Poem for Friday, August 30, 2013

Monsoon Season

Metal has a terrible voice.

It stumbles sot-like through a forest
of octaves. I lack the heart to tell it
so I let it sing me to sleep.

I am no trainspotter; I prefer clouds.
They stir me awake with their melodic
dirges--the price of omnipresence.

She asks how come the clouds in
monsoon season look so ominous but
bring so little rain. I tell her:

everything, all of us is a facade.

Poem for Thursday, August 15, 2013

Three Autumns Ago

This one evening in October when the power
failed, when it bled out from black cables


forming parabolas over sod fences, snakelike,
dissipating into the valley, I went inside his


house. Darkness abounded, of course, so
I followed a draft into the kitchen, gripping


the hem of its imaginary dress like a child, like
some curious little child. He pulled out a stool


at the table and lit a candle so I could write a
letter. Looking out the window, he stood with


his arms behind his back, one hand gently
cupping the other, watching the spectacle for


a few minutes. I stopped writing to watch him,
to feel his eyes wax and drip through the


glass like the very candle in front of me, and
without turning his head he told me to come


over and look out with him in a tone tinged
with a beautiful urgency. Then, he said this:


Tenger khaaya ulaan baidag. And at that
moment, there it was: a bloody war in the sky


started by the sun. Before it passed, before
I returned to my pen and staggering flame, I


had to acknowledge his words and whisper
back in agreement: yes, the sky is seldom red.

Poem for Sunday, August 4, 2013

A Hundred Years

Piano Rags by Scott Joplin
has been spinning all
day.


The whooshes and clanks
of thirty-boxcar trains
promptly follow;


black-ink night has seeped
into the sky. Tonight my
dreams


will drag me back a hundred
years by eyelids clenched
shut;


there will still be a war. If I
fight, my letters to you
will be


bloodstained and eloquent.
A thousand miles
away,


you will dance gracefully
as tattered flags kiss
the dirt.

Poem for Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Fruit Vendor

This stretch of highway has poor drainage,
I thought about calling to her. If it floods,
your fruit could drift away in the
muck.

Her feet were propped against a trailer
full of twenty-something ripe melons.
This called to mind Lorca, loitering by the
watermelons in a certain Californian
supermarket.

Around her, the atmosphere dampened
and grayed, advanced towards ashes. You
should have seen how oblivious she was
when lightning broke the stitches in the
northern sky;

when the thunder ripped through sound
just as those bullets had done on
that summer day near sleepy
Alfacar.

Poem for Thursday, July 11, 2013

What We Leave Behind

The lost cry of the seabird, Neruda said.
This is true, along with the damp
sand, its stick-scrawled proclamations
of love and the lovers

who wrote them, barefoot
and young. Next the ships, masted
under sails of white surrender, built
from oak trees, from spruce trees

that once skinned our arms,
that once sliced the moon
with its branches and peppered us with
the light. Then everything else

too burdensome to list that accretes
into something cosmic, something
composed of stardust, cups of coffee,
library books, conversations and

bougainvillea vines. Finally, the seabird

itself, crying out an elegy against
roars of salt-tinged wind, hungry
for reaction.

Poem for Saturday, July 6, 2013

Damascus Steel

Passing by a certain field bleeding yellow
wildflowers--

what came to mind was when a girl told me
to wait for her in the tabernacle because
she wanted to change into something I would
like. After she left, I sank in the oak for some
minutes, swatted at the dragonflies, wondered.

Finally, I caught her: xanthic hair, flanked by
her girlfriends, approaching in a summer dress
lost somewhere between lavender and indigo.
These were the circumstances of her return.

And then, "What do you think?"

She slayed me with the force of Damascus steel.
She had the skinniest legs.

Poem for Friday, June 28, 2013

Two Lovers

In the hill country, the winding curves tend to lull me
to sleep. My dreams go like this:

Somewhere out there, two lovers are making love
in a pile of alfalfa hay while the sun cooks their
young limbs. When they finish, she curls into sleep
imagining how their children will look. He slips off
into the woods, treks a dry creek bed and cuts
his leg on a jagged rock. His blood forms a new
river.

Minutes later: the stink of dead coon. I awake then,
lost in an army of black-eyed Susans.