6 poems

Rewriting the Border

 

It’s doves and thorns and sunsets

all the way into night, and blue mountains

float away at dusk. The border

isn’t what it used to be, no

Spanish is the Lovin’ Tongue or Marty Robbins

riding out of El Paso. Used to be

a line between the cowboy sky

and shops whose colors overflow

to make tourists feel as happy

as they couldn’t be at home. A hawk still hovers

with each wing in a different country

and ravens cross over with ease when they

dip and dive for joy, but there are

no visas for the jaguars

drawn by the scent of survival. Twenty pesos

for a dollar, undocumented sunlight,

new lives for old and corridos

from the radio playing

on an August roof in Phoenix. Taco Tuesday

in El Norte, deportation

on the menu every day. A flag of wind

still flying west of Lukeville, hammer tap

in a mechanic’s workshop, trucks

with hearts of steel between

Brownsville and Tijuana, highway never

sleeping, flan for dessert. A family lost

and a Rufous-capped warbler

in southern Arizona, slow river

leading a line of cheap labor

to the interstate; wasn’t that a time

when water was the passport

for anybody carrying their first home

in their pockets. Cheap labor on the move,

supply and demand, a cupful of rain

for a day digging fields. A trogon

calling from the oaks and sycamores. Summer

is his time before the sky opens;

fly south, fly north, never fly at all

for fear that dreams

come only in translation.

Beth

 

Cloudlight on the ridgeline, dust

yellowing below, blue wind

in all directions and a blind spot where

the sun should be. It’s been six months

 

since anybody saw the lady

whose mind escaped her when she fell

and the turquoise car in her driveway

is the only sign

of life today. She used to sit

 

outside and chat, took her dog a block

and back, complained a little

or a lot – it always was the same – and when

she came home from being cared for

 

turned a monsoon’s shade of mean.

Some days another car

parks next to hers, some days the silence

that surrounds her house

cries out for understanding. It must

 

be comfortable living

with air conditioning and cats, window blinds

down, listening for

 

a storm to break and rain

to be delivered to her door in cups

just large enough for her to stir some thunder in.

Octavio

 

He’s a thimbleful of jaguar mixed

with centuries of housecat.

Wears sleep as a disguise

suggesting domesticity, but once the clock

between his eyes ticks daylight

he wants and wants.

Sunlight on the mountain,

 

kibble in his dish, white bread

on the table, he’ll eat

anybody’s breakfast when the window

blinds are raised. Postprandially resting

with finches in focus

 

he adjusts the flow of his spine

and leaps to where their feeder hangs

on the safer side of glass.

Race from wall to wall, complain enough

is not enough by chewing

magazines as though they grew in jungles

and investigate

 

any open drawer or door to where

he’s not allowed. Breakages

are part of his identity, the collateral damage

of being alive. He must

be dreaming when he’s curled into a question

mark of fur, must remember

 

the unrecorded months

before unsheathing his claws to snag

each passing day as though

time were meant to bleed.

 

Sun Rising

 

Slow light on the awakening road, a thrasher

calling up the sun, the sky breathes in, breathes

out, a dream floats away

without knowing how it ends. Desert red,

 

a world apart. No interest rates, no headlines, just

a jackrabbit who listens

to the stones whispering. It’s too early

 

for suffering to begin

or souls to rise

in protest. It’s beautiful to see

the ancient sun the people here before

 

worshipped as it rose

and whit-whit now the mountain

 

holds its heart up for all the world to see.

 

In the Beginning

 

                I want to reconsecrate things as much

                as possible, I want to remythicise them.

                                Pier Paolo Pasolini

 

Before there was a wingbeat

to set the shiver free

that turned into the moon, before a mountain fell

from the unmapped sky,

before quail and mockingbirds and orioles

who trailed fire when they flew

came thunder loud enough

to touch.

                So did the moment pass in which

all beginnings began. No advance notice.

No cooling winds. A patch

of winged sunlight descending

to the ridgeline beneath

which spiny lizards first opened their eyes to see

themselves glow, becoming myth

in tiny dragon scales.

 

The Afterstorm

 

                 . . . after which, the trees sing

life back into birds, red earth runs

down from and water runs back to

the clouds. Oak speaks to sycamore and

madrone to the pines,

a Black witch moth informs the deer

the forest has awakened.

An alligator juniper

 

that drank a streak of lightning

stands its ground

with scars to show while light

steams from the rattlesnake grass.

Flash, flash, the rocks

 

gave up their secrets, the creek had wings

and Turkey vultures gathered

to an early roost. They’re resting now

with stillness shining on

their feathers, each of them secure

 

in knowing it was just

black daylight passing through.