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.

Poem for Saturday, October 26, 2013

Message

She left with the blood-red leaves
of autumn, whirled out the door

in the same wind that took them.
Outside, the sun tears through

the naked maples with branches
outstretched like crucifixion, like

something beautifully broken and
tinged in the gray of surrender.

Inside, everything still functions.
You notice things like how loud

the wall clock ticks, how the
table has become amassed with

plates and cups. She left one last
ring of coffee there, inches away

from her napkin, as if to say
this is how it must be.

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?