Día de los Muertos

Come home.

Afraid that building an offrenda

would wake you

from some sacred silence, I mixed new

mortar instead.

Adding sunrises from Puerto Peñesco,

dolphins too;

I mixed in a bit of cement

and a touch of rebar for remembrance.

Perhaps this retablo will offer me guidance

in the sacrilege of hope.

Then again, I’m no painter.

Merging

San Miguel de Allende’s cobbled hills

against Pacific fierceness

from Los Cabos,

I sprinkle with migrating whales.

I can wish for the impossible here,

in our intimate

Sonoran skies

Oaxacan hills... .

I reach into this batter

and taste.

I swallow stones.

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Dressing Mom

Soft as new skin, pliable as silk,

the casing of her bony arms

slide into the bra straps.

After the hospital, at this age,

I cannot help but wonder why she bothers.

Only whores go without bras.

Earlier, helping her wash,

I sponge underneath and around

the long empty breasts that fed five children.

I hold her as she washes the feathery gray pudendum,

the mysterious labia; origin places.

I hate for you to see me like this.

I ask

which shirt she wants to wear,

and she smiles up at me

grateful and gentle.

Nothing like her mothering years.

Then, the hard core of self-preservation

created us both. Born out of its hard shell

with eyes open and screaming, we traded combat secrets

and realized we were both

alone in this war.

How long can you stay this time? We could go to that bookstore you like.

What

would have happened

if I had loved her like this before? Loved her smooth tan skin

before the rice paper wrinkles?

Hatred is just the awkward side of love.

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Headless Women

For The Winged Victory of Samothrace C. 190 B.C

I didn’t know who you were

when I carefully cut you out of the art history book— such sacrilege—

push-pinned you to my teenage wall.

Your ocean-drenched belly, graceful and precise

proud breasts brazen,

chest forward...a delicacy of stone in motion.

I was far from finished but the chisel

had already left its marks.

You were not left to the imagination. You

once had a head. If only I had no head,

too young to consider hope. But,

you, voluptuous, wind-swept—you

were unsheltered, you survived.

I learned the language of your followers much later:

Hellenistic, contour, sinuous. I too

wanted to be held by the wind.

They imagine your head, your arms,

but who needs arms when you have wings?

A fearless fluttering of grey marble, such movement in stillness,

you are a celebration of the body’s force.

Sister of strength, daughter of Styx,

I cried in absurd supplication

when I saw you for the first time, in person,

in stone, in light.

They searched in vain for your head.

They remodel, surmise, envision, reconstruct what

Victory must have looked like;

what terrifying countenance they concoct. But,

your face...my face.

-----

There Must Be a Science to This

There must be a science to this—an improbable equation

or a Fibonacci sequence that refuses

to spiral into madness.

These are not my memories. I reject this gift.

When I was thirteen they put us in a P.O.W. camp....

Perhaps a little of this drink and some of those pills

and a few hits, some greedy sex, and—

I will be fine. I will not accept your nightmares

regardless of the remuneration offered.

I refuse this guilt you silently pronounce as mine.

I read that suicide is for those people too gentle for this world.

It must be the equal sign that’s missing.

Either that or your forgiveness.

I never was any good at math,

where the answers are always the same.

I waited for the new and improved mom

to come back from the hospital

each time, but the solution

must have been made of imaginary numbers.

Your situation had too many variables for me

to try and balance. But your stories stayed

with me as memories of things I had never seen....

There must be a science to this—

a sign, a symbol, a proof worth solving.

When I was fifteen a soldier took me to a hotel room and....

I will find the puzzle’s missing piece

and eat it in remembrance of you.

I was not made to be complete.

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The Whens of Now

When the gloaming begins

and the sky becomes a Turner painting,

when the air smells of fallen leaves

and cut grass,

when crickets serenade the last

of the fireflies—that now.

When hero-bats flood

the dwindling horizon light, and frogs

are in a brief conclave with sleepy bees,

when trees turn silhouette from the bottom up—

When just before the darkening oranges

take over for their 15 seconds of fame

and we could be in the Sedona Red Rocks

or in a field of Van Gogh's St Remy sunflowers,

when we sit on the rooftop

in San Miguel de Allende drinking wine,

when, when, when this is now—if only for a moment. It was.

Oh, here comes the past tense again. Not yet.

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