Some more poems

Courtyard of the Museo des Belles Artes

She’s brought January rain to San Miguel.
The poor people here are wearing
garbage bags to keep out the wet cold

and at night they are dying. Despite this
men in the square still call out Hey, chica
to the blond northern whore as she passes by.

She sits in the courtyard, skin dead-white,
served tea by a Mayan with blue-black hair
thick and strong as a cable-tow.

Four cobbled paths converge in the courtyard
from the points of the compass to a stone Lamb
of God, bathed by a fountain.

All around there are leaves like falling tears,
tongue-like, arrow-like, all pointing fingers–
there is the pagan, she who does not believe.

The church bell’s clang begins– single beats,
tranquil at first, familiar, but then
a furious alarm, a mad-man’s hammering.

Mexican Silver

In the back of every jewelry store
there is a girl who is kept busy polishing away
the taint of disappointed love,
spread through songs
of white-haired guitarists in the public park.

The corrosion of funerals
penetrates even midday in the square
with its heavy equestrian statue
flanked by papyrus reeds–

exhalations of the misunderstood,
the jilted, the abandoned,
effluvia that burn the nostrils

each adding a distinctive tinge
to the patina on the wide bracelets like shackles,
the yellowing waxen figures

Mexico

Bless her with pink
and bleak citron yellow of paper flowers
with the penetential green of funerary tiles

Bless her with onyx, glossy and faceted,
with verdigris and noble oxidized silver,
square paving stones of agate.

Bless her with blue jasmine,
with Madonna lilies and the grey pads
of prickly pear.

Bless her with flaking clay pots
and domes of eroded stone coarsened with lichen,
gold leaf and the crystal of chandeliers.

Bless her with fountains and with arches,
with palm trees and oranges hanging like lamps–
let black and silver mariachi play in the public park.

The Honey Jar

Aubade

The shutters shift on their hinges
in the dawn wind.
All night it seems the swifts have been screaming,
whipping between the ancient houses
whose stucco walls are pink, yet not pink.

Empty thunder woke me.

I am as I was last night
in meditation:
a channel of breath, a glass vase containing thoughts
swimming in harmless circles.

A flock of pigeons is blown across
the aperture of my tall bedroom window.
White muslin curtains lift and swell.

Can I be swayed by desire?

Hotel of Dreams

Welcome. This is the entrance hall. Yes, it is
grey and unprepossessing. We don't need
to be attractive. The dreams you see lounging
in the dormitories, slouched across old mattresses,
smoking unrecognizable substances by the pool,
are all unavailable.

Although it is difficult to understand
why anyone would want them
when seen up close, their very inaccessibility
and aloofness makes them desirable.
We often have break-ins.

The dreams don't want out, of course.
They get three squares a day, only
have to help cook and wash up every other week.
They are perfectly happy watching TV
or listening to baseball games on the radio.
Here they don't have to live up to anything,
are never a disappointment to anyone. Now,
would anyone care to make a reservation?


Exhibition

Your upper lip forms the couplet
to the octet of your nose.
Your lower lip droops, a ripe fruit
or not quite ripe, mostly carmine
red and firm to touch
with the tongue, but
your mouth is slightly open, dumbly
wondering at the machinery of perspective
with that most intelligent part of you,
the bitter black coffee of your eyes.

How sweet it would be
to investigate the slope of your shoulder,
to compare the monument
of your nape to that of the marble Apollo
we circle like opposing planets.

If I could only for a moment
make you stop thinking about art.

Mermaid

Tonight you watch me
from your porch, wondering
which house I have left, barefoot,
without a wrap.

Moonlight clothes me, my skin
blanched by it, eye sockets shadowed
so deep you cannot guess
their expression, pearls
on my neck thrumming with paradoxical
luminescence, passionate and cool. I sense each step
barefoot on wet sand, sea-smoothed: you watch
my unfamiliar woman-toes grasp the slip of kelp-fronds.

The sky sucks up wind from the ocean
landward, where I am exiled.
You are strong, warm, golden,
like nothing in my native country.

Will you not cover me
with your coat,
lead me back into your home?

The Selkie

They came upon a lake in the summer hills
and no sooner did he, the trickster,
scent the water, than he changed
to a brown otter,
slipped into a new skin,
to roll and dive in a fresh element.

She was left wading in the shallows
like a child, leaning to interrogate the sand.
But longing works on her like a spell
until it lifts her out
on the surface of the water and she walks
there, like no other creature.

She reaches him as he dives.
When he comes up for air,
he will see her
as she is.

Riddle

What is it that has been so long, waiting–
in a sidewalk cafe at noon with pastis and olives,

in a darkened room where fresh figs ripen
on the bedside table,

among lavender flowers that must be bruised
to release their essence?

It comes when it will, regardless.
It chooses to play with dangerous toys,
is never on time, interrupts decent people
when they are having a conversation.

It does not forgive, can
never be forgotten– in this evening
under a linden tree in a deserted square,
bodies resonating like tuned bells, our

hands may touch, grasp,
despite everything,

everything.

Figure of St. Francis in Bronze

He stands on a plinth of broken marble
his hands held outwards, cupping
an intangible gift. Thin streams trickle
from the moss under his feet to a basin,
and more: his generosity pours into a gutter
where all animals can drink–

like the brindled dog that drank from your hands
filled with water from a city fountain
on a sultry night of chattering starlings
when I first knew your touch
and grateful, shivering,
took what is more important than water¬:
gained strength to return love like a spring
unstopped, a flow, soaking,
swelling seed and bud into mortal
grass and flowers.

The Fig Tree

Before she left she stared down the fig tree
outside the bedroom window.
What right had it to be so fecund, so full?

She had let the summer in.
Flowers filled the empty basket of her ribs.

The green figs, ripe now,
give their red hearts to others.

Flagellum

Silversmiths of Avila made exquisite whips,
handle proportioned for female hands,
knopped with an acorn or a fleur de lys,
a mystical number of flexible strands
bound with a silver braid, each filament
bearing a cross or dainty heart, or spears
biting the naked flesh, bruising at first,
then drawing virgin blood, so scarlet tears

drop from each terminating charm.
Later, wounds will fester, glazing
pain with fever and rampant demons.
Then secret scars, the badge of blazing
limitless love, scars that tell of a vow
fulfilled, a whispered detail of the Passion.

Desire, sharpener of senses

Infuriated, she throws the soap
into the suitcase,
packing to leave.

Choked with silence,
humiliated, vulnerable,
she is as dangerous as an empty pan on a high fire.

When she walk past him
neither of them looks the other in the eyes.

She has no appetite, terrible thirst,
can’t sit down, can’t stand up.

She stands outside his door at midnight,
willing it to open.

The Petals

All my friends told me his smile was a lie,
his charm the blackest magic. The sound
of his voice was sunshine on a honey jar.

He arched over me, a ribbed shield:
the skin of his back smooth as milk
while I flowed under him, strong

as an April stream. It was an unlooked-for
blossoming, uncalculated, rash.
When he was gone, the petals, torn by rain, fell.

Looking Once More At The Photograph

When he moved in close to touch her hand,
slipped between parked cars to cross the road
beside her, arm around her waist,
she came into flower like night-blooming
cereus, once in ten years.

Later she kissed his forehead, his ear, his neck
and he claimed to have recited Aves to resist–

In this season her garden is full,
its skin splitting with gorgeous fruit.
She is writing better than ever

and there, out of focus, wearing
black socks with his shorts, is he,
a plain man, she sees now.

How the Mantis does it

Cut the head from a male in the act of mating.
It will not matter much. The female mantis
is looking forward to a romantic dinner
afterwards.

Relieved of nattering mantis thoughts the spine
remembers unhindered the deep rhythm of sex.
With the head off, it’s more reliable.

Our consciousness is made with memories
pulled from the giddy present. Without memory,
no fear, no regret, no guilt.

Aspire to lose memory in the service of pleasure,
that karmic sense of immanence. For us, a state of grace
can be achieved without decapitation.

The Loser in Love

Like the Commisioner hated Inspector Clouseau
(destroyer of my plans)
Like Wile E. Coyote hated the Roadrunner
(too smart for your own good)
Like Bluto hated Popeye
(more lovable than I)

You, Luke and I, Darth Vader
You, the Whale and I the Captain,
the obsessed, the vengeful:
You, Lucifer and I your jealous god.

I pursue you: injure, vanquish,
cast you out. This is how much
I hate: this is how much I love.