journeys of a restless mind

Burial at Sea

At the bridge railing
with wind-whipped hair,
her hands going numb
around the steel bar,
restless water below,
she knows she will not jump
not now,
not ever.

Still, the water is rushing up
toward her every minute,
one day it will swallow
all the pieces of her
that she thinks of as herself.

Even if she believed in heaven
she knows the transformation
it takes to get there
would render her unknowable:
the shapeless soul elusive,
scattered, subject to
the vagaries of the wind.

Better to be mired in sandy
bottom, embraced by salt
and seaweed, offering pieces
of willing flesh
to all the nibbling fish.

Archeaology

Even queens had to pierce their tongues
and light fire to their blood-soaked prayers.
The heavy smoke drifted skyward,
then dissipated between the snaky vines.
Visions, once conjured, had nothing to reveal.

There is no redemption.
No one has seen heaven.

Her name, carved into towering stelae,
crumbled along with her bones.
No one remembers her sons;
her cities lie split by roots and brambles.

The days have been counted,
things put in order, secrets
stored deeply inside caves
or buried beneath temples with trapdoors.
Still they come, centuries later
to rip it all out again,
believing that to decipher
means to know.

The gods are hungry,
the daimons hungrier.
The insatiable future
stuffs scripture, now profane,
into its gaping mouth.

garbage day

She counts the lies one by one
and puts them in a glass jar
on the window sill.
From time to time she takes it down
and pops one in her mouth
where it bursts like ripe fruit,
and fills her with bittersweet liquid
that she takes her time swallowing.

Often there are pits
or bits of ragged peel
that get stuck in her teeth.
She pulls them out with her fingers,
shakes them into a garbage can she opens
with her foot on a lever.
It whumps closed, and nobody is any wiser
when she brings the lumpy plastic sack
out to the curb on Wednesdays,
plops it in the tall dry grass
and waits for the smelly truck
to shudder by.

He always comes back to offer more
and she pretends to believe each one,
round and glistening,
immersed in tepid water,
pressed against the inside edge
of the chipped and dirty jar.

untitled

Pilings covered
with seaweed and mussels,
exposed then swallowed
by the relentless tide,
look like spindly legs.

My grandmother
is  standing
shin deep
in the sway
of some forgotten
shallow cove
where she bends
to the water
one hand holding
her straw hat
tightly to her head,
the other
turning over stones
that seem to waver
in their bed of sand
under the gliding water.

My mother
sits on the beach
crying. Her mouth
full of sand.

Waves lap
at the pilings,
little tongues
full of salt.

I stand on the pier
tossing stones
into the water
one by one,
my hair whipped
by the wind
into tangled serpents.

The Three Kinds of Rock

You search the riverbank for stones
smooth and flat, round
in your palm
to toss across the surface
calling, mom look
it skipped three times.

Stone in my pocket, stone
in my hand, the solid weight
just as temporary
as the water’s splash.

I rub my fingers
in talismanic circles
across the surface
certain of my power
to wear a groove.

Igneous, sedimentary
flowing fire or tiny bits pressed
hard beneath the layers
that came before.

A stone to swallow, a stone
to chew, crumbling shards
between my teeth
scraping across the surface
polishing everything clean.

A stone transformed
a bird flying
from a boy’s fingertips
lightly touching
the surface of the river
three times
before sinking down
through the dark water
metamorphic.

Popocatepetl

Popocatepetl is breathing fire
sending ash over the broken back of the city
and a rumbling underneath that nobody notices.
The people know a thing or two about disasters,
natural or otherwise.

The square is always full of tarps and banners,
smoke rising from old cookstoves,
the smell of unwashed bodies and tortillas.
Teachers and truck drivers have come
from homes far away to camp here
in the shadow of Parliament on the hard stones.

!El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!
they shout over and over as they march.
The people! United! Will never be defeated!
They set up camp that spills out over the square
like the contents of a drawer overturned.
Defiant and tired, they lay their heads down
on the cobbles and listen for rumblings.

It’s only smoke and ash, there is no molten river
coursing down the mountain to purify
everything in its path. The tarps gather dust
and soot, tourists and businessmen walk by
without a glance. Nothing changes
until the rains come and wash a trail
on their faces like tears and turn the ash to mud.

Sestina Moreliana

The chicle boy is dirty and small
and knows to smile wide
and tilt his head to the side
just so, like the stray dogs that beg
for scraps beneath your feet as you sit
quietly drinking coffee at the portales.

The cracked stones of the portales
that arch above you are as wrinkled as the small
women who usually sit
still as statues on the wide
pavement, peeking from blue rebozos, begging
for coins, which you slide sideways

into their open palms. It’s hot outside;
it’s hotter at home. At least the portales
offer cool agua de sandia and the laughter of begging
men who whistle for Cata the waitress to bring small
cups of cafe  that they encircle with their wide
hands. Tipping back their hats, they sit

contentedly and ignore the chicle boy who sits
on the curb picking at a scab on the side
of his leg, throwing rocks into the wide
empty gutter. Does he sleep in the portales
in a corner at night under a small
dirty blanket? “I am not begging,”

he says, “like she is begging.”
And he points to the old woman sitting
in that worn out spot in the corner, small
and quiet. “I do business,” he says, close by your side.
So you buy some gum. You know at the portales
that’s how things are done. Along the wide

busy avenidas under the scalloped wide
arches, everyone is begging
for something. Just because you come to the portales
with your pockets full of pesos and can sit
drinking coffee all day at tables side-by-side,
doesn’t mean your needs have grown small.

Nothing about you is small,
not the begging for love nor the wide hollows inside
like portals you cannot cross, but start through only to stop and sit.

Why I Cried Driving Back to Santa Cruz

I fell in love last summerfall
with a wild lion-maned sailorman
that everyone thought was homeless
and stepped back afraid at first
but then we all fell for him
a little bit (and me a lot) because we envied
his freedom his smile his
happiness and easy lion-hearted way
of never combing his hair or trimming
his beard or even wearing shoes
when he and I walked across
the Golden Gate bridge in October.
He wore my girlsweater
black with little buttons up the front
that he couldn’t unbutton later
when he had to go back onboard
because girls’ are backwards and
his sailorfingers too big
so I helped him in the dark by the dock
take off my sweater fumbling standing there close
and goddamn
I wanted to kiss him so badly my lips aching to learn
his wild lion-taste because there we were
taking things off laughing
in the dark and my body didn’t know
like my brain did that his lionlove
was not mine.

There is method in the meter
and the measure and the notes,
but the harmony
is full of madness.

There is no sanity
in what resonates
between your lips
and the hollow of my throat.

If I walk the tightrope
of the silvery strings
won’t I fall the minute
you start plucking them?

When I tumble,
landing hard inside the hollow
where the music sings
won’t it throw you off the beat?

There is no kindness in the melody
no mercy in the chords,
not even a remembrance of softness
beneath the callused tips
when I kiss your fingers, one by one.

some Elizabeth Bishop in honor of her centennial

I'm more than a little crazy to post a master here in amongst my own work, but it's Elizabeth Bishop's 100th birthday today, and so I must. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do it.

I Am in Need of Music

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop