Mean Streets

She thought she done taught me a lesson
on the black streets of Richmond - these
niggerly, miserly, stagger lee streets -
opening her eyes so I could see the yellow
'fore I hit her again,
another shot dropped her, maybe
breaking a hip in the fall, her purse now clutched
in my punch-stung hands; yet she rose,
thanked her lord, her tongue lolling. I got
curious, done asked her why. Pause. She says
help just won't come for folk like you.

Shudder

Eyes closed, I become Coyochauqui,
whose brother threw her Aztec celestial self
down temple stairs with disdain so unimaginable

I shudder that one's voice can be lost
so quickly. She was dismembered,
relegated like Palestinians who crouch

behind bomb-wearied walls, left
to speak of tears and truths but caged
by foes that disregard these cries

into silence. Others work til cotton bleeds
red, teach til labeled 'not red enough':
identities dirtied by authority, paved over

by history. Yet flowers still sprout from
between cement cracks where the headstones
once stood. I imagine such morbidity shies

from light because nothing cowers one human
like the timbre of another and our waking
hours birth voices like pinpricks of rain -

only in a quiet midnight can anyone hear
lost voices. And who am I to receive forgotten
fruit, these cries left out of the dialogue:

whipped pyramid builders, hand claspers,
drunks of union, labored by a fate that
darkness whispers into my consciousness?

Eyes closed, I see her arms and legs
left like omens for those who dare,
people with whom I share molecules of air

and I can not sleep,
can not sleep,
can not sleep.

Of It All

Sprays of flowers bathed within shafts of sunlight
reminds me of a time when my head lied, sandbagged,
unsure whether I would ever see spring's true rays.

This moment of not-knowing crept up on me,
stalking like a butler, an uncertainty in my blackest
nights that served a thought darker still.

In those cold moments I had to imagine my daughter rise,
my wife grow old with grace, and wonder: does voice alone
convey such things? Will it be enough?

Now awakened by my child's puppy breath, battered
by her arms that flail in dreams, I am amidst blue pitch,
stand up, let the dawn pump life into limbs, walk

out to where pines are sentries, feel its needles,
ones browned by the August heat, let them puncture
and redden my pink skin, and revel in the sight

of it all.

41 Lines

The brightness of the sun has rendered these Gucci sunglasses
helpless. Oh I must sit down under the sunshade – it’s an
authentic Cinzano that Dave bought for me last time we
touristed Venice because it just fit so well poolside.
And the pool has just been re-surfaced, we’ve a nice
Mexican man who does a little bit of gardening &
trims hedges and such, and then, one day on a cloudless
day like this one Dave asks him what else he does and
he says . . . hey kids, stay in the shallow end, okay?. . .
your little one was out in big water there . . . he says,
in English, “I can do that.” So we have the man here,
sitting in that same deck chair that you’re in now, and
he looks at the pool and he throws out a number,
a number thirty percent lower than any contractor had quoted
Dave before. So he resurfaced the whole thing, from
sandblasting to a new fiberglass finish a week ahead
of schedule. Dave was so pleased. Would you care
for some more lemonade? Would the kids like some?
I can go inside – it’s only Country Time straight out
of the packet but it sure hits the spot, doesn’t it? Dave
really likes it when he comes home from the club . . .
no, kids, leave those floaties on . . . I know they’re
a bit bulky but they’ll help you go anywhere, help
you keep your head above water . . . okay? I . . .
No no, you don’t have to get up, the kids will do
what they’re told. Besides, I don’t think they
can work those floaties down the elbow and off the
arm anyway – I could barely get your son’s on
and this was before I slipped a little vodka into my
lemonade glass, you know what I’m saying? Just sit
back – the deck chair comes from our friend’s
catalogue business. He’s an inventor and developed
a deck chair that is balanced on a fulcrum of weight
distribution – sorry about the hiccup – so one can
lean all the way back until and not tip backward.
Hold it, I need to get some more lemonade.
Wait a minute. I see two floaties but I don’t see
Erik. Erik? Nikki, call your sister to stop
listening on her headphones and come out
here. Erik? Erik?
Erik?

Cafe Music

Left crouched by the gravity of years and the presence of friends
like warped reflections in a mirror, the aged at the adjoining table
lament

- the presence of five new wines
- the absence in one's collection of a true grigio
- antique mirrors sold ever more cheaply
- how decades had left Athenian digs ever more bare

barer, I'd imagine, than anyone at the table would admit,
as they huddle to catch the warmth embedded within
voices of friends who understand. As I eavesdroppe for clues
a path opened, the afterpatter of storm clouds; at most I would
pass on only experiences, backed by the same baroque chords,
with nary a story or a chord out of tune.

DMZ

Flags ripple history,
barbed wire blood
that runs in the minefield
on sun-baked earth.

Old men squint in the
bright shadow of star
striped bombers and
cry for the separated,

left unsung, forty-odd
generations severed by
a parallel, a map that
betrays the territory.

This is my DMZ.

Occam's Cherub

The ventral view of Occam's sprite
shows pure cherubity, fat-puffed
cheeks with size deigned wee.

Yet said cherub confounds appearances,
wailing down stars even with a swelled belly,
heirlooms and keepsakes nothings in its hands

and that smile, o fie, looks forsook
as jelly-stained hands grasp white
shirts, walls, eyeballs. Anything that

can be grasped is. You give
pause, reconsider the logic of spawning,
reassign youth to some devil

and then your sprite smiles, glows,
her eyes the clear blue of history, and
suddenly you are not so sure.

Meadow Vow

A vow. Wind rambles through birch branches, whisks the words away. Repeated. Again the avowals vanish like night bodies on a Nicaraguan roadside. With perspicacity unheard, heavy moments pass, fall on lichen rocks. One more treasure left in a meadow. The unspoken-made-real plays out to silence, the invisible of liquid time, shattering on flat stones.

Outhouse

On Day Two I met Lolette.
On Day Two I met my cousin.
I never learned his name.

Lolette's house on cinder blocks is
where my blind cousin lived,
his pupils an unfocused sea of green,
naked under these tin eaves that Lolette
had purchased with money squirrelled
from a stint maiding in Saudi.

For six pesos the local cola was his;
(seven for a Coke or Pepsi).
My cousin drank one. Then two.
Soon his body writhed. "Fire ants?"
I said. "No. Toilet." Lolette smiled.
The bathroom, made of spare lumber,
had been placed in the cow pen,
with breezes sweeping the
smell away.

I stood to open the gate,
Lolette grabbed my arm and held it.
"No," she said, scuffing playing cards
across a rutted table.
"If you do it, he will not learn"
she said, as he ambled toward the wire.

Careful fingertips first found the fence.
His arms and legs and every thing
crouched,
then paused,
then felt the air,
perhaps sensing the presence
of barbs, the eyes of cows,
the sun, and us as brown
skin shimmied into unclaimed
space, angling one leg
into air that by now held
dire expectation, then another,
moving his torso in slow-mo,
soft skin clearing thorns by the
width of an eyelash.

Petrarchan Sonnet for the Swingin' A's

The shocking promise of dollars from Charles O.
Finley birthed a vibrissae at play
and lips from which strayed hair belayed-
seventeen 'staches of summertime growth.

Men nicknamed for creatures - The Vulture,
Catfish, Buck - and kid VIda Blue,
clad in green and gold of garish hues
as ambassadors of a rough hewn culture.

The league office hoped for clean-shaven jaws
not men torn from an old western past
but the Seventies would see no bigger winners

than men who, bound by byzantine laws,
fought their owner and the shorn to the last,
with the verve and animosity of beginners.