Squash

Summer Squash

Near the end, when my mother

was mostly cotton pajamas

and bones, we could see the tumor

rise out of her belly, as big and round

as a prize-winning tomato.

With every heartbeat, the thing

pulsed its own defiant life,

pushed its roots deeper

into a pancreas and liver no longer

rich enough to be good soil.

My brother, the pharmacist, found

it first while turning mom,

put his hand on the swollen fruit

like he might have felt

for his children, kicking with life,

safe in their first dark and secret

place.  He tried to talk me

into touch, but—watching his hand

rise and fall—I could not bear

such labor, as clinical and intimate

as sex.  When all was said

and done, I returned to my home

states away, to the summer garden I had

hurriedly stuck in the ground—eggplants,

peppers, tomatoes, and squash.

Every previous year, the squash vines

spread green through their end

of the bed, bloomed yellow flowers

as bright as the morning sun, sprouted

a squash or two, then suddenly

wilted and died—I determined this year

would not be the same.  According to

Extension Service Publication 2348,

“Insect Pests of the Home Vegetable Garden,”

I have squash vine borers, clearwing

moths whose larvae chew through

the stems of otherwise healthy plants.

Remedies include “chemical prevention

of egg deposit” and “manual removal

of larval young.”  Bore holes tell me

I’m too late for prophylactic action,

so I take a penknife to the garden,

search plant stems for protruding frass

and a bulge, cut as gently as a lover

along the axis until I see the hidden

living worm, gut the fat white thing,

and, with the blade, scrape the bastard out.

Phoenix

The Visit

July, Phoenix

            c. a long time ago

I.

                                               

Wednesday, I step from the plane

into heat     I am

in the belly of an old bird

            trying to rise

from flame

She sees me first

and smiles

            the same old toothy grin

We hug, make

mental adjustments

            age enhance memories

fast forward  hair-color  weight  skin

Later, at her house

in the gravel backyard

            I see a Bird of Paradise

blooms  orange  yellow and  red

flowers along a stem

fashioned

of fire

When we talk

I make myself clear

about how we again

can be dear and dear     When I am confused

            I find it helpful

to be very clear     She sits

quietly and seems

            to  listen  think  hear

II.

Next morning, when we walk

I see saguaros

            as tall as telephone poles

She says they cannot

grow arms

until they are 100 years old

            I think, such a long time

to wait for limbs and love

In her refrigerator

she keeps a case of Snapple

            a cornucopia of juice:

mango madness  kiwi lemonaide

tropical punch

The first full day

            I drink five

Friday, we drive to Sedona

where bloodshot rocks rise

from the ground     Windowless castles

            made of trapped sun

and pressed heat

In hushed reverance

we enter the Chapel of the Cross

for the cliff-side view     Monks chant

            on tape     Later, we eat

at Taco Bell

III.

Early Saturday, Williams, AZ

            We ride a steam train north

to the Grand Canyon's

southern rim

with two of her friends

            Beth and Pete

I hold my camera

            forward out the window

and photograph the train

disappearing into juniper and sage

She identifies a cloud

and explains the season

of monsoon rain

            In front of us Beth plays

with Pete's hair

            while he sleeps

The whistle blows

when we arrive at the edge

            where canyon falls off

into canyon and the river

            runs out of sight

at the bottom of thousand-foot walls

While Pete and Beth

eat at Bright Angel Lodge

we walk the rim to Yavapai Point

            in drizzle and mist

Four deer cross our path

            like apparitions

of people we might have been

IV.

Sunday, driving

back to her desert town

            she says this

and this and this and this

            I say, agreed

That evening, she naps

and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps

            and sleeps as if my visit

has made her very tired

I watch a documentary on the Titanic

            in which it sinks

V.

Monday morning, Sun City

            We eat granola and split

the last cold Snapple

            I surprise her

with a flash photo as she walks

through her bedroom door     She appears

            startled like a rare bird

caught off guard

by the camera’s mechanical

            and shuttered desire

           

At the Phoenix airport

            in front of my gate

before I step from dry heat

into the body of a plane

            we  embrace and stop

one moment to lock mental images

in place:  brown hair  green eyes

the curve of a cheek

            the final expression

on the other's face

Uxmal

Uxmal

In the Yucatan at Uxmal, the full moon

lights gray stones, shines behind palm leaves

on great hewn stones.  Cautious as an ape,

the moon slips through sky.  Whiter than bone,

the round stone hangs above temple and earth—

bright, tethered captive in the eyes of a lizard.

Mayans call the iguana, mystic lizard—

silent temple guardian by day, but in full moon-

light, he jerks and jumps about the hot earth,

singing lunar songs, dancing on palm leaves,

praising leaf, stone, and sky.  He holds a bone

to the stars, remains of some ancient man or ape.

How can the quiet iguana praise life—ape

wild abandon and zeal—so unlike a lizard?

He sees the tourists walk with old bone

steps in the great halls of Uxmal, no moon

fury ever in their eyes.  Immune to leaves

and stars, they sweat, grow fat, ignore the earth.

I came to Uxmal—hottest place on earth.

Sunburned, young, I felt the eyes of an ape

at every turn:  picking through cold leaves

of lettuce at lunch, watching breathless lizards

in the sun, climbing stone steps to the moon.

He was the sad, howling flesh on my every bone.

I have seen the beauty of sculpted bone,

lying in the high green grass of the earth,

shaped smooth and white like the curved moon,

seen in myself both precious bone and ape.

I have walked like tourists and heard lizards

sing—a motion in the wind, in the leaves.

But I am more than bone or ape, I am leaves—

their delicate tracing of veins like bone,

the sound of the wind in them like lizard

song.  They turn yellow and red, fall to earth

and burn in a slow fire of musk like apes

smell—they flame in the shadow of the moon.

I am like the lyric leaves plunging to the earth,

full and faceted—beauty, bones, stone, ape—

Sing lizard, praise our lives to the white moon.

Sestina written in James Dickey's year-long seminar in verse composition during grad school (1990s) at University of South Carolina.

Cluck

The Chicken House at Night

A shiny, black beetle with a curved horn

like a trumpet stands on a post, and the air—

full of summer and dark—wraps sentinel corn

in a tailored cloak, dress-grade and uniform.

Crepe myrtle limbs secure far boundary lines,

and pink blooms flare under the vigilant stare

of the moon.  Heavy toads parade from ivy vines,

patrolling grassy fields, vast beneath the pines.

The chicken house cloisters a dozen red hens,

sleeping heads bowed, bony feet tucked,

but one red hen roams the grounds, extends

her wings, a night-yard queen—she clucks.

Dead

The Dead

Do the dead cross their fingers behind their

backs when they promise to lie still for so long?

Do they change their names and make new

friends at mixers for the freshly deceased?  Do

they finally know their true selves?  Regret they

did not die sooner or later, briskly or better?

Do they miss their bones, birthmarks, the

comfort and beauty of dark?  Do they ever call

home, or wonder why words came so slow in

phrases and lines instead of like thunder,

booming all at once?  Do they tell stories,

develop hobbies, miss feeling naked and alone?

Not seeing the whole, do they wonder how

marriage became a part of the plan?  Do men

and women alike finally feel their children, and

their children’s children, move inside of them,

kicking and stretching in time?  Do they miss

the weight of a hammer, the smell of sawdust,

the familiar edge of a broken tooth habitually

sought with the tongue?  Depending on

circumstances, do they recall individual

orgasms with pleasure or pain, wonder or

shame?  Do they know the name of the last

number, see the earth’s edge because, in the

end, they find that planets are flat?  Do they

cease making excuses, write poems instead?

Do they open their eyes, draw and dream at

will?  Do they know how it feels to fly from New

York to Paris without a plane?  Do they wait

excitedly in eternity’s lobby for each loved one

to draw a last breath, capitulate and die?  Do

they miss their lips, the ability to kiss?  Do they

watch the living come and go, a terse drama

they see without fast forward, only real human

time and its reverse?

Ancestors

Smith Family Farm

Pelham, Georgia

Settled, c. 1880

I.

Broken china and glass

Sprout from the rows

Of a black, plowed field

After the rain—

One last try

By ancestral eyes

For a glimpse

Of the corn-

Tasseled skies.

II.

White china seed—

Familial fragments of

Stoneware cups and plates

Sown into a vernal cycle,

As if some spring,

When the rains fall just right,

Chimney-shingled houses,

paint-layered swings,

And screened porches

Will suddenly burst

From the ground,

Complete with

Coffee-brewed fathers,

Beauty-shopped mothers,

And the late-yard sounds

Of dinner calls and

Laughing children

Chasing hedge-toads

On night-light lawns.

III.

I know—

The dead hopes,

The odd ambitions,

The lure of measuring

What we lived

By things we left behind,

But I could not resist,

So last spring,

With a dinner plate

Of everyday china

And a hammer

From the barn in hand,

I walked one evening

To a back acre

Of plowed land.

While the creek murmured

A song wet and low

And the dogwoods bloomed white,

With a swift, breaking blow

I entered the ancient passage

From earth and night

To groundbreaking and light:

Time to plant,

My fathers,

Time to sow.

Hairline

Hairline

The last days of my mother’s life,

when bones were almost all

that was left of mom

in this world, I kissed her

on the forehead and called

her “sweetie” each time

I put her to bed, kissed her

near the widow’s peak where hair

and skin met like the fracture

line between earth and sky,

her thinning skin stretched

tight over a hard plane

of bone, her downy hair

as soft as clouds seem, framing

the vacant space

where crows caw and fly,

call to her and fly.

Rose

The Rose

At middle-age, my father planted roses­—

the man who never painted or patched, satisfied

with the leaky roof and white siding grown green

with time.  He broke ground in early spring,

not long after mother found his truck grafted

to the shadows of a strange house in town.

I remember the day the mail-order roses

arrived, my father sifting the thick-caned,

dormant plants from the damp wood shavings

in which they were packed:  Double Delight,

Pilgrim and Prince, Wandering Star, Eden’s

Peace, Lasting Love, Scarlet Tongues of Flame.

On planting day, father plowed the sunny

plot with a new tiller—muscling the straining

machine like a wild horse he could not quite

control.  By summer, the leafed-out, stubby

stems offered their first true buds—small, tight

fists of color—yellow, white, pink, cream,

and red ellipses hovering in the stifling heat.

Late summer nights, father walked the blooming

rows, wrapped in the sweet company of roses

while we slept, every cupped and knotted

bud rising like secret love or thorny questions

whose answers slowly unfurl.  Even now,

I see him:  standing in the tilled plot, staring

down fragrant rows, his eyes searching

for hidden flowers in the moon-softened dark,

thinking of roses outside the bounds of sight,

learning how seasons of human pain pay

such a small price for the presence of mystery,

finding what comforts beauty bestows

in the place of the rose, what deep-seated truths

are throned in the petal-covered heart of the rose.

Blahgspot

To Blahgspot, My Coy Mistress

If you want to post

poetry instead of a blahg,

better venues

must exist,

for Blahgspot loves

a soft return, but firmer

                                              formatting

stubbornly resists.

Band

After the Band

Blonde Hailey sings

            hard and

Lean like a

            saw

Rips through green

            trees,

White planks cut

            rough-

Edged and splintered

            on a

Summer day.  After

            the

Songs, when the

            canvas-

Gloved men go home, and

            the day sits

Still like a hot

            blade, an

Unkissed boy with

            eyes of

Burning wood

            drifts

Restless and tenuous

            like

Smoke or silence

            through the

Pines.  What a

            curious

Time for an

            ember-

Eyed boy when the

            storm

Strikes like a band—

            needles of

Straw lie quiet and

            dry on the

Forest floor, thunder

            lines

Crouch in the sky

            like

Unplayed chords, hard

            beads of

Rain fall unchained

            from the

Clouds, the

            lightening

Hums a saw-toothed song,

            the land

Awakes, and the trees

            praise

Fire in the night.

Time

Time of Death

Saturday night, on the way to declare my mother dead,

the hospice supervisor got lost.  Her GPS ran out of data,

led her down our dark country road, to an end

that was no end, just nowhere, a black stopping place

between peanut fields and dense acres of pine,

the unmapped road and rolling hills persisting

as far as the car's headlights could shine.  By then,

my mother had been dead for some time, comfortable

and propped in bed, at last her pancreas and cancer out of gas.

The death certificate will say 10:15 p.m., but she died

all week­, and before.  On Monday, she woke for three mornings

—5, 8, and 10—each time asking for coffee, but falling

back asleep on the couch before the pot dripped

its way to done.  Tuesday she gave up breakfast and food

altogether; Wednesday sat on the porch one final

time, watched the hummingbirds visit from another world,

her face a blank, unsigned form.  On Thursday, she refused

water, walked herself to the bathroom for a terminal,

autonomous pee.  But language faded all along, as if words

were a load too heavy to tote from one place to the next.

Friday she said, “I love you,” and “Take care of Jeanne,”

her youngest sister, who was very sick.  All day Saturday,

we watched her chest rise and fall, counted beats, swabbed

her lips, teeth, and tongue, till she took a breath near dark

that was not a breath, just an empty gasp, a dry suck on the straw

that was her life.  7:55 p.m.  So we sat, held, hovered, waited

for the one who could say she’s dead.  Not thinking then,

but now, what is the real time of death?  Near 11:30, when

the funeral director and his men rolled her toward us in the den,

my brother unexpectedly said, “Can we kiss her goodbye?”

Surprised, but agreeable, the handlers paused, pulled down

the rich, velvet spread, revealed the black vinyl bag beneath.

Though I can’t recall the exact time, no matter how hard I try,

when they zipped her back up, I know something died.

Line

Crossing the Line:  What It's Like

I.

First:

There is this—

the insatiable need for fact,

the coiled wire waiting to be unspooled,

the two steel towers, unstrung, facing the windless gorge,

a drowsy green bird dreaming of flight, and a tiger roused by hunger pain:

II.

Karl Wallenda, high wire walker, born January 21, 1905,

near Magdeburg, Germany, to a dancer and

trapeze artiste:  by ten, balancing

in beer halls;

conceiving the great seven-man pyramid, rising three tiers high,

in the winter of thirty-eight; leaving

retirement at sixty-nine

to set

the high-wire distance record (one-thousand-eight-hundred feet);

later, in a burst of wind over San Juan, falling

twelve stories to the lined,

hotel street.

Or:  the hum-

mingbird (Archilochus colubris),

smallest bird in the world, alone able to hover:  fans

its wings seventy beats-per-second, producing a humming sound;

feeds

on nectar pooled in salvia, thistle,

jewelweed, and the scarlet horn of trumpet vine; weaves

a nest of spider silk, laying eggs, each spring, the size of navy beans.

Or:  the four-hundred-pound tiger, biggest in the big-cat family filadae,

each tiger marked with a pattern of stripes as distinct

as fingerprints.  Night-hunter, searching

animal trails

and stream beds for buffalo, deer, boar, badger and hare; creeping

within thirty feet of prey; leaping the sandy line;

crushing throat or nape—eating men,

a rare case. 

III.

Then:

There is the terrible

tension we string in the wire,

the joules and foot-pounds of work performed by like, is, and as:

the Great Wallenda stepping as quiet and careful as a tiger stalking

its prey—for a moment, after the gust, hovering

mid-air, like a ruby-throated hummer

balanced

on invisible wings.  The tiny green bird, a floating spot on the tiger eye

of the sun—a weightless Wallenda fabricating crisscrossed lines

bridging the blank canyon of the sky,

linking bloom-

to-tree-to-post-to-nest-to-roof-to-rim—stringing up unstrung flowers

with geometrical flight.  The flaming orange tiger

falling like death on the up-turned

face

in the grass—tiger eyes shining with the hardness of emeralds

or rubies—the air humming with tension—the paws

electric with power before the deadly

arcing rush.

IV.

Here!  It is Wallenda falling.  Here!  The whirring of bright, green

wings.  Here!  A fiery pattern of stripes

flowing like finger-

prints.

V.

Last:

We have the writer,

writing—balancing words on a trembling wire,

funambulist crossing the line—this focused, verbal walking

always

done out of fear:  seeing

a crouched tiger at both ends, out

of need:  drinking trumpet nectar from the deep ruby wells

of blooms,

out of joy:  walking

where no human skin has ever

felt the wind, out of sheer abandon and devil-may-care—

crossing the line, stepping out, on the most wild and reckless of dares.

Strength

The Strength in You

                                       

For the lover is forever

trying to strip bare

his beloved.  

– Carson McCullers

                                    

I found a strand

Of your brown hair

In my bed today,

Eased it over my hands

To feel its length,

Raised it to my face

To savor the scent

That might remain

On a thing so small,

And then,

As I am prone to do,

Gripped both ends

With determined strength

And pulled to break

The thing in two—

But lost my grip

And could not break

The smallest part

Of you.