Youth

What never comes when called.
What hides when held.
Guest
most at home where least
expected. Vagrant
balm of Gilead.
What, soon as here,
becomes
the body’ s native ground and,

I.

By the road she hovers in heat waves,
propped up on a cinderblock wall,
revived by mixed house paints,
fending for herself like wild mint.

She is behind your shoulder,
a blind spot, your city's poverty.
A figure waits under a freeway ramp,
gesturing as if she knows you.

I.

The Santa Anas, childlike and profound,
blanket me; I see the dust stirring the valley
and clouding downtown San Bernardino;
I feel the sting of your loss.

The black oak leaves, brittle, tumbling,
crack under my feet. Is your hand
touching the dryness of my lips?

You sing: "Don't sit, mountain-still,
a coyote skull whistling."

I tug at the skin on my wrist, trying
to peel off the seam, my stubbornness.

Bethlehem in Germany,
Glitter on the sloping roofs,
Breadcrumbs on the windowsills,
Candles in the Christmas trees,
Hearths with pairs of empty shoes:
Panels of Nativity
Open paper scenes where doors
Open into other scenes,
Some recounted, some foretold.
Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold
Gleam from small interiors,
Picture-boxes in the stars
Open up like cupboard doors
In a cabinet Jesus built.

A boy who knew enough to save for something
like the whim that took me downtown on the bus
one lost Saturday morning of my mother’ s birthday,
I sat in the back where the gasoline smell
made me dizzy and I closed my eyes but didn’ t
think of her, only of myself, basking in the light
and love that would fall down on me when I

sometimes you know
things: once at a
birthday party a little

girl looked at her new party
gloves and said she
liked me, making suddenly the light much
brighter so that the very small

hairs shone above her lip. i felt
stuffed, like a swimming pool, with
words, like i knew something that was in
a great tangled knot. and when we sat

So by sixteen we move in packs
learn to strut and slide
in deliberate lowdown rhythm
talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat
because we want so bad
to be cool, never to be mistaken
for white, even when we leave
these rowdier L. A. streets —
remember how we paint our eyes
like gangsters
flash our legs in nylons
sassy black high heels
or two inch zippered boots
stack them by the door at night
next to Daddy’ s muddy gardening shoes.

I wrap the blue towel
after washing,
around the damp
weight of hair, bulky
as a sleeping cat,
and sit out on the porch.
Still dripping water,
it’ ll be dry by supper,
by the time the dust
settles off your shoes,
though it’ s only five
past noon. Think

At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’ s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’ s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.

I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.

In the harsh glare of an easily
reprehensible life. The channel changer is lost
in the crack of an infinite sofa.
Everything falls apart, everything breaks
down, torn into a million
fragments, Jericho everyday.

I want to be the blameless
victim in this canceled puppet show,
the marionette every mother loves, the one
souvenirs are modeled from.