Mysteries in the Public Domain
INTERRUPTION
For a moment
I could not remember
what brought us
to this place
flat on our backs
and naked. We should
not have been talking,
or
trying to talk.
The room was too
still, the house
even more so.
The bed was a small
organ, and in the middle
of a long slow stroke,
when the hand is
an exquisite mind,
the phone rang
and like a fool
I answered.
A small shaky voice
from the twentieth century
crawled into my ear.
When I returned,
arms extended,
I had to answer again,
then we rolled over,
back to back,
and wandered off
to sleep.
Rising Waters
INTRODUCTION
What happens when the rivers we live beside swell out of their banks, as the did in the nation's heartland in the summer of 1993, and we find ourselves wet up to our knees, and then to our chests and chins? What happens when the door knob to the post office is below the still rising waters and we find ourselves dreaming about murky depths even after we have reached higher ground, and the newspaper, the radio and television are projecting ever higher apocalyptic crests?
What happens in part is that our imaginations begins working overtime, attempting to accommodate and understand the magnitude of houses and towns being washed away, of a twenty minute drive to work that now takes four hours, of Lear jets turned into winged canoes, of coffins resurrected from their tranquil resting places, of trying to stop a river with fifty pound bags of sand.
What we are seeking is a context
that will help us explain this phenomenon, and that is what all the writers
in this anthology have done.
At the Dead Center of Day
THE ELVES AT KATYN FOREST
It started during the night
after the burning of many cities.
It started when the soldiers in uniforms the color of miles
of muddy road began the forced march of the defeated.
The mud of the vanquished and the mud of the victors
indistinguishable. Prisoners
became guards, guards prisoners.
Dressed in fear and exhaustion, no one any longer cared.
It started in a faraway country, years before, when money
was spent in wheelbarrows for a loaf of bread; when someone
in a place signed his name
in water; when a cigarette butt
on a sidewalk was punishable death and conscription
It started in a shirt pocket crowded with rats, in a bowl full
of glass eyes blinking in all directions in a field hospital.
So the long muddled lines
drudged into a dark forest
to a strange mumbled cadence-the belch of boots being sucked in
and out of mired miles-fifty thousand struggling vowels
and rifle reports the only consonants spoken over the dead
guarding the ditches. Soon
the forest turned blacker than
its wet pines. Fore weeks, the raw upturned earth burst
into small blooms of brass buttons and bones. An entire country
stopped breathing. Each year the trees grew more bloated.
A half century later, out
of Katyn Forest miles of mud-caked
uniform march. At dust-choked crossroads villagers look for
passing cars. The sucking sound, the faint moans, only wind twisting
through the gargoyled and steepled churches. Couples stroll along
rivers, watching their children
run ahead. Cottonwoods sail
their leaves on the reddening current. The evening grows faint;
the sun's pulse weak on the water. The children shiver, listening
to stories of elves who return to retake the country the lost.
Yet Other Waters
YET
OTHER WATERS
for Bobette
You could not step twice in the same rivers;
for others and yet other waters...
--Heraclitus
With sand to shake form damp
towels;
to work out of our shoes on the porch
step, turning them upside down;
to wash out hair and scalp,
the softest
folds of skin; and later to fall
from the novel, its cover slightly
curled from too much sun,
and there
on the desk, not to read, but to find
not gook reason to continue, seeing each
grain, each rounded edge and
prismatic
center, a kaleidoscope of grit to be swept
clean and carried off... but then I can't
stop recalling: pulling her
close, wet
and naked, chilled by the tidal wind,
nipples puckered, the curve of her spine
drifted with sand, and the
waves breaking,
breaking...Is this what
Heraclitus meant, that we could not
step into the same body twice,
whether
it is a river, ourselves, or another,
that we are not just the same slipping
away, but he sand we walk
over
and carry with us, caught in our cuffs
and shoes, is forever changed,
and changes us, though love
may cling
like each grain late in the day
on dunes still leaning against a winded sea.
The
Vertical River
NEWTON REVISITED
GRAVITY and motion and some
thing massed
to go lower, precipitous prescription,
as when I watched a man in El Dorado
Canyon, dressed only in red silk
shorts and tennis shoes, scale
a plunging granite face higher
than any city building. His thigh muscles
finer than braided rope, each spiraling
sinew compounded by another. Ascending
he grew smaller, angelic, and sometimes
swung upside down, reaching blindly out
and up over a ragged ledge, feeling for
a finger-thin crack or feeble shelf
of heaven to grab and hold. He was half
spider climbing a fissured igneous web,
and when he reached the top, fists
of lighting punched through the bellying
clouds, The canyon became a thunderous
well as rain obscured and turned
the mountain into a vertical river.
I waited out the storm in
a cave,
considered his survival near naked
on a freezing mountain, his only way
down a slippery escarpment. In the middle
of the downpour, he walked up soaked
and shivering, smiling as he told how
he was unable to see his hands knuckle in
crevices, his wrists buried in the sheering
water, and carried into its current to the bottom
in a flowing firmament, until he stepped
on grounded principles.
Water
Breathing Air
MAP TO THE PARTY
IF you wait, you grow old,
nothing
more. Traveling light is your only
illuminating illusion.
Either way you can't remain
time and place inseparable.
To settle is to amass names:
lespedeza, hickory, Providence
Road.
To accelerate is to compress
latitude and longitude,
to shoulder wind in every
direction, to wear a hole
in the already worn cartography.
To grow old is to grasp sheer
granite faces, to negotiate
declivities and eruptions
of aspiration, to disbelieve
coded legends, to find instead
water's divides, to follow the rule
of thumb-civilization's always
down stream a steaming ruin,
a crumbling repository, a flow,
a seepage, the final flush
to sea level and lower. Buried in
the alluvium: Etruscan bronzes,
eroding pyramids coral-encrusted
hub caps, cracked glass fishing
floats. On an oil-blackened spit
the aging Archimedian rabble
gathers to count the grains
again, praying for a mistake.
Fields
of Thenar
BEIRUT
Machine guns inhabit the rooftops
like hungry crows.
Bullets peck the library
city hall the cobble streets
Allah's forehead.
To the east
the mountains belch dust
as artillery fires into the city
planting the bloom of brown orchids
on the beach apartments
on the Hilton
in courtyards filled
with the shattered rosary of bricks.
People are opening their bodies
for the world to read
the print still wet and so red
it pours out a stoplight
on Broadway and Ninth
in downtown Columbia,
Missouri.
Harmonic
Balance
IN HARMONY
This is occupied country.
Aliens have landed
but no one’s listening to the radio.
Water towers are graffiti-stricken Martians
invading on tip-toe.
They spew forth hard water.
We drink and are overwhelmed.
Time soaks our rusting bodies.
The streets are windswept
passages of history.
In low-angled evening light
the storefronts are bright
as the Seven Cities of Cibola.
After school the Dog ‘n Suds
is Normandy Beachhead,
the landing vehicles
filled with newly licensed
sixteen-year-olds.
Memory fails us recalling
only the past.
The retired town planner
wants to speed up traffic.
Get rid of the bottlenecks.
The streets are rerouted.
The black arrows all point
one way. No one comes back.
TO PUT BY
He walks to the back of the house he’s lived in all his life and finds a room that he’s never entered. He opens the door and feels along the wall for the light switch. How strange to work both his palms over something cold, flat, vertical, and in the pitch of darkness, extending to the infinity of corners. For a moment, he’s falling upward, sideways, and down. He secures his feet to the floor and turns. Something long and thin brushes his cheek. He spins from vertigo to fear. Quickly stepping back, he swings his arm to defend himself and his hand tangles in the pull chain. A dusty bulb shrouded in cobwebs ignites, as if a clod of earth were glowing from the low ceiling.
He coughs from the musty odor of things sealed and undisturbed. From floor to ceiling, he is surrounded by shelves. On each shelf he sees old glass canning jars. Thousands of Ball jars crowded into rows and labeled, the hand-lettering faded beyond reading. A surviving “e” here, a “cl” there. He looks for pickles, peas, pears, parsnips. It’s not what he finds. From the top shelf, he pulls down jars packed with cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, stratus clouds, all of them sealed tight. He sees all the faces and animals and the grotesqueries that ever came to him, lying on his back in fields staring up at the passing days: the flocks of sheep, herds of buffalo, legends of Roman soldiers, flotillas, armadas; the islands, archipelagos, continents where he wanted to spend his summers and falls; and the dancing Katchinas, the spirits that surely must be behind it all.
On the lower shelf are jars of wind. There’s the one that softly dissolved him as he sat on the porch one long late afternoon. In the next, the wind that pushed waves into his boat as he crossed a lake, and the gust that caught his kite, breaking the twine, releasing him to blow across a field. The other jars are aswirl with what hasn’t arrived.
There are jars of snowflakes, each classified according to its intricate frozen lattice. There are sunsets packed like colored sand in shot glasses sold in stores along the highway in Tucumcaria and Yuma. Jars of light rain and mists, deluges and floods. Forty days and forty nights of jars. Jars of extinct bird songs, jars of grackle crackle and sparrow twitter, so many he can’t reach, sitting too far back.
He finds the shelf full of his breathing: the very first one that burned his lungs into life, the longest one when he fell from the oak breaking his arm, all of those from the hospital waiting for his father to die, all those inhaling the fragrance of another’s hair, the new jars appearing at that moment to take in the breathing of this room.
The Body of
Water
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,
or 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.
HIGHWAY FIFTY WEST
The engine is insistent, hungry, demanding to be fed more miles.
The windows rolled down, the long zipper of September locust
song is undone and falls into the rags of distance. In the last town
without a stop sign, light neatly folded the clapboard houses
into the envelope of long shadows. Even vultures are hungry
for the road, following it more closely than drivers, they tilt
and swivel their awkward wings low over the gravel shoulders
for what has left a humped stain. The Roman Emperor Nero commanded
Seneca to suicide, perhaps for telling him that if he wasn’t happy
with what he had, which was all the known world, it wouldn't matter
if he possessed even an unknown empire. But then history's fatal
collisions are not the same and will not be remembered on this road,
but relived in the small plastic-flowered crosses by an overpass.
The scarlet rash of sumacs bleed up hillsides. The sharp blue edge
of horizon cuts above soybean fields. In the drainage ditch cattail blades
are honed on yellow shafts of afternoon, and in the turbulent wakes of
passing traffic can be heard the clatter of ancient duels, frog and snake
fattening for hibernation. The bald monuments of road-cut rock display
the scars of exposure, drilling and dynamite, and begin to glow in the full-
face of late sun. On a tarnished plaque below a statue of Columbus in a square
in Barcelona, on a similar sunny fall day, can be read the inscription: “You
have to navigate. You do not have to live." On this road that we desperately want
to disobey—it makes no difference if we suddenly wrench the steering,
swerve, hit or miss, we crash through the bronzed light of evening.
The
Feast
BEING ITS TIME
In a small Baltic town, on a cold overcast day that could have been yesterday a century ago, and for all practical possibilities will probably be tomorrow a century from now, and whose indeterminancy turned the maypole in the hay-stacked field just east of the last half-timbered houses into a spear stuck in the frozen ground by a falling warrior of Valhalla—here Heidegger slipped beyond his and anyone else's journal. He abandoned future biographers who might scour the town for street corners where the great thinker stood, so they could ponder what he might have pondered, such as seeing his reflection in the window of the shoe-repair shop. He stepped away from the preponderance of philosophers who would keep turning the pages until they were blank as the coming Arctic snow¬. It was there at the small desk in the inadequately heated third-floor room, which was really an attic he rented under an alias, where each breath hinted of the last, that he first wrote that the only thing worth thinking is the unthinkable.
Heidegger had dipped his stork-white quill into the inkwell and flown into the dark, not knowing if he would ever return. There was elation among those who thought he had given birth to the unknown or, less, that he made the improbable probable. Accident became coincidence, coincidence synchronicity, and synchronicity the fine tuning of the cosmos. Whole tired towns swore off potatoes and turnips, and starved, believing they could live on the light of his thinking. These emaciated towns became known as the first voluntary pogroms. A man bloodied his face trying to run through a wall, but the rumor persisted of his success. Throughout the country large bandages flowered over noses, as if an early sign of spring. Women hanged themselves from ceilings, hoping to get closer to heaven, and had to be cut down. Finely braided rope burns around delicate necks became high fashion. Photographers began keeping records of the soul using glass negatives. To be crowned unthinkable became the rage.
For others the century was a curse. There was the unthinkable factory job, the unthinkable war that led to the next unthinkable war, and the unthinkably cold tenements in the cities. The unthinkable kept looming larger, leading to the unthinkable bomb. And then there's the unthinkable God enslaved to eternity, and Heidegger's own unthinkable being thinking in a darkening world.
LOST CREW
Book 6
. . . the victim and the executioner.
--Baudelaire
The snow begins to melt, and the yellowed grass spikes up from a poorly seeded lawn left half-finished by a construction crew. He sits in a parked car thinking it looks more like clumps of hair left after chemotherapy or radiation, or whatever it is we choose to do to ourselves after we discover that it's too late, that it's been done to us.
This isn't to blame the victim, we all are victims, and not to diminish the executioners either. They hone blades on their own histories, which is also us. From that first eye-opening moment when our luminous gray irises float on small fat faces, when we see through it all and never see a thing again, when we are nothings with limitations, it's really the world falling in on us.
The random patterns turn our small hairless heads, if we have the strength, and no matter which way we look there is something falling into our nothingness. If we cry, the liquid lenses just magnify and bring whatever it is closer and upside down in the sliding of our salts. We can't stop the faces from falling down on us: mother, father, siblings, all the strangers that we later search for, flipping through photo albums, phone books, skimming rush hour crowds on city streets, for the rest of our and their lives, believing there's a chance we can resolve, perhaps understand that one haunting glimpse from so long ago.
In jaundiced lighting of airport terminals, slouching in stiff chairs, we exhaust ourselves half-recognizing each traveler who passes, the concourse filling with half-recollections, thinking this is how they might look twenty, thirty years later, leading a child or carrying a briefcase, walking arm-in-arm with someone we should know, smiling, waving goodbye, hello. We must restrain ourselves from running up to them, saying, "Aren't you . . . ? Did you know . . . ? Do you live in . . . ? Did you go to school at. . . ?" Restrain ourselves if only to save our reputations and conceal the desperation, knowing we carry this same burden around with us, that we are only half recognizable to anyone else, half of what someone's searching for, yet we will wear out our knees trying to make up the difference with the half of us that hasn't drifted beyond our reach, the half that someone else is sure they know, though we have never met them before.
He sits in a parked car staring at the snow's conflagration, the glare off the remaining sooty patches, and flips through the pages of Homer that he has promised himself to read. He catches a movement out the corner of his eye, and wonders if it's someone who thinks he knows him. Quickly he turns his head, glances in the rearview mirror, but there's only the smoldering shadow of Troy.
Remedies
for Vertigo
Civilized Sacrifice
I have climbed the backs of gods too. It's not so
strange, dressed in heavy coat and boots, hat
pulled down to the eyebrows, cheeks windburnt,
gloved fingers numb, and each brief breath prayed
upon, each step thrown onto the loose altar of stone.
Blinded by spires of light, I've looked away
as the unblemished blue splintered in all directions.
And I've backed away from the sheer
precipice, the infinite suddenly a fearful measure,
the way down to tundra and the jagged maze of
granite, leaving only a crevice in which to cower.
I've lain on the steep slopes of night under spruce,
wrapped against rain and cold, and watched clouds
explode in my face. Stark boughs reached
then sagged back in a sweeping, resolute silence.
I was shaken loose by thunder and lightning,
like the small girl, named Juanita by strangers.
She tumbled a hundred yards down
Nevado Ampato peak, her whereabouts unquestioned
for five hundred years until a nearby volcano
began a festering eruption, thawing the slope,
and wrapped in her illiclia shawl woven in the ancient
Cuzco tradition, wearing a toucan- and parrot-feathered
headdress, her frozen fetal posture a last effort
at warmth above tree line amid ice fields, there
to address and redress for rain and maize, for
full vats of fermenting beer, plentiful llama herds,
for the civilized sacrifice, to be buried alive and wait
in private, as we all do to speak with our gods, hoping
to appease, to know, to secure the illusive cosmic
machinery, and in that last numb moment her left
hand gripped her dress for the intervening centuries.
Minor Gods
Another roadside bomb, another suicide
bomber, another dozen blind-folded, hands-tied-
behind-the-back bodies found half buried at the town dump,
it's how a Saturday explodes until I turn off
the radio and look out the east window at a tabby
crouched in explosive morning light and acting strangely.
I hurry outside to rescue an eight-inch long, pencil-thin,
ring-neck snake before it is playfully eviscerated.
A hundred yards into the woods, the palm heat
of cupped hands has pacified its coiled panic
and I scold it to be more careful before it calmly
slithers into a brush pile and into another ambush.
Balanced between two flood lights on the west wall,
phoebes again build a nest out of moss and spittle,
and I build a four-feet high fence on the ground below them.
They quickly abandon their efforts as if not understanding
what I'm trying to keep out and keep in. Occasionally,
I see their bobbing drab-gray tails on a nearby branch.
I leave the fence standing. I blame the cats
without evidence of guilt. Weeks later,
the phoebes return, the same pair or different,
I don't know after so many seasons of failed attempts
on every wall of the house, including the black snake
that scaled ten feet of siding to eat the hatchlings.
From the kitchen window, I watch them fly back
and forth through the gauntlet of clawed hunger,
too early to know ends except this flying.
Either the gods are omnipotent and not good,
according to Epicurus, just look at this world, or they are
good and not omnipotent, look at these phoebes.
West Of West
Ice Bound
Sky's gray sheet spreads icy rain.
Through the night we heard the branches cracking.
Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes.
Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen
as the radio announces the list of schools closed.
An hour earlier I inched my way along
the road, tires spinning toward the ditch.
Now I read aloud to a teenage daughter,
who tolerates my foolishness, my claim
that Lao Tzu traversed a more slippery world.
With two books open on my lap, one in my hand,
two on the floor, I'm surrounded by imperfect
translations : a gathering chaos; something
mysteriously formed; without beginning,
without end; formless and perfect .
She responds, Sure,
I knew that , so what ? I persist:
that existed before the heavens and the earth;
before the universe was born . She's ready to go
upstairs and listen to the radio. I ask,
What was her face before her parents were born ?
she answers, Nothing . I ask again.
She says it again. Where are the angels,
nights on humble knees, the psalms of faith,
the saints of daylight? S he walks out of the room.
I'm surrounded by thin books.
How pointless to go anywhere on this day,
or maybe any other, but then
the time comes when there is
no other way but to stand firm on ice.
Manifest Breakfast
In a house buttressed by books and slanted morning light
slicing across the grain of the kitchen table, Lieutenant Colonel
George Armstrong Custer's 1876 orders to pursue the Sioux,
Cheyenne , Sans Arcs, Blackfeet , sits beside an emptied bowl
of Grape Nuts. The document is randomly punctuated with crumbs
from half-burnt toast, difficult to read the general's elegantly looping
Nineteenth Century signature and the limits of force given Custer's command.
My wife has printed over in her typewriter-meticulous style a grocery list
of olive oil, cilantro, garlic, tortellini, supplies for this evening's company,
but not the 7 th Cavalry last seen surrounded near the banks of the Little Big Horn.
There's also a lengthy paragraph to herself , notes on rehabbing
the upstairs bathroom and the rest of her destiny. She's scribbled
calculations , an attempt at reviving a diminishing bank account,
and an addendum to the Christmas card list, and it's only February.
This morning my wife sits down to rewrite Custer's orders to pursue the Sioux.
Theban
Traffic
Blue Migration
Jake’s in some kind of too late mid-life crisis, not that he thinks in those terms, though he’s consumed by a feeling of unease, really a subtle and growing disease, whose diagnosis is not obvious to any of his friends, or health care workers, two types he’s strenuously avoided these last months. It could quickly turn deadly, not that there was really any hopeful prognosis, and too easily, cynically, summed up behind his back by "sooner or later."
He turns into the satellite bank’s parking lot, the afternoon a perfection of blue?there’s nothing to see with his head tilted back into a falling-up sky. On days like this, emergency rooms are crowded with a rush of vertigo cases: sand grains blown off the beaches of patients’ inner ears, all who want to leave the planet, be transported, seduced into the infinite, eternal, ethereal, out-of-body, out-of-mind, out-of-this-stinking-place, head-for-the-hills, head-for-the-stars, take-the-money-and-run . . . wait he’s stopped, the only dented, wheel-well rusted, right rear-taillight-missing, no hub caps, car in the lot, that looks half like an abandoned osprey nest. When he opens the door, he’s taking flight, moving out onto a limb of sidewalk, and he almost raises his arms to begin flapping.
Jake enters through the double-tinted glass doors, hands in his pockets, there to check his balance, walk the tightrope of accounting, slip past the noose of overdrafts, make a small deposit. The silent TV mounted in one ceiling corner displays the enclosed captions of CNN, morning’s stale coffee sits in a silver urn beside the stacked peak of Styrofoam cups. A bowl of Jolly Rogers by the only open teller’s window, and in her practiced, mellifluous voice she says, "How can I help you?" and he can’t remember, he’s a fledgling falling from a nest, a jettisoned rocket booster tumbling through space, an aging man in a too quickly aging moment.
She asks again, and rather than opening his wallet and signing the check, he says in a meek monotone, "Give me all your money," and pulling off his sweat-stained baseball cap to use as a pathetic receptacle, the teller dutifully, awkwardly stuffs the hat and hands it back. He flies out as slowly as he walked in. He’s sitting in the car, staring up through the dirty windshield at a single stringy cloud that’s cracked the sky, when three police cars careen past, lights flashing. They run into the bank, guns drawn.
Having completed their reports, dusted for fingerprints, reviewed the video cameras, they have no leads. Jake’s still nesting in his car when the police leave the bank. It’s not clear to him, the money spilled across the passenger seat, wrapped in small bundles like green dominoes, if he’s dead or just the soul of a bird in flight.
How Tables Learn to Talk
Jake can tell you what and maybe why he pulled back the covers and got up, sitting for a moment on the edge of the bed, taking one conscious breath then another, inflating the body back to life, left hand feeling for glasses on the night stand, chin on chest keeping his head from falling to the floor.
It was around 2 a.m. when the table startled itself awake, realizing it was no longer in the kitchen and hadn’t been for hours. With wooden legs and a lumbering Frankenstein gait, it must have sleepwalked into the living room. Paralyzed with fear, it couldn’t make it back to surround itself with chairs and so became a ventriloquist, shouting through the woman standing next to it, Stella in a night shirt and naked from the waist down.
It must be moved now, not before breakfast, not after showering, not before leaving for work, but now in the moonlight slipping across the newly waxed floor, dry with shadows. Tables are so hysterical when they wake in the wrong room.
Days Like This Are Necessary
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.