Series: Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

Hard to say now where a seam in the soil
marked the place where a row of villagers

with their arms tied behind their backs
slumped to the ground after the order

to fire. Someone has engraved a plaque
to show where something was raised

from rubble— But dark wounds petal
every patch of earth under stone

and gravel. Someone has pledged
a troth or signed his name in blood

at the base of a monument. Bird wing
or flag flutter? It’s hard to tell

when shadows lengthen and currents
darken: so many faces in the river.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

And just as the fog burns off and lifts,
there is a white bird wading in the shallows
gathering its silhouette tightly to itself
as we cross over the bridge.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In this creased picture, I am one of a half dozen
school girls in navy blue skirts and white blouses
with Peter Pan collars, whose mothers sang us to sleep
with Que sera, sera. Skin thinner than papyrus,
blotchy with hives and more restless than the others,
I pressed my forehead against the cool of windows
lashed with rain, the steady run of water from the roof,
as they coaxed bright floss through the eye of a needle
and eased squares of cloth over embroidery hoops.
Who knew how many children would pass through our
narrow hips and where they might be headed? No sign
swung from the ceiling of the sky, and when the eye-
shaped gap eased shut in the clouds, only the wind,
unstitched, came to shadow our heels at bedtime.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“…Who shall give a lover any law?”
~ Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” (Canterbury Tales)

The squeals up in a tree are of a squirrel
fighting off a suitor; perhaps a paramour?

The usage of this word, Middle English,
the 1800s, is for the sake of love, par amour.

I like the entry in Webster’s 1913 Dictionary:
lit, by or with love, from the Fr. par amour.

Such beautiful words: when did they turn
illicit, derogatory? Stripped of armor,

title, role, various defenses— beneath the flesh
is the heart’s taut muscle, matched to any matador.

Songs of courtly love all aim at the impossible:
the beloved out of reach, the hapless troubadour.

In Spanish, querida means dearest one. When did it come
to signify poor fallen dove, secret paramour?

Wong Kar-wai’s film has neighbors thinking the lonely journalist
and the secretary from the shipping company are paramours.

The screen’s painted in tones of broody red, shades of jazz
in the background. The message: love story with no guarantor.

The man whispered the secret that he could not share
in a hollow in a tree, and covered it with mud: nevermore.

Is it my voice you hear in your head, when you first rise?
I loved her first ere thou, wrote Chaucer, for par amour.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Pool of melted tallow in the pewter dish.
Bar of laundry soap scraped across the palms
of the woman washing clothes on the stoop.
An old man walks out of his house at the same
time each day and up the road, dazzling
in his white suit and panama hat. Where
does he go? Drawn blinds with their slightly
sticky film of dust: behind them, a glass-topped
table and two wrought iron chairs. If this
is a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, the screech
of a parrot from the patio follows
the pattern of light splayed across the stones.
Sheer curtains carry the smell of almond skins.
There are children hidden from view on the balcony.
The cook fingers the leaves fluttering like pages
in a book of tripe. Plump ends of chick peas,
upturned like the white flame of a deer’s tail.
Long afternoons. The smell of cotton everywhere.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

too many memories crowd into the room tonight.

One wants to lie across the entire length
of the bed. Another is angry as ever, punching

a hole in the wall and taking out a length of pipe,
rust blooming along its waistline. Consequently,

when a few of them take the first hot shower
they’ve had in years, the water starts leaking

to the floor. I know I shouldn’t feed them:
not a piece of toast, not even a drink of water.

But already they’ve found the cabinet with
the bottles of Merlot and Vinho Verde, the stash

of leftover Christmas cookies. I push the window
open and heave a sigh. There’s a moon shaped

like a hammock in the sky. In the air, a metallic
tang. And more than a few hours left till morning.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In the seam between January
and the tentative unfolding

of the leap year month, textures
overlap, blur into each other:

the milk-blue of dawn with
the opal light that lives

somewhere around seven o’clock;
the outline of a feather

shed by a body that’s flown
in the direction of the sun.

White and grey speckles
on a field of tawny brown:

costume discarded by whatever
wanted to scale the branches.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

There are these questions
arising as if out of nowhere,

warm-blooded and full as the wind’s
bodied passage— That morning,

for instance: when the mother,
oracular, slumped to the floor

after heaving handfuls of still-
green bananas into the air like missiles.

And the stalk from which they were gleaned
quivered against the doorframe, like a bow

with which arrows had just been launched.
What word from the mother-in-law

hung in the air preceding this
onslaught? My ear quickens

to the humming of bees in the backyard,
radio signals of sticky love multiplied

in each golden cell. Some things pass
without saying from woman to woman:

shreds of song, pennants
of explosive radiance.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Some children are pounding leaves
on the stones— slippery
leaves of the hibiscus, a stray

petal streaked with coral. A little
scatter of detergent and water, a bent
piece of wire— and late afternoon

light floods through a prism
of bubbles. The blur in the road
is the dust raised by feet rushing

then jumping into packing boxes.
World of makeshift joys: thunk
of a fruit stone meeting its sling-

shot target, and from an upstairs
window, the ice cream bell sound
of a typewriter carriage return.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.