If you come to Mojacar
and peel open an orange full of worms,
count how many there are because
those are the days it will take for your body
to decompose after you are buried.
If you come to Mojacar
and find a small green snake with its back
broken, don't step on it or you'll cause
an earthquake that will catch up to you
while you sleep in a continent far, far away.
Once, in the city of Kalamazoo,
The gods went walking, two and two,
With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion,
The speaking pony and singing lion.
For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart
Lived the girl with the innocent heart.
It was the blind girl from the rez who
stole the baker’ s missing bread;
it was the guitar playing fool who crooned
and raced the wild mustangs through our heads.
It was the village idiot who played
his chess without the fool, the bowl
of soup who said too late, too late, too late
to blame the thread, the spoon, the text, the mole.
Beside the waterfall of fallen things
just east of town, it was the bearded man
attaching fallen things to angel’ s wings
while singing legends to the long, long grass.
The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
It burned part of the sky
Which stayed black in that corner
For years,
As if it were night there
Even in the daytime,
A piece of the sky burnt
And which then
Could not be counted on
Even by the birds.
Then there's the Yemeni legend
of Eve in the Garden knitting
a pattern on the serpent's back,
the snake unfinished like the rest
of creation, the first woman
thinking to add design, a sheath
of interlocking diamonds and stripes
along that sensuous S,
