Squall of 1976

2016 (c)

Watching you perform I was always alone—

an anorexic mannequin, featureless

except for a fixed stage-right stare.

 

That winter squall—

snow hid everything,

potholes, downed power lines, the road.

 

Your cousin Tito and I

sat two feet apart

at a folding table

in the Filipino community center.

 

We both loved you.

 

Tito smoked his last Camel

while you mimicked Tony Orlando.

 

He pulled on the cashmere overcoat

picked up in San Diego

where he’d never need it.

That peacock gesture was for you.

 

I fished keys from your coat—

Tito and I tried to find

a smoke shop in a new town.

 

I thought it was nothing.

 

After the show—

your razor-edged silence.

 

We loaded the guitars, amps, speakers

as the engine idled.

 

We got in.

You backed up—

then rammed the brick wall.

 

Tito and I both turned

at the same time

to look at you

 

as though we were one—

Whore.  Fucking puta!

 

What I felt was ice breaking—

an iceberg calving fr

the first visible split.

Asparagus Summer

3/2016 (c)

I blame you, Grandmother, for the asparagus.

 

I steam it tonight in your kitchen.  I remember

the summers you sent me to gather it from the slope

behind your house, leaning toward the apple orchard—

Winesap, I think, and Red Delicious,

bitter, green knobs when we visited. 

 

Snap it at the root, you said, showing me once—

or twice?  Such an innocent,

I didn’t use the basket but held them

like an Easter bouquet of Blue Bells.

 

Small pieces for angelic mouths, you said,

scrubbed them, boiled the fiber white. 

I didn’t know until later

how you ruined their taste with water and salt

and remember them still as heavenly.

 

You taught me to believe

in a Providence that would provide—

 apple crates sent at summer’s end

applesauce, pies, fritters

an apple a day

to keep the doctor away.

 

I pardon your reproves

laced with bible verses and hymns

as though Jesus himself came down

to stop me from climbing tractor beds,

 

from hiding near the picker’s sheds

where I first saw how crude life could be.

 

I forgive you for calling me bad seed,

for thinking I was something

to be prayed out of.

 

I sat at your table, still as marble,

while you painted hope into my still life. 

Between brush strokes you swatted bees

settling on the honey jar—

Satan made those, you said.

 God wouldn’t create something so nasty.

 

Grandma, it is your fault

I think your god is small.

 

If he is the one

who erased my face from your memory

 

a stranger at your sink,

washing asparagus—

 

wanting to be

the disappointment

you still remembered.

 

 

Braiding

(c) 2004 

Though Grandma is dead

she waits at my kitchen table

for me to braid her hair.

 

When alive, her hair

was too short to braid.

Now, twining is natural.

 

I need to know

what is mine—

 or could be.

 

I am one of five granddaughters,

her favorite

as easily as any other.

 

I am the one

who volleyed bible verses

across burnt toast and tea.

 

In dreams, what is missing

appears.

 

I ask permission

to forage in her jewelry box,

to claim her credulous faith

in the unseen.

 

One brooch or ring—

infused with meaning—

a thread,

 

what to take,

what to leave.

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.

 

Medical Advice, Circa 1945

(2007)

Hesitate when excising a frontal lobe.

The procedure can result in disaster.

Utmost skill and confidence are needed to probe

 

without culpability, the patient dis-robed.

Practice on uneducated or unemployed.  

Hesitate.  When excising a frontal lobe.

 

You are the personality’s quiet erasure.

Institutionalize mistakes.  Maintain the posture

of utmost skill and confidence are needed to probe.

 

The hysterical brain reduced to something knowable.

A mass. A fault. A thing to master.

Hesitate when excising a frontal lobe.

 

The seat of passion flickers—interruptible.

Meds may soften; the needle works faster.

Hesitate when excising a frontal lobe.

Utmost skill and confidence are needed to probe.

  

 Record success. Discard the irreparable.

History will call you doctor. Not disaster.

Hesitate when excising a frontal lobe.

Utmost skill and confidence are needed to probe.

At the Catskills

(2003) (c)

We weren’t at the Catskills that summer.

We were never at the Catskills.

“I’m good at those,

like rain under an umbrella”

 

I think he said that, offhand about his kisses.

He could have been talking about anything.

 

Some tired melody

we didn’t recognize

droned from the radio.

 

He flicked a butt out the window.

I picked imaginary gravel from my toes.

 

“A beautifully considered epic—

that’s what I want” I said.

 

The radio had become a despondent buzz.

 

He shielded his eyes from the sun,

low like on oncoming branch.

The road ahead shimmered with oil slick mirages.

 

Soon enough, we’d turn back.