Lesson #60 : a.k.a. Mexico Time, October

Mexico is not in keeping with California’s clock,
timepieces here already fallen one hour back
of the border’s other side.

This makes for a zone of hands, one set lurching
forward without me in its minutes, day’s rewards
unborn, a knee I might scrape safely bent, not much
different between sheets as inside her womb.

Mick Jagger’s been elusive, a scarecrow taunt
of ticking beats: you-can’t-always-get-what
get-what get-what get-what
you want from a dream observed in an hour
yet to come, sleep stuck in a groove of pursuit;

or am I the one running the creases of time,
plumping the seconds inside my pillow, rearranging
sharp feather ends away from a cheek where the hands
spin.  Stage lights come up.  No, it’s the sun
rained through slats, wind stuttering them to thwack,
the rod where they attach, a watch stem.

~

[After "Bar Time" by Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room]

September Scorpions

They are the color of golden french fries.
Drought brings them inside for water.
Already I have killed six
where they froze sensing movement.
If the orange bulb of venom did not dance with hurt
like a bauble hung to catch light,
I would scoop each onto a page of white
and carry them out to the field.
But fear races this heart.
The orange bulb pulses and I toss a tome
flattening these small lives.
Rain would save us this grief
like a widely arced flag of surrender.
A truce would ensue between creatures
and these books, these tomb markers
would rise and regain alignments on shelves.
These weighted words, these poisons –
these sabers rattled against what’s not understood.
I am the color of killing,
more orange than the bauble of tails.

Hunger

Mexico.  Baja Norte.  The Popotla Cove.
Mid-morning. This ocean and sky are one soft gray
expanse. If there be surfers inside these mists
waiting out lesser rollers for larger rides,
they wait or rise, bodies slick with sea and balance,
in silence.  As if gauzed.  As if their whoops of
success are wounds carefully bound in bandages
wheeling out from absorbent marine layers, thick
with possibilities:  all night the beach fires glowed
before tents, boards stood as totems facing west,
hopes went up like incense for feasts of fine rides
with sun’s break.  And break it did
behind quiet fog.  Here, the foam’s ebb and flow
is a lick heard, invisible, salted, receding
as surely as clock hands proceed about faces
through measured time, allowing small creatures who
abide in the sand their meal of air, of continuation
between tides.  Now the totems may be weighted
with the builders of fires.  Striations of sea
blend with air.  The larger ride will come.
They are hungry; they are ravenous with faith.

~

[after reading Ted Kooser's ALP post of Wisconsin poet Ronald Wallace's 'Sustenance']

9 February 2008 : poem : The Characters are Coming

Irene introduces her dunderhead brother
Alex, who lights the fuse: Cannon; barker;
Small-time band; suckers in the stands.

Sharon introduces Teddy, dead, and a desert house
With fake panes and a ghost of her in the window:
Painted chairs; green-tined rake; a daughter;
Pendulum lights; a smudge like a kiss on the glass.

Ricky Towne slouches past Theo’s City Junk Store
Wishing for better days, bicycles in a row, stead of:
Ivory combs; shattered silk; empty ornate frames;
Bowling pins; styrofoam cups; a red lacquered trunk.

Foster introduces Irene, little man, overstuffed;
Irene and Little Fish introduce Bucky and Bucky
Intros the pigs sliding down pig-chute ramps:
One little pig; two little pig; three little pig;
Four; a dog for Buddy; bail to get outta jail;
Pesaries and quiffs; capes and sails; slats nailed
To Sycamores in Penn. 

One by one they tumble to page, one by one they expire
Like paper dolls cut and paper-clothed: Daughter;
Brother; Mother; Son; Strongman; Cousin; Friend;
Clown; Lover; Woman; Girl: The story ends.

Three P.M., Popotla

Why do seagulls have an orange dot on their lower beak,
like a persimmon beauty mark, or boil,
like a bright orange dime on their lip, 

then a whiter white coat of feathers (beyond decent),
and an eye, rings of yellow and black,
for tacos camarones I eat? 

This chair is the best ___
facing breakers rolling for miles,
two legs on one level of decking
and two legs on another, a foundation shift? 

one nobody noticed and after one Pacifico,
and another, who cares___
those breakers breaking, like Popotla is

a great conch I sit inside,
the roar pulling like a heart tide, the gull on the rail,
mariachis at the next marisco stand
 
and, too young, but a busboy___
twenty, twenty-five, maybe sixteen
a table away,

brown skin, white teeth (beyond decent)
and the ocean teaming with birds striking waves
in the sun long after midday.

 

[After "Morning" by Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room]

The Heart I Brought to Baja

Inside the dishrag crocheted from coral
cotton and olive-drab yarns, a recycled
heart of blown glass travels.  This light
catcher for windows otherwise plain, save
a view of red bud and roses beyond a stain-
less steel sink above a wandering trickle
of drought-stricken creek, waits for fingers
to lift it back into place on a new pane 

in an old country.  When the cold heart
of what was cracked like a .22 shot echoing
up from a canyon, broken lobe in the shape
of a severed green thumb skittering Baja
tiles to calm at the base of a glorious palm,
we (busted heart and me) knew how to mend.  

 
[After Robert Wrigley, Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin, from ALP (American Life in Poetry)]

The Young

The young
are at play without names

their laughter is 
bright lanterns on a carnival night 

or flamingos lifting a sky with pink wings
su aire es ingrávido azul 

they make song from dirt
from gum wrapper notes rolled of foil
behind bins and power poles
on sidewalks cracked by the roots
de árboles 

their voices vary and go
tag the white walls of houses
tap on the windows,
spring from the screens 

            I would ask you to continue dear young
            and play through whatever comes 

let sirens wail on Main Street
while your giggles prevail 

and mothers and fathers refrain please
from calling your children in 

I would ask you to tarry longer

Boy with the guitar
Girl in the blue soccer jersey
Girl with the red-handled jump rope
Boy in the untucked white shirt

The Myth of Moving

Seven hundred miles south, where Mexico’s federales keep the peace, there is a small house at the end of a row of small houses, with round stones planted in the parking area for traction and a gate that is blue-green from the locked side.  A woman sits on the locked side when she is there, when the Pemex plant burns off soot from its refinery machinations and fine particles roar out on her private sky, blue inside the invisible remains of fuel, blue behind the tat-work of clouds.  And in mid-November, when her winter waits to begin, as though seasons are a state of mind, as though earth stays its whirling and gravity maintains a summer tilt of axis until, ochre skirt ruffles twirling to float out like a windswept field of ready wheat, she will sense the years flowing, escaping, as before, like glacier melt into the rivers of time.  The rivers are more than can be counted, and some are only ghosts, felt rather than tasted, known, and unknown, and brought back again in gleaming dreams.  Now she packs minutes into the last cracks of space between saucers and lampshades, gardening gloves, maple syrup and Merwin, moving the months to southern traction near an ocean not far from the blue-green, and on the hips of never and always she carries fragile starts of what may flower from stone.  Where the border opens its chaos of song she will enter and become one note humming the desperate road falling the length of Baja.  A little while later the horizon will trade shades of melon for papaya, guide her to the beginning, the place where the world picks up where it left off and the rustle of skirts on date palms click through the dawns like rain. 

 

[After Merwin, The River of Fires, The Book of Fables]

Dia de los Muertos: Conversations

There are the marigolds bunched to earth with flounces of amarillo, castanets on their sepals, dust narnaja on the garden fingers where little bones baille on headstones and sugar teeth are azul.  There are the sombreros negra laced with silver, pumpkin seed pearls bleached blanca, cinnamon and manzanas rojas.  There are the little bones turned of dust, noon or sunset, la noche y la mañana, little bones turned of dust.  They become the trickle that feeds stones and sheep with song.  When they laugh, the wind sighs and silences, sighs and silences like bells hung on a new moon when la bruja’s skirts flash past.
        The Lady of the Dead is dust and whispers to dust, telling them who sits with marigolds blossoming from their chests.  She loves the sighs and silences between fists and bowls of grain, how the grain plays armónica, y el perro thumps la pandereta, and all the little bones dance. 
        When did marigolds learn flamenco?  When did they don castanets?  When did I hear the little bones singing on their way to dust?  The child girl with ears as long as a truck has climbed up the ribs of the woman to hear what she heard at one.  And a smaller child, who nests inside, has climbed up the ladder of neck to hear the bells toll on.   
        I will hear them talking, one speck of bone to the next, and the next, and then they will turn to me, me with my azul teeth, me with my marigold skirts y camisas rojas, me with blossoms amarillos floating over this cabeza del azúcar where loco thoughts once curled, and we will dance, the way little bones dance, until we are singing water, dew on the bells of the moon.

Being Here

Mid October, thirty miles south of Tijuana,
from a white casita I’d inexplicably contracted
to rent for a year, the view after sun fall
is dark date palms lufting good-byes and.
goodnights.  Lucky sky behind tall trees
is papaya warm.  And some hand has backlit
the sea, the ocean, with aquamarine.  It’s
as if the far side of this horizon is not water
but glass, and el sol, settled in over there,
focused for all he is worth on glowing
Pacific’s salt azure.  Uncanny, the colors
a dying sun looses on the world,
like a well gone riddled with holes
floods a square until asphalt and grass
are the same broad mirror showing trees
how they look when they bend, cars
how they move when they glide into gear,
columns on courtly mansions how grandly
they stand, and life, as it passes, how fast
it speeds by toward death.  Now the dark
palms lift their roots and move further
into night, disappear into an ocean some hand,
perhaps the same hand, has emptied and
refilled with a total absence of light.
Only sounds between casitas -
dogs barking stories from block to block,
a car alarm the next street over, voice
of a woman too distant to know what
was said – tango with hours.

You know how
a voice comes and without seeing the maker
of the words, gender is clear as a bell.
Without knowing her language or what
her words mean, you know she is a mother,
she will be obeyed, and loved for her
absoluteness.  Such voices are not
questioned.  Such voices simply are. 
Such was the voice that came in
and then faded through my window tonight.  
Now, all the dog stories told, old mongrels
snore with the stars.  The car alarm is gone,
giving back night’s skin; when it went silent,
as startling as when it began, claiming nothing
for its warnings.  I am certain the tides
are too far away to hear, or the breakers,
on hiatus from crashing to shore, are unfolding
one at a time, rolling out like translucent tongues,
long and wide, ready to speak of how water fares
on the south side, unwilling to wake the tired sand. 

                                    To be sighted
in the middle of night, be hearing in
the center of quiet, leaves a stranger curled
next to the heart, another eased under the tongue,
a third with a net on a long handle, who sits
where the ribs almost meet, catches pulses
and beats, keeps them from straying out
on the dark where the mongrels sleep. 
Phantoms drift in and out, stop by to lift
the tongue, say hello to the dreamer there,
but the red child of words cannot speak,
rolls noises up from the lungs, grunts and turns
with lessening squeaks, and so the drifter
moves on.  He would sneak through
the chambers of the heart, but is barred
by the stranger there; he would steal
the net of the pulse catcher, but is caught
by the net, instead, and thrown to a toe
where he pinches you awake.  And each
morning do you thank them?  The mothers
who call you inside and the inside strangers
who hide under tongues and swing from
your ribs  catching thieves who would
wrestle your heart from your chest?  No -
for these miracles of breath, sight, sound
you pay no price, offer no crowns, see
another blue sky, green frond, red roof
without knowing you see them at all; hear
another dog bark stories of high mountains
and gulches where coyotes grow horns,
cacti are covered with teats that never empty,
and the men are all kind. 

 

 

[after Philip Levine, Getting There, The Simple Truth]