How can I, a woman walking here, so afraid 
of illness, of slow death--of any death, of any illness--
learn what I must learn to endure another night in the cold?
Such thoughts sit in the back of my scalp and look straight out 
through my two brown eyes, through their smooth wall fountains,
into this morning’s halogen light, and here among the tall 
lean and lighted trees, I hear the perfect stillness gently slit 
by the point of a whistle--kik ik ik ik kik ik ik ik--
from a hooked beak high above, from the swish 
of long wings beating through the branch. 
What serenity in a world where everything must die.
An important lesson no doubt and my soul longs for it.
So I look again how calmly the wide-winged 
whistler flaps herself without passion from branch to branch,
into the lean and cold unknown. And suddenly 
I am a woman who flies along from tree to tree 
on her morning walk.

Whenever we say goodbye

When I fly away to Europe and then to California, 
and when she comes to visit and then goes home
and any time we part and know 
it will be long till we meet again,
my mother puckers up her lips in the shape 
of a fresh spring tulip and takes my face in her hands 
to crunch my cheeks, then kisses me--
a peck really--and then, in case we never meet again, 
she tells me--to be sure I know that once 
it had been good between us-- 
You have no idea how much I loved you
when you were my little blond girl. 
She would say this, I think, because, 
since that time, so much anger had blown
between us--its slag sticking on us.
But whenever we say goodbye, it all unsticks, 
rolls down the deep well of forgotten things. 
With each farewell, there's always that sweet moment 
of two awkward souls fumbling.

I really like

I really like

when the glassy mask slips off

my mother's face,
when the snug fit around her eyes and cheeks
comes undone,
when some electrical charge snaps
and she pops from the trance
when her extended laugh flips
her head around to some inner song
and she laughs like a diva 
when her words erupt all honey lava
and her mood spumes like champagne, 
when I can hear and smell her fizz.
I really like 
when she can be happy like that.

Saved

Another little soul
saved in the church
of St. Theresa.

The old priest's hands wave,
call forth the saving spirit
bless this child, bless that one too.

One hears the click, click, click
of cameras, moms and Godmoms
in fluffy prom dresses, dads and
god dads in clean jeans and new shirts.

The freshly christened
crawl and wail
in their escape.

No Mass. Really?
No one
understands its
moral gravity
anyway.

It's time to party.
Tequila, hot sauce,
sheet cakes.
On every table
bowls of baby angels.

The DJ's crowd-pleasing music
Too loud. But the throng dances
til closing, demands
and gets one final song.

Some sit ill on the steps
over puddles of vomit,
others scold or weep or trip.

Such is the rhymn
and the mystery
of the faith.

Another list

Ha ha ha       and HA!
That's my response. 

Indignation 
and a sarcastic laugh! 

Come! Lets write a poem 
the New Yorker might run. 

Something indistinct. 
A string of 
non sequitors 
and blurry
            contrivances
stilted 
                and      
        
          exhausting 

and opaque.

Just 
another 
list 
of 
words--
musket                 balls
carbolic       soap
and a     good 
old               Wych 
elm. 

Jeez. 

No narrative EVER kicks in. 

And another thing:
Blah blah blah. 

Really, blank stares.
That's is what these poems do
arouse in me.  

Am I to blame? 

n o. N   O.

I'm just the 
reflecting pool. 
#

The leap

I am not in the photo with the kids 

on that colossal rock we call a dinosaur egg,

in that flat grassy infinity behind our house. 

Yet the photo is still in me 

even though not much happens on that egg 

while we wait for my father

to come back from Korea. 

Only endless summer picnics 

of red Kool-aid and boloney sandwiches. 

The State Fair blows to kingdom come out there 

and my idea of a great time is born.

My brother calls every man he sees daddy

and then one day a stranger stands in our door.

Slips off the brown Army garrison cap, scans 

four kids sitting on the sofa for inspection.

I hope you've been behaving yourselves, 

that's all the stranger says before he holds 

out his arms to his wife, rests uncertain lips 

on her more uncertain ones. 

My mother is the only person in the room

who recognizes his face.

But not even she knows yet 
the leap from the window has begun.

Lime Green

It is a bleak winter night, moonless, starless, fog engulfed, 

an all embracing darkness

except the building my mother has just died in

holds fast to its lime green stain and every window 

clasps a yoke of yellow light. 

The bag they bring is black, a bleak gray scar 

runs down it. My mother, packed up like a suit.

It lifts my feet from the ground, the hair off my skin.

And then the zipper hums up the track, up, up

to her half-open eyes, her slack jaw already 

packed, then a click and a buzz and the suit’s ready

to go, to go where? 

Onto a gurney clattering to the back of a van  

waiting on the asphalt where I watch like a tree 

with its bark burned off. 

Beyond the door, a chamber of a deeper black 

than the one outside. 

This is my most unforgettable night, 

the most howling of all nights. 
Not knowing what comes next, 

no God to turn to.
My mother hurtles through the blackness
of infinity.