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?
A poem plucks me from the day to day
into bygone places--
in all their glory or distress—
but compressed--liquid flushed--
only glucose in the soft skin
of a raisin
pressed onto my blank page.
I look at the mess up close,
sometimes for the first time.
A poem can pounce from a scent
and hurl me back
to the high school gym.
Or leap from a song and suddenly
I am cutting my wedding cake again.
I can feel it, see it, be it
one last time.
At 15, I am introduced
We sit across the table smiling,
our mothers beside us chatting
in their mother tongue.
My teen eyes unprepared for
his Santa Fe blues and
my browns retreat.
But a force rises from the ground
to push our atoms together,
commanding my eyes to seal
onto his
and injects a poison that
makes it impossible to blink
and I worry our mothers
will see this conjunction--
this inability to act--
and understand.
Another day and the man who slept beside me for so long shrinks
 |
Day after day that shrinking, that fading of him.
Not long dead yet he is losing visibility
though I clasp hard and strain
to smell him on this Hawaiian shirt, to hear his timber.
Another day of not seeing a man
I knew by heart.
More and more spaces between his bones and mine.
Soon I will peer into thin air
and his happy banter will fade
like a train whistle rushing into night.
But today I like how I handle that truth.
Today I hear only a squeal from my own heart
when I step from my car
under the white bulging overhang of cloud
along the great blue bay.
Geese jabber. The wind crashes through my coat
and my body shivers as I pass
the bench where he sat and something
moves hawklike over it and suddenly
I recall his toes were the last
to disappear into the black plastic bag.
I remember the weight of his ashes grey as fog,
heard his knuckles cracking.
My fists clench in the cold shower
of recall.
