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.