could come to such swift understanding
of how something could untether from the body
suspended within a bathroom’s cold white tile,
climb up the wire dangling the lone light bulb,
out the window, past the twisting trees
to where the thin, high notes of some
small bird beat through the air—

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Paciencia y barajar.” (Patience and shuffle the cards.)
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote

Open certain books, and windmills
become giants, most certainly arrived
to take over or worse, defile the earth.
Since no one else apparently sees

the impending danger, you have to be the one
to don your suit of armor, fix the brass
washbasin on your head, hoist the pennant
of your dirty dishrag— Turn the ignition

of your trusty, pre-owned chariot and ride
through fields of goldenrod drying in late
winter light, as birds scatter cryptic
messages in the air. And who’s to say

this isn’t the waking world, after all?
The stakes remain the same: beneath
its newfangled disguises, love; honor,
in a world where it grows harder

to tell the nobleman from the thief.
The story that knighted you, the song
you were given, that you have
to keep trying to sing.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Nothing went to waste:
sweetened skins from gourds,
pickled rinds as edible
scherenschnitte. Their seeds,
sprinkled with salt and roasted
on a tray— we cracked them
between our teeth while gossiping
on Sunday afternoons. We snipped
every last button from shirts
rubbed thin at the elbows,
and saved them like coins
in jars. I loved best the ones
covered with lattice strips
of leather— each nubbed
surface, a little luxury.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.