after words

A shades-of-gray ratty cat, middle-aged,
with an eye gone double the size of the other
and demon red, lingers.  He stays clear of me,
hides when I pass, whines in the night
till I flip a light and he’s gone like he never
was there.  A “chicken” cat, a fraidy cat
with no yellow stripe down his back
who won’t go away.  My son’s wife has named
him “Forest” - not because he looks like Tom
Hanks, but because he came out of oaks,
cottonwood, black walnut and pines draped
with vines near the creek.  My son thinks I
should adopt Red Eye (I could never call him
Forest) and I smile and move on and the cat
ducks out of sight when I near, as if
he’s never been there.  I put scraps out
for dawn’s raccoons to find or Forest to steal
and frown at his tenacity for going on
with the demon eye now gone foggy blue
like a marble cut from sky.

 [after Philip Levine, "Dust and Memory"]

Hold a finger to your tongue then raise that one
into the air, hold it there, that one,
all its heightened sensors
wetted for approaches:
let them come.
You are ready,
heart on your sleeve,
ripe, mature, primed
for the pluck,

the ecstasy of lifting, lilting,
carried as a leaf, as strings
of willow leaves.
You are no climatologist,
have no blue screen to dance before
with indicative arms and quick reversals
pointing out the body’s highs,
cooling fronts, lows -
except the sky, sometimes
behind, sometimes above,
a crenulated code 
blown indecipherably wide. 
Yet, there is this wheel of wind
that comes
and comes again
out of the east
or west or slanted.
You know its feel, tender
beginnings, imperceptible
but for a finger
held to find.

You face a horizon
blocked by conifers and taller things
and hear them throwing scented selves
all over air, enticing it
to stay with murmuring of rustles:
Come, filter through our shades.
Until what, by shy approach,
began your way, dissipates
and goes.  Eyes close,
eyes close.  You
cannot bear the stillness,
the ease of flight swallows make
without headwinds, no buffet
of wings or tails.
 
Then blow the Santa Ana’s furnace
heat, too hard and bent
on pitting skin, piercing
without foreplay
or kindness,
breaking limbs, shattered
blood that you would’ve shed
by sacrifice for love, but
bring the finger in, save
the spit you’d give it for a day
less tumbled with weeds,
one with fewer
plastic bags hung on thorns
of bushed mesquites.

Take stock of your erosion:
how chiseled down the palpitations
infatuation once made mountain high -
a Denali of Delights -
powdered dust these days,
these nights.  When the tickle
of a tendril blown
across a nape
turns your head with hope,
skirt edges blossom full as sails
never scathed by doldrums.
 
And you will ride, you know.
You will ride for the duration.
For as long as this breath from heaven breathes
you will course its course,
grieve its grief.
When it stills, when you hear
the shudder thumps of your racing heart replace
the whistle round the sills and turnings
of the gates, curl your fingers to a fist,
don’t search out another, wait,
wait for the rise to rise 
of what you had, have, retain:
contours of shoulder blades like dunes
shaped by Shawondasee
to silhouette night
against a dim light
from the hall,
rippled patterns set so firm
no Sirocco, no Pali, no Chinook
will shake them
from the clouds of here.

[after Adrienne Rich, "Diving Into the Wreck"] 

You trust all of it, you do.
Even quicksand has a bottom.  Pink is
the color your heart beats, beats above ground,
picking up pigment and pace before those toes
touch bedrock - oh, but the saturation trembles
on pulsed aftershocks before you climb hands
and knees out of it, safe.  Knew
the length of yourself and depth of regrets,
what kills, the lesser threats (cancers
and accidents), and days.  Knew them
absolute - but asphalt’s gone squishy with rain,
hasn’t it, Girl, and what’s under
is manmade and sluggish sewer.  The good
globe entire is paved with intent and you
have lost where to step.

.

[after "Assurance" by William Stafford from Contemporary American Poetry, Fifth Edition]

Today William Stafford’s many stones
made a marker under the skylight, one
of those stacks of relatively flat rocks
that say: 

Some-
one was
here & placed us
just so for reasons
we don’t understand. 

For reasons I don’t understand
the word for that rock pile skips
over my tongue, hits the back
of my throat, lifts again to nick
along molars, but refuses
(even silently in letters soft-leaded
on the page) to form.  It is a hierarchy
of rocks, smallest on top, largest footprint
on the bottom, more in the middle space. 

I know you can see what I cannot find. 
I will blame this lapse of easy-word
catching on the ceiling fan, not on the sun
or the earth or the sky turned down
like an ironware bowl glazed blue
and fired with runnels in tact.  Not on
a dead poet’s crows or stones.  It is all 

a balancing act - the remembered, what
is not, the naming of acts, after effects,
how soon one topples, or stands. 

Is it enough that I know there is a word
for such a marker stacked out of stones?
After all, it’s not the compilation I admire
in the end, but the elements, stone by stone
that cause my heart to cave in.

 .

[after reading three Stafford poems: "Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People", "The Early Ones", and "Notice What This Poem is Not Doing" from Contemporary American Poetry, Fifth Edition]

Decide on the look first.
Will there be one color, or two,
and will they be warm or cold, plain
or bold?  Both or either or none?

Feed the snake prisms and small suns, one a week.
If there are rainbows (and there will be)
collect them by net and stuff them back in.
Pay no attention to his cleft tongue; once
it was whole and real, although
never made of rubies.

When you build his eyes,
and you find you’re without iris and lid,
go to the tin of buttons Elsie left,
find two glassy blacks, glassy as obsidian
minus the edge capable of dull cuts.
These will see as much as ever artifice did.
You’ll sense them prying your ribs apart
with sharp stares, trying to get at your heart.

Coil him, then, in a corner of dark.
Remember, he is your bright invention,
one to continue to build, one to unravel
at will. 

[after reading "Dismantling the Silence" by Charles Simic, Contemporary American Poetry, Fifth Edition]

They had, one would guess, brought the helicopter
in on account of hope that all was not irrevocably
lost on the office kitchen floor, that resuscitation amid
coffee pot shards by strangers in paramedic yellow coats
was merely Step One to Sitting Up, altogether again 

with working heart, inflatable lungs, apologetic
about all the fuss, the broken cup, shattered carafe,
assurances, once he caught a second wind,
he’d replace the wrong done.  One of them had to laugh,
and his laugh let the others smile about whose mouth
had saved his mouth and Cancel-The-Medi-Vac jocularity 

might have been the way, instead of hopeless rotors
lifting him off to that hopeless place where staff
awaited their turns to emote - from Chaplain
to ER nurse, attending physician (He Who
Pronounced) - their audience was me. 

White jackets, green scrubs, suffocating. 
A rehearsed Gravity as if sympathetic, they began
to inform (as they should; as this part is in their Job
Descriptions), this mute, this CPR Dummy who
stands on thick legs, sand-filled (Widows Wobble

But They Don’t Fall Down) chest, a bomb wired
to the aorta, ticking, ticking.  Seven
thousand nights ago, in a green staging room
where no natural light finds the dark.  And two doors away,
him - no apologies/assurances, no promises made. 

 .

[from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell, "Washing the Corpse" p.63]

Death, your blazer is blue dumb cloth, durable
against ribs put leaning on stains, snapshots,
letters out fishing words while you’re up gathering
years I will be.  Is it how wine swells with seams
straining, bagged crowds excited to have you,
friend, dear?  Meat living like words, ice and vodka
with place, kitchen in easy space, a backward movie,
home, the running sandwich of ceremony, a fish,
tuna and bread bites reassembling in schools, fields,
our unlaced hands praying.  Garage the idling car,
Death.  Collage a different “together” and paste it
on the stairs, unwind the how, friend, old, life -
you of Day Last - think of me. 

Inside, dry and hot, are you.
Outlines press this skin.
Soul pods flinging a milkweed scatter, a heart,
mine, in August delivered.  Ticket a right, an in,
spotlight a hole, a pocket I’ll be left In.
Ecstatic visit to come, you’ve recognized life,
mine centered at the sky dog.  Jacket blue, you
wear Death after August.  Is it cloth? this “How”
of your saying I shall?             

 .

[after Maxine Kumin, "How It Is", Contemporary American Poetry, fifth edition]

                          ~ San Felipe, 1989

On the Sea of Cortez, the moon makes
wrinkles in the flat bronze, glosses wide
slips with milk flats and ribbons, that
dreamed (half awake in years fuzzy
with dawns, midnights, dusks) go
quiet: no slide of foam tides lapping in,
tonguing out; no coyotes crying above
dunes where Baja mesquite grows
through cars without windows or answers
or doors.  Footfalls do not crunch sand
on the night.  I dressed in a shirt of white
soft as bandages and long as a wound. 
Silence so vast in the beaches of sleep
where we step and halos surround
our running feet, where we fall and the lips
of ribbons and milk sooth our thighs while
a stranger’s smooth tides, without a word,
writes: You are alive, you are alive. 
Umber is everywhere in gradations moving
the loco moon to ripple dunes and stipple
Cortez’s Sea with spray where a star
extends one leg into the shallow horizon.
My small bean of life cracks, the stem
of something forgotten finds the night
and snaps, tender with chaos and aware. 
I remember his name, Michael;
he fought fires in San Diego and was
engaged.  We made angels in October’s
sand under a moon too crazy with tequila
to care about the cupped hands of a star
holding us above what was coming
and already passed.  Stripped cars house
their lizards, give skeletal shade once the moon’s
spilt too thin for day to spell it, and colors
squeeze over even the dispossessed.

 .

[after Philip Levine, "My Sister's Voice", The Simple Truth]

No wonder Whiskeytown Lake drew us in,
holding up, as it does, all the great weight of blue sky,
holding down all those ghosts near the outskirts
where a mining town drowned
once the dam came in.  We hauled our crafts there,
escaped August’s heat, February’s ennui,
lines humming on Summer’s catamaran,
kokanee nibbling bait thrown
from our blue-bottomed skiff in pre-Spring. 
We used the road to the drowned town
for a boat ramp, saw walls standing in the clutter
of blue gill schools once
after a seven-year drought - the water, so low then,
small fortunes could be had mining 
snags for lost lures.
When gnat wings went gold with sun and buzz,
we tied off to wild vines and took the shore grass
to our thighs - yours mine, yours mine -

O how we laughed at the thorns.
O how we laughed at their bite.

With nothing but water, we’d go dizzy and drunk,
shallows lapping us free and making us new
in the womb of a finger cove. 

Uphill from the drowned town there are cattails
and blue-bodied dragonflies, yellow marsh iris, blackberries,
minnows, frogs.  When the burrs of memory snag
and hold, I am water and sky and you
are the honest air of both, allowing me breath. 
The road remains.  Always will.  

. 

Barley flags, and oat
wave from untilled destiny,
tilt pregnant on May wind.

Stand me centered in the thistle blooms,
purple till they burr; sagacity
to spare, they hook a barb to ride
the passing hide of hare, or hair of dogs,
the stiff black lab’s, the shepherd’s tan,
the mongrel damp of strays,
the musk of does with Asian eyes,
their scent, like a sword
slashing through my browning wilderness,
and cerise-blossomed vetch, and eucalyptus. 

Flags, lean as far out as you’re able
with your seeds gone gold that hold green
generations’ stems, roots, leaves, fruit.

And when you pull up from your several thousand bows
to learn I am no more than a mere “she”
wearing a long bone frock with indigo-
printed stems, wearing crepe skin
too thin, now, too hairless to secure
a burr’s barb - I will wave back,
being the sister who stands, unrooted,
reliant on your grace.

.

[after Pablo Neruda's "Oh, Earth, Wait for Me" from Isla Negra, A Notebook]