Tourist in Ocho Rios

(2017)

 

In a caged cell of ocean filled

with juvenile sting ray,

I submerged, ordered myself breathe.

Flooded with anxiety, hyper

ventilating, I jerked back into sky.

The fourth attempt I trusted

that apparatus tooth-clenched and strapped on.

I sucked in air, thick

as tobacco smoke in my lungs.

Through murky gray and a plastic lens,

no surfeit pirate gold tucked among rock,

only sting rays undulating gray wings,

and fish the size of silver-dollars.  

In the dolphin pool, I treaded water awaiting

their rubbery press. A pair.

One foot on each dorsal fin, I hitched a half-length

of their compound, a demigod’s chariot,

whitecaps billowing behind. A failed,

flailing victor’s V, I collapsed into their wake.

In the photo see that though we were instructed

to hook hands to vest, I was scratching

the elongated chin-chest of one dolphin like a cat.

That camera temperamental; four minutes that dolphin

with its beaked, mawkish grin nuzzled my cheek

as if it truly liked me. I kissed it. Kissed it

with small filial kisses for a lost cousin, cooing

until my daughter yelled Get a room, Mom. 

I bought a cane reed bracelet, hand-braided to fit

from a man dark as cocoa, sugared with ganja.

In the park, not so much to sell bracelets

but prophecies in patois. He saw past

my piker skin, my present tense, evoked

another time, Yoruba perhaps, where Jah

enthralled my chimeric heart. Magical. A resistor.

He pushed my shoulder, you know this.

And I felt it too seductive to believe him.

Hypoteneunce

(2016)

Tuesday is the diligence of pencils.  Thursday is papers piled

and filed irregular as gopher mounds. Friday is a clock. 

I measure time no less than time measures me. The verdict:

habitual innocence. What I am told is not always what I feel.

Do tell, genius can solve a quadratic equation. That time

I plumbed second degree was unsettling; I felt approximate, 

felt subtended. Without habit, I resume ignorance.

I never factor in the motives of superficial muscles. Still,

I heed knives; I rebuff stones and sticks. I protect my back.

Saturday’s crowds and clowns by Sunday are an excursion

of recalcitrant bones. The defrocked clock the sky.  

That moon, like everything else, has a core. I’m not the only one

frustrated by a rock heart. Soil cannot litigate against deluge.

The ocean contains salt while fresh water collects

in a depression. Patience, and these memories, from one: another.

Know what I feel: sediment settles everything. 

Hydra

(2017)

Many nights I wished him dead, my father.

No longer to remember his thudding

up the stairwell, plodding, heavy—

a pallbearer in polyester pants—

come with one surreptitious forehead kiss

to check that I am sleeping.

                        Kisses are a decoy.  I use them too;

entwine to sniff out adultery: perfume,

an overlay of salt and soap, pungent

cunt underneath my husband’s tongue.

I faked obedient sleep, a sham angel,

to turn Father back to his cacophony,

his chaos, leave my small world unsullied

by all those exemplum’s, the exegesis—

I could never escape being bad. 

And even at five, Daddy’s derision:

my alienating ugliness, foul breath,

my willfulness a stink so vile

it permeated air like yeast in a bakery.

Shame was the only sense I could make of it.

                        Kisses elicit lies. Like the rapist

                        who whispered “I love you”, stroking my hair.

                        How flattery and attention disarm me;

a disembodied ghost of a negligible child

conscripted into the supporting role,

or an intrepid diver, never sure

which kisses come without a parachute

or whether I care.

That kiss, unexpected, unwarranted

in a world where if tenderness played out

it was a theatrical role, a soliloquist

acting-out parent in a pop-up performance.

Even at five, I misunderstood

the musty curtain, the every-changing scripts,

all the mirrors, distorting

mirrors; I thought I saw affection.

I giggled. My eyes opened. Another?

                        The last good kiss, at fourteen, my first taste

of boy and an unfettered desire,

like desire was a property of the self.

It was purity slipstreaming eternity,

an image of mutuality I could hold to,

an Ace of Hearts up my sleeve, so lovely,  

that I will never forgive my father

his whiskey and cigar saturated kiss

given only when I was compliant

as a corpse, and a return of affection

was an affirmation that diminished him.

His rage marked upon me a permanent blemish.

His rage, now mine, burrowed and bored.

Finally, impossible to escape or resist;

it is renewed in every false kiss.

Begin

(2016)

Over thirty-two-thousand years ago

in Southern France above the Ardeche river

underneath a limestone cliff

inside the Chavvet Caves

the luminous souls of our ancestors were captured

in drawings on the stone.

In that place of deep, dark silence

layer upon layer, outside of time,

bound by space, a community painted

of human, of bison and mammoth, bear

eyes fixed on the observer, and the sweating

flanks of horse herds. Except film or photographs,

those of us here now may never see it.

Nonetheless, we are the traces of this story.

Non-literate, seeded pre-temple, pre-Ur,

Kish, Lagash, rising up from mud lands

of the Tigris-Euphrates, we measure

by celestial spheres; from Sun and Moon to Pluto.

Moved forward through the telling of lamas,

sheiks, shamans, rishis, rabbis, and Rinpoche,

we are poets, artists, and mystics.

A mythic coupling

that started with a fearful, lonely I am.

A creation, a cosmos, pouring forth

from old Melanesia, to cross ice,

to walk the earth, to overcome fear

and unite I am to I am, and at last

to become vulnerable.

Imprudent

(C) 2017

The wine glass shatters, its pedestal

an egregious tooth beneath the base cabinet.

Like a wide smile I sweep slivers

in a glittering arc. Shoo, shoo.

Two crouched cats already on the window sill.

One day, I’ll wear slippers, I’ll watch where

I place things, look both ways before crossing

the streets of Indecision and Dare.

In theory, cleaning up after is meditation,

or it is regret. Either way I talk to myself

the same as to wary crows who forget no bad deed.

Over-shoulder, backwards glances. Incessant rain.

I am grateful for their wings. The implied flight

away. Here I stand on impudent feet.

Wood chips. Porcelain splits as though seamed.

In cracks and carpets glass shards amplify

a thousand mistakes. Some nights

I am one, others a different matter altogether.

In the Event

(c) 2017

In the event of an emergency
do not worry about me. Do not
wonder if beams above this basement
studio broke, and I am trapped
by rubble and one-hundred-year-old brick.
Both legs broken, no phone reception,
no phone. I was born trapped;
breathing dust and despair for decades.
Don’t worry if the pier where I work
swept out, and I am chin high
in rising water, watching
the last thin line of air recedes.
If I am buffeted by coffee cups, monitors,
splintered pylons and rats.
Don’t worry. I remembered to designate you
my beneficiary. I updated my life insurance,
wrote a will. I raised you
from the wreckage of my marriage
to give my ghost a good-enough name.
There wasn’t time, there wasn’t reason
to tell my own mother, at last, that I loved her;
I didn’t. Nor a need to call and apologize
to your father that I would never be back.
Marriage was another steel trap,
and once I severed my foot, I felt free.
Don’t wonder if I am praying.
If I am repenting. If I am asking Jesus
to be my personal savior. If I am betting on
a last-second reprieve. If I have hope
for heaven or fear of hell.
Nothing in my life has been that easy.
I couldn’t have lived differently.
My unwanted birth set a trajectory;
your birth set it in stone.
When lighting hits, know it illuminates
some truth I never considered.
When the car collides, I finally feel my body.
The avalanche grinds me home.
In the quiet aftermath, clouds settle,
blood slows and we are all homeless.
Give the coat off my back to an imperfect stranger,
plant a lilac bush because I was never a tree.
In your own darkness, know
that I could never have loved you more.
Go, love someone like that. As though
love is brightest, when it is chiseled out of grief.