Squall of 1976

An anorexic mannequin, featureless

save an unwavering stage-right stare,

always alone, I watched you perform.

But during that winter squall

of Nineteen-Seventy-Four, when snow

coffin-deep, hid everything essential,

where to trust the road was safe

was to think away pot holes, downed

power lines and where fog dimmed

all our feints and fears, that night

your cousin Tito and I, twin impulses

of fealty and fidelity, we sat two feet apart

at the same Filipino community

center table. We both loved you.

I know now what I did not know then;

that love manifests analogous to snow:

Slush flurry—egg white slurry beaten stiff,

glacier—crystals—water vapor,

volatile, tenuous as jealousy.

Fat, wet flake clung to weeds

until everything we thought we knew

was buried, indiscernible, and reimagined.

Tito smoked his last Camel

while you mimicked Tony Orlando.

Would you want him first-time driving in ice,

 at night, in your car, in a city none of us knew? 

He threw on the cashmere overcoat

picked up in San Diego where he’d never need it,  

(that peacock gesture for you, cousin).

Your El Camino keys in hand we hit the ice,

skidding our way to a collision. 

Love doesn’t even melt the same way twice,

temperatures and altitudes as variable as emotions.  

A momentary flare up, a match snuffed or forgotten,

that was me, but goddam Mike,

even at sixteen you could sharpen floes into stilettos

After the show, after your unbearable

razor-edged silence radiating out,

like a years’ worth of my parent’s scorn,

an evolving front, polar and tropical air colliding,

all of it common and natural and familiar,

after we loaded the El Camino

with guitars, amps, and speakers,

the engine idled up from zero,

after we all got in, you backed it up

then rammed the center’s brick wall.

Tito and I both turned sideways to look at you

as though we were one,  

to snap the lies off our faces,

Whore. Fucking puta!

You wanted me to feel your hold.

What I felt was a calving, an iceberg

ripping free of the glacier, a visible tip

hinting at our encroaching future.

Asparagus

I blame you, Grandmother, for the asparagus I steam tonight

remembering how you sent me to pluck it

from that slope behind your house that leaned

toward the apple orchard.  They were winsap, I think,

and red delicious, never ripe when we visited. 

Snap asparagus at the root, you said, showing me only once,

or was it twice?  I was so young and didn’t use a basket

but grasped them like a bouquet of blue bells.

You snapped them into small pieces, scrubbed

then boiled the life out of them.  I didn’t know until later

how you ruined the taste with water and salt

and remember the asparagus, still, as perfect.

It is your fault, Grandma, the way I blithely believe

Providence will provide an abundance of asparagus and apples.

That crate you sent each fall kept the doctor’s away.

The applesauce, the apple pies and fritters,

they were all sweet.  And so I forgive your dreadful bible verses

and the singsong hymns you tucked us into bed with,

hoping to correct our ill manners,  and to punish us

for playing in the tractor sheds and in fields near the pickers sheds

where we saw just how desolate life could be.  I forgive you

for telling me not to play with the children I played with anyway.

It is your fault, Grandmother, teaching me to pick

the wild green sprouting amidst the dying grass.  I forgive you

for calling me bad seed, for thinking I caused more trouble

than you could ever pray me out of, even after that summer

I sat stalk-still and you painted so much majestic hope into my still life. 

That summer you swatted at the bees settling on the butter,

decreed Satan created them, not you.  Grandma, it is your fault

I think your God is small.  He sinned when he erased our faces

from your memory.  But Grandma, your scripture is worthless

if I am now just some stranger peeling apples at your sink. 

I never want to quit being your last regret, your shinning disappointment.

Grandmother Dream

(c) 2004 

Because though Grandma is dead, I suppose,

she sits at the kitchen table waiting on me

to braid her hair. Hair too fine to interlace and hold

although twining is inevitable.

My need is to at last embrace what is or could be mine.

Because I am one of five grand daughters as easily

her favorite as any other. Because I am the one

who returned bible verses volleyed over burnt toast and tea.

Because the way of dreams is what is missing is missing,

and what is needed is needed.

Because her ghost fades, I seek permission

from her son who has no authority to grant what I, after all,

may only grant myself.

Because I root through Grandma’s jewelry box for mementos

he calls me a locket toucher and says,

claim her credulous belief in the supernatural; it is what you are meant to do.

One brooch or another, Grandma spooled a spiritual thread

and I live to find my own pull ends and pull starts. 

Destination: Elsewhere

(c) 2008

What I need is for the bus to come—

on time, or early, or late—

whatever best meets
my punctuality, my procrastination,

my need to make a connection,

to get somewhere else.

Some destination that today feels right,

as if it might stave off

the small insecurities of waiting—

of brooding at the god damn bus stop.

Which seems to me

an apt metaphor of my life:

waiting, and the desire to move.

 

Frustrated
by my wilting agency

 to buy, to maintain, to insure
my own automobile,

my own decisions,
my own job choices

 or lack of choices.

Waiting for situations to improve.
For any action, any thought, any emotion,
that moves in a straight line—

point A to point B—

something like a narrative

I can follow.

 

Waiting

for the magical moment,

the poetic moment,
the tempestuous lover,

the good man who will be good to me.

 

For the ideal driver—

who knows where I’m going.

Empty Handed

(2002) (c)

My prayers are fingerlings scratching an impervious surface—

even gods and goddesses curl to sleep beneath winter’s ground.

 

What winter offers is only for the empty-handed.

This is my season to give and forgive.

 

This winter waited like a rare good mother

while I scurried to find my buried shoe, my nerve—

lost like a key.

 

Waited like one true love, jilted,

knowing nonetheless I’d return.

 

This is the winter I never dreamed of articulating—

a meditation in water,

an incandescent white so bright

it fractures into color.  

 

This is the winter I need

to see myself

godless, singular, cold—

and still very much alive.