Heraclitean
In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet.
In goes the philosophy teacher
explaining the theory of eternal
return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet,
still owing money to Mozart. In
goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel
of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten.
Every river is Lethean,
so why should we care
if it’s not the same river? I hate
how everything changes, tree
to failing term paper, chatelaine
to beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc.
The heart softening faster than cereal
but then hardening to a relic
which turns into another line
of depressed poetry to recite
to the next eager trainee
anxious to be more than lint.
Going up, you’re also going down, so either
way, as your mother said, Be nice.
When she went in, she was very thin.
Earth, air, fire, water, mother.
Fish pulse slowly under the river ice.
Pima Canyon
Do I look scrawny? Elizabeth asked, on her miserable Parkinson’s diet,
no more foods she loved, she wasn’t supposed to drink
but she was drinking a little, red wine, because you can’t forgo everything,
and in any case, you can’t secrete a protective layer like a tree frog
or stay still as a cottontail or pretend you’re a stick or rock or flower
to keep yourself safe, the world seeps in no matter what.
Plastics in rain, microwaves, x-rays, all the invisibles, dry-cleaning chemicals
damaging cells in your brain. My whole childhood, my brothers and I slept
under cheap electric blankets, we could have erupted in flames.
You can’t go back to being a girl, having a smaller shadow, running shirtless
through the weedy yards to dodge whatever’s waiting for you in the dark
beneath your bed. Here in the desert the mountains glow every evening,
the saguaros grow spiny and upright, pocked with nest holes. On the trail, quail rustle
in the mesquite, a shy coyote trots away down a dry wash, stopping to look back
with its yellow eyes. Poor coyote, it won’t live very long in the wild.
Ask the canyon how long before my friend’s tremor worsens and she can’t
write her name. Ask the planes, painting their dirty contrails on the sky,
one headed for the airport, one droning toward the military base.
Maybe we should let our hair go gray, Elizabeth says, stopping to adjust her hat.
Her black hair looks wet in the sun. Maybe, I say. But not yet, darling. Not yet.
Cigar Box Banjo
Blind Willie Johnson could coax
music from a single string. God plucked a rib
and found a woman. Concert aria
in the gypsy song, long groan
of orgasm in the first kiss, plastic bag
of heroin ripening in the poppy fields.
Right now, in a deep pocket of a politician’s brain,
a bad idea is traveling along an axon
to make sure the future resembles a cobra
rather than an ocarina.
Still there’s hope in every cartoon bib
above which a tiny unfinished skull in
its beneficence dispenses a drooling grin.
The heart may be a trashy organ,
but when it plucks its shiny banjo
I see blue wings in the rain.
At Seventy
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka
I need a frozen sea for this axe... I need to remember something...
but what...I need to remember that space isn't empty,
it's some kind of field...Particles pop up & then disappear
like those prairie dogs I watched in the desert...
Sometimes I need a desert...a mountain at sunset
where the old saguaros gather to lift their arms
to the mystery...I believe in the mystery...Maybe I don't need
to understand much of anything ...What a relief...But still
the water beneath my feet keeps churning...The past
keeps trying to pull me down like I'm hooked on a line--
isn't everyone?--by some patient undersea god...
blood in our mouths...So many rooms of memory
at the bottom of the sea...bedrooms, party rooms, family
rooms, ugly rooms the parents lay in, waiting
for the end...It's our turn soon...
But don't think about it...Think of the ice
in space, deep in the crevasses of the moon...
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto...
I have an axe for all that...if I could only dislodge it
from my heart...
Day of the Undead
2024 Election
Trump's winged Tesla is drawing near...Someone should start serving
their time...or the martinis....Halloween's over, giant skeletons disappearing
from the yards, ghosts folded & put away. The witches are still drowning,
going down like torpedoed ships. The headless trussed turkeys are drawing near,
the wild-eyed shoppers stagger into the deep, unlovely woods...Shaken, or stirred?
Red pill, or blue? Ever taken a pill, not knowing what it's for?
Let's not talk about politics ever again. I'm going to start fresh... I'm going to be a squirrel
among squirrels, hoarding my acorns & old pizza slices, stashing my sutras & moldy feathers...
I'm going to run from predators in a zigzag pattern, to avoid the slings & arrows
of disinformation. The pumpkin we carved is still rotting on the porch.
My squirrel kin have been at it all week, first the eyes & forehead,
any minute the jagged smile...The weather's turned colder
than a witch's IUD...A squirrel can smell food after it's buried in the ground
but no one else can...I'm going to just lie here quietly, interred in my sheer evening gown....
Monsoon Season
Here beside the enormous
silence of the mountain
the birds of Arizona cross on their errands
and the heat swells like an edema toward the clouds
darkening all afternoon.
The great herds of rain are set loose
to surge over the many-armed saguaros, the spindly mesquite
in the parking lots of restaurants and nail salons,
thundering toward the college stadium and military base
and the institutional rooms
where I want to believe
the very old switch on
like forgotten appliances and turn
their faces to the window,
tangled in the cords of memory, suddenly
electric and speechless with joy.
Little Elegies for the Year
January
Hello, pig. Here is your afterlife:
eight people with cell phones
tweeting your roasted carcass
in the amber light of a restaurant.
February
Black dog in the snow.
A frozen bicycle.
Ice riming the pots
meant for herbs.
Helicopter over the river,
carrying a heart in a box.
March
There are rivers under the skin
and sometimes horses come to them.
April
Jon’s being buried in Florida.
Hours after the rain has stopped
its damp love still darkens
the splintering boards of the deck.
May
Child’s Shoes
worn to school that morning,
used to identify her remains.
June
M’s child is sick of work
T’s child is full of Percs
W’s cancer: terminal
Th: petty criminal
F & S have failed each other
Su is going to be a mother
July
Family Plot
Under the stone, the butcher
who held my father in his arms.
August
She dug up her dead cat.
Emerson opened his wife’s coffin.
Nature face to face.
And Winky, still losing his fur
And ignoring her call.
September
Sorrow Radio
bringing you the songs that once made you happy.
October
Shoes in Gaza,
shoes in Ukraine,
slogging through puddles
of blood and rain.
November
In the end we couldn’t solve the problem
of evil, so it was just another dinner
while elsewhere some grew richer
and some grew thinner.
December
Those were her last days.
“I know you can hear me.”
And she looked at me harder, I thought.
NOTES:
"Heraclitean" and "Cigar Box Banjo" are reprinted from My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014
"Pima Canyon" first appeared in Rattle.
