Poetry

Selected Poems

from Blue on A Blue Palette

Canticle at Twilight

Floating like a feather
like a single grain in the sea
grateful despite being alive

craving grace as I crave evening
cradling rage as I cradle no vicar
I think I might just be a clock

& juju power in a terrible century
a needle & the way to plunge it in
dancing through a meadow away

floating like singular rage
unlike twenty sheaves of feathers
like a vicar alive & dancing anyway

craving this terrible century
and every clock cradled in the sea
I think I’ll always be the needle

grateful for my grain & juju power
and all the ways to plunge into it
in this meadow just for an evening

from Live Encounters

This isn’t global warming—

just great shreds of Klamath River lamprey,
an orange light someone once named sun.

No longer seduced by any half-shell with
its near blood and little mate, we crowd

under umbrellas, knee deep in sediment,
waiting for religion in the wake of flaked

mica. We are silent and stumped; a herd
squat on the village handkerchief, under

weeks of fractured moons, longing for signs
of harvest, return of the oyster or Appaloosa.

from Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day

St. Valentine, Bishop of Terni, probably beheaded,
was also the patron saint of asthma, beekeepers, and epilepsy, so he might have said

love in the time of COVID is no different than
love at any other time: that is, full of loneliness.

Only more so. Pre-COVID, there were possibilities:
clandestine meetings at Trader Joe’s, Fisk’s Jubilee

Singers’ Balm in Gilead at Tuesday’s pancake suppers.
All attempted. All for naught. Post-COVID, love will still

be a hungry disciple with her wimple being what it always
was; her overcoat continuing to think in all the places it was

already thining; her outline identical to that surrounding
a bloodhound, run over. And even that outline will dissolve.

Some say that among COVID’s symptons are a loss of
taste, a loss of smel. And the loe loss during this COVID-

without-end emits the stink of Valentine’s remains stashed
in reliquaries, a bitter taste of beetroot laid on his holy table.

from Rosebud

I live in California

though I like to say I live in Mexico, live on
stolen land although some say that is just

a spoil of war. I like to say names of places
like Bolsa due to the ways it couples: Bolsa

Chica, Bolsa Knolls, pretty sounding places,
muy bonita, whatever language you speak.

I like saying Cucamonga probably because
saying so is a child’s game—cuckoo, cuckoo,

cuckoo—and should California’s teachers be
forgiven if they don’t teach the history of

the Gabrielino or the names those indigenes
gave to their places? I can think of no reason

to say Downey, named after the State’s 7th
governor, born in Ireland, seduced by riches

(thanks be to the California Gold Rush), a
backer of slavery in the Kansas Territory, fan

of San Francisco’s capitalists. I’d rather say
Fresno—meaning “ash tree” in Spanish; I’d

rather say Hoosimbin Mountain, thinking
of the Wintis’ buzzard water. I’d rather ponder

the myth about the place in Humboldt called
Loleta of which some local Wiyots, those yet

to be killed off, grin, say “let’s have sex” but
somehow words can corrupt in translation.

from Interliq

History, necessarily brief

Chicken. Egg.
Egg. Chicken.
Cluck, crack, yellow, mellow.

Then a mer-fish (someone
named them Eve plus Adam)
grew three legs and coupled

but they soon grew sick of
omelets with cheese & enough
will never be enough. So came

dachshunds and turtles, the hut
in the suburbs by which I mean
to say overcrowded cities of tent

to which the nomads objected,
citing the gods, citing oil-slicked
waters, and sometimes—often—

citing no reason at all. But isn’t
the reason for what happened, after,
the weapons: the rock, the spear,

a boomerang, Chinese gunpowder?
Okay, I’ve skipped some great stuff
that was the new big thing along

the way: sea-cry of a conch-shaped
trumpet; the screw press Gutenberg
invented to record everyone’s sins;

the potter’s wheel, ship’s wheel, fly
wheel, all depending on torque just
as many men do. Anyway, all this

was going on while wars, famines,
tsunamis, wars, were. Then, of
course, a family went to see Old Yeller,

flew to the moon, felled the birch &
the sycamore. But ruin can be fine in
the end: we each shine our own apple.

From Beg No Pardon:

How I Learned Where We Come From

When she wants him for the late meal, she calls
supper soon, Kingstown-man, curried goat, sticky wicket

and he responds, testy, not yet ready Bequia-woman,
Anglican church, basket with no handles.

We children, we laugh, head for the hills
and the tall sweet grasses, listen for the lilt

of frangipani tante. She call come in now
pigeon peas, mangoes, poor man’s orchids—

then we run, for true, and supper is all
cassava root, callaloo, very little sugar cane

and we’re in it all at once: choirsong above
Mt. Pleasant, Port Elizabeth, harp of Paget Farm

till Father, he say no, defends his slipped-on wishes
for Soufrière, Sans Soucis, Wallilabou Bay

and so on into the evening, calypso and steel drums,
a little Rasta and Bob Marley for us young’s

until, finally, we are no longer black ironwood—
wood that will not float.

From Fretwork:

Wombsong

Here I am, mom—all motive and

gristle and moaning for a daddy

but that bell just won’t ring. What

a playpen you were: Isle of Langerhans,

echo of Charlie Parker, miasma of

hominy, chayote, and fried fat-back.

No call to worry, my maker of mysteries.

You took a gamble, gave me away, and

neither of us will ever know all it cost.

A Sorceress Strolls New Grass

I am neither mother nor turquoise neckwear
but you are such young women,
such new potatoes, and there is much
for me to tell you:

            that bishops joyride in the dead of night,
            that blue’s favorite color is blue
            and earth is just a gaudy paragraph.

And though I am ripe as November, I can tell you

            no sorceress ever abandons midday
            and a sculptor is always better
            in a waterbed.

Yes, I’m vainglorious with all my knowing and croaking

because you women are writing your own Book of Migration
and without warning, I feel useless as an empty valise.
What you know makes the bandicoot fly and you converse
in flamingo and seashell, smell like smoke and rapscallions.

            You are tambourines
            in the stewing pot,
            a crucible of cymbals.

            Being fresh as new grass, you
            inspire me to astonish, then gloat;
            to beg no pardon, then begin.

From Start With A Small Guitar:

Empathy

I don’t care what you do. Find some-

one rounder or anyone who smells like

what you remember of persimmons.

Remember last summer? Violence was

only a rehearsal and we were so much

older, more fruitful. I don’t care again.

There’s going to be another intifada.

There’s gong to be a wind-up and we’ll

be sitting in an Olvera Street café, eating

frijoles and what’s left of our young.

Please don’t pretend you don’t

remember this or any other lie—

I saw you. I saw a winter moth succumb,

clutched between your nervy thumbs.

I saw you kill it with your dirty spoon.

Optimist’s Requiem

Foolish fool, foolproof fool, Queen of Foolhardy Fools, fool for the long foolish haul although Mama didn’t raise no fools isn’t part of my lexicon and having a lexicon is one reason I’m such a fool. I’ve been fooled fifty-nine times and never fooled a single soul. I’ve been a fast car fool, a fool for fool’s gold, an American fool and

I’ve volunteered everywhere that needs one. Seems I’m not interested in anything else; I think I want fool etched on my forehead. Was a time when being a fool was a slip I could have slipped out of but that was forty slips ago. Now fool is tattooed on my tattoos as I seat the table eating beans and more beans—a farting fool, that’s me.

I won’t think of desire or anything might night turn

me optimistic. It’s not going to happen. I’ll forget

how buttons button, get the cancer and die and

still be thinking may did you see that

did it look like love?