A Stretch
We eat dinners,toast, sing,
dance. We swim too, dive,
dig, crave for more. A scrappy moon
tonight and so many songs tugging
the roiling spiny mass in the long stomach
of God,
the last frontier.
From "Slow Dance on Stilts"
La Jolla Poets Press, © 2001
Where I am
I am what is missing.
--Mark Strand, "Keeping Things Whole"
She was that kind of woman who
could nurse a baby while driving a pickup
down the 405 to Chula Vista. She had a way
of tuning into sounds, like wind.
She knew which tone of voice to use
When calming brush storms, the desert flood of dust
that threw itself on us every August.
She joked about her working relationship
with trees, was aware of their favorite poems.
Then the old man flew the coop, just up and left,
and she lost the old ease of moving
inside the wind, of identifying river blossoms.
It was the sound of her kids crying in the other room
that tore her up. Crying in the same room
where he left his new phone number
with her name on it.
She blamed herself, began to mistrust forests
stopped camping by the river with the children
and sold the truck. She wanted to know things
like how to walk around the world one small step
at a time and how to merchandise inner beauty
and slow dance with God. But she was broken-
axled, out of music, mud stuck to her brow
and she forgot how to change a tire.
When you have good kids you have it all,
she realized, and hitched her wagon to an idea.
Off they drove in a Chevy station wagon,
an Abrahamette leading her flock across the desert
of make-believe, the kids playing I See Something Blue
and singing songs their Mama taught them
when she was somebody’s wife.
They boogied with the mules at Grand Canyon
and flew to the moon from the Space Age
Motel in Gila Bend, the first of many flights
to places requiring wings of fiction.
Now she longs to lie awake by a stream
With them again, swim in black mountain lakes,
listen to their song -- saved from the surrender.
But the trips to Venus with Mom are kid stuff now.
Kisses like soap bubbles, and journals crowded
with names of battles won are packed away
with the boxes of drawings and painted stone.
Cartwheels lie behind on the grass at the river's edge.
She's that kind of woman who can partner with silence
while driving the 405 to Los Angeles until the voices
come, the ones that calm the storms and sing without chains:
Where we are there is nothing missing.
From "Slow Dance on Stilts"
La Jolla Poets Press, © 2001