Arts & Sciences

Spaces in the electric air divide themselves
in circular rhythms, as the slender
grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles
describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,
one that once reverberated continually in
a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple

in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and
match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter
of eye-lashes, the pupils create an
unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles
blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal
could possibly enact.

I want to reach you —
in that city where the snow

only shimmers silver
for a few hours. It has taken

seventeen years. This trip,
these characters patterned

in black ink, curves catching
on the page like hinges,

this weave of letters fraying
like the lines on my palm,

all broken paths. Outside,
no snow. Just the slow pull

of brown on the hills, umber
dulling to a bruise until the city

is just a memory of stained teeth,
the burn of white marble

Once when I was harmless
and didn’ t know any better,

a mirror to the front of me
and an ocean behind,

I lay wedged in the middle of daylight,
paper-doll thin, dreaming,

then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint,
then forgot.

I sat naked on a towel
on a hot June Monday.

The sun etched the inside of my eyelids,
while a boy dozed at my side.

The smell of all oceans was around us —
steamy salt, shell, and sweat,

but I reached for the distant one.
A tide rose while I slept,

1

When the thought came to him it was so simple he shook his head.
People are always looking for kidneys when their kidneys go bad.

But why wait? Why not look when you’ re healthy?
If two good kidneys do the trick, wouldn’ t three do the job even better?

Three kidneys. Maybe two livers. You know. Two hearts, of course.
Instead of repairing damage, why not think ahead?

At the farmer’ s market in Rosarito, Mexico,
a man touched my arm.
He sat on a stool at a wooden table,
and in the center,
a blue pitcher of water beaded under the sun.
Hunkered over his lap,
he worked with a gouge on a block of walnut,
and he blew at the dust,
and the dust swirled in the breeze.

Breakfast, and I’ m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey.
I’ m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio —

life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages
of a book remind me of Tucson

and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home.
There was a sofa in front of my one window

where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings
stirred in the trees with their admonishments.

Yesterday afternoon, I hung a framed print in the living room —
a task that took two head-throbbing hours.
It’ s a wedding portrait that we love: Frida and Diego Rivera.
I wonder how two people could consistently hurt each other,
but still feel love so deeply as their bones turned into dust?
Before Frida died, she painted a watermelon still life;
before his death, Diego did too.
I want to believe that those paintings were composed
during parallel moments because of their undying devotion.

I’ m eight years old and all the rooms
of my father’ s house are larger than life. Two days after my
first divorce, the only landscape I know is simplified, bone-smooth

and

Someone’ s at the door, somebody please get the door
Somebody please get the door.

is

THAT ONE, is a poet for all poets
AH, then I would suppose
to be an edwin for all edwins
OH, then there is only one of you
you are being one for
AH, I am one of me
but one is too many for all
OH, then how can this one be for all
when that one is truly for truly’ s sake
Which one?
It isn’ t a which or a what but a be
HMMPF, an ending for all endings
UMMPF, to be a poet for poets
is a mere suppose
BLECHH, you covered suppose in an earlier poem
YUCHH, but no one heard it

I can’ t tell you I had climbed for hours on
ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth.

My hands negotiating
through the teeth of the palisade
lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies.

And I can’ t tell you that I came
onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof,
ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water.

Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight
a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood.

The opposite end of root
speaking for its entirety through
silence and color.