Poems
From The Swing Girl, from Louisiana State University Press
On the plain below, dozens of cloth windmills spin,
the air clean enough to see through. Like the waterfall you
slipped behind, or left through, years ago.
Light fills the convent garden, the ancient myrtle tree
covered with hundreds of hopes for recovery: bright ribbons
knotted to branches while the ill keep faltering.
One wish gives rise to another, and dominoes click in the shade
on a tile table. The nun, who has lived here since she was three,
picks fleas from the dog then pours our thick coffee. The oldest peer
from their half-curtained screens. They cook for themselves, eat alone,
and pray for the world.
It's a long stream water makes falling, each drop coalescing. That spring
you died, the moss on the banks seemed greener, spray going farther
than thought.
(The Georgia Review, and Poetry Daily)
From the porch I watch the blue containment of noon,
and every day the dog trots into it, pees on the clover,
then makes headway through the timothy grass,
his coat full of seed. He has some idea of where to go
and what wants him, and since he's no skeptic, he goes—
rye, corn, the whole fermenting season ablaze, the dog
running off as if to make August history.
Who's to say his is not the same lithe world that swayed
around pharaoh’s daughter and the baby in the bulrushes.
And this sun overhead heated the earth when voices flared
a final, frantic time for Joan on her pyre of wood.
Precise, those minutes of time waiting in the reeds
or standing on top the sticks, while the dog lies down
after a day of futile adventure, the ravine filled with wings
and an undergrowth of eyes.
(published in Amicus Journal)
I say, crow and watch it fly through the pines,
until, like a hurled inkwell, it sprawls
on my window.
Catch the scent of conversion. Not the stench
of burnt feathers and flesh but the notion that this crow
is going places, caught for now in the body convened.
Gold eyes of a mutant stare. I stare.
Winger of wind, lingering prophet in trees—
all of us set lose to make impressions on air.
But this crow is pressed on glass. It's lifted out of the moment
(a dreamer's stop for the moment), and already the woman waits at a window,
marking the green avenues as routes of exile or arrival. Sister, with red shoes
poised on your feet, can’t you see what's before you?
My mouth helplessly fills with crow. Across the leagues of sleep,
I give a limitless, underwater shout for raucousness-in-the-pines, any warning
for this cross-the-heart-of-blackness-then-see-what-happens bird
until the morphic shift begins. Its face furs to our more wizened simian kin:
dream, the short-winded approach to the heart that once beat in us and
swung through the trees—the other side of the world pinned for thought
and study.
(published in Virginia Quarterly Review)
At night home reappears, its insides confused with
time running out the doors and windows.
Each clock, stopped at a different spectral point —
the unmarked hours of dream.
Essences attract me, starting with the striated eastern sky,
then moving deeply into afternoon in the box canyon.
Perhaps that’s why I took his dare to sleep with the sketch
of a glyph meaning flick-of-the-gekko’s-tongue. A pleasure
that starts from within., wind making cartwheels of the sand,
unnerved.
Beside me on the boulder, a line of vertebrae. Tiny spine
exposed, a creature no longer. I too am without direction, feckless and
sunning on a rock,
By the pool at lunch they’re doing the desert thing, piped-in water
misting us like heads of grocery lettuce. Two guys splash about with beer,
yelling that this is the worst motel pool they’ve hit all week—freeloaders
ready to disappear at the first sign of recognition, Budweiser stacked
in their battered pick-up.
At twilight I give up on George, the African Gray in the breezeway.
He won’t stop talking. Any syllables caught on the fly, this parrot repeats
without forethought or reflection.
Now he’s a screeching eagle drifted in from the mountains.
Raspy voice of a solitary in the sky. The real eagle on TV
finishes up with a 200-mph free-fall after a rabbit.
Incense by my bed collapses to ashes.
What doesn’t want to live inside the music of another? Take that shadow
I followed this morning to the back of Boynton Canyon. Unnamed, it flew
over vast splits of hematite, me scurrying in the red dirt below.
Bloody earth, I was thinking as a mockingbird traded places a voice at a time.
Sort of like George, who now is upside down on his swing, squawking,
Hands off, you lowdown two-timer.
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POEMS
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