Poem for Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Breach

You reach for something in the dark:

your hand, a delicate foreign object, slides through
the membrane of my dream.

It lands in a wheat field. I stand in front of this old
farm house. Red and white paint chips from the trim
rain down like confetti.

Your grandfather, whom I have never met, is there.
Real men, he says, break their backs. Real men
have thicker blood.

He begins to ascend. I look up at the sky. It is the
exact same color as the veins in the old man's neck.
I make the connection.

I start for the field then. I find your hand between the
golden stalks and begin to pull hard. The sun whispers
that it just killed Icarus.

It takes months to see your whole arm. It takes years
to see your eyes. But I stand, I pull, aging in the heat:

my back broken, my blood thickened
until I wake and after.

Poem for Sunday, November 10, 2013

Meantime

Someone is trying to describe the sky, thinking
of synonyms for gray. Someone is dancing in
the devil's evening shadow. Someone is peeling
potatoes and sniffing the skins before throwing
them away. Someone is burning an effigy, and
someone else is feeling the heat under their arms.
Someone is saying I love you in an empty room
and meaning it.

Someone is picking wildflowers and giving them
Latin names. Someone is obsessing over dark
matter. Someone is eating toffee and suddenly
missing their childhood. Someone is relinquishing
everything. Someone is dropping a vase, seeing
their face multiplied in tiny crystal fragments.
Someone is saying I know in an empty room
and meaning it.

Poem for Saturday, November 2, 2013

Virgen

We have few things here--no long Indian
summers, no window-toothed skyscrapers,

no lights, almost. There is one string
of lights between the moon and the ground

coiled around the Virgen de Guadalupe,
her holiness boxed in glass to protect her

hands, to keep them soft, white, clasped
in prayer through this black November

night. She catches you strolling by her
street, beckons you, and suddenly you

are standing  in front of her with your hands
in your pockets. You think of all the drifters

here in town and recall those childhood
stories of saints clad in tattered clothes

and panhandling angels. Through the glass,
she tells you to not be fooled--none are

like that, all of them are very much men,
most of them godless. You remember then

how her heart was broken the hardest,
turn around, continue into the dark.