New & Selected Poems
BkMk Press-UMKC 2009
$16.00 (Cover and inside art by Mike Sleadd)
Selections:
The Paseo
-for Federico Garcia Lorca
The last flung-back, bullet struck
moment on an arid Andalusian slope
of the Spanish Civil War;
a soldier’s death caught
in shades of black and white,
his body halfway falling back forever
toward his shadow, his rifle pointed
at heaven, his head turned away,
already forgetting to tell us the way.
A woman’s gaunt upturned face,
lips drawn back from her teeth, a forehead
of plowed wrinkles, her eyes straining
to find the sewing-machine hidden
in the sky, clouds being stitched
together with threads of fear,
and we know what happened,
the dusty, dive-bombed rubble
of Barcelona, the child at the slope
of her exposed breast
nursing on oblivion.
In the city where I lived one summer
oaks rose in civil explosions of leaves.
Branches arbored the boulevards
over the speeding cars and trucks
that had somewhere more important
in mind, work or love, not the quaking
heart of an air raid siren.
Mostly it was Friday,
maybe Saturday evenings, that I drove
the Paseo as it was called, the body of asphalt
releasing the day’s mesmerizing heat.
Along the way, fountains reared horses
and breached dolphins, spouting a moist
eternal glitter, surrounded by groomed
green esplanades where I might stroll
an equally endless time. In one
breath paseo simply means ride,
and in a different one it means
take him for a ride, the end of one
language and the beginning of another.
House of Turtle
I can’t tell you where to start, maybe I don’t know,
or maybe I’m simply not ready for the responsibility,
though it has nothing to do with not wanting to help,
nothing to do with all the possible guilts that sweep
over us for not having loved enough, or been present
enough, or even not having stopped the car and moved
the turtle off the road, and finding the flattened mess
when we returned, having watched in the rearview
mirror another driver intentionally swerve. We must
take into account another time it was hopeless,
of just pointless, when we had not yet surrendered
hope, when the pond by the highway was drained
for a new apartment complex, the backhoe with its
claw sunk for the night into the breached embankment,
waiting for morning to again swallow another mouthful
of earth and spit it out. What more could be done,
the quitting-time traffic no longer able to dodge
those orphaned by the air, who crawled for other waters,
and over the asphalt the hundred or so moss-backed
shells were cracked and savaged flat. Perhaps this is
just a warning, like the children standing in a down-
pour shouting over whether running or walking
through the rain will leave them drier, even as the rain
falls harder, drenching their most refined arguments.