Poem for Thursday, October 17, 2013

Lessons from Stanford

I.

There are countless metaphors for death, each
more cryptic than the last;

death is indifferent towards them all


II.

There are several ways to judge a man:

the length of his string of crappie
the way he rolls his tobacco or if
he can clutch your soul and mark it
with his stories

There is one way to judge a woman:

is there fire in her eyes?


III.

There is something incredibly significant in
this image:

         a moonlit knife shining under the
         creek bed, washed clean
         of blood (on the
                              surface)
                 

IV.

We are those bloody knives, all of us
gazing up wide-eyed beneath the ripples
irradiated in moonbeams
tear-glazed and beautiful

Poem for Monday, October 14, 2013

Tumbleweed

Cutting through this mountain town--
that windblown ball of twigs
in a perpetual hurry,
rolling

        past the murder of dumpster crows
behind the Chinese restaurant,

        past the drunk native woman singing
in the little league diamond,

        past the jackhammers and chunks
of uprooted asphalt,

        past the tawny beer bottles clanking
in forgotten brick alleys,

        past the unlit Virgen de Guadalupe
candles on cluttered desks,

        past the leaves and the pine needles
dying mid-air deaths,

       past the the drunk native man flipping
the bird at a bus stop,

       past the dew-kissed grass recovering
from the morning frost,

       past the two bundled lovers sharing
cigarettes in the sun.

Godspeed, then, desert seeker--
we understand how winter
stalls for absolutely
nothing.

Poem for Saturday, September 28, 2013

Sonata

We heard the piano first--notes struck by blood
under fingers, nothing more, carried away
in the mountain wind. They were so hopeful, and
they were so sad, floating in

the atmosphere with angels,
nitrogen and other things. The violin next, stealthy,
puncturing the air with the graze of the first string.
It took over then, defined

the whole sound: a metaphor,
you decided, for us.

           Remember when that music was still playing?

           Remember when the fog finally shrouded
           the moon?

Poem for Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Mongolian Waltz

An aging school gymnasium, any handful of dilapidated
concrete buildings--these are the places they do it.

They waltz to the same polka song, frozen on replay,
birthed painstakingly by dust-smothered speakers.

The same accordion expands and contracts, screams
its shrill Bavarian scream in the middle of a desert

in central Asia. In January, when winter refuses to
forgive, I lean against the lukewarm radiator and

watch them count, shuffle, spin. Each pair locks
eyes, shows an inkling of a smile and orbits their own

invisible sun. But their minds--their minds waltz
even more. They waltz through the times their children

grow up and leave home, the times the cold takes
most of their sheep. They waltz through the seasons

to when suddenly it is warm enough to deliver
their foals and to bury their mothers and fathers.

I wait against the radiator, my breath floating above,
knowing one of them will eventually take my hand

and pull me in the dance. I will waltz with her then,
meet her eyes and return her smile. I will spin through

the times winter broke my bones straight to when
I had my picture taken under the crab apple tree

in my grandparents' yard, year after year, blaring red
against the autumn sky.

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.