Moonbird

 I was speaking, a moaning call,

a spreading gray constellation,

a smoke of words

but you weren't listening anymore.

It is the only language I have.

I live in the interstices

between seed and fruit,

seed and earth,

sea and air,

love and absence.

I have come a very long way, and yet

I am as gray and unremarkable as old lumber.

My love expresses itself inside the earth

and produces a single emissary.

The way is long, the continents pass by.

We meet again only at intervals, but on the same ground.

I was trying to tell you about moonbirds

in their secrecy and their millions.

They seem to vanish, they glide without effort,

but are always there, like love or frailty.

I was speaking, a moaning call,

a smoke of words between sea and air

but you, you love the smell of milled wood,

and weren't listening anymore.

__________

Travel Advisory

 

In Denver, poems stay up in the Rockies at night

only rolling down Colfax Avenue in bright afternoon,

hanging out in the vanished record store with

Allen Ginsburg, waiting for night to howl at the moon.

In Toronto, you can catch a touristy rickshaw

or hustle some change at night on Yonge street

depending where on the grayscale you fall,

and the poems there wear boots and are desperate/sweet.

In Manila you can take your poem to a fine hotel

or share Italian in a restaurant where they let you write on the wall,

then get starry/holy at one of the cathedrals

and set out before dawn to hunt up some warm pan de sal.

But in London there are no poems, they've all

fallen into the gap, been run over by trains,

gotten rat-tired of curry and black-coat robots.

Nerves fried, orphan-empty, they sick in the streets, 

cut out their tongues, and die whenever it rains.

______________

for Word Garden Word List--Iron Horse

Music: Leo Kottke Eight Miles High

Pawn

 

I want to pawn my grave

but they tell me it is worthless

and want my skin instead. 

the sky meets a pickpocket

who lifts the sun and sells it on eBay.

roosters' GoFundMe falls short.

the world spins but produces no cloth.

naked world, let me know you, and love you.

it responds with acid ink on sandpaper.

I buy the sun and slaughter the roosters.

I set the world on fire but die alone.

I miss my skin but have lost the ticket.

________

Shared with Word Garden Word List--Shy Creatures

Oasis

 

Well ducks, it was the place to gather in those days.

There were ceiling fans that made one think 

that Baron Von Richtofen might fly in at any moment. 

I wondered whether a man wearing coveralls had to climb

 up on a ladder each morning

to heave the blades into motion.

They served a concoction of fruit, gin, crushed ice,

the low notes from Hernando's Hideaway, and who knew

what else. It tasted like children's party punch

but made our high perches start to  pitch

on the rough seas beneath our jelly legs.

Down some white stone stairs, there was a blue pond

someone had stocked with mallards, as green and gold

as my jewelry. They were free to fly

but could never leave--the desert

would have turned them to cardboard.

We slept with scorpion nets. One night I dreamt

that a handsome man in a uniform of water lay with me,

told me my hair was good rope from India, and

that I had been a snake charmer

in a previous life. He kissed me and it stung.

Ah, love, there you are looking at me through your new

telescope, your young face behind the lens like an egg.

I gave up gin, and traveling, and most other things long ago.

Now I'm talking to you with my bird beak,

free to choose but forbidden to leave

except via packing box, to be sent by air mail over the dunes

to the oasis bar, c/o my younger self, cash on delivery, payable

in florins, code phrase "wing walker." The Baron will be there waiting.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Across the River and into the Trees

Music: Hernando's Hideaway

Wishbone

 

When I was young, I learned the art of

decisions made with wishbones. 

A living heart had informed them

with a love of yellow corn and a fear of silver hatchets. 

I came out of my shell one night during 

a traffic accident like waking during surgery.

Wrecked Chevies turn shy as little girls

but their drivers find illumination in oil and blood and pavement. 

Jail and church are cousins and I found

in one what had eluded me in the other. 

That morning they returned my effects.

A crow had nested inside my leather satchel like swag from limbo.

Why bring all of this up? Why now, when

October is just a penny on the railroad track

shiny and done with, like an old flame?

I guess I'm just telling how I got here, the whole swerve of my life.

Living alone takes nerve, more than I ever had young.

Magic never gets the laundry done, or the

chicken fried, but I have it in spades these

rainy days, when my hawk-heart feels the wishbone

and I wonder what it will tell about me, how it will split

between sweetheart and shrew, drunk and duena,

all the spilled tiles and tears that depicted my face,

the one I wore while here, doing the best I could, grandmother and memory.

________

for Word Garden Word List--She Had Some Horses

Music: Katey Sagal Bird On The Wire. 

Weight & Lightness

 

In morning, a thousand plans;

afternoon finds me recumbent

Hours become like contraband

and my plans undone but done with.

I feel unchanged, sitting by the window

but tire at the slightest exertion.

I watch as the evening bends low

and wonder at vitality's desertion.

But my mind! Imagination grown brighter!

While a simple chore leaves me breathless.

So I poeticize or read another chapter

and for the moment feel light, lifted, deathless. 

____________

for What's Going On? -- March of Time.

I have been a sad child and a wild addict and a recovering person, a long-time employee, been married and raised a son, been divorced and started over, called myself straight and LGBTQ, and I end as I began, with a love of dogs and poetry. What a long, strange trip it's been, but I am happy where I have landed. 

Don't forget that the Word Garden Word List remains active through Sunday. 

Music: Fleetwood Mac Landslide

The Mournful Crow

 

Waterfall, Sierra Madre, Philippines

If you want to find God, you can go by rail

or catch a jeepney, repaired a thousand times

and driven by a madman with a rosary on the mirror.

Tell him you seek the Divine and be certain

that he does not misconstrue your meaning.

You go down General Luna street to the place

where the Moon and Mars both must bow

to the great glittering of the Creator's face.

When you arrive, look for the Indian Laurel tree

where a crow has come down the backbone

of the Sierra Madre to wait here for you.

He knows you have lost much, your child, your home. 

The Sierra Madre crow can offer only baubles,

still-warm bits of pan desal bread, and his wise mein.

He is here, like the church of San Agustin,

as mournful as the Christ, as wounded, as kind.

Go inside, where adobe bricks contain time itself,

and the Spanish artifacts reconcile gold with rust.

There you will find Dibella, Alberoni, majesty and peace.

Outside, the kind crow, the Philippine sky, the laurel trees.

__________

Written for Word Garden Word List--Full Dark, No Stars. When I was 20 or 21, I visited San Agustin Church in Manila. If there is a place in the world that is truly God's House, then San Agustin must surely be it. 

Music: Kate Bush This Woman's Work 

Yarn Ball

 

The devout go to graveyards, too.

numbered from the day we are born;

winter-bearers disguised in gentian blue.

Every cat knows the yarn ball has its end.

stitched into a world of glorious patterns

comprised of flesh, genomes, accident, atoms.

I am the baby playing in the April clover

riding inside the disappearing bone-brittle

biddy, herself a rider who with Charon must settle.

In between I live my dream within a dream

within a buzzing hive of urgent ephemeral illusion,

a corporeal toy. an aspect of God, in a barrel on a waterfall stream.

___________________

for Word Garden Word List--A.E.Stallings

Maury Wills

 

When I see the blackbirds and sparrows 

                                          speeding low in the sky

                                          ahead of a storm,

They remind me of a childhood summer

                                         and Maury Wills, the

                                         stolen base king.

I remember my father's barber crowing at the tv,

                                       "What a crackerjack!"

                                       as I waited in a chair, feet dangling.

When I see the red squirrel take over the feeder

                                      despite being smaller,

                                       I think of Maury Wills beating the odds

and the throw to second.

He disrupted the pitcher, catcher, and fielders

                                    like the neighbor cat in the ground ivy

                                    sure to pounce, just a matter of when.

His feet were his fortune, raising the dust sliding in

                                     on legs purple with dreadful bruises

                                      and red with rash, the Dodgers' captain

doing whatever it took.

When I see the grackle strutting with its gotten peanut

                                  I think of Maury Wills'  bright jewelry--

                                  the Hickock Belt, MVP and World Series rings.

The resourceful chipmunk makes me wonder, what is it like

                                to be smaller, quicker, cheeks stuffed

                                 while the circling hawk goes hungry?

Then I realize that I already know these things, even as

                                the years steal on me and I grow slower

                                sitting in my sanctuary, watching the action.

_________________

For Word Garden Word List--Mary Oliver. 

Process notes: Maury Wills is a lifelong favorite of mine, first for his baseball skills, and later for other things as well. He grew up in the projects in Washington DC and had no idea a black kid could hope to play in the majors until a Senators player named Jerry Priddy showed up at his local diamond to talk to the kids playing ball there. Wills never forgot it. Too small to be a slugger, he learned to switch hit and to use his speed, a forgotten weapon in baseball in an era of burly bashers.

   It was a long road to the big show for him, but when he finally got his chance, he ran with it (pun intended!). He went on to become captain of the Los Angeles Dodgers, break Ty Cobb's single season stolen base record, win an MVP award in 1962 and the Hickok Belt for sportsman of the year across all sports. He even made numerous appearances on television variety shows, playing the banjo--typical of him to choose such an instrument. 

   When his baseball career ended, and everything he had worked so hard to excel at was over, things changed. A girlfriend introduced him to cocaine, and Wills fell down, all the way down, into full-blown addiction. It took time, but once again the tenacity and drive that served him in baseball served him again in recovery and like me, he lived sober for the rest of his days. Maury Wills lived by his own lights, found great success his own way, and beat the devil to finish up on a high note. 

   I have tried here to combine Mary Oliver's eye for the everyday wonder of the natural world with the story of a childhood hero, Maury Wills. 

Music: Tracey Chapman Fast Car

Book

 

Let me tell you about the book I've been reading.

I started it so long ago, I can't now recall the opening lines 

or even how I came to have this book.

I think it was a gift, but I'm not sure from whom,

and though it's at most about a hundred pages long.

it has a great many chapters and characters.

Sometimes I love it and wish I could stay on a favorite page forever,

but by turns I want to throw it against the wall or destroy it.

Every time I think I've figured out where it's going or what it means,

the narrative changes and goes off in some unexpected direction.

I'm often displeased with the author or the characters

and wonder why in the world the story goes the way it does.

For the first few chapters, I was eager to read it quickly,

but as I've gotten nearer the finish than the start I want to slow down.

I loved some characters so much that they became part of me,

and I genuinely suffered when they were written out of the tale.

Others I hated and yet they lingered for page after page.

I had hopes for what would come next, more when I started than now.

What began as a children's book, became YA, adult fiction,

and now it's almost a memoir. I'm not sure how many pages are left.

I wonder, what if I had found myself reading a different edition,

a sequel, another book by the same author, a different genre,

setting, plot, or style? Would i have liked those better, or less?

Ah well, even though I have thrilled to the love scenes, cried when

the characters failed, were terribly hurt, or died, believed every word

or scoffed at the absurdity of it, none of it is even actual in the end.

It's a tale, something made-up, though it has seemed very real.

Novels, plays, films, they move me, change me, sometimes bore me,

irritate me, or leave me in despair, but they are only shadows. 

One day, the book will fall from my hand, and I'll protest that I

wasn't finished! or perhaps I'll sigh and say I'm glad to be shut of it.

No one else will read my particular book again after me, though

sections and passages may be passed down and I'll be

a character in someone else's book, a product of imagination.

_______

for What's Going On? -- Books/Reading.

Don't forget that Word Garden Word List remains active through Sunday. 

Music: Crash Test Dummies Afternoons & Coffee Spoons

Palomas Perdidas

"How different it all was from what you'd planned." --F Scott Fitzgerald

 Here's the thing about love--

you can't finesse it for long once it's

worn away

                      like a river stone,

lost in the mail,

the ring gone down the trap.

Oh, you're right, it doesn't stay

cinema big-screen hothouse bloomed

the way it

                   starts out,

all fever-fine experiments in joy.

Just because you get lucid in the drowse of time,

doesn't mean call the hearse,

cut the roses,

ask the waiter for something mild and bland

like some blue hair breakdown of the heart.

No.

When we reduced, though, in the long shadow of years

to a shorthand slang for what used to be

a poem written

                                 with the soul-vase of our bodies,

we became pilots in a sky without any gardens below.

I'm sorry, you know? I envy the old dog still loved,

still a sunrise in someone's eyes,

or to be the one with a candescent heart as fine

as old art,

                    stars forever swirling over lamplit groves.

_____________

for Word Garden Word List--Our Man In Havana

Palomas Perdidas "Lost Doves"

Music: Concrete Blonde Mexican Moon

Laika

 

Looking up through the trees in my yard at night,

what does it matter that the stars we see are already dead?*

I look to God as my dog looks to me.

Still there? Good. Anything you want me to do?

Sometimes I think about Laika, the Russian space dog,

so happy (as I imagine) to be rescued from a pound,

given a job and a pack. Did she look to them

as my dog looks to me and I look to God?

They sent Laika into space though there were no sticks,

no fields, no soft bed, no pack to go with her.

She must have wondered where everyone went,

and been so bewildered and lonely.

Who's a good dog?  Oh, you were, Laika.

My own dog looks to me as I look up to God

in tears and asking, still there?  

----

*required line written by Amy Woolard

for Dverse Prosery--Amy Woolard, hosted by my friend Dora. I don't normally write prose anymore, but made an exception. 

Music: Tom Rosenthal It's OK

When I Die It Will Be In Springtime

 When I die it will be in springtime,

trailing all unfinished things behind me

like a newlywed leaving in an old Chrysler. 

Charon will be at the wheel. 

The water will be calling him,

and he'll fidget with the radio, changing stations.

When I die it will be in springtime.

I've been waiting, as if living in a bus station

for the 3:45 to Omaha.

Time has grown drowsy. Print newspapers fade.

In Florida, ballplayers wear logos and speak Spanish

like my favorite poet, Lorca.

_______

For Word Garden Word List--Wordsworth.

Bridge Over Water Lilies

 My heart rides in the petals of a water lily--

my coat a pebbled shore.

Here is the bridge of turquoise stones,

magpie calls, and bamboo bones

with the blind sky waiting, waiting, evermore. 

My heart rides in the blind sky waiting--

my love a wounded bird.

Here is the bridge of mica memories.

the lost valise, and aromas of home

with the blue water singing, singing, a flowing word. 

My days are blue water singing--

in a ewer made of hours.

Here is the bridge of goldfish scales,

old china dishes, and copper nails

all riding in the petals of a lily, a lily, my water bower. 

______

for What's Going On? "Bridges"

"Water Lily Pond" by Claude Monet

Music: Aisha Badru "Bridges" 

Promenade In Green & Gray

 

Spring is the season of madness,

as fine and also bitter as any high always is in the end.

Every doomed thing that grows boasts in beauty,

and who wouldn't finger the new green blades?

who wouldn't close their eyes in the warm stranger sun and sigh?

Every heart is a blind radio, and what good is the word or song

without someone to hear it, turn toward it,

and seem to know the meaning?

Summer is a fever we invite, because we long to be feverish.

What fool thinks a bonfire will burn a hundred years? 

Look, legions of fools consumed by the thing that feeds them,

vanishing because we long to vanish, and then crying, lost, surprised.

In autumn, I have felt myself fall in a million pieces, until I stood

naked as any idiot tree. I was beautiful in a million ways,

pick me up, press me in pages, even just one leaf between leaves,

but I end up with all the others, up against some fence, silent, far from home. 

Winter is the season of stillness, and those who have stored up sorrows

find they do not lack for much. Snowy ground makes others much clearer--

where they've come from, where they're headed. There's no need anymore

to build with strips and shreds, we become our own nest and wait,

astonished and patient, a quiet station at rest in the moonlight. 

_______________

for Desperate Poets "Desperately Different". 

Title adapted from the song Green Rocky Road

Music: The Motels Only The Lonely

Rán

 

I can't recall what this place was like

before the renovations.

There were difficulties--

bombings, whatnot,

and the removal to the madhouse of the construction foreman. 

Blueprints are lovely, don't you think?

Smooth and blue as calm seas. 

Birth, though, that's a bloody messy business

of screaming gobsmacked arrival

held up in the hands of the midwife who never cuts her nails.

It's not so much that I love this place as it is that I was presented with it.

I woke in these rooms

with the hammering already in progress. 

I long for waterfalls and love,

but have skin like bricks, and hair like shingles.

People say, make it beautiful, you can do it!

Be your own fetch, a siren of the flooded basement,

luring yourself with your own song.

Make it your home away from home as drowning sailors do,

find the bright side of blistering paint and warped floors like heavy seas.

All right then. I have tattooed the name Ran

on my arm, see it when I hold you.

We are limited only by burst plumbing, crumbling rebar,

and our own imaginations.

We are castaways keeping our heads above water

in our Rubik's Cube Winchester House 

of gorgeous possibility.

__________

for Sunday Muse and shared with desperatepoets open link. 

Un Recuerdo (A Memory)

 

When I was younger, one of my co-workers

was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.

She was just always there,

a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--

some sort of salad. 

She was just an ample, 

stationary emplacement 

as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin

to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties

still rumbling around Havana,

something you'd smile at

but not feel had anything to do with you.

She wore a cross that rested on her bosom,

like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis. 

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.

"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce. 

I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.

What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather

blood and bone and breath

breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.

There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,

just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.

British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs

in grainy archive footage

as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing. 

"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered. 

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.

I still think of that day at the hospice, though

and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,

like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,

at that wind-down hour.

He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,

but though we protest that we were only in the middle, 

I want to see how it ends

he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,

"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

__________

for Word Garden Word List--Stephen Dunn. 

The last line says, "Nothing is forever, not even suffering." 

Music: Compay Segundo Chan Chan