Birth
Birth expands into the world
bathed in cries

blows a trumpet
to announce the divine

escalates
a human being

across the bandwidth
of the universe.


Birth unwinds
the pattern of a name

finds love
as creation is pain

only wants
to run with it

trembling
on a slender dew point.


Birth is a song
for each life

takes a kiss
and parts the sea

into
shoreline

delivered with a bow
when its done.

Daughter of Wind and Water 

Name Refrain
My heart contains an extra chamber
where I hide my name from the tide,
the only thing left to me
from the old days. Mine
until I swim the channel.

Named after a grandmother I never knew,
a sound translated from Hungarian into English,
picked by Edgar Allen Poe
whose Raven my mother recited at bed-time,
a solid thing that cast no shadow.

She didn't allow me a nickname.
I stayed who I was,
a girl who spoke to stray dogs on the run.
I see with the brown flecks
of my mother's green eyes,

I'm my father's voice in the shower,
my father who ripped across the Atlantic at such speed,
he diverted the current,
and my mother's attention
from bridling sea-horses with seaweed.

My parents wait for me to swim
past the weekend and beyond the bridge
where seagulls fly above water
looking for a drifting name,
any easy target for them to pick off.

Death Valley, April 2005 

Prayer to Death Valley
1.
The desert blooms gold in the spring
where I've come to make a pilgrimage
after years of living in cities.

All I hear is expanse.

Blooms yellow gold with purple mats
spreading across the desert floor
like a beautiful contagion.

I stand below sea level
on a skating pond of salt
looking out on two tectonic plates
and so want to catch it,

the way a flower struts its stuff
on a shelf of rock.

Change me.
Make me new.

2.
All I hear is expanse.

Long ago,
near Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx,
I strolled with my doll, Judy,
along a slate pavement.

I remember how she smelled
when I first opened her box,
like a bird with the scent
of cut grass on its wing.

She had an alluvial fan of brown hair.

I loved her so much.
When her sawdust brains poured
into my hand,
my mother bought
new dolls to take her place
with clothes, and some could talk.

Imposters.

I vowed silence
until I found out
what had gone wrong,
flew back
to the only place where trees grew
in my borough, Pelham Bay Park.


3.
All I hear is expanse.

I've seen people
walk through a revolving door
to find air conditioning
on a long afternoon
exhausted by heat,
looking for water.

The dead cannot be replaced,
only remembered.

It's creation we know nothing about.


4.
Valley, uplift this daughter.
Fold together my pain.
Change me.
Make me new.

Show me the terrible place where love comes from.

School Figures
A student of harpoons
with holes drilled inside lungs,
and how to pack caverns
with compost from each day,

until there's no more
batting to stuff down there,
or she's unable to keep
cotton-mouthing his name,

when emptiness forms
a pond of tension
for some recognizable thing
to skitter across, or not.

On the Job
I've tested positive for boredom,
rushed to the balcony twice, no three times,
hung my head over the pilasters
and hoped for someone Romeoesque
to call me with his swan song
into discus hurling the whole thing:
pension, security, health insurance.

I've tested positive for Baudelaire
running giddy-up in my bloodstream,
invoking his curse for the ego power chumps:
"Manges la merde." Eat shit.

But what can I do? Centrifuge more results?
If I don't figure out something soon,
I'll be addicted to boredom.

Trees in Two Voices
Several trees crowd on a bank.

Does it matter what kind of trees they are?

Yes. Oak, Bay. A few others.
Here come birds to land in their green corona.

Can a bird choose between branches?

Yes. A department store of trees.
Right size, smell. Some trees grow more proud.

Do you mean more tall?

Yes. They steal sunlight.
Smaller trees scavenge beneath them.

Does this make the small trees cry?

No. They siphon water.
Growth is in the roots.

Can you hear what the stream says?

Rush-a-la, rush-a-la.
It's the sound of time washing.

What's Going On?
Vietnam was televised,
but not the Revolution,
chants echoed across Sproul Plaza,
monks, nuns
doused themselves with gasoline
as an appetizer for a lit match,
Hmong storycloths traveled down river,
while different pieces of soldiers
chatted with each other on gurnies.

I am there on this last day
before cases are dismantled
holding an audio cassette,
but listening to something else,
as adults explain,
"The V they are making is the peace sign."

I am there in these last days of winter,
and see a man point to a display,
"I use to deliver that same newspaper,"
watch children nod with understanding,
as someone touches their finger
to history, how much it hurts.

--written after seeing "What's Going On? California and the Vietnam Era" at the Oakland Museum, August 28, 2004 - February 27, 2005

Anger
for Anita Barnes
1.
Anger raises its own shield so thick
nothing can penetrate it
cry no shout no hand

when invisible shields are up
phasers ready to strike
no getting through

a thousand cobras
in outer space
for too long cold

even for them.
Snakes come home
from whatever ouroboros,

why I wouldn't fly
the first seven years we were married
I heard hissing.


2.
Why was I so angry
a young girl
who had everything

living in the Bronx
commuting to high-school
two hours away

weekends
at a posh
hospital address?

I never wanted to go to kindergarten.
A teacher with a hair-net
who locked me inside closets.

She wanted me
to line up by size,
her mind so boring.

In third grade, my mother
rolled out dough
to make me

into something
she could understand,
my father

with his eyes
of brown leather
bathed in acetone

so soft
enough to see me
rose-colored.

When they both died,
the pie was opened,
I was alone with my anger.


3.
Then there was you,
my husband of 20 years,
with a curtain of anger

you raised
above your daily performance,
Red Velvet Gone Bad,

is what I called it,
with demon authors
who drank you under the table.

At first,
I couldn't get enough,
I was fascinated

watching your aura borealis
spread out in lights
until I became

a character in the play.
You saved a part for me.
I was the villain.

Then the two of us
could get angry.
Every day blades

went up in a salute.
After awhile,
I tip-toed around,

threw words
back at you.
But you were too agile, loud,

had spent years in improv.
What could I do to save myself?
Duck.

4.
You said you loved me.
I can still smell the nicotine between my fingers
from when we used to sit down with each other

at the table and talk
about life and love
and what we were going to eat for dinner,

a tin of smoked oysters,
together with
a glass of red wine.

Why couldn't you see what was happening?
For years we occupied separate bedrooms,
started our day together

in mid-afternoon.
Now you've left me
with our two children

and the sound of my own anger,
which is like water
hissing from a punctured hose

someone's forgotten in the front-yard
after she's been out-of-town
longer than expected.

Brit Shalom: Convenant of Peace
Long ago I looked
at sky and saw
it was all morning glories,

blue flowers
stretching from
the top of my head

and climbing along
an invisible thread
the way Jack's

beanstalk
grazed the window
of a giant's palace.

Now, I'm no longer
a young girl
who can turn

sky
into flowers
during my morning watch,

but, even so,
I practice
beneath a dome

outlined
by winter rain
in curves of light.

I believe once
you know how to hope,
you never forget.

Psyche Talks to Cupid on a Wood Bench
Along Leona Canyon Trail,
miner’s lettuce just beginning
to surface above the leaf mulch,

I wonder, Cupid, where you've flown to
with your strong white wings,
leaving me to watch television?

Maybe you’d planned to ditch me
all along, never getting close,
appearing only as a shadow.

Why else would you never eat breakfast,
go for a walk, dig in the garden,
do things married people do together?

Maybe it was your way of protecting me
so I wouldn’t have memories
to draw inside my blanket.

It worked too well.
I still want
what I can't have.

Maybe you and my parents,
who stormed off so many years ago,
were in cahoots.

So I ask,
what would you have me do?
I hear the burble of an approaching spring.

Paris Super Saver
Last night I took a day-trip to Paris,
packed a bag and threw it over my shoulder,
walked down the checkerboard street, and caught a bus.

Right before me sitting in the back
were Rimbaud and Verlaine cutting it up on a yellow seat
studded with cigarette burns.

I wanted to say something,
but instead, I burped for cover.
They looked at each other,

waved their arms like wands,
veins river-rafting over their knuckles,

and turning from the window
where I pretended to stare, I finally said,
"Thanks, guys. I so needed to get out of there."

Invocation of the Dead
If the living cannot save the planet,
let the dead confabulate in coffee klatches and tea rooms,
remain polite for a short while
before spinning on bar stools
with the ferocity of a million drunks
spiralling out of control on a cushion
of portobello mushrooms caps
and frisbees covering their collective ass,
let them scream on a ferris wheel of light so loud
so loud someone will hear;

pray that they release their gangs of children
from the sewers of Rwanda,
Bosnia, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Sudan
or unhinge those stuck between two tectonic plates,
let them dig up AIDS orphans
still young enough to hope for parents,
coax them back for one moment
while we pay an entrance fee
of a punched red ticket,
but forget everything once we're in.

If the living cannot save this planet
let the dead chant,
the first indigenous people,
even as a voice announces,
the park will be closing in five minutes;
after a day of riding Phantom's Revenge,
we realize there's no home
for us to go back home to,
all we can do is to kick a few pizza crusts
to the side of the road.

Death Semi-Waka
Now I know that death
is being in the lot late
next to our building,
hearing my name called, "Lenore,"
hearing my name called
to come upstairs for dinner,
but longing to stay
and watch the colors, listen
for shadows silence granite.

Tsunami
Just a few years since 9-11,
it's all over the Internet, linking headlines, one after another
bodies stretched on a beach, washed back to shore,
the smell of thousands gone to heaven

as survivors sit inside a circle of grief for lost children and mothers,
fathers, holiday goers at peak-season with an ocean view,
indigenous peoples extinct below the ground cover,

while the war in the Middle East,
which has absorbed our world with its killing
continues to make a blood sacrifice
for some religious rant or right.

Nature has reclaimed her theatre.
Give succor to the living.

Okay

I'm thinking you protected me, belched loud on a rock so I wouldn't notice how you couldn't dance the way I always wanted you. Our link together is billowing silk until it cuts

through the force of years as you got dragged up on a beach, while I was washed into the sea, and how we both missed each other. I'm thinking the computer keyboard are piano keys to a song I'm playing.

Christmas Eve 2004
Along the trail,
there's a sewing machine,
its bobbin a rusted minaret for sparrows.

I think the fairies were repairing
the world last night,
at least along Leona Canyon.

Looking Backward
Some people think a house is a castle,
but yours was a citadel
where you holed yourself off from the world,

watching tv at your desk in a bedroom
that really was a living room.
Some people think a house is a castle.

Each day you cursed the world in your room
allowing dawn no asylum through shut blinds,
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Moving from your desk to a computer desk,
inside a character who was king of them all.
Some people think a house is a castle.

Busy? You were dodging memories,
wrapped in the lineament of a child
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Yours, an inviolable space, a bubble
I, or strangers could rarely permeate, a place
where you holed yourself off from the world.

Offshore Spherific
She worked in a programming sphere
where the passage of conscience
made her think life was a reality show,
any day a contestant could go packing,
as judges reached the shoreline
the whole thing could blow up in her face.

Real problem: there was so little face-to-face
in the web sphere
where a straight line
had no up and no down and no conscience,
only for those who failed to go packing,
and no one was underwriting that one-hour show.

At least not immediately. The politicians talked a good show;
they looked her right in the face,
said jobs were in the mailroom packing,
and unless she played along with their surround sphere
by going offshore with her conscience,
she could forget everything, including a byline.

Not even the networks knew about wavy lines,
they didn't have enough imagination to show
a "crisis of conscience."
Like any sane person, she did an about face;
there was so much BS in the hemisphere,
now she's judging for herself who needs to go packing.

If she got the word to go pack,
it's because her signature wavered on the dotted line
where she'd rhapsodically doodled, entranced by the material sphere,
wanting to feed her hunger, so she could show
no hunger; no question, it was her face,
a credit card never had a conscience.

But it wasn't about conscience,
was it? And it wasn't about who was going packing.
That was a threat. As plain as her face,
as the nose on a fish who's just met a fishing line
and finally understands its own element; no show,
the real thing: just being tangled in her own perfect sphere.