Exit HeRe

i love you like a biscuit
melted soft and heated sweet
the sign post marks the distance
30 miles, twenty feet

with each passing gated farmhouse
each long-tongued, wagging cow
i water for the taste of it
only 19 miles now

the buttered, floured memory
of your golden yellow kiss
has left me as a beggar
wanting more, tasting bliss

1 mile left to your truck stop
i can hardly feel my feet
as they lunge onto your doorstep
your smile, my hunger
let's eat

Event at Mauna Loa

A fallen seed
from yesternight's bright flower
tumbles amid discarded husks
and humbled trees before
the crimson river's splayed
and crackling knees.
The red flood drags its dense
demented wake--seething,
heaving, blacktopping
root and reed.
Bedfellows strange beneath
the field--cinder and seed.
However deep the bed,
at some appointed hour,
with waft of dew and brush of light
fanning desire,
the seed commands its pavement dome.
It gives.
And, as all hope by hope is healed,
the flower lives.

Japanese Beetles

130 minutes
for us to sit in silence
the sun burns my face
so I turn away
wishing you would speak
but knowing
every word you're thinking
scares me
like Japanese beetles in my hair

Dance

Years of ballet as a child,
She walks on toes pointed out,
Soft as snow steps.

Costumes now hang
In a closet. Bright lights,
Boardrooms, no men
In tights. She's learning
To set her heels,
Solid like ice.

Make-up still masks
The pain of a pirouette.

The Raincoat

I know not from where the raincoat came,
Only that it hung in the corner of the hall
By the old stuffed chair near the game room,
Where old family pictures lined the wall.
As a child, I used to marvel at the fabric,
Worn and tattered, yet golden in its hues;
And I would think how one day, if I were sick,
I could put it on along with Daddy's shoes.
It seemed like a comfortable way
To hold my hurt inside--just wrap it tight,
Close my eyes, and ask my Mom to pray
With me to ward off evils of the night.
I knew that it was safe and strong, for Daddy
Wore it on those days of rage and pain
When things weren't all so happy,
With crops near death from too much rain.
Today at Mom's I finally put it on.
It was rather small and did not fit at all--
Quite strange, for in that house as Daddy's son,
It always seemed alone and very tall.

Me With Two Roots

My aunt with the rhythm
moves to exotic music
brown hand beats drum
I begin to dance

My cousin with the wide hips
wears her hair natural
she steals all the stares
I let my feathers go

My husky uncle with the food
eating chocolate-covered almonds
near the Tequila and black-eyed peas
I sip some poison

We with our eyes
stare off far away
we vision our thoughts
I see African trees in Mexico

Family Album

each time I open the tattered book
I find myself drawn in
by the angle of my father's chin
and his father's before him
and how my brother's small head
even then turned toward the window
in a way that made me know
he longed to go, to leave
that set of jaw, that olive skin
that name he shared with generations.
I'm sure I puzzled even then
about what every turn of face might mean
and just what would become of him
when age had closed the shutter
and the only place to look
was in

Sorry, I Just Couldn't Make It

Fell in love
In Chicago . . .
Doing homework.
It felt like I fell off a building,
Or passed out after a day of fasting.
It hit me as hard as not finding a parking place at dinnertime.
Do you see the sleep lines of my face?
I obviously have still not recovered
Because I can't find my shoes,
All my clothes are dirty,
And I don't have anything to wear.
My heart has been taken hostage,
And I can't stop dialing for help.
I feel I've been abducted by aliens.
I wake up and can't walk.
I've got 24-hour amnesia
All the time.
I know I'm in Chicago, but
Am I still in love?

Breakfasts and Sara, You Were Beautiful

Every day I think we went to the cafe,
the cafe of vapors and rhyme
and the circular truths going 'round,
truths of every day, like the sound from the
jukebox down there, our talk scratching
like an old record . . .

I spilled my confessions like coffee and
we mopped them up, the soppy glop like
a plate-load of me.
I'm sorry I'm sorry
An old record going 'round . . .

The smells of cinnamon and of grounds . . .
and I begin to think of you as a priest,
in your absolution and your grace.
Oh, and the long hours 'round noon,
your presence like sugar
on a long-handled spoon.

Pastoral

Outside the library, two cows browse
the still-wet grass,
unaware of the surge of intellect
going on around them, unaware of poetry,
politics, and what the fall fashion forecast is;
they are only hungry like me.

It's a clear case of mud and muddlement,
this morning's rain clinging to the pasture . . .
and I still clinging to my dreams.

For now things are in balance;
the weight of the mind,
a spinning feather in the wind
never touching ground,
while the two cows browse,
blissfully unaware.

No One Decides These Things

Once, when she was four years old,
she took the hand of her father
and stepped over the puddles left
in the potholes from the rainstorm.

One puddle was underneath an exhaust pipe.
It shone with oily colors: swirls of red, yellow, green.

"Daddy, I see a dead rainbow."

Her father clutched his heart
because it was such a beautiful thing
for her to say.

The years have gone fast.

Here she is now,
thirty-one years old, trying
to breathe new life into a dead bird,
mouth to beak,
with her own small son watching
very carefully.