Living

William cut a hole in his Levi’ s pocket
so he could flop himself out in class
behind the girls so the other guys
could see and shit what guts we all said.
All Konga wanted to do over and over
was the rubber band trick, but he showed
everyone how, so nobody wanted to see
anymore and one day he cried, just cried
until his parents took him away forever.
Maya had a Hotpoint refrigerator standing
in his living room, just for his family to show
anybody who came that they could afford it.

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

Ventura because she was hungry and because
She was curious — but more because she was curious —
Took the dare, a kiss for a pomegranate.
Everyone gathered, her friends and his. Everyone
Watched: the boys, the girls, the pigs and the chickens,
And more. Moving to the front were the children
She and Clemente would one day have,
And the children of those children, too,
Gathered and loud with everyone and everything else,
Loud as the pigs and fast as the chickens
Though she could not see them.

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.

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.

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

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.

As soon as possible, I will confront the wren’ s
doings, rinse the white streaks from the porch bricks
drawing lizards from their shade, the immediate
smell of water too much for all of us.
But first is lunch. The remains we’ ll scatter over
the driveway away from the bricks. Wrens come,
crusts from our dishes make drama. Then history.

i. the positing of space, corporeal history

medium of my body

bent to narrow rivers,

touching of the touch
commits

totem to shape:

jasmine buds,

water poppies open as the mouth.

Propolis and juniper oil

resinous viscera
embowered in trees,