let a wound
on her 43-year-old foot fester
for two months until it sagged
to a blue mush,
until that leg was chiseled
down to half today.
Now I can’t decide whom to blame
for this latest catastrophe.
She wasn’t dealt a good hand at birth
my husband always said
about her disability—this mind
that can’t count change,
and trusts too easily.
But I was the one who let her leave
the board and care home to live
with the boyfriend.
Still, how much blame is mine when
she kept running away
to him anyway?
I can’t blame the boyfriend either.
He does all the laundry, all the shopping,
all the cooking
despite being legally blind
and on dialysis.
Blame isn’t black or white.
It bleeds across a spectrum,
in pale grays and starchy whites,
and bruised blues
like a rainbow.
Blame leads to talking to yourself
and feeling stuck
and wondering if things had gone
better for her
if my husband hadn’t died.
But blame is also myth-making.
And offers second chances, ways to build
one more version
of the past.
Stepping out mornings into my sunny garden
Coffee mug in one hand, I turn on the hose
with the other.
Cool water showers the herbs and I hear
a quiet applause rise
in me for their perseverance—
those deer did not return.
I pinch buds from the basil and the scent
bursts like green confetti into
my nose and move on
to my mother-in-law’s orchid.
It’s lived 13 years without her now —
Lived with her a decade before that
neglected by her and now by me
who neglected both.
And yet it endures.
Like her, it keeps on giving.
I’ve pruned my guilt about it but
it grows back like her orchid’s improbable
blooms, a sweet gift and a silent
rebuke.
Back in the kitchen,
the basil’s scent won’t let go.
Each time I brush hair from my eyes,
a wave of green spice fills
me up and quiets the sting
of that regret and of children
who take too long to call.
But when they do, it’s not the basil’s calm
but the sudden, soaring thrill I feel
when seeing that orchid bloom again.
about the times we worked together.
We agree it feels very long ago.
My friend looks fabulous for her age.
A good decade more younger.
Her wardrobe, makeup, manicures,
cosmetic interventions were--and are--
tourist attractions.
So it shocks that she is losing her mind.
Six times I tell her my man has died.
And now she inquires cheerfully,
So how’s your husband?
I return our talk to the past she remembers still well.
That beautiful past when my man was living
and my friend remembered his name.
to be serenaded every night.
But people do that.
The bugs sing to seduce yet keep on singing after
every orgasm for the pure joy
of it, I guess.
What a world!
I love to hear them on my evening walks but try
not to visualize a thousand black bugs squeezing
their hind legs together.
How that kills my reverence!
Tonight along the water's edge embraced
by leafy trees of varied ethnicities,
among them a splattering of lost marigolds.
crickets croon to me and
a jolt of their joy rips through me.
A jolt of privilege to walk in this lovely place
where it is safe except for the frightened snake
& a family of raccoons rustling the brush and thistle.
My house is not in flames.
My family not bombed.
My son not being waterboarded.
No army turns off my water.
Stops the delivery of food.
I have medicine.
This feels like a miracle!
Because elsewhere (you know where)
whole families are hunted like prey.
Even the stars above them die with less pain.
But here the oleander
that seemed dead all winter
is alive & abundant, well watered.
How did I get so lucky?
My wings rub together with the band
of crickets.
Whom do I thank for all this?
The calls from hospice come every
Another weakening,
a further descent.
My brother's eyes hardly open,
no quiver under lids.
His life a dreamless sleep, I am told,
he swims away from his shipwrecked flesh.
Nearly gone, stepping out
of it as he would from a suit,
loosening the tie, unbuttoning the shirt, dropping the jacket to the floor,
one by one.
What can death take that this deep
sleep has not already stolen ?
Today a nurse puts the phone to his ear
so I can speak, Frank, I love you.
She's sure he hears me.
She says hearing's the last to go.
No loved one stands beside his bed.
No wife. No child. No God.
Just my voice from another world,
my words conjuring for his vanishing mind,
a compass star
on a dusking sky.
That is my hope. It is all I can hope.
There's nothing left but that.
My grandson wants to bury our black lab’s ashes
in the west corner of our yard
under the Manzanita tree that leans on
his bedroom window
until he remembers we plan to move to Alameda
and worries we'd have to dig her up
and bury her in our new yard.
I propose that Ruby would want to stay
at the home she spent her life in,
her bones nurturing the tree that shades
the room she shared with you.
And you know, I add, that tree stands high
above the house
and so all of the San Francisco Bay
can be enjoyed from every branch
and when we take our walks along the shore,
we will be in the tree’s view
and it will always find us
if we want to be found.
I would love that. I want to be found,
my grandson says and because he is only 8,
we hug with extravagant affection.
Don't ask me how I'm feeling.
Because I'm reeling.
No, no ask me...please.... ask!
Because I’ll tell you
even if you don't inquire,
even though I'm drained
of all routine desire.
I want to tell you. I really do.
I don't want to be alone
emoting so much blue.
I need to report it.
Or should I say, deport it.
What is the right word
for all my anguish?
What explains this weeping?
This mood unrelenting, creeping
as a shadow
follows me around
from my bedroom to the kitchen,
From the market to the plaza?
I know the diagnosis—it is Gaza.
I start the day by eating toast
to begin a new ritual in my new
moss green kitchen
where I hang a gold and blue image
of Our lady of Guadalupe
to save me from misfortune
because I have always been superstitious
and now grateful
that I don’t live anywhere near
Palestine, Ohio
where a homeowner with a bad cough
took a microphone and told the
CEO of Norfolk Southern
that his company stinks.
I too have a right to feel wounded
by miseries bursting from pipes
and potholes and cracked sidewalks
across my state.
Inside me a loud cry
will not cease
for I know there
is no savior, no path away
from slumped bodies tossed
under feeways by big owners.
of everything.
The smoke of small fires drifts out
from the underpasses
so we cannot forget
who sleeps there.
But I have avocados, sonnets,
leaves from Lake Chabot, a grandchild,
a plane ticket.
I can look but not get
away.
The poet to my right coils and uncoils.
Flattens her chest against the table.
Crosses and uncrosses her legs.
She just can’t contain
herself in a single form when she
speaks of her mean lovers.
Not her on my left with a penchant
for all the other hard things in life,
which she reads to us with
spine straight as a rod.
Her whole body pleading,
Please don’t hurt me.
Another sits deadpan.
Life has scraped her clean.
Taken her apart bone by bone.
Washed and dressed her
and set her down across from me.
Her poems fidget. Search
for a place for the pain to start.
She asks, Can someone help me?
We writers model courtesy, self-control.
There’s not one carnival vibe among us.
We don’t even blink when our teacher
tells us he will soon be dying.
On command we pick up our pens--
our rescue—
And write down his prompt—Mercy.
And then beg for it
shamelessly.
Microsoft buys Activision; Kroger buys Albertsons; AT&T buys CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT; Warner Bros, Disney buys Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox; Google buys smaller things, Comcast buys everything else
Another merger, just as the prophet
Marx predicted.
Capital never sleeps.
In continuous motion, sucking all
its forked and flicking tongue
can bag in this craving
for omnipotence
over nations, over new planets.
Soon over Black Holes.
And we the ruined shops and souls
are just their fuel.
And we the stars that twitch
then vanish over their event horizons,
are torn into indivisible bits
where once we were whole beings
who created all manner of angels and spheres
to save us from all manner of hells
but who are so frail
before a force
that swallows light itself.
The old warned us there’s deprivation
that worsens with time.
Parents, pets, friends--all we love--
carried away
and our own sweet bodies
a shock in the mirror.
They did not mention a sunset on the Bay
could bring more peace than a
striving young heart
could know
just by placing one foot after the other
along the pebbled beach,
my friend laughing beside me;
a picnic of lamb chops and mango waiting
in my backpack for a shady spot.
Everything needed provided.
But on this sunset my friend turns her face
from the glow and says,
I‘ve got 15 summers left,
if i'm lucky.
So she plans her summers with care now.
Each a precious stone kept safe from thieves.
I was angry at my mother for not coming
that month I lay pinned to a hospital bed.
But how could I know it was her last summer?
A summer of curated movements.
I wish I had not argued with my man that June
he tripped on the sidewalk
when it took precious summer days to heal.
We did not know it was his last June.
How could we have known that in October
the sun would set at six and not rise again?
One by one they walked out of this house—
or were carried out.
The oldest daughter, then her sister, brother
my mother,
……..my husband, my dear, my man, my angel.
And now the final leaving--our boy's packing
and this house enlarges as with every departure.
It's a castle now: ceilings sky high, hallway
a cavern--the whole place a relic,
unsound and useless.
now that his kidneys can't
and he endures this
without a mother
(She would have nursed him
like no other).
He has only me, wife, and the machine,
both second best but we keep him going
on this tightrope, we keep him swinging,
rebounding—we keep life on its tip toes.
On his bad days, I tell him:
Just look at the weeds shooting up from the patio
pushing through the odds.
Look how the blind bats catch a meal
in the pitch of night,
how the mushroom explodes overnight
in the junk yard.
Life abides. He likes to hear this.
So I repeat: Life goes on by the grace
of some generous force.
It stages comebacks, abandons reason,
and drags on stubbornly,
flying in the teeth of it all.
The generals say 200,000 soldiers
He does not say how he counted
100,000 twice
or how sure he is the dead
and partial dead
are evenly divided between
Russia & Ukraine.
He says Autumn has turned
the solid ground to mud so tanks
with sons and lovers all will sink &
that makes further slaughter
tough.
This seems the time to call a truce
but the generals want their sides
to hunker down
and wait for earth to freeze
and then begin to kill again,
with much more ease.
He never lets out a wish, a sigh
for peace, the peace of doves drifting
to the ground.
If it were me, I‘d ask for that—
a quiet season for those still living
men and boys.
I would send them home to autumn
on their lawns of gold.
I wonder if the fighters love their lives
as much as I love mine—I would never choose
death in any season,
most especially not in the Zen
of Autumn skies.
The already dead —all 200,000
known, loved, now wept for —
have made the low beds
they now must sleep in.
No recanting, too late to demand a truce—
tho if there were a God, they could.
The sunken tanks as useless as their bones
and TV viewers who cheer the generals on
will never have to see teeth gleaming in the mud
under an autumn sky made hellish
red with death,
Here by the beach, two women
at the next table
as the sun sets
& the breeze plays with their hair.
They must be 85 but still dining out,
still smiling, sipping.
Whatever has aggrieved them,
whatever has left
their hearts blind or broken
has not destroyed them.
Here they are, saying little
but feeling this earth just
enough to fill ne more page
in their diary,
enough to knit one more poem
with a morning latte,
about how a stranger smiled at them
as they watched the sun
turn the sky blood-red and
slide behind them.
Marianne serves herself up on a half shell, raw and true.
Proudly calloused
from the last campaign, she makes
her grand return by noting
streets are littered with more bodies
than cigarette butts.
By noting Americans want
to live a normal life
yet feel the shade
of ruin nearby.
And so Marianne confronts the powerful
and calls for mercy.
Marianne overcomes despair
with spiritual ideas
like love
which the powerful dismiss
as beneath them.
Marianne carves up their coldness
and swears that
kindness can heal the cold-eyed
exchange of money.
To Marianne, the campaign is a crusade
and the podium her pulpit
and politics is for all the people.
Marianne cries for the ways
we have been abandoned
by the leaders.
Their promises passed down
and around,
like clothes in a washer.
She says don’t believe things
they say that hurt you
but believe in something
that will not hurt you.
Marianne ought to rein supreme.
But the party thinks not.
They mock her.
I dream of Marianne basking
in the media-curated sunlight,
of the whole nation holding her ideas
in its palms.
And Marianne saying, Thank you all
for coming,
for being raw and true.
For knowing all lives matter.
Marx predicted.
Capital never sleeps.
In continuous motion
to suck all that its forked
and flicking tongue
can reach in its craving to beceome
multinational, multi-planet--
all-dominant universes —Black Holes.
(Let's give them names--Walmart. Chevron. Disney.)
And we the ruined shops and souls
are their fuel.
And we are the stars that twitch then
vanish over their event horizons,
torn into invisible bits
where once we were whole beings
who created all manner of gods and angels
to save us from all manner of hells
but who are helpless before a force
that swallows light itself.
In fact theirs will be worse:
the climate will sweep away their bodies
like wind sweeps up the sage brush
but still they angle for jobs that will kill them.
The lettuce fields, Quick Stops,
the meat packers and
old secretaries and truckers with bad backs
and huge co-pays
who cannot retire,
and again
railroad workers are told,
Sorry, no sick leave!
Those are the rules.
And so they all wait for another
planet to roll by
or maybe Heaven.
All my life, the world makes
more and more of those
who sleep in bunks, who will never own,
whose lives must fit beneath a tarp.
Not enough to go around.
Not enough baby formula.
Not enough insulin.
Not enough warm coats.
Not enough schools without broken windows.
Not enough. Not enough.
Just little fixes that don’t fix.
A high-interest loan, food stamps,
and reminders to say
thank you, Pfizer,
thank you, Elon
thank you for not taking everything,
for leaving the cheap couch
from China, this hand gun,
the crystal meth,
this last frozen pizza.
Thank you for sharing the air.
