My Grandmother’s Dream

A shout woke me in the middle of the night:

German is not something one wants to hear at 3 am.

As I burst into her beadroom, afraid she’d had a stroke,

She turned to me and smiled,

“It was my mother telling me to get up and go to school,”

A school where, eighty years ago, they beat the language out

With the sharp edge of a ruler.

But now, in the night

All sorts of things are coming back:

Her mother, fifty years gone,

And grandpa, twenty;

The german language isn’t the only thing resurfacing

As grandma is submerged.

Now, she sleeps more than she wakes,

And the dead seem more real than the living.

This slow passage towards death

Is not as clean cut as I imagined:

The wall between worlds is but

A weakly built fense,

Which we might peak though, from time to time.

I grow more used to death, I think,

Our permanent house guest

He joins us at lunch and then peanuckle, hearts,

Watches with interest the evening news.

He’s everyone’s mutual friend, I think,

Growing closer by the second.

Without Shame

For so long my life has been like a soiled lost-and-found item

I was too ashamed to claim,

Or that much regretted one-night stand

You ignore at a cocktail party, avoiding his eyes.

I had made an orphan of my life.

Now the only thing that shames me is that shame,

Caried on back back for so many years.

I denied myself the truest love I’d ever known.

Now I’d like to claim my life loud and clear

Send it home like a note pinned to a child’s coat,

Open my arms to my own life like lovers reunited,

Together after all these years.

Yoga

Yoga is the poetry of the body

Each pose is a phrase

That whispers “one”.

First Kiss

I dared him to do it

If he bowled a strike;

He didn’t but I let him anyway.

I didn’t know what to expect,

My first kiss, having

Only practiced on pillows

And the inside of my balled fist.
The sensation of his mouth

Open too wide against mine

Blended for all time with the scent of cheese nachoes

And cheap beer

The first bristlings of mustache,

Like winter grass though snow,

Tickled my chin– I laughed!

Laughed as one more mystery

Opened itself to me, like his open mouth

(It looked like a hungry baby bird’s)

Drawn out of the magician’s hat of the world.

It wasn’t my best kiss,

But it was my first.

Looking at a photograph taken five years ago at our university’s spring concert

A strong spring wind tugs back our hair:

It must have smelt of melting snow, that early in the year.

You and I stand arm-in-arm in the foreground,

Half-moon mouths caught up in mid-laugh.

We are both a pale, young-looking 18;

Your cords are slung low on your bone-white hips,

And our breasts are unblossomed flowers, mere buds.

You had deadlocks back then,

And my hair was as short as a boy’s;

You hadn’t lost a lonely year abroad

And I wasn’t two nervous breakdown’s into my twenties:

Our freshman year.

White tents and rubbish litter the background,

The sky is an indeterminate shade of gray

Curiously, over your left shoulder,

I spot my future-ex-boyfriend

(We have not yet met)

He is holding his belly as he laughs, and swigs a beer.

What strikes me about this photo is,

Well, almost everything,

But most of all the way our eyes

Like laughing slits seem closed

To all that’s yet to come,

As if we’ll always be freshman,

As if our lives will always be fresh,

And full of infinite possibilities,

Frozen in a photograph from years ago.

Laundry

I’ll come clean with a dirty secret:

I love his laundry,

Hot and fresh from the drier

Smelling of Downy and that hint that remains:

A slight musk, trace of the man

Who fills out these clothes.

Pressing slacks to my nose, cotten socks,

Slow dancing with collared shirts,

The laundromat lights so unreal.

Pigeons

Pigeons

Are much maligned for a reason,

The very reason the South Pacific

Suited me so ill.

Some people need

A certain kind of beauty

That rock doves lack,

Though sacred in Samoa.

 

It makes me wonder,

What, afterall, is sacred?

For some it’s love,

For others, hate

Or else some tightrope in between.

 

Still, I cannot feel

For the pigeon, mean in all senses,

Like a narrow island

So unloveable to me.

Bob Dylan’s Whiskey Tea

Somewhere between Napa and Berkeley

The hills turn to butter.

Emeryville, the Pacific Coast

And the lesser eveils of the world melt in

Sourdough hills, vagabond poems.

American Canyon’s not a place to hang your head 

Or otherwise show your fear.

 

A strange fever takes me over

Somewhere on Highway One.

 

Sometimes the stars fall in the vineyards,

Vinters dream cool aquamarine,

And sometimes in the redwood hills

Coyotes steal my poet’s voice and

Howl.

Tamarind tastes like shoreline

Solitude

Tastes like that beach

Every weekday morning

Empty 

But for the sounds

Seabirds, shorelines

And the changing winds.

 

I knew a doldrum beach once–

Could’ve stayed for years.

I knew a hurricane beach once,

There I couldn’t stay.

 

Now I live so far from the shore

But like a sea-shell earphone

I hear it still.

 

[I've almost forgotten 

how to hold a pen.]

Bob Dylan’s ghost haunts my view of the golden gate bridge

Bob Dylan’s ghost haunts my livingroom

Crawling in the shag carpet

Harmonicas at daybreak

Cultivating some image still 

As bewitching as box wine

Book spines,

Poetry at dusk.