Home Life

People would come to my great-grandmother’ s house.
She was in a room. They would stay in the kitchen.
The words their words rolled like cars by on a train
Here from somewhere else and going somewhere else
Moving on faster almost than we could read them,
Sound them out my brother and me with our small mouths,
Chessie, a cat, see? the Erie, Santa Fe, Ferrocarril,
Ore cars from the Southern Pacific, brown
And all the numbers of all the engines.
The words they rolled easier, fat and longer

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.

He forgets that he used to call me mariconcito-
that I harbored years of hatred toward him
while hoping to find my real father. My
childhood memories of him reminding me
I was my mother's son, not his. I tried
to poison him once and scattered sharp nails
inside the shoes in his closet. By the time one
of his sons died of AIDS I was already lost
in contempt for the man I blamed for everything.
There was the time I was in love and he met my
boyfriend. Now he forgets to go to the bathroom

Everything was the apple and the glass of tea.
The mountain, the mold, the apron on the grandmother —
the neck of a brown baby holding its tiny head
to get rid of the black bees.
This is the end of a bad century,
the opening of a door that was never built into the chest.

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.

These days are best when one goes nowhere,
The house a reservoir of quiet change,
The creak of furniture, the window panes
Brushed by the half-rhymes of activities
That do not quite declare what thing it was
Gave rise to them outside. The colours, even,
Accord with the tenor of the day—yes, ‘grey’
You will hear reported of the weather,
But what a grey, in which the tinges hover,
About to catch, although they still hold back
The blaze that's in them should the sun appear,
And yet it does not. Then the window pane

My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in.
For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem;
for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one.
She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card,
and wrote I must be brave even when it’ s hard.

Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides

death surrounds itself with the living
i watch them take the body from the house
i’ m a young kid maybe five years old
the whole thing makes no sense to me
i hear my father say
lord jesus what she go and do this for
i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house
i watch him walk around the garden
kick the dirt
stare at the flowers
& shake his head shake his head
he shakes his head all night long

Wind whistling, as it does
in winter, and I think
nothing of it until

it snaps a shutter off
her bedroom window, spins
it over the roof and down

to crash on the deck in back,
like something out of Oz.
We look up, stunned — then glad

to be safe and have a story,
characters in a fable
we only half-believe.