Sitting

sitting, still and here with my grandma
learning to wait on the trickling words
small economies too complex for analysis

the smell of an old place
sudden screams just down the hall
(startling mostly in their lack of power to startle)
belie the soft light and flat screen tv, a Christmas relic
of a family that still visits nearly every day

I am visited instead by guilt
for living too far away
for the six months that have passed since
the last confession of my face before hers

the daily pound on an uncooperative body
and mind active but tiring – the two meeting less and less often

All of this makes me somehow whole –
not glad, not that,
as I hide tears from the night nurse – but full,

Our responsibilities to each other
sinking like mud into the chinks of weakness and pain
to flesh out the place our hearts reside.

public

looking for the public –
this eye in my chest that blinks and blinds –

Steps to a tower in Bogotá –
emblazoned with gold plates that warn, “ private property”
as a city tramps to the very top

A violet orchid in the botanical gardens whose scent teases –
cannot be captured

Honeysuckle vines carefully tilted and turned
that lilt from a neighbor’s wall of bricks –
eight feet with festive colored glass glaring, aching, from its rim –

what is public in any of this?
in the hand that shoots
unthinkingly, from her waist to steady the stumble of another

in the approving glance of a man etched with years,
still welcome for its open gaze

in the heart, (product of a black science fiction writer’s pen)
that leaks, chary and charred, with every tear the world lets fall
to the earth –

what is public in all of this
or – what is not?

redeem this poem

waiting in the rain
for redemption
still, the sky will not empty itself
and we go on
redemption tarries,
looks out the window,
and decides to stay home.

today it rains, same as yesterday,
only lonelier.

Be drawn into someone else’s arms
Dive further into the muck
in this rainy season

Hope for landslides to cover scars of roads past,
lovers’ leaps -- all we've got.

our times

a sepia-toned montage suspended in midair
no amount of tv movies or made to order documentaries
will erase the immediateness: the

smell taste feel

grit-encrusted nostrils
dusty tongues, babbling loosed of meaning, bits of sky crumbling
into upturned mouths

the street swallows, and the burning bitter ash
crumbled down throats
carrying unblessed belief
unrelieved by red cross water

Soon it appears:
desire will go homeless, irony become a dirty word

Skin still intact on the lucky ones

Mimeographed dots of black
and white

on the unlucky.

Entitlement Men

Saccharine tropical music
Puts me in danger of writing more bad poetry

Full moon on the island means
Good luck in the ocean’s warm embrace

A short walk on grainy streets
Takes me to the 24 hour farmacia
Where I pause in aisles watching bleary tourists
On the isla del encanto to buy witty T-shirts
aloe to soothe days of heat too deep,
Nights throbbing, muggy, and prone to burn.

Men of entitlement
Complain gently to the concierge
Grow more insistent, make one last try for the ocean view
A high-class vista to raise the quality of their wives

They grow sullen and tricky when refused.

post-election depression

On losing, when t.v. proclaims a winner
and your people are let down

It rains all day -- just a mean, sorry, spiteful drizzle
and your wife’s fortune is left paltry and dry,
Her saucy humor fades and one whole day is a grimace,
mouth full of old cigarettes and stale mixed nuts.

Your long, dour face glowed from my screen
I read your name:
Africans, Veterans, Unions and Teachers wanted you
but would go home unsatiated, left with the wanting
taste of it on these lips

Under all our skin we felt pricks of early goosebumps;
still, you rose not

Rappers banged harsh words against your opponent
Spectors of youth strode,
half-somnulent,
past white obstacles in the videos.

When the lasting barriers have always worn black robes
Sheathed in precendent, cloaked in midnight decrees.
They’re still hiding behind the sheets,
and we’ve yet to awake.

our Saturday afternoon crane

we were on our last hill when we saw him, perched atop a Georgia pine

legs staggered, he seemed to turn and stare at us
from that height
the hush that fell froze limbs and minutes passed in which
I’m not sure we breathed

what we felt that day remains dear and true
still, I wouldn’t mind seeing our crane again
wouldn’t mind hearing you say again,
I’m yours for always.

Tonight your voice flutters softly in my ear
strumming that guitar and softly singing
this time just for me

This missing you rends even the warmest lamplit night
and try as I might to patch it up with pink moons and chocolate bars,
it will not mend and lingers,
waiting and still, like me for you

Waiting - I never could stand still -
twitch and hop from leg to leg with our crane,
in the Saturday deepening day's light
Solid on one leg, like me for you

Central Library, New York

Women everywhere are applying lipstick
surreptitiously, as if their hands had just glided up on their own,
fluttering shades of mauve and chartreuse onto casual mouths

Gilded ceiling and marble floors
shiny with the dull glow of thousands of footsteps marking the same paces,
stopping suddenly in front of the same forgotten volume

Precisely every three minutes a man to my right
lowers his book slightly to glance over my work
as he stands up, a note flutters to the table:

Take nothing
Leave it all

Watches and umbrellas find their rightful owners
This day, too, will return in time

there was no before

Two years old:
there was no before
and no one else can know this

underneath the table I spot
a wad of gum my brother stuck there
two years old and there was no before

there was no before
the tiles always speckled, cool and rough under my cheek
the soft thud of mother, discussing,
I was not supposed to hear
Neither began nor ended

not even on this day,
when I no longer and shoved, all lovingly
into the garage,
where the noises sounded more like muffled late night tv
and less like home

there was no before –
the touch always bruised
mother’s eyes always pleaded like that
try to understand, no one else can
there was no before.

there is no after, not yet anyway.
this is all anti history
seeding a lifetime of re-creation,
of a non-story
this is not front page news

moats and moors and ordinary walls
all proportional
to the stories behind the doors

doors shut so tightly, that to open them requires
the force behind the world to rupture
and open at its seams,
the prehistoric code forgotten, or destroyed

buildings don’t kill people, I’m told
the loss of the code does

there was no before

the fear, it came with us.