30 April

The woman in question

for Cathy

1995

“So, who is she, anyway?”

the fellow from the assessor’s office

asks the barista steaming skim milk

for his dry skinny decaf au lait to go

as the screen door flutters shut

behind the woman in question.

“I don’t know her name,”

the barista replies discreetly,

“but she’s a wonderful customer.”

Might have been a waitress once,

she thinks but doesn’t say.

“Medium regular here.”

The guy from corrections hands her

his sludgy bulgy pitted plastic mug.

“Well, we saw her walking the other day,

staring at the sky and smiling,

and you know what was up there?

Nothing but clouds.”

29 April

VILLANELLE FROM HELL
1999

"Fourteen days at Slocum Creek
are fourteen days too many," moans
the river, sallow, slack and sick,
"but I am waiting for the dam to break
and will wait 'til time and times are done
if that means fourteen centuries at Slocum Creek."
"I cannot gasp, but if I could, I'd shriek,
squawk, squeal and groan,"
the crappie, sallow, slack, and sick
is rasping as it fishflops down the thick
stagnant soup that it called home
sixty-six years ago, at Slocum Creek.
"This so-called campground sucks."
“That pissoir of a lake.” “Discarded, putrid bovine bones.”
The anglers, sallow, slack and sick
are calling and responding from the wreck
of outdoor recreation. Clowns!
Just fourteen lines describing Slocum Creek
have left me sallow, slack and sick.


Note: Should you be planning a vacation here, a BLM sign at Slocum Creek Campground near Owyhee Reservoir indicates that the overnight camping limit is 14 days.

27 April

Counterpoint
1991

I am the weight
at the opposite end of the scale.
In country where it rains
eight feet a year, the green kin
in my windows traveled here
from deserts where their fleshy leaves
stored scarce water and their spines
squared off against death’s teeth.

As I meander into love with you
I dream your death,
dispassionately wonder if you’ll be
the one I get around to
murdering.

Each day we kill our loves
a little more carefully.
I say what no one wants to hear.
My laugh is loud and impolite,
my silence has sharp edges.
When my hands clap rhythm
they reach for counterpoint.
You tell me you don’t know
if anyone can dance with me.

26 April

Everything I Made
early 90s

“There is nothing left to keep me here,” he said.
“I have lost more than I knew I had to lose.

I would take my grandfather’s clock
to keep it safe for whoever is to love it next,
but I will go without it if I must.
It is a fair trade for my life.

All I was given becomes a story I will tell by firelight.
Everything I made, I can make again.”

25 April

I DO
for David, April 25, 1998


Call this my rough draft of the vow
I’ll revise and renew and never quite finish.
What I did got me here, but it won't
get me past here. Remember
those strange words I stammered,
stalling for time, when you asked
if after two decades of safety
I might consider the danger that's love?

Our compass is set for a bearing
beyond my Shabby Hotel by the Sea,
out of sight of your Shoals of Reason.
You called me Ambassador from the Edge,
Consul of the Lost and Found.
You knew me well enough to name
my Homeland. The answer is yes.

This moment light gathers around,
I promise you what I do best
yet still with least confidence:
Like my mentor the mole rat, I will
gnaw through the perimeter. I am
poised to become the new creature
this marriage calls to. From now on I do
whatever it takes.

24 April

Eggs like these
2006

Easter morning
and we haven’t colored eggs in years,
but there are two in the little hollows in the fridge,
brown already, courtesy of the chickens.
We will do our part with magic markers.
Seems it’s our histories the two eggs
wind up wearing, with the good humor
and perspective on our years of troubles
only time bestows. My egg becomes a face –
mildly curious eyes,
nose too prominent to be attractive,
smile bulging with silver –
all surrounded by ringlets on the verge of blue.
When I was a girl, I tell you,
there were men, women, boys, girls,
cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and turtles
crowding the refrigerator door.
Though I drew them all myself,
they still surprised me every time
I pulled the handle and the light flashed on.
When you were a boy, you tell me,
you spent an entire hour
painting a Madonna and Child
on an eggshell’s curved surface,
and I’m wondering if today I’ll get to see
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
in miniature, but no, it’s Lenin.
I would recognize him anywhere,
and on the egg’s reverse, fireworks bloom
above Red Square and words you outlived
to ridicule: “The victory of Communist labor
will be ours with eggs like these.”

23 April

Underground
Late 90s, early 00s - wish I knew for sure


It’s April and we’ve planted pastel spheres
of pea seeds. We’ve had the necessary
drizzle and shy sun, and our neighbors’ lilacs -
one stark white of saintly faith, the other passion’s
violet signature - lean across our fences.

It’s three in the morning, muddy, and the night air stirs
exhaust fumes from McLoughlin Boulevard
into the scent of cold, wet dirt. I sit on my heels. I listen,
but I cannot hear the ghostly tentative roots
investigate their home’s dark nourishment.

These are the sweetest days of my life.
Only lend me the grace to wait.

22 April

GOOD FRIDAY’S GONE
2005


Every April,
when the cellophane grass, chocolate rabbits,
and squishy bitter yellow chicks appear,
I realize once again: Good Friday’s gone.
When I was a kid back home
in the second-biggest city in Vermont,
the whole world as I knew it shut down
between noon and three o’clock
the day Christ died. There was no school
and the weather was always unseasonably
warm and sunny. I used to wander
in a post-Apocalyptic daze. I loved the darkness
behind store windows, loneliness
of the streets, where few cars crawled by
all those slow three hours, and no one was out and about
but me. I admit I wasn’t thinking deep religious
thoughts. I probably caught a few disapproving glares
over the years, though I never noticed.
But I’m nostalgic now for those bleak collaborations,
the force of will that kept my neighbors
shuttered from the sun, even if snow
was forecast for Easter, as it often was.
I miss the watch I kept those hours,
feverish, morbid, but not irreverent,
and how the world came back to miraculous life
each mid-afternoon, and stirred the mystery
of my peculiar faith.

21 April

SESTINA: URBAN LEGEND
1999

Here’s how I heard
it. Some rugrat let all these alligators
loose even though the babysitter
threatened him within an inch of his measly life. She recalled the beehive
incident, had been trained to stay away from a Corvette
with a stain in the back seat, or a man with a hook.

So this ordinary creaker, except for the hook,
he was the one who heard
the sound like a Corvette
moulting, only it was really alligators
slinking in the sewers, a militia like a beehive,
but the babysitter,

who might have saved the city, that babysitter
was otherwise occupied. She was dialing 9-1-1, cradling the hook
in her boyfriend’s neck, every hair in her perfect beehive
keeping its iron grip, while she heard
the ambulance wail toward Lovers Leap and another sound that might be alligators,
which she ignored, preoccupied as she was with body fluid leaking all over the Corvette.

She coveted that Corvette,
and if her boyfriend bit the big one, the babysitter
was hoping she’d inherit his wheels and not his collection of squeaky toy alligators,
and she kind of wanted the hook,
too, she’d heard
they make attractive accessories for a beehive.

She’d never had a swarm of bees take residence in her beehive,
but she had seen a few back seats of a few Corvettes.
There were the obligatory ominous urban legend lectures she’d heard
involving various bubbleheaded babysitters,
and if they got the hook,
well, maybe they deserved it. Meanwhile alligators

were issuing from the city’s every orifice, alligators
the size of freight trains, and she was touching up her beehive.
The man with the hook
was leering at the Corvette
which he wanted more than the babysitter,
and him licking his scabby lips was the last thing she heard.

That’s how I heard it. The alligators
ate the babysitter, beehive
and all. The authorities never recovered the Corvette or the hook.

20 April

Some good news & some bad news
for Dan
1999


The good news is
my big brother got
disability to the tune
of twenty-four hundred
dollars a month,
tax free, for as long as
he’s certifiably nuts.
That’s the bad news.

He’s philosophical,
says he’s always wanted
to pull some crazy stunts -
he’s still so protective,
he won’t tell me what -
& now he sees these impulses
as investments.

Me, I’m saving
my pocket change for bail,
consulting the Magic 8-Ball,
shopping for a greeting card
that says, “Congratulations
& Condolences.”

19 April

GRAPHING OUR DYSFUNCTION
for a rocket scientist
1998


x > -4 (that's me).
y < 11 (that's you).
For instructional purposes
I'll keep it flat.

Take your graph paper, mark the axes
horizontal x and vertical y like the cross we bear.
Draw diagonal lines from the top edge
to 4 lines down from where you marked that x-axis.
All the way across. Good.

Turn your attention to the left side
of the paper and draw diagonals
in the opposite direction up and down
its length until you reach 11 past your y-axis.
There. Now that's done.

Note the crosshatching where the two graphs meet
in the upper left-hand corner.
That's where my terror of abandonment
and your ambivalence about commitment
overlap. It's the graph of our dysfunction.
It's what's wrong and why there's no use trying
to solve this problem

let alone all those trains
leaving Midwestern cities at various times and speeds,
loaded with dynamite, conductors
asleep at the switch.

18 April

Little things
2000

I cherish my bottle
of Ibuprofen
manufactured at
the Khimfarm Kombinat
in Staraya Kupavna.
It's dark brown, real glass,
the label recommends
"Keep tightly closed
in a cool dry place"
in Russian, and I can
read it! The cap doesn't
have any childproof features,
another way of saying
I can open it! When I do so,
I find no safety seal,
only a hundred sugar-coated
rosy pills and a wad of fluffy
white cotton I have been assured
is pure.

PS I'll bring you some.

15 April

SAY WHAT
1992, 2011

I am going to practice
taking note of what I say,
not what I mean,
or think I mean,
or say I didn’t mean
when I don’t care for
some response I get.

14 April

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
2008, 2011

When a mutual friend,
whom she had been just about to inform
that news of him
was the last thing she wanted,

told her that he had said, in reference to her,
“I so screwed up,”
she found herself aloof,
dispassionate, barely curious

which of his multitude
of indefensible actions
he might finally be beginning
to acknowledge,

and she knew for sure she was done with, over, gone.

13 April

Rickshaws in the Snow
for Marta

Note: The Polish city whose name is generally written in English as Lodz actually has diacritical marks gracing three of its four letters in Polish, and these make it sound like “Woodge.” You are likely to encounter rickshaws – rikszy in Polish – if you visit, which I highly recommend.

I know the game
of hide and seek
with spring,
last year’s leaves
rustling in a tree
while this year’s
sruggle to unfurl
in a wind I do not feel
down on the ground as we turn
the corner
onto the long stretch
of the street
that people think of
if they think
of Woodge at all.

I know how summer
hovers suddenly,
briefly in between.

I know the thorough
chill of autumn
on November’s
Independence Day
as I shiver in the rush
of air against
the bicycle that bears us
south down the old part
of Piotrkowska
no one cares about.

But I yearn to know
the cold that settles in to stay,
the slushy muddy tracks
of three wheels plying
their way up and down
the long straight street
shaped by twin hidden rivers.
I dream of pedalling my own
rickshaw in the snow.

4 April

Before The Maze
1996

The sky is so wide I can see past any storm.
I have such desire for union, but I am alone here.

It is called The Neck, a narrow ridge dividing two vast families of canyons.
When we met, I was not paying enough attention.

Red, rough-hewn temples, cryptogamic earth, the mysterious marriage.
There is nothing more important than commitment.

Flash flood, water crashing down the sky, down the gutters, down my neck.
I hate it that I must leave everything behind.

We are overlooking the earth falling away, away down canyon after rivulet.
When I lost the canyons, I lost my voice.

Forgive me for my trespasses into your sanctuary.
The Flint Trail, jagged, steep, where we stood at the top afraid,

before the rain washed the road away.

2 April

The alchemy of language
2006

William, I too rise early,
write poems every morning.
I set my standards low, and wait
until later to tinker with what comes
to me, what always comes, the way
the river flows to me, the woods
gather in grace around me.
But that is all we have
in common. Though I long
to write the mystery and magic
coursing through each molecule,
each moment, William, I am sick and stuck.
Not so far from your tranquil Lake Oswego
lurk the trailer parks on 82nd Avenue
that I escape daily but only
for an hour or so by
following your example.
Show me the way further, William,
take me beyond the Clackamas County
line, get me out of Felony Flats,
give me something to write
about besides addiction,
failed get-rich-quick schemes,
small betrayals, fistfights in tavern
parking lots, scrap metal, children with wary eyes
and dirt and snot smeared under their noses.
Make me a new life. Teach me the alchemy
of language, shine the light up ahead
to where the curtain finally falls
on this sad, sordid, stupid
white-trash drama.

1 April

Just look,

the blossoms
on the cherry trees
entreat,
even if this year
you think that you’re
past caring.
You don’t have to feel
a thing, they promise.

And so, against
my better judgment,
at the edges
of my damp, stolid
scaffolding
of a soul,
gentle mysteries
begin to stir,
unfold.

2006