Wild in the Plaza of Memory 9781609402129, 9780916727925

Citation preview

Other works by Pamela Uschuk: Poetry: Finding Peaches in the Desert One-Legged Dancer Scattered Risks Without the Comfort of Stars Crazy Love (American Book Award) and numerous chapbooks

Wild in the Plaza of Memory

Pamela uschuk

San Antonio, Texas 2012

Wild in the Plaza of Memory © 2012 by Pamela Uschuk Cover photograph by William Pitt Root, 2007. Used by permission of the artist. Front cover design by Lynn Watt. First Edition Printed Edition ISBN: 978-0-916727-92-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-210-5 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-211-2 Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-212-9 Wings Press 627 E. Guenther San Antonio, Texas 78210 Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805 On-line catalogue and ordering: www.wingspress.com

All Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Uschuk, Pamela. Wild in the plaza of memory / Pamela Uschuk. -- 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-916727-92-5 (pbk., printed ed. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-160940-210-5 (epub ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60940-211-2 (kindle ebook) -ISBN 978-1-60940-212-9 (library pdf ebook) I. Title. PS3571.S38W55 2012 811’.54--dc23 2011048303 Except for fair use in reviews and/or scholarly considerations, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author or the publisher.

Contents What Came True



Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca 2011, The Year of the Metal Rabbit On Pigeon Mountain Wind Say What Wild Poppies Regarding Volcanoes and Scalpels Learning Subtraction All the Way to Angel Fire Peak At the Ouray Vapor Caves Whole Notes Green Rain What Came True Nervousosity The Anarchist Chooses the Chinese Watercolor Brush Driving for Home The River Of Lost Souls Overflows

A Short History of Falling A Short History of Falling In Dharamsala Among Tibetan Exiles After the Chinese Government Outlaws the Belief in Reincarnation Focus of the Mind’s Labyrinth Contemplating the Globe of Stars One Theory of Poetry The Racheting In Synch Who Today Needs Poetry

3 4 6 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 24 25 27 28 30 31 32

35 38 42 43 48 51 52 53 54

Cloud Gathering Domestic Affairs and Foreign Policy My Sister Dreams Herself A Jaguar Elephant Ride, New York A Palimpsest of Motion Notes On Loss Riding The Stars

Wild in the Plaza of Memory Mother’s Day Celebration Desert Detour I Have An Illegal Alien In My Trunk Desert Sunday With Clouds Healing Tongues Stalking the Divine Under a Full Desert Moon My Brother Steps Off the Jade Dragon Boat Carrying the Dead Compassionate Heart Sonoran Desert Bat Rise The Same Old What If What Cannot Be Determined What Buzzes Wild In the Plaza of Memory Acknowledgments About the Author

56 58 59 61 63 65 67

71 72 74 76 78 80 83 84 86 89 92 93 95 97 99 101

This book is dedicated with love to my brother John George Uschuk (November 25, 1949 – October 12, 2010)

and to my much loved nephews, Patrick and Seth Uschuk, and, as always, to my life long love, William Pitt Root.

What Came True

It is here. At a touch of my hand, The air fills with delicate creatures From the other world. ~ James Wright

Ode to Federico García Lorca



Federico, sometimes you come to me as a little rain straining up from the south, smeared with the scent of orange rind and blood. Smeared with rabbit blood frenzy, coyotes ring the house howling the hour the moon ticks like a gypsy watch above the pool where the heron sleeps. Where the heron dreams, a smear the size of the moon is actually a guitar moaning the syllables of your lost name. Federico, when you come to me, the unbearable longing of trees roots deeper in the sky, flies among stars like a comet in search of its dead twin. Federico the wind tonight is arctic silver, not green, not forever green, and I think how easy it is to die, skin basted with orange blossoms and loneliness as if loneliness was a horse a poet could break or deny. Tonight, you are the slivered silver moon ticking above cedar and sage that remember their roots in the olive groves of Andalusia. Green rind of death, how dare you spit out the syllables of such desire? Federico, some nights you fly through the window, the eye of a hawk on fire, black gaze gone to blood, gone to the ropey bones of moonlight, to guitars laughing in blue pines, to the wet bulls of passion, to the weft of love abandoned to oiled rifles in an olive grove on a sunny day before I was born. Did they so fear the delicacy of your hands?

• 3 •



2011: The Year of the Metal Rabbit for Roger Frank (1944-1972) and the Valenzuela brothers

The forty-third anniversary of the TET Offensive and we are still burying evidence trip-wired by an enemy we cannot see. Is it change that breaks its frozen toes on morning’s door sill? I want to see what a metal rabbit looks like, a Humvee rattling a Kabul street or the hare of hunger uprooting rusty mortar casings in a valley west of Da Nang, where my first husband was ambushed by dragon fate, his stomach unstitched by machine-guns, a quick bayonet stab. Two days he dreamed between steaming earth and death’s scabbed hands swirling a bamboo stream he couldn’t reach before Medevac found him. He survived only three years, his Purple Heart unable to airlift him out of terror that strafed his constant fever to death. In D.C. we meet two Viet Nam vets, the Valenzuela brothers, Mexican Americans about to be deported because they can’t prove which side of the border they were born on. One of them wears the Bronze Star for valor on his decorated chest. Spider-white scars from Agent Orange devour his hands. He says he has no strength in them, cannot hold up the flag much longer, asks the gunmetal sky, Where is my Commander In Chief?

• 4 •



We leave the aging vets in dress uniform, at attention in ice rain and begging justice from the sparse audience on the Capitol steps while Chinese exchange students snap souvenir photos. What changes will the Metal Rabbit bring clanking in on its armored back legs— such tough prey, invincible to hawk talon and Kalashnikovs— its multi-colored back snagged on the hooks of the inhumane, ears cocked for a compassionate mate.

• 5 •

On Pigeon Mountain: City of Rocks for Rick Jackson and Terry Harvey

There are rocks that are the compressed vertebrae of turtles whose shells collapsed eons ago around fear. Fear can leak like radiation into the sea from a breached reactor some crack in concrete when the earth’s plates shift in Japan to consume cities and rocks who believed they were solid and real, and we learn there is no place on this planet or in space that is far removed. Everything can happen in the blink of a photon shot past Alpha Centauri. Sometimes my heart believes it is too far away from love. Then a friend turns to share water near huge rocks that flex like black vultures from the rattled hills of paradise. Some rocks open their sandstone jaws to the paws of foxes, fissures split deep as knife wounds in their mineral guts. We can’t see to their bottoms. Viewed from the moon, boulders the size of inflated elephants would be invisible as our footprints or the black rat snake bisecting our path, scintillating vector of darkness, its vision blurred by scales left from shedding skin, tongue fiery as a penstemon quick-sipping spore from breeze. This rock is as big as a garage and talks our ears off at dusk when its gray coat glisters like the rind of full moon or a TV screen where rescuers dig through dense strata of icy mud, wrenched metal, tsunami-splintered beams, screen that shifts scenes to Libyans blasted by the dictator’s bombs in their own streets.

• 6 •

How can the battered boundaries of our minds take this in? Some boulders are strewn like three story mushrooms at the edge of a glacier smashing mastodons, forests and ancestors10,000 years past. What does this have to do with everyday betrayals, the imagined slights we see flicker at the corner of our vision? We are not surprised to meet rocks who resist climbers, trip overconfident toes that have taken them for granted so that inexplicably a veteran climber tumbles thousands of feet splitting his new ergonomic helmet for an eternity of screams. Across rock’s ridged spines, Rick picks his way with a hiking stick, his hyper-extended knee capped with a thick flap of skin drawn down from his thigh, takes no step for granted. Few speak of the lichen-cloaked hermit rocks who recite sutras among Appalachian blueets, polygala, the sticky yellow tongues of honeysuckle. They’ve stopped reading newspapers for tragedies, fast for centuries, wouldn’t hurt a fly or a viper. We nestle against their cold shoulders when humidity sweats sun-struck weeds. Terry and I leave the men and walk around a cliff that is tall as the Seattle Space Needle searing loud into the clean fabric of sky. It reminds us of the way our fathers shouted at us, mine after another double shift grinding steel engine parts at the Oldsmobile, hers after whiskey scraped his teeth mean, both gone now, their lonely spears flung on solar wind between the frigid rush of stars.

• 7 •

We laugh, say our bones mimic these rocks, calcified as tortoise shell, honey-combed from rain, speculate on just how long it will take for radiation from the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant to reach us. On the way down the mountain, we stick sandstone chips in our pockets to carry us home.

• 8 •

Wind



Wind’s so crazy in love with dust this afternoon she’s writing her wild middle name on the inside of ravens wings, tossing them upside down, narrowly missing trees. Some believe wind is a witch churning up earth for a mate or a sea turtle made of glass eating its way through the belly of the shark that swallowed it. This wind is gray as pudding stone matrix and could be easily mistaken for a steelhead’s beak flailing to spawn in the murky shallows of a creek. The pregnant mares in the pasture feel wind as a pebble-stinging prod to gallop, their muscular flanks flexing, tails lifted and driving the stallions nuts in the corral across the road. At times wind smells like the snow fields of a wicked god, blasting blossoms on apple trees. Today, walking against wind’s cold temper, my student tells me of her husband, injured this week in a coal mine when a boulder smashed a detour into his side, severing the tendons in his knee. She doesn’t know how she’ll feed her kids, let alone stay in school.

• 9 •

For her, wind feels like bad luck that hasn’t stopped punishing for years. I want to point out ravens to her, tell the story of Leonardo, the baby raven blown by mountain lightning out of his nest that hovered over our back yard, how, despite his long crash to earth, the claws of neighborhood cats and mini-bursts of wind splitting trees, Leonardo thrived, surviving on scraps. When threatened, his talent was to become obsidian, unmoving with one eye cocked heavenward, for storm or grace, we never knew.

• 10 •

Say What for T. R. Hummer

Say the fist-sized toad disguised himself as mud, left only his outline beside the butterfly bush when he vanished into dusk. Say the mind flutters like a torn prayer flag in the wind of oppressive news while ravens head south with their laughter. Say, a cold summer breeze knocks thick yellow pollen from pines, and the heads of poets pound out their anguish like Caribbean tin drums. Say, students are bludgeoned again in Tehran, protesting the landslide re-election of the dictator with a wife who casts her head down with her ballot. Say the students know they could die but demonstrate because silence stings deeper than an interrogater’s electric cord. Say a poet powers on a computer, half a world away and blasts toad-sized letters of longing into cyber space, and the lonely air bursts. Say the dictator concedes the election and heads south to the Persian Gulf to count songbird populations decimated by war. Say his wife lifts her head, enrolls in a free poetry class where she learns to write the metrics of her truth.

• 11 •

Say the toad is reincarnated as a small cricket, hunkers in dust when a black and white butterfly carves the sky into quatrains above him. Say poets take to the streets wearing green tshirts reciting slant rhymes of sorrow and grace until riot police train automatic weapons on the tyrant’s mouth. Say the toad is the ghost of consciousness, a fist-sized god who sinks into common dirt, poetry he needs to become most himself.

• 12 •

Wild Poppies at Solstice





Season of planting and sprouts, of new wasps, yellow tomato buds, spider webs luminous as this season tender with stems holding the temporary faces of wild poppies and lupine to sky. How do we bear the brilliance that strikes then dies, the blossom and disintegration of shape? Starlings squabble in the eaves, secreted from rainlight, merciless wind that tussles piñons as we crawl to summer’s long light. The buckskin mare drowses while her colt nips her mane, eyebrows and face, nudging her up so he can suckle, then run loose circles around her, testing what he remembers. Above him zip bluebirds and close after, a red-tailed hawk. When Grandma Anna lifted her lilac housedress, baring arthritic knees to warm the history of dancing locked in her bones, I was stunned by how young her legs appeared. We sat on her steps watching pink cosmos bend to the wind that would unmake them. Her memory walked Bohemian fields thick as a lipstick-shimmered sea of crepe petals, grieving over her only brothers in the Crimea slogging through a war their cannon-split bodies would never be recovered from.

• 13 •

What I have left of her are stories, an early photo of her in America gripping the small hands of her sons, my uncle and father who would, before my birth, set off for a world war that hardened their compassion to blackthorn. They couldn’t wash bomb craters, shrapnel, the sulfur stink of powder burns from their palms. Now, they have become numinous sea lions plowing through sky’s multitudinous tides. What connects us sizzles through the shared stem cells of stories, poignant as mares breathing in their birthright of stars or starlings that jitter the pouty lips of poppies spiking memory’s battle fields.

• 14 •

Regarding Volcanoes and Scalpels Driving across the Rez to home, the shattered cores of volcanoes accuse rain that evaporates before it can save dry earth. One resembles a woman head thrown back, wailing down the mute sky. Where is love and why would he button up his shirt of gray wind, turn up the sleeves of his solitude, pull grease through his braids only to leave? Her cries vanish like vultures who snatch beaks full of dead rabbit scoured by dust and the slow grind of earth through stars who never forget their names. In the time it takes to bolt the door on heartache, the woman is calm as a monk, face recued East, sunblazed, chin lifted, hair cascading a sandstone river or an avalanche stopped mid-crash all the way down her back. In either case, she is alone with the weather who fashioned her from an imagination larger than time, alone, that is, but for the red-tail hawk circling the crown of her decisions and four slick-billed ravens ripping fresh-struck rabbit from berm. Last night I dreamed of volcanoes, of saving the tribe as I led children from the crocodile earth, cracking under our feet. Lava the color of a fiery wound

• 15 •

crowned high above date palms telling the ancient truth that rattled too high for our broken tympanum to hear. Driving through mirages refiguring asphalt, I think of a friend whose violin bursts for love to save her from fists punishing floors that betray her. Fire is her grief consuming the furious air above her fingers that crackle out the prosody of longing on Isaye’s mad chords. The skin of her flexed wrist fits close over mine. What tempers the scalpel that dissects its own anguish in desire’s fickle lab tray? Nothing saves me but this highway cut through a desert where old volcanoes remake themselves according to angles of rainlight and wind, to blue so wide it swallows our breath.

• 16 •

Learning Subtraction





I Michigan was flat as my chest, the Lookingglass River so lucid that even at seven I could read its slow tannic thoughts. Even at seven, I knew I’d fallen into the upside-down heart of a world always saying goodbye. II After last night’s dust storm that slashed nuthatches from trees and flung all the solar lamps around the gravel yard, sky is unapologetic, sees all regret wriggling like meal worms under its scoured lens. Must everything today lean over its reflection like a heron mesmerized by the pond of its own loss? Mountains rip wind through grief, sing the way a saw sings as it chews through spruce. III At ten I watched a tornado harrow a trench straight down the road to our farmhouse, while my father stood in the kitchen door. He sent me to huddle with spiders, my brother, sisters, with Mom, the only one screaming down the stone ribs of the basement.

• 17 •

I could have run, then, into the shriek of wind, pulled out its tongue, strangled the syllables of fear spitting shrapnel into my mother who would dervish into a mental ward before the next week, but my father blocked the door. More guts than brains, he said of me. IV Grandma said wildflowers can’t be transplanted. She wanted to die in her own house. All I wanted was for her to laugh beyond my own life line. It took me twenty years to visit her grave, and when I rubbed my hand over the unmarked mound, a sweat bee stung my palm. V Where do they come from—those gales that whip branches out of our hands like the faces of those we love who won’t stay in place? How do we begin to untangle the snarled hair of goodbye?

• 18 •

All the Way to Angel Fire for Bill

The goldfinch carries sun on its back brilliant as molten Aztec earrings all the way from Mexican jacarandas and hibiscus shimmering to thistle seed I’ve sprinkled in our feeder, and we believe again in the disappearance of ice as if a small bird’s gossip could melt our winter hearts. Now, snow’s gone, I can see all the way to Angel Fire Peak, a day so clear there’s no mistaking its intentions to allow us some clarity. Even the blue Buddha glows as he smashes my windows. Misery loves smeary glass, loves a horizon sleety and cold. I’d be the gray juniper that wraps around its own limbs beautifully dead--wind keeps it singing. Walking the ridge above the Pine River, geese oboeing in oxbows, we follow the trail cut by mule deer, wild turkeys, elk, their scat going fast to dust, to wind, just like us. There is nothing more urgent this morning than the river’s silver tongue flicking into itself while it stammers over stones and willow snags. Croaking above us two ravens flip midair to mate.

• 19 •

To thaw, we throw off heavy fleece shirts. Whirling up from the San Juan Mountains, Buddha approves. You are lovely down to the last mole on your chest, and I’d like to lick wind’s alliteration in your ear my heartbeat sun-quickened, alert as wild ginger there.

• 20 •

At the Ouray Vapor Caves





I Persephone, too, shudders at disrobing when aspen leaves freeze, just before opening the slimy door to the underworld. Clammy as a wet towel, the air exhales fatal black mold and sulfur across the ceiling of the spa shower in spite of aromatic eucalyptus and cedar smoldering in sconces near the massage. Your skin registers first the ecstatic scrim that laces her, skittish as a salamander. With her fingertips, she reads earth’s scald as she descends through granite the color of a scalp wound striped with aging hair, through milky quartz, through the stone heart of a mountain rising a mile, then more above her. Dim, the antechamber, so steamy that eyes film and fingers lose their grip. This is the realm of water gods cascading across smooth mineral buttocks, hollowing the mountain into a drum keeping time to the constant drip. She readies. This is nothing compared to the crush of dark heat that pushes against the door of her terror she cracks in spite of this abduction

• 21 •

from her mother, who is left to her fury, to scream then turn earth blind as ice. II My love and I enter the far grotto slick as vulva or oiled nipples, heat-woozed, the only couple inside this giant geode radiating haze above a broiling pool droozed black as stamens inside a tulip. We dip in our hands, our feet, watch them become their own ghosts. Stalagmites rise around us sluggish as glaciers, the steady pop of droplets from stalactites like wet stone beards we stroke with numb fingers while we breathe our own staccato heart beats, regretting those bursts of desire too often lost to laundry, stacks of unpaid bills multiplying on the counter, lost to the stale air of offices and memos collapsing our lungs. III It is then we relearn speech, purring words that reverberate deep as the throat thrums of Tibetan Monks or the keening of sperm whales across

• 22 •

distances as vast as the spaces between star clusters in Alpha Centauri, yearning as old as the moan of Pluto when he finally lifts Persephone’s smooth chin to his eternal loneliness. Dumb with sweat, we hum across the cave to one another, long vowels clanging against sorrow, vows taken long ago in earth’s belly, while Persephone unhinges wholly to what is inscribed on bedrock oozing heat.

• 23 •

Whote Notes



God is the tongue of the female timber wolf slathering my face, rough as a snow shovel scraping back the pages of Red Riding Hood, revising my ears, centuries of lupine villains. Listen, says this wolf tongue speaking its severed language of love and sorrow, its history of stick games, generations of guileless pups strangled in dens, history of rifleshot from airplanes, forelegs snapped in steel-toothed traps, trailing blood through snow. Listen. Have you ever heard eighty wild throats howling their ghosts at noon, eighty fanged angels buzzed by yellow jackets and the belch of oil tankers downshifting just over the ridge? Have you heard their long-boned whole notes of goodbye? Wolfwood Wolf Refuge Ignacio, Colorado

• 24 •

Green Rain, a Birthday Poem I love the green laundry smell of rain over the palomino backs of colts testing spring mountain grass cupping their hooves in the pasture sloping up to our adobe house, love the green watercress tang of the river swelling a crystal fontanel between banks that cannot contain its joy, love rain at the edge of this desert lifting orange paintbrush, blue lupine, wild yellow clover to ripe clouds obscuring mountain and cliff, sheer rock faces where goats cling in thick white robes judging no one, not the root-beer colored eyes of grizzlies nor menstrual cramps of thunder cracking the sunny intent of sky nor high mountain showers running cool fingers over wet angora sweaters to feel sweet nipples hidden there, the way rain’s soft tongues write a score of green notes for a world too long held hostage by the iron-thorned arms of teen suicide bombers and dictators who’ve outlived their paralyzed smiles, love the Afghan farmer plowing under a warlord’s poppies to plant winter wheat, love green tomatoes fattening on the porch and the gentility of toads hopping across dawn, love thrushes singing from a wet awning of oak leaves, the saturated flutes of canyon wrens and turquoise violins of lazuli buntings

• 25 •



composing raindrops drenching tender cones, bending pungent blooms on silver sage, love marl cementing sandstone, where the mountain lion hunts rabbits, white-footed deer mice for her kits curled and dry underground in their mewling den, love runnels of rain inking spots on mule deer fawns invisible under the thick branches of pines and junipers, love the watery grawk of ravens hunkering in cottonwoods whose roots wriggle like angleworms in a feeder stream’s clean thrust bashing the brook trout’s muscle, lifting silt and dragon fish, love the slick red hover of a dragonfly, love the rain on this birthday, love rain insistent and pounding earth’s piano, love dust going to adobe in desert no longer waiting for lips that can never lie, opening and opening to rain, green rain.

• 26 •

What Came True





Blue mountains came true and the stars writing our history across night’s eyelid even today when I see you among giraffes, hundreds of miles away, snapping with your third eye, camera shots of those lashes longer than hummingbird wings. The body as memory came true, the shady notions of mountains bared their teeth and were true. In the hazy Italian Apennines that we drove through long ago, rescuers dig out two hundred bodies crushed by earth shivering in its thin unreliable crust. The heart as flower came true until the moon like an interrogation lamp stripped the bedroom of privacy, electrocuting dreams of kindness on its short circuit betrayals. What have we learned in all these years but habits exhausting their own circles, stupid tongues dragging in the dust? Or balance laughing and tucked under a hawk’s wings, holding out dawn’s lilac attar, a mouthful of rain water, the blue grist of sky to rub against our hollow palms?

• 27 •

The Anarchist Chooses a Chinese Watercolor Brush Let it sweep first the ragged lines from your palm, paths of luck or grief incised startling as grace notes and common as speckled starlings in the eaves or as the jazzy flutes of grackles that spackle twilight leaves. Ink the doe’s tail, deep as the pupil widening the intent of the crewcut boy who picked up a rock to chuck at you the first day of school and you learned desire’s backhand curse. Does the endless appetite of the brush frighten you as it soaks jet-stained water to stroke indelible forms on the blank page or does your hand rush forward like the heart of the brush intent on charting undefined space, tracing the history of your own hunger? Stiff mane of a Mongolian pony racing winter across the steppes, bundled sheaf of blonde wheat soaking up wine shimmering with images like Li Po and his cronies who wandered jagged mountain roads from cup to drunken cup or a headless bamboo witch with her white wild thatch, this brush casts fortunes in lines black as a hearse, tattoos of truth and lies sprawled across hope’s naked shoulders.

• 28 •

Quick, sketch your self-portrait tinted with almond and ground coal onto the wide-eyed page. Throw open the windows in rooms mildewed by the rhetoric of fear to hear ravens invent laughter we’ll all need at the end of our ropes.

• 29 •

Nervousosity

for Seth

Nervousosity, my nephew names the glittering blade of his insomnia. I know those flensed finches that chatter him awake, the way their charred feathers snuff dreams until they are blue as electric wires clenched between his teeth while the blind buffalo of the world slumbers on. Last night those beaks needled me to read syllables of betrayal snapped behind each constellation of loss mapping night. What besides love and its lack spans these synaptic gaps? This is the labyrinth of desire, fortune’s singed edge, and the trick, to charm this austere metal to sleep.

• 30 •

Driving for Home





Horsetail clouds brushing the shoulders of pines more resemble egret feathers spitcurled by wind. So much is misnamed— take the brown thrasher, that brash thief with a song like water on fire that builds its nest in the desert spikes of teddy bear cholla. Swainson’s Hawk sounds too butlerish for this heavy-taloned philosopher of the plains, often mistaken for a child hunched on a hungry fence post watching for mice under the massive swivel of sunflower heads. What have I misnamed today in my rush from car to class to office to car, what essentials are missing? Poetry grinned at me with her cracked teeth, held out a slim hand but I didn’t have time to offer lunch or ask her name. Only now clouds claim me, the blades of egret feathers waving frail lacy question marks across my windshield above the swarm of cars driving for home.

• 31 •

The River of Lost Souls Overflows Runoff surges, crested as the backs of brown mares stampeding downstream, and the River of Lost Souls overflows to drown the red feet of tag alders, silts gills of Brown trout and Rainbows, dragon fish hunkering in sand behind rocks, baptizes the scarred trunks of penitent oaks, rattles the wren bones of our inner ears to hear the burr whir of the season’s first hummingbird. Hunger drives him to red, and my heart leaps to the Japanese plum framing the kitchen window, blasting smeared panes with new blooms. I’ve always been a sucker for that edge of water that could drown me and the naive proposals of apple blossoms. This afternoon when Bill’s radiator drools, then blows like a mini Moby Dick under slim Aspens sprouting outside, I want to cry buckets. What is it with all this water, anyway? If I was superstitious I’d say Moon in Cancer pulling tides from the blue suck of the Pacific to these melting Rocky Mountains, all the way to this parking lot and us stranded, overlooking the twist of the Animas, River of Lost Souls, that, from this height, sounds like a flock of wet hummingbirds whirring through a valley we can no longer escape.

• 32 •



A Short History of Falling Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity. ~ Gustave Flaubert

A Short History of Falling

for Namgial Rinchen

Sweet Babel of birdsong syncopates dawn’s light as bruised as the hematoma oozing under the skin of my left knee. Sudden leaves reshape trees and the delicate longing of tree frogs pipes snow into a bad memory old as falling. My knee still aches from Sunday’s tumble on the pallet I didn’t see over the stack of sawn aspen I carried for the night fire. Unmindful, I tripped on an iron fence stake cockajar against the woodpile, this time breaking my fall with my palm’s life line. My history of falls is unkind. At five, I plunged through a rotten barn board all the way from the hay mow while shafts of numinous straw whirled like moths on fire past my Dad shoveling manure. I smashed into the concrete floor wet with cow piss near the Holstein’s hooves. Her licorice eyes were as big as my fists as she bawled at me this first lesson of gravity. At ten, when I slipped on ice running for the school bus, I lay on my back watching my breath and snow become the ghosts of bare maple limbs

• 35 •

twirling blind white. Not wanting to move my spine’s broken porcelain, I froze hoping to melt into all that was pure and cold. When I couldn’t rise, my dad carried me in, cursing my clumsy and bruised tailbone. Afterward, falls pocked each year, unpredictable as a broken clock, until I crashed in a midnight parking lot, both hands in my back pockets, boot catching the cement bumper turned upside down and painted with tar. My chin first cracked the curb, breaking my jaw, then ripping three ribs from the sternum. What came from my mouth was garbled as birdsong, a blood murmur I mistook for a scream for help. What I remember are the three good people who walked around me, not stopping and the table full of cops I could see through the restaurant glass, who never shifted from coffee mugs overlooking the wounded rug of my body. What I remember is my lover’s face white as a terrified swan as he lifted me. Above Mangyu Village, I hiked the thin trail far above tree line to sunset, bending to the infinitesimal in the shape of a plant I could barely see, petals the size of molecules, its yellow center smaller than a drop of blood, when

• 36 •

the mountain tilted, and my shoes slid gathering speed on talus that prattled like oiled marbles of fate. I could not stop and wondered whether to fly off the ridge pressed flat so I wouldn’t somersault the thousand feet to the valley or to sit back on my heels, use my boots for skis. The last moment I grabbed the only thing that held the last rim, a turquoise rock. The other climbers thought my yelling a joke, all but the Sherpa who leapt sure as a mountain goat, Zen master of shifting stone, snatched my wrists to yank me back to the path. We sat then, breathing for a long time, unwinding our stories like prayer flags strung out in Himalayan wind. How do we ever thank who or what saves us? Namgial told me to look at the turquoise rock clutched in my palm. We call that a god’s eye, he said, and there in one sea-colored facet was etched the eye almond as Buddha’s and open as if it knew, while above us, a Himalayan eagle incinerated before falling to the other side of the world.

• 37 •

In Dharamsala Among Tibetan Exiles for Galen Murton, Jamie Johnson, Jen Maples, Ben Tyson, Lauren Mann, EllieDuke, Molly Wiebush, Sarah Decker, and Linnea Decker

I In Norbulingka begins the pulse of water under prayer flags, bamboo and tropical figs. Even air holds its breath steady listening to thin syllables raising the consciousness of the stream. Doves quicken thick leaves, their throat-songs on the edge of Babel, insistent. Love me. Love, love Me. Light slides like a silk sleeve over the water buffalo shoulders of rocks, carved in the four-colored keys— Om mani padme HUM—and the hungry traffic of the world dissolves. Peace and the flame-tinted lily tilts its six tongues to a shifting sky. II Why does the heart take so long to arrive in any place, days even weeks after the body with its somnambulant tastes unpacks its luggage, forgets home?

• 38 •

III A white-cheeked bulbul flips upside-down, clowns in a mango tree, and I no longer imagine his antics are just for me, as time clicks its worry beads, flickering through all of us. IV What is the nature of longing but the body disintegrating like wet silk in the rush of current over stone? What begins water or the tensile strength of spider webs caught on my skirt? V This far gone, home is more heart than bone, than stucco, windowpane or sandstone strewn by design in our front yard. What I don’t miss—the niggling tongues of newscasters playing the old stick game of disaster, the on-going argument that sends thousands away from home to roadside bombs, to the broken metal teeth of Iraqi streets,

• 39 •

the blood-smeared dieties of conquest in the Bardo of civil war. VI Sun strafes Himalayan peaks, speaks something like Shangri-la, distills to serene wine in this slow garden, where blue-headed magpies fan the long elegance of white tail plumes through a jungle of heat-deflecting leaves. Even random dogs are polite, don’t bite when offered a vulnerable hand. VII Just up the hill, the Dalai Lama chants, old and deep as whale-song, instructing monks in the art of peace. Namgyal monastery is misplaced along with survivors and their memories of torture and extermination in Tibet, where high ridge after ridge razors blue air, where Chinese settlers swarm, inexhaustible as colonies of ants, and where the songs of birds and dzos are driven across snowline. Two red dragonflies mate as I whisk black ants from their task of cartography, charting my body’s intrusion into their ancient trade routes. Negotiating treacherous folds, they skitter across the turquoise terrain

• 40 •

of my skirt. Is their intent less passionate than mine? VIII In Norbulingka, monks in bloodred robes glide past like contemplative poppies among tourists staring at intricate Tibetan boxes, thangka paintings and boxcar-sized bronze sculptures of Buddha in this place remade from the broken bones of home. No barb wire or cattle prods, no Chinese tanks rattle these refugee streets where the main commerce is meditation and healing—the miracle is that the heart persists, intoned dusk and dawn, in the spin of gold prayer wheels above golden carp who for centuries have learned water’s changing moods, learned to adapt to the current’s wild thrash and sullen backwater. I admire these weightless hungry ghosts disguised as fish. What do they see through bulging sun-colored eyes but my distorted shadow blocking their sky and the way I disappear completely as any bird wing or common leaf blown across the transported face of water that is constantly leaving. Dharamsala, India

• 41 •

On Hearing the Chinese Government Has Outlawed Belief in Reincarnation for Bill

If one blue Himalayan morning, a window blows wide as a ventricle sucking wind over your head, and the bells clanging on the Dzo’s neck being sung to by a woman as they walk to the fields reminds you of the entranced Oracle who banged the bell in your ear to wake you from disease, then you might see the way light loves the granite teeth of near peaks and know the next breath you take is mine, the breath of a woman hoeing barley and driving demons from sky’s smoky mirror as it thunders through the clap of a finch’s brief wings.

• 42 •

Focus of the Mind’s Labyrinth for Ama Adhe

I. Before sun scales the Himalayas and breaks through the panes, we wake to the surfroar of monk-chant, chattering mynas, the clear water melodies of blue shama birds, to crow squawk and the slap, slap, slap of a basketball dribbled on the court across the street. Moon Peak bleeds sateen just east of our dreams and we are struck by luck’s riptide at this juncture of prayer wheels with long-tailed birds. Daily the Dalai Lama intones sutras older than oaks, among mountains and their cargo of refugees, instructing an end to enemies and their detonations of suffering, remote and close as home. II. Our Western heartbeats tuned to the cockroach rush of deadlines, finally calm as we sit in thick grass, awakening. My body sways to words deep as blue whale song or river notes at the back of a mourning dove’s throat

• 43 •

until I forget the clipped syllables of spin doctors, conquest’s sharp verbs. I remember the female grizzly in Yellowstone, glowing cinnamon in sunset’s orange bath, a pendulum ticking to light leaving this world. My heart shatters only to reassemble its reflections downstream. How close we are. On crow wings, my friend, writing in Hawaii, appears, her long black hair streaming salt over black sand, her songs recalling temple bell and high-altitude breeze, ice and its passage from the world. She and I sit, in another time, singing under these trees. She flies through me, and I know happiness is more than gossip or laughter, is the trigonometry of shadows shimmering between vectors of shine, the way certain wings die into sky fast as runoff from Himalayan peaks. What can circumscribe the delicacy of wrist bones turning up to face the sun or the way a crow slices sideways through branches to chart each updraft of story creating the world.

• 44 •

III. Listening to rising leaf shiver, I hear again Ama Adhe’s voice, see river sheen in her grandmother eyes above the gravitas of her bones solid as yaks rocking up steep-skreed slopes, as she told of her arrest by Chinese soldiers in Tibet for refusing to renounce nonviolence, her Buddhist faith, arrested with her husband and her sister, both shot in the head while she screamed. With three hundred women, Ama was imprisoned, and in four years, two hundred ninety-six starved to death, numbers too vast for our hearts ripped open, bereft of calculation. Raped by cattle prods interrogators shoved into their birth canals, into their mouths, beaten and beaten again, these women refused to renounce love or their minds to the butchers who simply stopped feeding them. As guards watched, the women ripped their shoes into finger-sized pieces to share, chewed strips of flesh men prisoners sliced from the backs of their own arms and thighs. The women died anyway and the men, souls wrapped in prayer shawls of winter winds winding from the snows of Annapurna, from the endurance of sister peaks.

• 45 •

Refugees from a bulletblind culture, we cannot understand Ama’s lack of revenge for her captors, for the murderers of her beloved sister, husband and friends. Rootshaken and shamed by our petty whining, her story drove splinters of understanding under the fingernails of our sleepwalking lives. When we finally left the stunned room we inhaled the sweet alms of finch song above lepers dragging stumps wrapped in bloody rags through tourist streets. IV Waiting for the Dalai Lama, I sit cross-legged on the grass with a monk from Bhutan and a young Tibetan cradling her baby, who stares at us as he reads each of our secrets, his face a laughing moon, round and clean as Buddha’s, black lashes luxurious as wet feathers. Like the crows, he can’t stop giggling. In any language, babies laugh the same. Enemies are as much a choice as friends, whether, when hurt, to upturn a hand or flip a bird. Sometimes love can detonate faster than a grenade. V How can I bring this learning home, back to the slurry and burn of the everyday? Back to the greedy chop of political gain.

• 46 •

To automatic weapons, public lies and hating enemies, our multinational industry of fear. VI Hindi rifles flank the Dalai Lama as he walks past, yellow as a silk scarf unwinding grace, to the temple. Who would assassinate his kind intent? I don’t want to know. As he lifts his arm to wave, he seems on the verge of a joke, eyes bright as rainy crows predicting an end to drought. Eucalyptus leaves ripple sweet over us who would learn love’s ancient sutras, the focus of the mind’s labyrinth. Namgyal Monastary, Dharamsala, India

• 47 •

Contemplating This Globe of Stars for Judi

I Consider the inflatable star globe losing air in the gift shop, shelved between plastic dinosaurs and ceramic mallards. Monogrammed with constellations this leaky black beach ball is a star atlas impostor, turned inside out and impossible to read. Imagine children, lost inside, charting the collapsing zodiac tattooed to its thin hull. Even a child must notice that this universe is finite as a basketball and running out of gas, just a toy with puckered skin instead of the vast imagination of space, glyphed with the gleaming syllabics of stars. II I remember nights in Sutton’s Bay, after work we’d walk your small son to play in the deserted park edging Lake Michigan. Inside the globe of dark, we named stars we pumped our swings toward, distant and miraculous as saints— Altair, Arcturus, and Betelgeuse. It was Cassiopoeia we cried for, raped by Zeus, then exiled by Hera’s envy to circle forever’s cold dome.

• 48 •

Oh, to hunt Zeus down, slit his immortal throat or slam Hera from her icy crown then break gravity’s apron strings, slingshotting back to far suns we left at birth. How could we make sense of the way our mother chattered to psychotic ghosts or Dad whose anger leapt into countless tides of amnesiac beer? Above our heads, the swing chains creaked. III Reshelving the star globe, I think about night’s mind ruled by its own irreducible logic, where light from dead stars flares brighter than living novas and where matter is sucked into black holes consuming the cracked bones of their fear. Without buying anything, I leave. My sister, you taught me to name the numinous you aim for, constructing complex maps of courage beyond the massive stroke that axed your mobility, daily disasters your laughter survives. In the amplitude of natural darkness, I trace Orion’s opalescent bow that tenses just above the Gemini twins, Pollux and Castor, forever poled, then all the way to the red eye of Pegasus opening opposite the Pleiades, those sisters taken far into the milky future.

• 49 •

What star do you wish upon twinned as the narratives of our lives inscribed across this oceanic globe that even now must rise like a blue star between the moons of Venus?

• 50 •

One Theory of Poetry for Walter McDonald

It’s the solace of lazuli buntings and chipping sparrows I hear, not the whine of steel guitars scarring wind’s memory. This is the hour before owls take the trees, hour of snake retreat, of the tarantula’s return over gravel, panic hour when trees are not what they seem, gray hour when the dead look for sustenance in a set of misplaced car keys. Even now I long to see her, gorgeous Figure in the Flame, hear her tap those ashy feet, impatient with Ovid’s sniveling into the meaning of life. I must get on with my burning, her white lips sizzle as she steps back into the inferno of suffering she adores. Walt, I think of you driving the hill country from Austin, your boot toe keeping two step rhythm with ghosts piloting the road in its solitary dance. I watch my love’s car lights bounce arterial through black branches comforting as luna moths on fire tattooing the road he breaks from home.

• 51 •

The Ratcheting The full moon eats the screams of magpies, dawn-colored jays ratcheting away atop soggy lawn furniture even though the moon’s developed new facial cracks and has lost more mass on its way to total disappearance in another million years. Still I am grateful to see its bright white appetite as it flies invisible as the handkerchief of my grandma’s ghost while sunrise claims this world. Yesterday I thought I was going blind, fragile retina blown apart or aqueous humor squeezed by a fatal tumor from my eyeball’s global field. Etched somewhere inside my sight, a phantom yellow bulb or spectral solar paramecium shimmied through my cornea. Neither sleep nor eye drops erased the indelible proof of melanoma’s nickel-plated electricity murdering what I envision. Why do I always feel I deserve disaster? After a battery of tests, stinging drops, finger pokes, laser white lights digging at the back of my eyes, the doctor says everything is fine. The floater still burns and leaps just out of range. I’ll carry it through the afternoon’s bureaucracy, the endless back to school meetings, but I would rather be that magpie yelling at the uncooperative sky or a jay braying against the full moon it can no longer see. .

• 52 •

In Synch for Zazu

Sun stabs the horizon of my dog’s intention as she leaps at the front door. After she’s taken a leak, she jumps six feet although she’s only a third that size. It’s cold and she’s not one to suffer idiot weather. Her mouth seldom unsmiles, black lips neat as moist velvet trolling for Milk Bones and hoping that I won’t go to work this Monday. Like any god, I must disappoint her, and I wonder if this isn’t the true leash of the universe. Not just disappointment but how seldom our desires perfect rhythm or are heroic couplets in sync. It’s not so much desire as duty that draws me to the car. My dog understands duty as snarling at shadows, blocking strangers from entering our door. Prose she reads as shaking a stuffed toy like a snapped-leg rabbit until the dismembered covers the floor. Strange how Zazu, who must also be part comic or abused poet, likes it when the cat gets rough, sinking fishhook claws into her cheeks. Medusa of routine, she shuts down by nine, seeks her own direction atop the quilt, shoots me stink eye until I finally set the alarm sink into the sheets, where I find her warm silk haunch cloistered all night, anchor nailing the drift of my dreams.

• 53 •

Who Today Needs Poetry Not the California quail clucking for millet or gold finches glutting on thistle seed, not last night’s bats jittering between the end of desert heat and Cygnus rising nor the orb weaver’s invisible silk that clings to my cheek like a prescient shroud, not the beauty of orange butterfly blooms nor the hands of the torturer screaming questions and dunking again and again the drenched head of the unindicted into a breathless barrel of ice water, not Congress that sanctions waterboarding nor the rubber wheels of a trash can nattering my neighbor’s drive awake, not the three hatchling quails trapped in the brick well around the jacaranda tree nor the Cooper’s hawk eyeing the way they scatter at the shadow of my hand trying to rescue them, not the dogs still sleeping next to my love on satin sheets the color of wet cinnamon, not coffee steam alerting my cup to the dying syntax of dreams, not the healing odor of white oleanders fencing the yard, not the pinched skin of saguaro cactus nor the glitter of sunrise caught in their gold thorns, not the hollow howl of peacocks caged across the dry wash nor the banshee screams of coyotes hunching after cottontails nor the answering screech of a rare pygmy owl shutting its eyes against dawn, not creosote arms arthritic and stiff and long without rain, not my lover’s breath freed in the updraft of a flying dream, not coffin flies squeezing into a sealed sarcophagus, not the baby

• 54 •

unwinding the umbilical cord from his neck, not the leopard lizard zipping after flies she across sand, tail held like a black and white question mark over her fast back, not cool blackberries in a glass bowl on the breakfast table, not a belt unbuckling or the snap of the triggering device on the homemade bomb about to blow in a Kabul market, not the black widow’s web spun to catch wings for her children while we sleep, not the blue burka slipping over a mother’s head, not a father’s prayer rug clotted with his son’s blood. No, not any of these. Not these.

• 55 •

Cloud Gathering for Bill

Clouds bully sky somber as the two Ute buffalo bulldoze spring grass they chew, recalling wolf and coyote opening the bag of creation, spilling sticks cut in the shape of humans running across the globe who would soon forget to honor them. Not the Utes who stayed in the Rockies with courage, their survival gift. Horse tail cirrus etch stories behind bulbous shoulders of thunderstorms broiling over ice ridges, wild as your hair or the snarled mane of the stallion screaming for mares in heat who ignore him pastured across the road. These clouds can blow open even clenched jaws of fear. Love, I think of how I reserve my hipbone, the inner flesh of my lower lip for you on a Sunday like this when wind gushes in from snow-dazed peaks, unpredictable as whitewater runoff carving Crazy Woman Creek. We read that astronomers are floored to find giant planets with no apparent orbits, nomads blasting the heart from Big Bang, bending light and rewiring what scientists thought they understood about the formation of stars, the edge of our universe curling back on itself that turns out to be a crease mirroring time. Their orbits are too colossal to measure. How can we define anything in space or dream? Like climate change.

• 56 •

Like wandering. One day you might leap in your car, drive hours to snap photos of cloud light striking a wolf spider’s eyes, just when I need you to press a clean handkerchief to my loneliness. I might wander to a news website to read that in Syria another bus filled with tourists is blown up. Tap a link to a monster tornado chewing through whole neighborhoods in Joplin or Birmingham. Who can fathom the names of so many dead? Love, you might wander home, escort out the back door the bloated bottle fly that circled our sighs this afternoon while we made love, writing another creation story, exploding incalculable orbits. Demonstrating Newton’s Laws of Motion, we rock restless, spin stories from wombs of migration across the country and back. Like Utes who interpreted the intent of shifting talus on Colorado peaks, moved to valleys sheltering winter tipis, spoke the four directions, wolf, bear, buffalo, eagle before being barbwired onto reservations. Last night’s storm victims bought insurance, believed they were safe, rooted in homes until the mega-twister boomed, splintering walls and bones, smashing cars, old growth trees. We wonder at our gluttony for instant data useless to save us. How can we measure the blossoming cauliflower fists of clouds or understand the sagas of giant planets orbiting to their own natural laws? Yet heartbeat wanders the rhythm of all song, stories ripped like lupines from earth.

• 57 •

Domestic Affairs and Foreign Policy If we shoot past one another like asteroids on a collision course with Mars, our tongues acidic with accusations that scour our hearts with lye shoveled over a shallow grave, and if we reach such velocity in our keening to have the last word, ragged in its self-loathing, then how can we open to the first purple crane’s neck blooming against love’s adobe wall or notice the three year old at the wedding in Afghanistan, her small chest abloom with bloody roses or hear her cry lost with her mother’s to helicopter blades slapping revenge into blue sky we all breathe?

• 58 •

My Sister Dreams Herself a Jaguar Zero balancing is what the juju therapist names this as she lays her magic hands along my sister’s withered side, leg twisted as a jungle vine pinned in the plastic brace, and she shuts her eyes, sees herself undeformed, a jaguar fluid as muscular wind jumping from stone to stone through a jungle stream clean green as her aquamarine eyes, where butterflies blue as morning glories flap the size of her perfect paws. North of the Amazon, jaguars outweigh wolves, Cougars, my sister and me, each black rosette etched in fur replicating itself, each a negative twin star of the other, individual as a sooty snowflake nestling into the puzzle. My sister is running, a jaguar birthing her own muscle and skin, unique as a fingerprint or bass note blown through a clarinet in the smoky bar of memory. My sister squeezes through shadow and sun, a jaguar running now through the thick green underbrush of paralysis, her own deep breathing. She is not asleep, but sees her atrophied leg straighten, align with the other, her stroke-snarled hand relax as the therapist glides from pressure point to point and I feel my spine, honeycombed and brittle these decades, fail to ache. I can’t keep my eyes from following my foot that follows the exact arc of my sister’s twisted ankle

• 59 •

as it stretches back to zero, to nadir to zero, while she growls. Despite office walls trying to rebuild themselves, she leads us leaping heart-deep through this ephemeral sun-shot stream.

• 60 •

Elephant Ride, New York Twice the size of the trainer’s chapped fist or my heart stampeding beyond tight walls, smokecolored, shot bright as Shiva’s ring of flame, the elephant’s eye held all of me. We watch her sway like a ship heaving against a pier near the red hand-painted sign advertising elephant rides screwed to the semi that hauled her from small town fairs to honkytonks to this vacant lot. All my life, I’ve loved elephants, their tree bark skin, vigilant clutches of mothers guarding babies from water hole to water hole, the sorrow of trunks caressing their dead. When I learn her name, Rose, as delicate as the moth flap of her ears, those gray petals twitch at my whisper, my hand that slides slight as a spider web warmed by her teak-dense cheek. Humbled by the vast intelligence deepening this queen who kneels before me, what right have I to ride her? Still, how can I resist our ongoing history, my human blundering desire?

• 61 •

Climbing between the great lobed mind and the arc of her spine, my legs splay, bouncing useless as a doll’s. Her muscles stretch on hips that grind like an avalanche of boulders massaging my buttocks to pelvis to thighs, until I learn the rolling music of her stride, and my body resounds with each smart sharp and flat her feet slap into frosty pavement. What a sad lunar pair we make, finally, orbiting the parking lot, led by the bored keeper chainsmoking, a gray man who will not meet her eyes or mine. What sings between the folds of Rose’s hide and my thin skin strikes the cold New York air. Synched from pelvis to knee to brow to heart, we are a single chained animal. When she lifts her trunk trumpeting, a plea stark as a shackle snapped on a wild ankle, a blaze consuming our vertebra, scalds my blood.

• 62 •

A Palimpsest of Motion I have always fallen, mad for motion, the swing of the receiving blanket in my mother’s arms, onyx wings of crows pulling up dawn, undertows sucking water from the back of my calves, euglenas and paramecia swirling like Disney bumper cars and trapped inside slides in biology class— I could have watched their mazurka, the dip and spin dizzying hours beyond the bell— so I try to explain my latest cross country drive to friends who’ve given up road trips for pilates, developing core strength while I drive through air rising to the thinning mind of ozone above concrete’s Zydeco hum stripping off my tires for 3600 miles rocked rocketing in my small red sedan past burrowing owls and desert thorns to hill country cedars’ scarce leaves past the wheeze of refinery swamps to green bayous with alligator grins to gray muck Mississippi delta and plopped into the spangled pockets of New Orleans shivering in its transvestite pearls, to white sand packed by oily Gulf laps, around panhandling loblolly pines, clear water swails of North Florida, where billboards blare black and white signed by God that Judgment Day is set for May 20th this year, this certainty calibrated each decade in the numerical logarithms of rapture or doom that predicts metal split, splintered frame houses, our skulls shattered by vengeance on a cosmic scale. It hasn’t happened yet, but who knows, I might be spitting in my own soup.

• 63 •

Oh, glorious momentum, the neverstop pendulum pushing me from Interstate to Interstate is my redemption, my ultimate date with wind’s determined thrust and rain’s eyeteeth nattering on my windshield—the only muse is journey, itself, travel shattering the sound barrier of stasis, sweet eye-stitch of motion, swift funnel of an eagle over a mourning dove, the dream of never arriving, always the smooth centrifugal orbit widening the lurch to light, then away from, going to shade like falling in love or, rather, chasing lust’s wet red skirts, just to tongue her slim black cat ankles that never stop running until the gas jets fire and up the final ashes whirl.

• 64 •

Notes on Loss: After British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Explosion of 2010 “The world is a bag of lies ...” ~ John Tiong Chunghoo

Does the journalist’s morning desk face the empty wall, posters of Walter Winchell or window splashed by toxic orange-tipped waves? Bag is certainly the right shape, the globe a bag sewed with tectonic plates trussing in all its molten guts. Imagine any skin sack vast enough to stuff with what we can’t comprehend— the millions of gallons of crude spewed per day for months murdering what flies or swims or breathes in and around the Gulf. Perhaps, its just sloppy usage, “spill” a harmless nickname for condoned corporate greed. BP is just another multinational that drilled too deep, broke environmental laws no corporation meant to keep. As we ignite more fuel to drive to work or play, the journalist pours coffee black, adds real cream, despite its cargo of cholesterol clogging the throbbing carotid as insidious as crude oil smothering the sea. What he reads on UPI is our funeral written by asphyxiated swells. Who can fathom what cannot survive this catastrophic slick—

• 65 •

silver constellations of flying fish, bottlenose dolphins whose healing language we fail to learn, nations of coral reefs harboring starfish phalanxes, clownfish, parrotfish, sergeant majors, reef fish brighter than sunshot stained glass, bonefish, barracuda, blue marlin with their bulbous foreheads outwitting fishermen, sail fish, mango-hued pompano, the deep duende of whales, their eyes big enough to curl up in, octopi geniuses, blushing the color of a sun-burned belly, pipefish and red snappers, the wild buck of sea horses through shallows, pearly sprawl of oyster beds, goose barnacles, salsa dance of shrimp, lime sea cucumbers, razor anemones, moray eels, sea snakes and the brilliant coinage of cocinas flipping between tar balls on a Florida beach, sleek slide of nurse sharks, sand sharks, leopard sharks, manta rays flying like Rilke’s dark angels across the same crenelated sand pink conchs crawl, all aquatic dreams, now, what our grandkids may never see, drenched in greed no bag can ever contain.

• 66 •

Riding the Stars for Joy Harjo

Last night I warmed my thin hands at the bonfire of my friend’s stories, a young Indian woman hiding with an enemy turned friend behind a creosote bush while police busted a party in her past, and onto the sleek back of a comet, I leapt sparking once again across the obsidian bulge of night, past the fetal pink curl of the Horse Nebula, leapt naked and open-mouthed to breathe in the sharp new light, the way I came into this world. At the edge of the universe is song that will break your heart, spiraling up from the eternal rich green thatch of love. Yes, it is green. I’ve seen it. Going back to the stars always makes me cry. The Hawaiian healer was right. Stars are alive and have nothing to do with celebrity, everything to do with clarity erasing the illusion of loneliness and despair waving wounded flippers in turbulent seas. I remember as a teen riding in the back seat of a car full of nervous laughter, to the cemetery and hidden six packs of beer behind a mossy headstone. While everyone punned about ghosts drinking our stash, I couldn’t stop staring

• 67 •

out the window at the stars milky and hissing in that humid Michigan sky. Squeezed between the warm shoulders of friends telling jokes, I couldn’t stop feeling apart. The stars called, but I was too shy to share the silver music of their shimmering. I didn’t know then that my friends were me. This sunrise is a silver plate glowing peach at the center where the ghost of food shines. How astonishing the light of that feast waiting for us, just when we realize our hunger, how we’ve taken nourishment for granted. There is nothing but change indelible, electric as the charge between particles millions of light years apart and the promise of what boomerangs between stars, all that we mistake for empty space.

• 68 •

Wild in the Plaza of Memory We’re all tourists in this world. ~ Ernest Hemingway One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Mother’s Day Celebration for Terri Acevedo

What is love but feasting atop a grave? Mother’s Day and the Catholic cemetary is packed with barbeques, Mariachis and plastic tablecloths laid for picnics. There, alone with his hands pressed into a burial mound and in the cool shade of a concrete angel’s wings, a boy sits crosslegged. He could be a yogi concentrating on the orderly column of black ants that carry, one blossom at a time, yellow mesquite flowers to their eggs underground, except that its Mother’s Day, and he is as alone as he’ll ever be, staring at the empty curl of his fingers holding nothing but the distant mourning of doves. At desert noon even the dead enjoy singing that braids heat waves shimmering molten lead between spring blooms. My friend has come to speak to her mother riding the spirit horse of memory along an underground river this past year. She lights a candle and brushes debris with her tender palms from the ant-tilled soil above her mother’s ghost face. Walking between graves, her skin fills with a guitar’s laughing blue chords, with charcoal smoke, with the boy’s mute hands, with loneliness spun by hot wind each afternoon under the invisible birth of stars, where the dead begin to remember their names.

• 71 •

Desert Detour Just when my feet nurse grudges in their gritty sandals climbing from the gravel river bed to the asphalt path, I am astonished by trees that are chandeliers of white orchids, each tinged pink and vaguely lewd reminding me of the outthrust bud of a leopard frog’s tongue. Mesquites lace the path with shade, hold the nests of mockingbirds, tiny yellow-capped Verdins, a slim-billed Lucy’s warbler, silky flycatchers black as wet velvet, the flannel of lonely dove notes. This walk is so peaceful, we nearly forget how quick we can be to pick up assault rifles loaded with insults. When you want to check out a homeless camp, I do not tell you how my hip joints yelp as we skid down the bank of the dry Rillito River under a highway bridge where we stalk the perimeter of a lean-to, tidy in its way, lined with felt cloth, a nest shaped like a skull cauled by plastic shopping bags. One wall is neatly lined with quart beer cans— ice house Buds, golden Coors. Nearby, a jacket seems to rise up on one elbow next to a shopping cart from Sears. What will happen to the owner of this studio apartment with a view of the Catalinas during the next flashflood that broils furious? Once I saw a refrigerator carried light as a maple leaf

• 72 •

down an arroyo. Who hasn’t seen on TV the inevitable believers who misinterpret the water god’s intent like the mother of three drowned in her compact car while a drunken teen clung like a mantis to its radio antennae. Love, what promise draws anyone to this cauldron of suicidal heat scorching eyes and nerves blind? Delicate as corneas, these orchids thrive in unrelenting sun that stabs needles into our skin. How do frail blossoms make it with no mist or ocean breath to wet them down? Heat waves rise from my bare ankles scrambling for home, defenseless against what, in desert broom, coils to sting.

• 73 •

I Have An Illegal Alien in My Trunk Just north of the border, la migra doesn’t consider this bumper sticker a joke. Only a chihuahua without papers, maybe a pair of pawned cowboy boots would fit in the trunk of this mini SUV driving Oracle swarming at rush hour. Even though half of Tucson’s traffic speaks Spanish, the legislature’s declared English the only legal fuel—it’s the same Continental Divide stubborn and paralytic as the steel-plated wall insulting our nation’s learning curve as it cleaves us. For over seventy years my grandma’s high cheekbones were illegal. Lovely as a tiger lily she spoke the six severed tongues dividing her heart. In a grave that does not spell out her name in any language, she is beyond the shovels of police who would have to dig up her bones to deport them back to a village outside Prague, where beneath a Catholic church are layered the crumbling skulls and femurs of her ancestors slaughtered Black Plague and centuries of wars. I am safe in my adobe house with its rainbow congregation of chuckling quails, pyrrhuloxia, choirs of mockingbirds, skitterish purple finches, coyotes, javelinas, rattlers, scorpions, and leopard lizards, and the not so silent majority of English sparrows who accommodate too easily to walls—there is not one passport among them. The cactus wren weaves her tough nest among the barbed thorns of the cholla, while round-eared gophers construct

• 74 •

complex subways for their babies to run under chain link fences separating yards. Each day along the border of our sealed hearts gleaming with coiled razor wire, traffic idles waiting for armed guards to pillage each car trunk for contraband people and drugs. I have seen our agents rip out the interiors of vans, spit commands at old women with black hair and dark skin. Sanitary, they use rubber gloves to deconstruct the meager grocery bags and plastic purses of common lives. Indians are particularly suspect, even though reservations were drawn like tumors by both governments to spill across borders, so that whole families are amputated like unnecessary limbs. This morning walking the Rillito River, we read bilingual signs warning the thirsty not to drink irrigation water ringing ornamental bushes & flowering trees. This year, statistics say, twice as many border crossers will die of thirst in Arizona. Who can stop tongues alien or otherwise from swelling black at noon. After all, in the barbed wire waiting room of the heart there is no seating for sentiment nor room for the frail arms of hope to save strangers, even if they are nursing mothers or desperate fathers looking for work who haven’t yet learned the English word for por que. After all, waging a war on terror like any war is not for the faint ambitions of the humane, so, in the game of homeland security, we erect a bulletproof wall across the borders of our souls that guarantees destruction must win.

• 75 •

Desert Sunday With Clouds for Bill and Charlotte

Sometimes our globe spins sorrow and I want to tell you how my heart splits, a pomegranate knocked from its branch when you are hurt, when the wind blows betrayal through the cracked door of your guileless laughter or how, when I watched you rock the newborn in your arms, speaking to him as if he was an old friend back from a treacherous journey I was amazed to fall in love again with your voice. Did I mention that I am cheered by the way birdsong is a tiara for your morning dreams? Despite their small bones, I’ve seen hummingbirds attack both redtail hawk and golden eagle, whirring close enough to thrust their hypodermic beaks to stop those tyrants from spiking their nests which are the exact size of a human eye socket? Whatever melancholy notes are drafted today on the frail rags of desert clouds blown in from the invisible Pacific will drift, inhaling moisture for a downpour thundering thousands of miles east. Who can tell whether any clouds notice us as we turn our faces to their pitiless shade? What can I do with the news that my only brother’s scarred esophagus is being strangled by a tumor

• 76 •

with multiple tentacles except to cut through each cancerous arm with a machete forged on love’s blue anvil beyond death in my own mind? In Los Angeles, on the polluted streets of angels over 80,000 homeless people are hunted by psychoses and loneliness and terror sprouting buzzard wings so broken, we have invented no alphabet to begin to give them names. All I know are stories that tie us to the songs of cactus wrens braving the thorns on a jumping cholla to make a nest. Awe is in the scorpion’s talent to dangle its venom above its vulnerable back. A vermillion flycatcher can turn a scraggly palo verde branch into a multi-faceted ruby as it gathers light with each breast feather to amaze and blind us. We try to understand the metastasis of poison, disease and birdsong, heartbreak and laughter as unique and personal, until it finally destroys what we thought separated our names.

• 77 •

Healing Tongues for Peter Warshall

This morning holds out its stormy blue palm as empty as my stomach punched by the news of genocide or the eyes of the house finch strewn last night by a cat across the brick patio. Before sunrise tiny sugar ants swarm through the eye sockets, feast on the last finch memories of clinging to a eucalyptus branch before it snapped when a microburst whirled it within claw reach, the history of its morning and evening songs varied as Haydn’s symphonies catalogued in its crenulated brain. For over a month now across town, you’ve turned in your hospital bed, tangling the feeding tube, surgical drains, the IV dripping through dreams of sacred salmon, jaguars, wolves, elegant trogons, and the endangered you’ve worked all your life to preserve. Peter, who understands fate’s tantrums, its open-handed slaps to the faces of those whose gentleness toward existence sweetens the acid ulcerating our world? Above your bed, monitors read your breathing, your heartbeat, but they have no memory of the way you sat, chanting Kaddish while your friend’s bones popped and snapped in a crematory fire or the way you studied the behaviors of baboons

• 78 •

and spadefoot frogs, lions and hummingbirds to grasp the weathers of our own hearts. Didn’t you teach me the names of desert birds? It cracked you up when I pronounced verdin, Verdun, as if that small grey clown with the nervous yellow head navigating mesquite flowers was an old battle site? After days of failing to stop hiccups from ripping out surgical stitches, doctors gave you thorazine, and the protein bar in your hand suddenly compacted into the bodies of all those soldiers lost in World War I. What would Ginsberg or Snyder or Creeley or any of your friends say—hold a sunflower in your teeth while you kayak treacherous rapids, keep an eye out for the swirl of venomous snakes, don’t step in fresh scat left on the shore. You know the difference that a shadow moving makes to a magnificent red trogon hot after pomegranate seeds. Peter, heal now. We have undammed rivers to canoe, night fires to build against jackals and too many wild stories we will recount to live. The intricate curves of your brain know that the heart of what’s endangered is held infinite as patterns of birdsong we learn to preserve one another, vital.

• 79 •

Stalking the Divine under a Full Desert Moon I. Bleached as the bones of migratory birds, broken stones powder the foothills above Phoenix’s million lights. What shadows mark the true currency of freedom’s long journey into the divine? The arms of Saguaros rise like so many immigrants pinned to night sky, twisted and begging stars from the deaf hands of Gods whose language of NO clicks like bullets shoved into the chambers of ignorance and disdain. II. We are not afraid of rattlers, refugees whisper to crushed granite that doesn’t believe them, not afraid of the sidelong skitter of the fanged tarantula looking for a mate or the Gila Monster, its hide beaded as a bag slung over the bare shoulder of a night queen. We are not afraid of javelinas who materialize to stampede, clattering through creosote bushes on either side of our legs, they say, knowing their skin is vulnerable as tears smearing la migra’s indifferent fists.

• 80 •

III. How did they finally arrive in this place from the slums of Nogales, Guerrero’s empty stomach or a busted maiz farm in Chiapas? Stars shatter like the headlights of Border Patrol trucks on impact with their starving shoulders at the edge of infrared sights. Desert wind scours this emptiness, a lock-jawed wind disguised as law emptying hatred like molten tar into calluses pocking poor hands offered to this country’s needs. IV. We do not fear the owl, heavy horned and menacing a mesquite, owl landing like a small boulder thrown into lacey limbs, owl whose eyes are chiseled from yellow ice, asking who, who, who is next? V. Blue dwarfs spin near Scorpio poised to sting the Southern horizon where moon lifts her saffron robes into white, blind as the scald of searchlights on a child’s terrified face, blind as the metal bite of handcuffs

• 81 •

on a father’s wrists, blind as a mother’s belief in a better life for her kids. VI. Walking the desert, we learn our places, learn the strict edicts of talons and venom, of wild pigs who materialize to surround us, popping scimitar teeth, slitting thighs and torsos to bare ribs, learn finally that borders are merciless as the promise of safe haven, and the avenging angels of governors that snuff out the small songs of our lives. We do not fear any of them. Moon, oh Moon, we do not shrink from your luminous heart transforming desert dust to silver. As you ascend the nexus of dark, teach us to flex our free wings which can never be legislated even when our tongues offend the unjust who would extinguish our common human fire.

• 82 •

Compassionate Heart for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the eighteen victims of the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona

Dawn’s iced bullets crack to split night’s beautiful skull, the morning after desert wings turned to lead and blood stained the sky warming the Safeway parking lot, where we shop for cheap food and where time was blown off its feet when the congresswoman stopped to chat with people, her style to listen to people not distanced by emails or texts. Desert was opening her warm arms to the small crowd as the shooter strode, pulled out the new handgun and shot Gabrielle pointblank. There is no other way to say this. The bullet tore its acetylene blue path through her brain, then through more as he spun clenching the terrible automatic trigger of his anger, gunfire like steel hail popping on the tin roof of hate, ripping into eighteen others who could not get away. Among the six dead, a federal judge stopping by after Saturday mass to see his friend instead of hurrying home to vacuum floors and a nine year old girl just elected to student council who’d wanted to see how government works. And she did, at least, see how the opposition takes aim, crosshairs of rage centered on their opponents vulnerable temples. This is the USA, where the killer bees of intimidation shatter the everyday compassion of even saints like this congresswoman who wanted health care for the poor, wanted an end to racism’s frigid fists, wanted to talk to her constituents without rancor’s blades slicing from a microphone’s indifferent bulb.

• 83 •

Now, Gabrielle’s chest rises and falls to monitor beeps in the same ICU, where my sister recovered from a massive head bleed, six weeks locked in a coma five years ago. I know how it goes—the shunt pumping fluid geranium pink from the brain to relieve relentless pressure, the long weeks’ fight to keep swelling down, more surgeries and tubes, infected dreams burning down dim alleys of pain and fear. What do we hear? Internet threats and billboards paid for by political campaigns turned to ice, calling for M16s to take out the opposition, targeting this slim woman, a moderate whose slogan is love straight from her bleeding and compassionate heart.

• 84 •

My Brother Steps Off the Jade Dragon Boat Carrying the Dead Just before dawn flicks open sky’s lid, your eyes open my dream green as your hand-carved jade dragon boat. Sweet to see you again, tall unquenchable flame in your red monk robe, your esophagus restored, no scars from repeated surgeries, no mushroomed tumors, no raving PTSD screams. In gold light smoking up from the slow river, we watch our dogs play— strays we adopted skittish and canny as African wild dogs in their rough variegated coats. Beyond words and their awful music, you don’t speak, except for the shush of tide composing your eyes beyond all questions, beyond hope’s ripe scald. I can’t move or look away from the dogs’ mock fight, the way our sibling sniping annealed our spirits untamed in a dream room by what helplessness calls real, room whose walls are membranes alive lit by flames that do not burn, room booming fire songs from a dragon calling you to sail back to the rivering stars I can only count as love bristles wild at our feet.

• 85 •

Sonoran Desert Bat Rise for Steve Barancik

Imagine them folded like live leather wallets into linear cracks between concrete expansion panels under the bridge, swarming with the rising surf of Tucson rush hour. Here, the Rillito River runs only at monsoon. When evening heat hammers past a hundred, annealing earth to sky, we arrive to watch the bats emerge. You worry whether this will pay off. Years ago you read they gathered here, hanging like tiny arthritics, mouse-faced and vulnerable from the underbelly of girders. At first we spot only a few pigeons tucked like soiled slippers atop steel beams. Then the reek hits. Dense as a die-off of bottle flies, fried black guano coats walkway rails, river’s rumpled bed. While sun sinks in its burning citrus basket, we listen to teen girls squeak as a teacher shoves a recorder duct-taped to the end of a broom at a crack where bats scratch at their cement tombs, squabbling in infant pitches, reminding me of when friends contradict each other, interrupting and niggling because they have forgotten the vocabulary to translate what lies unsaid.

• 86 •

Wrapped in the murky wings of our solitudes, we hardly speak among the supplicants, some kneeling to get a better angle, adjusting sunglasses against glare. Walking an albino pit bull straining at its purple leash, a woman promises the bats are awesome, the chop of black wings will flow east, turn back on themselves like runoff, then pour over our heads. It’s not until after the mountains lose their batik to eternity that a few Mexican free tails slide from their slots. We lift our ecstatic faces turned to horror as they piss on us, flitting around us like purses or frantic outcast umbrellas. How easily our faith in wings is unhinged. A small boy in a black suit with a pale moon face standing next to me recites a litany of bat facts, the way they sleep insulated in their Bela Lugosi capes at Carlsbad Caverns, his mom a bird expert, his toddler sister already a spotter. By now, bats drop by the thousands like multiple births from concrete, swirling into a vortex thick as tropical mosquitoes, whirling and slapping dusk fall, more mammalian wings than we imagine exist anywhere, and flapping a history of vampire movies around our heads our bare shoulders. These toothsome miracles deftly echo locate hands, our inarticulate arms, never touching vulnerable skin

• 87 •

or tangling anyone’s hair, no neck wounds or rabid bites. How can we not love this wide eddy thick with slick black wings that lifts the fine satin of our cynicism on light dying toward an ocean our eyes are too weak to see.

• 88 •

The Same Old On any given Wednesday before sun peels back cirrus clouds cock-a-jar to earth’s spin, you might dream of alligators, their urine yellow eyes lifting from algae, measuring you for their next meal and you’re backhanded by memory walking the hard mile through the maximum security prison where you taught poetry nearly a decade, assaulted by cat-calls that still rise like polluted surf in the heart’s tidal wash. Half of them are murderers. You refuse to teach men whose hands whacked wives and girlfriends and children with small mouths cracked just enough to reveal split vowels howling from their tongues. Half of your students are murderers whose automatic weapons blow bloody holes the size of frozen orange juice cans through brothers selling the same mind-shearing drugs or those too rich to ever be caught or those who swear off poverty for cash fast as rat scatter across their blankets in the Projects of their childhoods stolen before they can learn to spell their names in what passes for school in Harlem or Bedford Stye. It is the Black Panther who accompanies you to class, his skin velvet as a tropical night, his red velour shoes fiery rebels ending the orange prison jumpsuit. He tells you that if he’d known the revolution was going to be televised, he’d never

• 89 •

have shown up. His sentence is his life, his poems gentle and soiled as pigeon feathers shed on city sidewalks, his scrubbed hands soft and cupping yours forever goodbye. Each time you enter the prison, guards pat down your sweater and slacks, take your jacket, then rifle school papers for weapons you refuse to learn to fire, for drugs you’ll never use. And, the pneumatic gates’ metal teeth click behind you for the rest of your life as you are ushered into the nation of the forgotten and ashamed. Do you remember their names? You remember their eyes leveled like lasers reading yours for fear or like bobcats gauging weakness in the wings of songbirds. You remember that the guards are far worse. Some nights your escort is the septuagenarian car thief who is teaching himself to read and carries Pound’s Cantos he’ll devour before the next semester ends. He tells you when he became a lookout for dealers, he dropped out of second grade. Other nights, it’s the Afghani diamond cutter turned heroin smuggler, his odd verses weaving smoky quartz eyes and Mujahadeen with hunger pains to link complex as Arabic grape vines surviving a Taliban mortar attack. He wonders aloud at why a woman unveiled would ever come into this place.

• 90 •

Far from concrete walls now, you are grateful to walk this desert that erases the dense shadows of bars, black mold mouthing walls and floors, all those incipient coughs from abused lungs and the pumped-up muscles of guards and inmates walking ruts in the same underground tunnels, as if any of them or you could ever escape confinement, hope’s chronically leaky roof, the testosterone smell of revenge and hatred’s carcinogenic cigarettes that on this Wednesday rise from your mug of shade-grown coffee as you click on radio news describing the quick deaths of two teen dealers shot in a car chase up the same road you take every day on your way to the health food store you think will save your life.

• 91 •

What If What if our planet eventually gets sucked into the sun blistering all life crisp as a lizard’s severed tail, still a cardinal’s wings in full sun can startle you like a handful of rubies fallen from the morning star, still the dog you adopted from the pound is learning not to be afraid of a man’s boots that must have kicked through her cage. You can do nothing about the venom in an ex-vice president’s eye or the way he’ll avoid prosecution for war crimes. The bottle fly’s legs are unbearably sticky as it begins to sip the skin of the tortured even before he dies. What if you drive through rush hour traffic only to arrive the first desperate guest at the wedding? And what if the mandolin you bought on a humid Appalachian afternoon from the famous blue grass strummer learned its own music and detested the calluses on your hands, but the slant of a friend’s shy smile through a glass of cabernet made it all worth the price? Today your nephew goes to his first college class and what you remember is that he couldn’t squeeze the right notes from his violin in the 4th grade recital. Afterward he told you he hated the word dyslexia, and you worried that his red eyes weren’t from allergies or desert wind that persists hoarse as a mockingbird’s song long after sunset. Therapists warn us not to play what if, but if is a seductress with false eyelashes, her gold lame dress slit up to her thigh and can blind even the falcon’s accurate eyes.

• 92 •

What Cannot Be Determined



Say the blue-eyed sky doesn’t view the cortege of ants bearing palo verde blossoms across dawn to line their larval nests underground. Say I don’t turn to you on the persimmon coverlet but brew instead doubt’s dark coffee because talking about the wonders of ex-lovers is never an aphrodisiac in the same way that sending troops from one bad war to the next doesn’t restore families or the Afghani bride whose veil is shredded along with her beautiful face by the rockets of a misplaced patrol we’ll officially apologize for in the evening news. Say that pinkeye swells my lid, and my vision swims in an aquarium blurred by the algae of betrayal or that your hand isn’t a revolver leveled at my heart but a fleshy question mark yearning for my cheek. Say that generals would rather be unemployed grocery clerks than be deployed in another guerilla war they cannot win. Say blood is a fleeting stain leaking from roadside bomb shrapnel that fills a helmet in Kabul with a father’s memories lost to the infant son he’ll never lift in his vanishing palms. Say that mourning doves don’t keen for the dead, and that the intent of ants is random as photons changing the shape of our cells as they zip through obsidian spaces between galaxies. Say that you love me this morning, and generals pick up the pens of their unmaking and sign

• 93 •

their own orders to return home. Say that until noon ants will carry fragile blooms to eggs hatching under earth, and the next generation will be saved.

• 94 •

What Buzzes for Alfred Corn

Not bees but Neruda and his horse swaying around glacial boulders, slipping on drizzled moss, the whinny of the dictator’s soldiers close behind him and light the color of a rotting apple making a topographical map of betrayal on his horse’s shoulders as he climbed to Machu Picchu to the spine of the Andes cracked by centuries of ice harsh as the executioner’s axe, as machine gun stutter that splattered his friends to heaps of powder-burned bones in Santiago streets. And when the guides’ nerves clicked like cicadas and they tried to prod him, the honeysuckle of wren song slowed his pulse and the spotted thrush rustling leaf song opened his ears to what crackles between stars so that he had to stop and memorize the syllables of each new language as he did each mountain anemone, each thorn bush, each tree limb twisting in frigid winds, to hear poetry wrapped in the vulvic bracts of lilies, the stiff downbeat of a condor’s primaries, through the rainy harmonics of pine needles,

• 95 •

no thing too small for the supernova constantly exploding his curiosity, so that smuggling the fragile verses of wild onion, the casual flick of a woodpecker’s tail, the long-boned moan of doves, the spiral of tiny black ants peeling mountain lupine, purple monkshood, the white-haired spines of daisies, Neruda escaped. Today not bees but the scald of those verses thrust tongues sharp as cutter ants dismembering the lies of politicians, tongues simple as hand-thatched brooms or dun-colored sparrows lifting from the vast dark folds of tyranny’s sleeves all who remain hungry and hunted in our world.

• 96 •

Wild in the Plaza of Memory for Dan Vera, Carmen Calatayud, Peter Montgomery, Joseph Ross, David Cheezam, Naomi Benaron and Melissa Tuckey

Oh, body of poems like an uncut bouquet of camas taller than our heads, pungent as grizzly sweat, that witnesses our metaphoric picnic, our aortic toasts to stars rewriting themselves each night while we dream. Oh, body of poems unwinding the stories of an old woman’s bare feet walking through corn pollen and banana leaves, through fields of sugar cane scythed by peasants whose tongues have been cut out by tyrants, poems scouring the blood of Afghani mothers from blasted brick streets. Oh, body of poems holding out washcloths to cool the foreheads of soldiers blistering on the streets of Baghdad, poems holding out cups of honeyed milk to children starving in Darfur sand, poems leaping with their hearts into rivers runoff swollen and drowning their own banks. Oh, body of poems laughing at the spittle of dogs with their heads thrown out of car windows on a freeway littered with Milk Bones and torn socks. Oh, body of poems that for this month, have thrown their arms around each others’ shoulders, like war veterans marching in Washington and Moscow and Santiago and Tehran and Jerusalem for peace.

• 97 •

Oh, body of metaphors rattling wrist bones like jewelry in the wild plaza of memory Oh, body of metaphors drinking coffee in a cafe sweetened by plum blossoms Oh, body of friends growing new leaves on the same struggling tree

• 98 •

Acknowledgments Magazines Asheville Poetry Review: “Desert Sunday With Clouds,” “Riding The Stars” and “The River Of Souls Overflows” Cimmaron Review: “My Sister Makes Herself A Jaguar” Del Sol: “What Cannot Be Determined,” “Healing Tongues,” “Wild Poppies at Solstice,” and “Domestic Affairs and Foreign Policy” Eleventh muse: “Contemplating the Globe of Stars” Four Branches: “Wind FutureCycle: “Palimpsest of Motion” Grist: “Who Today Needs Poetry” Hunger Mountain: “In Dharamsala Among Tibetan Refugees” La Bloga: “Stalking the Divine Under a Full Desert Moon” The Mas Tequila Review: “The Same Old” Three Coyotes Review: “Nervousosity” The Platte River Review: “Whole Notes” and “Sonoran Desert Bat Rise” Poetry Miscellany: “Cloud Gathering,” “Elephant Ride, New York,” “Notes On Loss,” “On Hearing the Chinese Government Has Outlawed Reincarnation” Ragazine: “Compassionate Heart” and “2011, The Year of the Metal Rabbit” San Pedro River Review: “The Anarchist Chooses A Chinese Watercolor Brush” and “All The Way to Angel Fire Peak” Superstition Review: “At The Ouray Vapor Caves,” ”The Ratcheting,” “Learning Subtraction,” ”Regarding Volcanoes and Scalpels,” “Wild in the Plaza of Memory” Terrain: “Mother’s Day Celebration,” “A Short History of Falling,” (Best of the Web, 2010), “I Have an Illegal Alien in my Trunk” and “Focus of the Mind’s Labyrinth” Untitled Country Review: “One Theory of Poetry”

• 99 •

Anthologies Dogs Singing (Salmon Press, Ireland): “In Synch” In Walt McDonald Country, ed. Jeffrey Alfier, San Pedro River Review: “One Theory of Poetry” Kore Press Online Anthology Devoted to Gabrielle Giffords: “In Tucson Yesterday, Blood” Poets Respond to SB1070 Anthology online: “Stalking the Divine Under a Full Moon,” “In Tucson Yesterday, Blood,” and “I Have an Illegal Alien in My Trunk” My ongoing appreciation goes to Joy Harjo dear friend who makes time to read and comment on my poems. I am deeply grateful to Marilyn Kallet for her help with editing poems in this book as well as for bringing me to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as the Hodges Visiting Writer, which provided me with time to assemble and finish this book of poems. Thank you to independent filmmaker, Brad Case for his indie film, “Nervousosity,” based on my poem of the same title. I am infinitely grateful for the caring of supportive friends, Terry Acevedo, Beth Alvarado, Carmen Calatayud, Pat Campeau, Alfred Corn, Teri Hairston, Terry Harvey, Diana Hadley, Lorian Hemingway, Richard Jackson, Charlotte Lowe, Lucinda and William Luvaas, Kasia Sokol-Borup, Peter Warshall, Don and Lynn Watt and many others whose grace remind me to walk with humility and strength. I am thankful for the last months I had with my brother John. My sisters, Judi and Val, my Aunt Olga, nieces, Julia Rose Brooks and Emily Rose Cranson, and nephews, Maxwell Jackson Uschuk, Lyndy Cranson, Seth Uschuk, Patrick Uschuk and Sam Stahl continue to inspire me. Un mil gracias to my publisher, Bryce Milligan, who believes in my work and keeps it alive and cared for in this world. A gigantic thank you to my husband and friend, Bill Root, grizzly bear man, genius, gypsy, poet, photographer, wildlife and wilderness advocate, and lover, and finally to my four-legged friends, Happy Wolf, Zazu and Sadie.

• 100 •

About the Author

C

alled by The Bloomsbury Review “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is the author of four volumes of poetry: the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, One-Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks, and Crazy Love (all published by Wings Press) and Without the Comfort of Stars (Sampark Press, New Delhi and London). Crazy Love received the 2010 American Book Award. Scattered Risks was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 Zacharias Poetry Award (nomination by Ploughshares). Joy Harjo and other musicians joined Uschuk on a CD of Finding Peaches (Wings Press). The author of numerous chapbooks, her work has appeared in well over two hundred fifty journals and anthologies, including Agni Review, Calyx, Future Cycles, Nimrod, Parabola, Parnassus Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, O Taste and See, 48 Younger American Poets, etc. Translated into a dozen languages, her work has appeared in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Dog’s Singing (Ireland), Grufvan, and Ploughshares. Uschuk’s literary prizes include first place in the 2011 War Poetry contest from winningwriters.com, the 2010 New Millenium Poetry Prize, 2010 Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the 2001 Literature Award from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council for Finding Peaches in the Desert, The King’s English Prize, as well as awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Iris, Ascent, Sandhills Review, and Amnesty International. Nearly 30 individual poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She has been a featured writer several times at Prague Summer Programs, the 2011 Sha’ar Poetry Festival in Tel Aviv, Israel, the American Center in New Delhi, India, the University of Pisa, International Poetry Festivals in Malmo Sweden and Struga, Macedonia, the British School in Pisa, Italy, Vilenica in Slovenia, Gemini Ink Writers Festival, the Meacham Writers Conference, the Book Marks Book Fair, the Scandinavian Book Fair, the Deep South Writers Conference, the Universities of Arizona, Montana, Gothenberg (Sweden), Oregon, Tennessee, Montana State, Colorado State, St. Edward’s and California State Universities, New York University, Juilliard, Hunter

• 101 •

College, Vassar College, SUNY New Paltz, numerous libraries and book stores. Pamela Uschuk is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College, where she also directs the Southwest Writers Institute. Editor-In-Chief of the literary magazine, Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado. Uschuk was a featured writer at the 2011 Prague Summer Programs as well as at the 2011 Sha’ar Writers Conference in Tel Aviv. In 2011, Uschuk was the John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennesse, Knoxville.

There is much to admire in the lyrical investigations of Pam Uschuk’s Wild in the Plaza of Memory. She writes about the breakdown and ruin that comes with war, environmental abuse and disregard, global negligence and strife, personal conflict and resolution with plainspoken, natural beauty. Her bold and artful surrender to the earth in peril gives us hope even as it asks how we “bear the brilliance that strikes then dies.” —Dorianne Laux Author of The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon

• 102 •

W

ings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas— without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish. Wings Press attempts to produce multicultural books, ebooks, chapbooks, CDs, and broadsides that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a transformational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, open-minded and interesting. But most of all it is honest. Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped. As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.

Colophon This first edition of Wild in the Plaza of Memory, by Pamela Uschuk, has been printed on 55 pound Edwards Brothers Natural paper. Titles have been set in Herculanum type, the text in Adobe Caslon type. All Wings Press books are designed and produced by Bryce Milligan.

On-line catalogue and ordering: www.wingspress.com Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by the Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com and in Europe by www.gazellebookservices.co.uk Also available as an ebook.