The Things You Said

You said that you had never seen breasts more perfect than these

Had never just lay there and kissed for so long

That our lives were two pieces

Of one whole.

You said that when you lay old

And dying (not too long from now) I

Should lay my cinnamon hair across your face

So you could breath me as

Your last breath.

You said you felt as if you were reaching into your past

To help me-as-yourself,

So many years younger.

Near the end you said

That I was like the daughter you never had.

That must’ve been why you left–

That’s what fathers do, right?

The things we say when we’re in love

Are null and voided after,

Like chalk messages muddled by rain.

Still I wonder, if years from now

I’ll be called to some retirement home in wine country

To a deathbed where

The nurses will wonder

At the still-cinnamon hair

Draped across your face like a shroud.

What a strange but devoted daughter,

They’ll think.

From the Sunday Sribblings’ prompt “Message”

The Train

Small town nights punctuated by trains
Carrying on their backs interrupted dreams
While Main Street lays like a dead man
When even the bars are closed
And the slow ballet of drunks in pickup trucks
Have woven their way home to wives
Who are leaving tomorrow, or the day after,
Which means never
Because in a town where all you can hear in the middle of the night
Is that train,  the sound of motion
Just reminds you you’re still
Because tracks are just an uncrossable border
Between the bad side of town and the good
Like horizontal prison bars.

The people who live in places where others pass through–
Shipyards and trainyards and freeway backyards–
Always stay put,
And the raging voice of the train shakes stained mugs from
Small kitchen counters
So all you can do is kneel sweeping
This mess, and wait for the next.

All you can do is lay awake listening to the train whistle
And the sound of your dreams rushing by you in the middle of the night.

Cielo Mio

Spain was always lit by you

Cielo mio, my wingless angel

And not the iberian sun.

And I slipped into my skimpy Spanish

Like an evening dress, so dark and smooth.

Two americans abroad, not caring about being lost

As long as we could find the other’s arms.

That day, in Segovia, the aquaduct, the castle’s tourets

We traded camera with a German couple, our backs against

The setting sun. How gold

With you the light was always,

Cielo mio. How hot the cafe con leche

How Spanish the Spanish people and the Spanish streets.

But I’ve begun to lose it,

The Spanish language

Forget the word for elbow

Or for caress,

Or the name of that wine we drank

Like water in the park with the pine needles falling

All around.
Spanish is receding, like your figure

That left me at the airport gate,

Leaning so heavily on the Iberia counter, giving up your tired weight,

Dead language, forgotten tongue.

Turning over a new leaf

I’m closing the book on us

So I can find my own happy ending.

A fairytale romance it was not,

Even though you rode in on your white horse

It threw a shoe and we had to shoot it.

One of those shockingly modern novels, profane

All stream of consciousness, hardly any plot

No villain or hero either

Just two flawed characters run up against each other for a time

And no one got the girl

And no one got the glory, no third act redemption here

The story just petered out without resolution.

Next time I’ll l pick up something with a little more scope and drama

Like Tolstoy, although the hero will probably end up ruined or dead,

Or better yet Austen with her logical symmetry like an English garden,

Happy ending as neat as a maiden aunt.

Or even better some Melville or Hemingway,

With no romance but that of the self,

“Men Without Women,” or something like that.

First snow

Trees glutted by the snow

And whiteness holds the light below

The pinkish sky. Winter quiet

Takes the cries of neighbor children crashing by

Dogs high-stepping in the backyard

Will soon come in, shaking

Melting powder from their shaggy backs, tongues out

As if to taste the deliciousness of being

Warm again inside.

Wanderlust

I’ve seen cathedrals and kings

Mosques and moutains,

Shook the dust of several continents off my shoes-

The sunrise over Lisbon

And the moonrise over Lima,

Jungles and jetties, forests and field, the whole world

Over, heard the wagging of

One hundred tongues.

The truth is I’d rather journey

A more domestic sphere,

I’d rather traverse

The broad hillocks of your chest,

The oceans of your eyes, the atolls of your cheeks

Dark forests of hair,

Flat planes of your abdomen and what lies below:

Undiscovered continent!

Oh what a brave new world.

No wanderlust like mine

For you.

Dare

She dared me into the sea

Fully clothed, November, Pacific coast

Such is the power of one thirteen year old girl over another,

I was half in love with her, middle school madness,

And so, the blue lips, wet chaifing jeans,

Waves like big dogs crashing against my thighes

Out there the sun disapeared, the shore disapeared, her on it

Only me and my stopped heart,

Never feeling more alive.

Junction

Yoga means “to yoke”

Which brings to mind two enormous oxen, heavy wooden harness,

Or else, erroneously, the sunny center of an egg.

But it’s more like

The happy but improbable junction

Of mind and matter

Body and soul

Breath and heart

Movement and meditation

And, most remarkably of all

My life and happiness;

Unexpected marriage, how opposites attract.

Write it in spiderwebs

Write it in spiderwebs with the morning dew

Or in the earth beneath a rock,

Write it in impermantent clouds across the sky,

Scrawl it in sand and let the tide take it,

Or else carve it in some secret part of my flesh:

He loves me not, and never did.

Rootless

I can be like those air-growing plants

Living on nothing at all,

Or a desert toad buried underground for years,

Just waiting for the rain.

I’ll wait for you

I’ll unwind shrouds

Everyday I’ll scan the shore.

I’ll make myself a lighthouse,

I’ll make myself a bay,

My house is the last one on the left,

One candle in the window

Lighting your way home.