STANDING UP, LOOKING IN

This country is preparing a war,
inking the insides of guns
to print the right death,
and I am on a hillside far away,
anxious the wind will blow me
face first into a tall yucca
I’m smelling today.

When I walk down by the highway,
strangers wave at me
and I wave at them when I drive past
road crews, survey crews, the telephone repair.
But the war will be popular again.
There are strangers to be against
and the irony is always missing.
We even marry strangers.

Here I stretch, I stand tall
and stick my nose close
to the sappy ooze of waxy white blossoms,
purpled edges, the open smell.
War has density and seriousness.
I have just my balance
and my tremendous desire to reach.

Ordinary Wisdom (Paradise Press/ Red Hen Press reprint 2005)

 

LOUGANIS

If Praxiteles had been an animator, this form
is the one he would have set in motion—
a spinning diver hurtling down
toward the surface of a pool,
its smooth skin raised to ripples
by an automatic wind machine.

He’d sculpt Louganis like a beautiful machine
poised against the cloudless sky, then charge his form
with action--the rippling
muscles of the torso tensing with explosive motion
as the diver vaults, kicks out and plunges into the pool
where cameras follow him down,

a sheath of bubbles wrapping him, down
where applause is a watery blur, the machine
of celebrity waiting above him, the press pool
of reporters eager to surround, touch his form—
a boy-god, perfect in stasis or motion,
an athlete who could ignite any crowd, send ripples

of excitement through an arena, ripples
of awe around the globe, even after he stepped down
from competition. I saw him once, pure motion
in a dog show ring, his Great Dane puppy not yet machined
into perfection. Greg was the one all form,
perfectly balanced on his toes, emerging from a pool

of dog handlers as the star. Outside a swimming pool,
nobody recognized him at first, but ripples
of applause picked up, formed
a little cup of sound, then settled down
again as he was one of us, no machine
of glory, just a guy and his dog in motion.

That was before rumors of HIV set chaos in motion
and sports shows ran films of his infected blood coloring the pool
Predictably, the story fed into the tabloid machine,
and the customary scornful ripple
of reaction to anybody gay threatened to drive his name down
from Olympus, but no bigotry could change the form

of his achievement, no machine of hate or ripple
of fear for his life could alter the timeless motion into a pool
of a beautiful boy falling down from heaven into perfect form.

Passing (Red Hen Press, 2002)

 

LATIN FROM THE MASS

I

Yesterday we laughed
and said some Latin from the Mass,
the Introibo and the end.

Then I went off to work again
after we held the little plastic cup
to the light and lined the liquid up

and wrote the figures down,
your blood and something else
flowing from your side.

The video we watched about it,
“Cleaning Your Drains,”
called forth the wrong tone

for the feeling, the horror of remembering
a stranger with a spear-like scalpel
slicing off your breast,

leaving you nothing
but the base
of that small mound

threaded with black,
a little Gethsemane
or was it Golgatha?

Was it a crown of thorns
that slipped like an empty bandolier
across your breast?

We look through the opaque window
of the bandage to the scar
forming like a track over the wound

won in a war, or was it
just a raid?
Was it just a truce you made?

II

Tonight the little plastic cup
you held up

was full of fluid, pink
like cream in berry juice,

like a morning rose or dull carnation.
Tomorrow, if it goes well,

the yellow tint will clear
all the way up the tube

to where it leaves your side
and we will chart

the numbers at the line.
We will cry and laugh

and slap our thighs. No more mass
under your skin in mammogram,

but one breast paid the price—
that toss of dice

your cells played
on you.

I hold you while you shake
the lotion, spread it

on your newly forming skin
and touch the final line, and touch the final line.

Passing (Red Hen Press, 2002)

 

WHERE I COME FROM
     for my mother

I come from having a job,
getting up in the dark
and dressing in the dark
and trudging downtown
before breakfast.

I come from being the breakfast maker
and the “good morning” sayer.
I come from owning the stools
where they hang their heels,
owning the ear they buy
with their coffee,
silent as the silent money
in the tray.

I come from going home after work
to bake pies, pie crusts and cakes.
I come from eating standing up
because I’m feeding others.
I come from in the alley, meeting
the man from Kitty Clover potato chips
and at the curb getting the donuts
from the truck, carrying the receipts
to the bank, checking off with a pencil
figures the teller reads back.

I come from being busy all the time,
the customer is always right,
our coffee is the best.

Passing (Red Hen Press, 2002)

 

POSTCARD
      for Lynda Hull

“Today every-
thing was glazed with ice
after a brief thaw then a plunge
in temp.. So the news was
full of spectacular 25 and
40 car smash-ups.
Weather & traffic as meta-
phor? I won’t touch
that one!”
     —postcard greeting from Lynda Hull

1

Found this message on a postcard from you
by accident about a month or so
after your death.

What did it matter then I’d stuck the card
as place marker in a collection of stories?
What did it matter then if you’d mailed it
from Amsterdam or New Jersey or Chicago?

Always in motion,
back and forth, faster and faster.
That was the danger—so much so soon.

One friend, seeing your picture in the paper,
mistook your obituary for an announcement
you’d won another poetry prize.

2

That line to me about weather and traffic
was just a joke—who supposedly knows less
about weather than a Southern Californian?
And who knows more about traffic
than a Los Angeles poet, anyway?

And who knew more about death
than you, the one who turned away
from that follow spot more than once,
the chanteuse who stopped shooting her blood
full of jazzy soporific juice?

Who knew more about flirting with death,
kiss-on-the-cheek flirting,
and smoky dancing thigh against thigh with it
down the chasm of love?

3

Everybody knew it would come, it would come
to end you earlier than most,
no old woman sitting in a room, dreary
on a white-sheeted bed.

It would come in high relief, it would come
like numbness in a needle, cold as overdose
even when you said you weren’t using anymore.
It would come because it always comes—

just like Chet Baker falling out of that window,
just like falling in love with how blood is dark and tasty.

It would come because you were
a hand-leaving-glove kind of gal,
risky as rhinestones before 5:00 pm.

4

Skinny saint, I would have put some meat on your bones
if you had slept with me.
But you were my guardian angel
and not anywhere near available for lust,
not anywhere near available to me
since I didn’t need saving,
just revising.

My belated epitaph comes down to
this shambles of intention.
I have a postcard from you that set elegy in motion,
and it keeps tumbling like a mantra of remembrance
or a cajoling spell for more words,
more poems as deep and lush as trumpet bells,
poems to love for their sheen and tactile intelligence,
chiaroscuro in language your metier.

5

Come to your senses, I say. She is dead,
and I place that foreign feeling squarely in front of me
like the postcard of a room in which the chair of an artist
painted by another artist sits empty.

Passing (Red Hen Press, 2002)

 

CACTUS

In the nursery, I always go to the cactus first.
Who are they anyway? Old ghosts, perhaps,
who meet you on their own terms.
Then I leave them and walk into ferns, cooler
heads, and palms, long arms and secretive.
I circle. If this were love I’d be thinking
opposites attract because I’m back
at the cactus counter fixed on someone
called Goat’s Head. But what did that poet say,

the one who was holding a woman so high
off the ground? Something about tenderness in love?
When I look at the cactus in my hand,
my hand carefully raising the green plastic cup,
I think love is the spines,
the spines that curve and radiate
in parallel lines.
Love is how close you can get and even bleed
and even want to pick it up again.

Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books, 1991)

 

FROM LOS ANGELES LOOKING SOUTH

Orderly traffic, a normal day
and 350,000 Salvadorians are in hiding
in Los Angeles.
Four women sit on the patio of El Rescate,
dirt packed hard from use.

Lydia’s the weaver of this story
and two local women translate the Spanish,
pull the threads straight for me.

She has given this testimony for others
besides me. She’s slight, simply dressed,
a former philosophy student, a suspect.

Her husband dead, her baby, living perhaps
with an aunt under another name.
Guernica again
hangs before us in the air
as the translators nod and check out
the current slang or a new word
from the war.

The sun is full strength
as I walk out onto Pico.
I take Lydia’s testimony home,
stand out on my deck
and look south.

Down the hill, the banana trees
fan each other and two black dogs circle
in a fenced yard.
There are no people on the street
and cars pass like flashes of sun
through the pastel afternoon.

Not here, but somewhere else,
an incident in a field or at a gate
hatches the Guardia like flies.
The interrogation team changes tactics
to machine guns and disappearances.

Not somewhere else, but here,
the poem I am writing
already wonders about its worth.
I won’t be shot for what issues
from the small house of my mouth
in this country of the tomb of language.

This poem will never have to lay a finger
to the lips of the person writing it
or head north
wrapped inside a bundle of my clothes.

Artemis In Echo Park (Firebrand Books, 1991)

 

THE GRACKLE ON THE LAWN

She wants the blossom.
She wants the seeds in the grass.

She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.

It’s so simple, she’s like a person.

She wants the beautiful thing.
She wants to eat.

She’s like a person, she wants to live
with that beautiful blossom and she wants to eat.

She flies off with the blossom in her beak.

The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007)

 

HARDSCAPE

Say it’s the memory of early mornings
in the shop, the power lift raising a car
in the dawn light, steam lifting off the highway
in front of the garage, and tools
coming to life at the touch of a hand.

Say it’s the clang of things, the ping
of ball bearings pouring into a pan
and then a gush of gas from the pump,
the cleaning rag running over
the steely marbles to spark their shine.

Up the hill, the farm horse’s shoes
tap against the gravel on the road,
the tack clinks and groans, the barn doors
bang and creak and corn stalks screech
against each other in the wind.

Say it made me hanker for hard things,
want to get outdoors first light,
handle sticks and dead tires, bang
old mufflers together and bam
a ball peen hammer against a scrap
of sheet metal behind the shop.

It made me not want dolls and the demands
of indoors—quiet in the parlor, quiet by the stove.
It made me a woman of landscape and weather.
and suspicious of my place. Say it gave me
a chrome handle to a different and difficult world.

The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007)

 

NOT DISAPPEARING

The poems I write
to you
seem bird-bone light
in comparison
to my poems about cars
and the freeway
and the heavy-metal centuries
in which I’ve lived.

Something disappears
when I talk to you,
and it also happens
that each word’s history
leads to a question—

what nouns and verbs
could we share
straight up?

I think the most beautiful words
are drifting, smoky things
with such long histories
you would have known them
as I would know them:

dawn,
the moon,
waves and boats,
laurel trees.

I think we both know the meaning
of a line of women walking
back from the beach,
some singing, some
carrying baskets—
and one who runs ahead,
runs not in a direct line,
but dips like a swallow—

and a cloudless pale blue sky.

The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007)