Writing in the Desert
Once you have entered the desert
a lock behind you clicks. A new vocabulary
floods your tongue and leaves you struggling
to pronounce the words. After the first year
you learn that silence is the official language
here. The longer you stay
the shorter the book you came to write becomes
until the manuscript fits on the wings
of a moth. Each dusk, a lifetime's work
draws closer to the flame.
(from: The Porous Desert)
Predictions
There will be ice on the moonlight
in the country of wolves
when they rush from the cover
of the trees. There will be dust
on the riverbed
at summer's end, just before
the swallows disappear. There will
be schedules left at bus stops
and old shoes in the road.
There will be blind men
asking directions
and brides dressed in white
selling confessions. There will be a time
of plenty and another
of even more. There will be
a time of need and nobody
will know the difference.
There will be deserts
so beautiful
on the night the cereus bloom
even the lost traveler
will lie down among the thorns
glad to be alive.
(from: Waiting for the Quetzal)
Waiting for the Quetzal
Begin in the lowlands, in light
soaked with moisture, where people
are waiting for a bus
they know will arrive because waiting
never fails them. Take the winding road
that peels away into the cordillera
promising never to end.
Relish the view at every switchback
with mountains flowing in and out
of the clouds. Soon it will rain,
the road will turn liquid,
but a mile into the sky
wild avocados grow
and epiphytes take root in the air.
The strangler fig
is water turning to muscle
before your eyes. Listen to the heat
as it drips around you.
Count down the time
to the storm drifting against your brow.
The song of the Nightingale Thrush
makes a bed in your ear
for the cicadas' shrill noise to lie down on.
This is your station
on three feet of earth
that rests on clay
flooding daily
as the forest turns to steam
and back to forest.
There is no light here
except what filters through the trailing greens.
All that remains
is to stare
into the tapestry, pulling apart fibres
and turning back the leaves.
You have imagined the Quetzal so often
it became familiar
before it was real. A sighting
is always too much to hope for
until you bite into the humidity
and the long feathers trail right before you
in the space between stillness
and invisibility.
(from: Waiting for the Quetzal)
First Night at the Shelter
The line at the shelter just before seven
runs along a fence and back
around the corner of a building
whose beds are already filled. Patience
is the ticket, and waiting
becomes so easy as to make the time
pass gently. Some men are reading, others
talk in low voices about a bus ride
they took long ago that brought them
to this city in the sun, whose winters
are the kindest roof they can hope for,
each with his bag or a bundle
tied together with resignation. Women too
stand in shoes so heavy
it hurts to walk. The first bus stops,
fills up, and pulls away
for an unnamed destination
as the night chill drifts across the faces
of those remaining. This will be your first ride,
the night you never expected
to fall, when you go to sleep in the company
of strangers and share a meal
cooked over slow hunger. Your appointment
book is folded as small
as your insurance card, and tucked
into a pocket with a five dollar bill
and change that gets smaller
each time you count it, the way
news bulletins lose significance
once you have come this far. A few blocks away
a different world exists in the same city
as the one you now inhabit,
where the mail never comes and the clock
has a minute hand only. Your bus
arrives. It purrs to offer comfort
as you climb aboard, and you know
it is the best you can hope for
when your return address
is your memory.
(from: Dry Heat, an online chapbook)
Night Calls
With a kiss of darkness comes the moth
cloaked in dust to the light
of a lamp by the latch on the door.
We sleep in uncharted territory
each night with our borders open
and waiting for messages
from creatures with whom we share
the floating world to enter
our dreams. When the unexpected
owl in the tree at the window
calls, the notes glow against the silence
and line our ears with threads and small bones.
(from: The Dreaming House, an online chapbook)
Duck Lady
Will you mind my tools for a while
the lady with the carrier says
I have to catch a duck.
She's been clipping the vegetation
on the bank of a pond
to reach a drake she thinks is caught
in twine. Thank you. Thank you.
So we stand beside her shears and long handled net
while she treks to a Mexican mallard
struggling in the mud
until she returns with the bird
under her arm. All she needs is
an injection. I take her home. I come back
in half an hour. Forty minutes at the most.
We promise to wait and meanwhile scan
the shallows for slackened wings
or drooping necks. An hour flies by
before a man stops to ask what we have seen.
A yellow warbler and a flock
of peach faced lovebirds. Then I ask
him if he'd mind staying here a while
to relieve us. Saving ducks? he scoffs,
You can't save ducks. Botulism kills ‘em off
in hundreds. Nothing you can do.
He lifts his binoculars to follow
a black phoebe. It seems like stopping wars,
this rescue undertaking. Nothing
we can do. Bombs, missiles, torture,
generals giving orders, and politicians
talking up the mission. There's a melancholy
hanging in the air, until the duck lady
returns all out of breath and
struggling in her second language
to say I got to her early enough. She'll be alright now.
I don't know how many but one at a time I can do.
(from: The Dreaming House)
A Letter to Kafka
Dear Franz, excuse me for writing in daylight;
it's a habit I can't break. I know you have a window
with a view of the stars, but the fact is
I need help. I've developed a phobia to optimists.
Death is entertainment where I live and religion
has become a business. We can see the end
of the world from where we stand, and people just
want a better view. A little darkness
would go a long way, something perhaps from one
of your unfinished stories with injustice as a theme
that would leave us to find a way out.
I need advice. What do I tell a lady I hardly know
who sends a message to say I need to repent
my sins but won't be specific when I ask her which ones?
We get religion knocking on our doors, religion
on bicycles, religion in chains and in leather, and we don't
hear much about blessing the poor these days,
neither is peace very popular. Something is making
people angry; maybe it's that anthem they need
special training to sing, whose notes are a symbol
of what few can reach in this country.
What I always appreciated about you is your sense
of humour, that relentless pursuit of absurdity
that turns out to be the way things are. Perhaps I need
to laugh more. I might make friends with whom to share
a vision of a country deceived into believing
democracy should be run by the wealthy. Living here
feels more and more like being a guest on a game show
where you guess your way to disappointment
and still receive your applause. That's what matters
in the end it seems. Even when you fail to reach
the castle, when you're the hunger artist down
to skin and bone, when you've lost more than you ever had,
been arrested for a crime that never happened
and subsequently declared guilty, guilty, guilty,
there is applause. So this is to say thank you
for the ghetto within, that ramshackle neighbourhood
nobody can destroy where everyone has a jackdaw
nesting in their insomniac heart.
(from: The Lost River)
Instead of a Poem for Inauguration Day
Let someone meditate
with all the nation watching. Let someone
be seen to look inward.
Between the fanfare and the public prayer
let someone sit cross legged
and recall what has been done in all our names.
Keep poetry out of this. The art
of speaking truth to power can't translate
into speaking for power as truth.
Let someone contemplate the way
of handshakes and whispers masquerading
as democracy, but don't ask poetry
to mark the occasion. It has a reputation
to uphold. Let someone hold a blank
sheet of paper to say
the poem that would have appeared here
would never have been allowed
to be read with so many listening. It would
have been too graphic, too honest, too intent
on seeking justice. It would have spoiled
the day. Let silence ring.
O Say Can You See the Animals?
A pig is burning. It happens
thousands of times. The exercise is
to keep it alive as if
it were a man. But fire hurts
too much to use it on anyone
with the power of speech to describe
what they feel. A squeal doesn't count.
A pig can't salute
or say no. A pig doesn't know
why it has to go through
the ordeal. It can't tell a terrorist
from the man who comes to feed it.
Before anybody knows who the enemy is
the goats are enlisted to graze
on the battlefield where
they are wounded and drugged
just enough to be still
while young recruits practice
removing a limb
while the earth spins
into the space where the sky used to be.
A vervet monkey has no country
other than the one from which
it is taken when chosen
to be a nerve gas victim so
a soldier being trained to kill
may be trained as well to try
keeping it alive
when its heart slows and its bowels melt
and if the monkey lives it will
be on a battlefield again until
there's nothing can be done
except dispose of the remains
after a simulated war
in which only its pain was real.