Ode to the Garbage Man
He came banging around at six
you had to have it out there quick
or live with it another day.
Heavy mud clad boots up the boards
between the shacks,
Tuesdays, Thursdays and once in a while,
on Saturday, without notice.
You didn't want to go out there,
say hello, he was all the untouchables,
an odorous wrinkled old man
that never died although it seemed likely.
Down in the dump near the tailings,
fires burned here and there,
the whole city of Rome smouldering
under a mountain of slag.
He had a name and we always figured
he saved his cash and was real rich,
buried those bucks in our Clabber Girl cans.
Ode called Where The Birds Go To Die
Where do the birds go to die?
There should be great stacks,
whole pyramids of bird corpses, and others
pyramids of different kinds corresponding
to the likeness of all of them, the animals
all the sea of things that breathe,
there they are somewhere and somewhere.....
They go there to sleep in that eternity,
a statue place where monuments cover
the avenue in shade and formula, the girl
with a hoop runs towards that point
following the shadows she haslearned by touch, the man
with a tall hat tipped slightly, avoids
his journey by standing like that, an arc
made of bird feathers on the cloth of bird skin
where they've all gone to simply be, flattened
into the thought that light is transparent
as much as the flight of where they go.
Watch how they go there all the time, watch
through the trees, the descent, the vanishing.
Ode to a Delivery Boy
Over the dial-up phone dial
mom would say bring it in a box
or a bag, lots of hamburger
and bread, a bit of detergent.
Juicy-fat Doyle would show up
one hour later
in a green Chevy truck from Warren PD Merc
with a bunch of staples for the canyon,
so it seemed. His cheeks were red
and lips profoundly flesh-filled.
It was a long time ago,
the front gate still opened and closed right,
Mike the Lab was still alive.
The spaniel was just a wet ghost
from my sister's walk on Tombstone,
real gone but there as well.
The skinny sidekick learned how to do it
from Doyle, he was a former paperboy,
and then, it all went out of style.
The veins dried up, people hitting 60
around the three o'clock whistle
before the pit and after the pit.
That old, comfortable blast that told time.
Doyle somewhere else in a piano box,
in a taxidermist's dream.
His juicy ghost delivering.
Ode to the Delivery
Over the dial-up
mom would ask for it in a box
shanks and loaves,
nothing frozen, a few greens in season.
Big Doyle would show up
with fat lips shining spit,
his cheeks a swelled up red,
a couple arms full of day-old bread.
Most of the afternoon light warmed
the front gate still which
opened and closed without
the usual rancor as Doyle gripped
all our family's bells and latches.
In the vapor and sunbeams,
our mother still held the iron
but the veins were soon bare to mine
all the slag gone cold,
our fathers shuffled into
the last three o'clock whistle,
that old, comfortable blast which told our time.
Doyle, in a taxidermist's dream,
Ode to a Mother's Jewelry Box
Mother dressed for purgatory
in cigarette burn eyelet,
tulle veils and hankerchiefs,
ironfolded in the top drawer
underneath the dancing tuxedo
and mini Natalie Wood.
Those two clung to each other
and three mirrors,
laquerwood steps leading down into
lost teeth and gold crowns,
severed hair from all the grandmothers,
down into zuni bracelets
in a melee of eyelashes and eardrums,
a musical comedy that went round and round
in polka dots stuck to a bow tie.
Writing the Longer Farther
The poem that got him into heaven
with apologies to Whitman I think.
Talked about a desert watering hole
all God's creatures, crying the same way, a manzanita bush
he must have eye watered while he wrote it
laughed when it was published
in the local rag. He must have laughed.
Not loved either but published finally.
His life story on the front page,
with apologies. Marlene Dietrich,
the frozen toes of the desert in Aleutia.
the family part of mining.
Part one concludes.
II
Here is the day he was discharged
honorably from eight years of his life,
a wallet sized picture of a road grater in microfiche.
III
This is the time when he leapt
like the elk over the Impala at Tonto,
my body waiting below in the gully for transport
between my sister's big breasts under
a Catholic style shirtfront, held me in c-spine.
Those were good times, a father saving a daughter.
A sister to lean on. A hospital to go to.
IV
Back over there he kept the nuts and bolts.
Jar lids screwed to the bottoms of cupboards,
nailed the latch back into place on the back door
broken from the banging.
He fixed the washer with his specs on,
perched low on his nose
his eyes peeking over them.
V
Right there above his long celtic brow
was a hole that was too small to hold a bullet
but it was a bull's eye and in his casket
I noticed it still. As large as ever.
The snapshot is in the special album,
the one that makes me cry.
VI
She came over for a spell to sit at the dinner table
tell stories with certain embellishments..
The one where his mother had an ax to grind,
grandpa's mistress out in the valley, some other children
we are related to, distant cousins.
How mean grandma got over that. How she hit with a crutch.
It is strange how long one can remember, how details
hidden come to the forefront in Riyadh,
long distance sisterhood and her swollen ankles
hurting from the flight. It matters
because I never knew.
VII
"Just a piece of metal, a broken one now
but you are okay, you are okay." Driving isn't
always easy on Laundry Hill but you are okay.
The new brougham wholly dented fender to rear.
It was all a daughter ever wanted to hear, and
caught me a little off guard. Mom advised,
you've got to tell your father, not me.
It'll be good for the both of you.
I think it was our only conversation
because he saved up the rest of his talk
for that poem, to get him into heaven.
A certain kind of self confidence you get
from fighting in a war.
VIII
We were in the lumber yard,
I was holding a grape Nehi,
Red was adding up the total,
two by fours and four by fours.
Four by fours good for killing sick bats.
We tooled around town like that for a couple years
when he was sober, preparing to die.
Just a pause he was taking between drinks,
about five years of dry wall and fixing the electric,
balancing on ladders, picking stucco out of my eye.
He'd take a hit of oxygen between corners.
Sometimes I held a hammer or a jar of nails
taken from the washroom. Then, somehow, I grew up
all of a sudden and he got mean about it.
He decided to drink himself to death
instead of shoot the bastard.
And he did. May 23 to May 23
but they got it backwards at the printers,
b.1982 - d.1913
I've got it here in his mother's jewelry box,
absolute proof. I look at it sometimes
and think about the wars.
IX
His poem is somewhere else, yellowed, out of date,
with apologies. I keep writing it.
Longer, farther.
Ode to a Mining Town Waver
Silly old man walks down silly old street
waves his hand at everybody. You don't know him.
No one does. So he must be a retarded angel.
Past the hospital, across from Dottie's Diner,
he walks every day just waving his hand in the air.
Eternity behind him, a shadow calls his name.
The hundred ghosts that shimmer into a tributary
all the way back down the other way to the Cole,
call him the Philosopher King.
They say, he was born that way.
Ode to Angela and Robert
Was that their name
or is it such that we just show up
to funerals hoping not to die
by recognizing the names of the ancients:
instead of knowing:
her hair was straight, her hair was black,
he drank Pabst, they lived
on Art for a while.
After he took his last,
she held on and would pray
in rooms cleaned daily
by the state of Arizona,
she would pray for this and that,
then this and that
would happen. That is all I know.
Ode to Bible Bob
You were waiting to be made
like a sculpture, all the obvious
nooks and crannies. Like the weather
which you liked as much as the Bible
that you carried by your side as a schoolboy
carries his girl's books. Tall and lanky.
Although you never married, you carried
your mother in her satin shrouds
into your backyard where I saw you once
sitting with her all alone, silent.
Her slip sliding off her skinny shoulders,
hair all gray the two of you,
alone with each other.
How everyone laughed in your honor.
And I am Claude Monet.
Ode to Carolina
She hung never-opened dolls on walls
over a yellow black and white
and every Tuesday, each Friday
she walked from bare concrete and gave us
two dollars of her life. Her man
a mesqual lover on thinner pay
from the shafts where he loaded
car to car like all the other
Mexicans, all the other brothers
and my father, all of our people.
Manuel knew only the language
of the Warren speak-easies, aqui?
Aqui? Put it here, a shovel and
lower the dynamite, borracho
en la manana, en el noche,
in the Lowell Waiting Room.
Carolina jabbered twice a week
over flat warmbread, between the sheets
and sky out back, from under our beds,
Manuel borracho tambien, to my mother
and my mother, tambien to her.
The Sonora so full of surprises, we
hounded her with toy snakes
from Ben Franklin's, me and John
chasing her around mi casa,
all her hands in flour
and mother on our tail.
We'd beg for all forgiveness.
Carolina'd open like a doll in the closet
and her 'tillas tasted good.
I liked butter and sugar,
John liked them raw. He used to say,
'tilla momma'tilla.
Ode to Dentist Hicks
He started out with a manual pump-up chair
in the old building across from PD Mercantile
where Levi Strauss leveled the playing field,
clothed everyone in denim plus interest,
the way it used to be -
and that is where he finished, every day at five.
He sent his son off to Dental School to continue
the family dream of cashing in on miner's teeth
offering a bit of advice but not too much, always smiling.
He pulled and pillaged bones with a kind of glee,
but through the waiting room window,
through the Venetian blinds and afterschool light
on strike or off, a pirate ship floated.
Up on the hill just shy of the Holy Queen Mine
was a permanent Christmas tree the town built
made of chicken wire, bare from January
to Thanksgiving, the hold made of hauled up St. Peter's rock.
Pirates coming for all the ten year olds
their ignored teeth all rotten,
not a soul to console a child
Vodka still expensive.
Christmas once a year, Pied Pipers all the time.
Moving from San Miguel to Ajo, then away,
the Gold Rush always on.
Milk teeth are for learning.
When Doc Hicks died a new one came from Denver
interested in leach water and decay,
something about fluoride.
Our brothers down in the Cole shaft
and the others off at college.
Ode to Doc Roberts
Old maid Mary worked the desk,
filed the claims, noted the 20/20s.
A real lucky gal to work for the eye doctor,
all the ocean in his twenty gallon tank.
She could look at it all the time
or run over to the bank to make deposits,
check out the Wolfenite and Native Copper
in their gem and mineral collection,
a display case full of the earth
across from four old-time tellers,
one of them named LaVerne.
Mary coached baseball for the girls
while her mother stood by the car.
Doc planted a rose garden on a plot
near the Vista, every single damn rose
a different color like all those fish.
Wives looking back, pillars of salt all around.
Ode to the Tomboys
It is hard to choose between L and her sister, L.
They were two sides of one penny from the same mint.
Six consecutive fathers, one consecutive mother
a repeat offender in the office of Dire Circumstances.
L was unlike L in that she aspired to femininity,
kissed with her hand held over her mouth,
behind my bed and we'd pop up to check the door
every time we made the next move.
The younger L was a bit on the odd side
and those two the only ones I'd let into my house
because we shared a kind of shame.
On the other hand, her sister the elder L was all boy
and we never kissed, sat one seat apart
at the movies so no one would suspect anything,
our bitter fear of loving and kissing.
The utter despise for all her stepfathers.
We stole silver half dollars from under
the sugar bowls in our gas-stained bungaloes,
hers a service station, ours a clapboard mineshack.
I chose L because we never kissed,
just hung around waiting for a way out of town.
We'd fish up at the reservoir with lost rusty hooks,
I was Huckleberry Finn, she couldn't touch the fish.
L the elder wed just out of school, I monitored the guest book
in a strange green striped dress.
She gave me a pendant, the ivory rose to remember
we used to bowl on Tuesdays against
the other team, all ex nuns. Ex post facto.
When L called years and years later
she told me to sit down, I would need to.
Here it comes I said, here it comes,
we both knew it all along.
She left him and the kids, enlisted.
The US Army had finally won!
Ode to Miss Opie
After he died you didn't want to change a thing
so you didn't and sat through the long hours
waiting to go yourself and we'd pay you a visit.
One eye snapped shut and your ears on hold,
mink coats starving in the closets for fifty years.
An exact replica of the twenties and the same
thing that you were when you died at 98,
the oldest old woman in town.
How to be a widow? How to be?
Not Kate Chopin but more like
the Cat in the Hat, all those weird things
in your credenzas, all the crystal lamps,
the bobby pins on your dresser
where we practiced counting
a hundred salt and pepper shakers,
the collections of a young woman, depression glass.
Lorna called you Miss Dopie just to be mean
or funny, hard to tell,
all your orifices in moth balls anyway.
We laughed until we found you in your kitchen one day,
propped in a chair near the yellow clapboards
looking really poor like us, real hungry
and too blind to cook.
That last year me and Lorna baked you a birthday cake
and it was real pretty for a couple of kids.
Ode to My First Lover
They made us kiss, up in the tree house
in the Chinese Elm,
all of it somehow a great big shame.
My brother on the lookout, my boy
sitting next to me, the first kid
we ever knew from a single parent household.
His mom was always at an office,
a stenographer or receptionist,
her legs perpetually crossed, invisible.
The kiss felt pretty good and still
I can see his shakey signature
on a second grade spelling test.
I traded with him, he traded with me.
Our papers folded in half.
One of the best kissers in town
and then he moved away, left me all alone.
Meg and Bobby up in the tree,
k-i-s-s-i-n-g. First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes Bobby pushing a baby carriage.
Ode to My Monster
There you are you little Frankenstein,
I birthed you in marriage,
a village boy who read the garbage for news.
I was much better even when you cursed
all my living relatives and some of the dead.
We didn't know much then about creation did we?
You, my old glove. My masterpiece.
I, your beloved wife, your help-meet.
How I pray you'll live beyond me
so I don't have to cry when you go
but then I think, I couldn't do that to you either.
So the next best thing is to stage a duel.
That's it, we'll just trust our instincts.
Yesterday, I napped in front of your grandparents
while they fought. I was at peace.
The old man stoked his fire. Your grandmothe cried.
They were waiting for each other to go.
Ode to Patty D
They said we couldn't play together
no more-no more, couldn't play together
no more. I didn't get it. La dee da.
You were white, I was white.
You were poor, I was poor.
You were mean, I was mean.
Just didn't get it so we snuck around.
We borrowed the Japanese Flag from
an old house half-burned down,
stole a crystal ball.
It didn't tell us nothing.
I think it was because you were
an Eastern Hillbilly and I was a Western.
But it could have been your mean-dog Trixie.
A gray pointer with gnashing teeth
or your brother David, may he roast in hell
for opening up the kitty that way.
Ode to Ragsdale
Up past the firehouse and all
the ash smelling houses,
we traipsed single file towards Easter.
A little army holding hands
coddling yellow and blue beige eggs.
Mrs. Ragsdale marched us so,
a colonel of first grade.
When she was born,
she was born that way,
always old and in her girlhood
she was still the same,
marching with first grade.
Mr. Ragsdale waited at home inside,
numbering jelly beans, three for each.
Outside in their old front yard
their gigantic pine gave a ring
so every Easter counted.
Lincoln Elementary School, Southeast Arizona 1,967 times.
Ode to Rosie
Rosie had a sweet umbrella
carried it in the rain, shaded
her fat body from the sun too
as she waddled up the canyon
with everyone whispering
through their half-open windows,
a dowel stuck midway to hold
up every four paned masterpiece.
How's her big fat ankles,
her sweets-stained mouth?
Always in a polka dot dress
from Woolworth's down on Main.
The same one, navy blue,
a belt hidden in her waist.
This is how Rosie walked,
big fat Rosie.
Ode to St. Pat's
They sent me there,
to Our Father and Notre Dame
to avoid going to Lowell School, the public.
It cost twelve seventy-five a month
plus books and skirts.
Mom cooked a little less meat.
It seemed I was the only one alive
on the first day, a hole in my sock
sitting the steps where in spring
Mike Mulcahy studied for the bee
with me. In high school me and him went
to the p-r-o-m-e-n-a-d-e and parked at the Divide,
a continental ridge that split water.
First Fridays we kept a school-wide vigil
near the apse, staring at the stations,
row after row of 1st through 8th on the cross.
Father Padilla on one side,
Lansing on the other, one soft back
and the other hard, to receive
whatever we could deliver in a confession.
Before we could take the Body of Christ from the elders.
In between Lent of one year
and Easter the next, some of us girls
tried to set the science lab on fire
with Pall Malls and votives in the dark below,
It's called a mining town cellar which smells
like fire, dirt and rain. We scorched some wood.
The science lab was a one bedroom shack
filled with pickled pig's babies and tapeworms,
just like the bigger one in Paris, full of bones.
Although it was entirely unintentional,
we confessed anyway. Sister Helen made us,
our fathers made us whole.
Ode to Streetlights At Six
Embarking the long haul, the misery of waiting
to see if the trees have grown into bigger shades
as I have under me, an acre of years.
There will be flags of constance back at home,
stories to tell, receipts and neighbors
bickering over parking space. Nearly a pathological lie.
I am the homeless I'll say. A good excuse.
I've done this many times, a caravan of Atlantics,
the same way only different because
that was then and this is now,
the road has changed. We have declared new things.
Running the course has changed into flipping a page,
a bit of walking the crooked mile. A new poem.
I love to go a'wandering,
trading sides with the Bosphorus, on a used tire
toes in the Salt River, making peace
with recreation, the drowning man
of Canyon Lake who waved then sunk.
The boaters thought he was having fun,
an honest choice of thick mud, low visibility. A newspaper headline.
Leaving is always the same,
goodbye to the fogs and a hundred shapes of bread
in foreign markets, illogical kitchens.
Hello to the usual rain, the usual bravery
of fire departments, every single white stone
a planned community, in and out of Arcadian doors.
Certain kinds of things in storage. A sacred dementia.
Step here step there,lay down in a new bed.
the memory of a family of girls over there,
where are they and the boy with a missing finger?
All moving along, grown up, some of them dead and perhaps.
The widow with the sick child, her husband's last breath
a disordered inheritance, what's her name?
There was a cop next door, a wife beater. A closet full of guns.
Marina her blue eyes the sea,
who stacked bets for a life insurance company,
below the irony of borrowed sugar, I could see her.
Marina would be my harbor if I could find her
behind a desk working for Allstate.
A docked boat to which I could return. The Tigris and Euphrates.
That's how it goes, you come and you go,
in Thebes everyone comes and they go, burning and drowning.
A new world order, a simple peace plan.
A second marriage and a third, beer with friends.
Year after year labelled first to thirty first in Gregorian.
Everyone is bringing 1980 to the pot luck. Streetlights at six.
Xeroscaping. Lawabiding. Post offices.
Little Debbie cakes, homes and gardens
up the yingyang. A certain kind of heaven
but no where like home, clicking my heels
and they don't know where to go:
Witch of the East, Witch of the North,
one shiney the other vindictive.
It was always about them. Then someplace else.
Ode to the Artists
All alone at last in a city
of nude people, you painted
cubist buttocks from your keyhole perch.
No one knew what you were up to
in Lillian's old house
which you decorated real fancy
with things from San Diego.
No one knew they was naked.
But the kids, we knew
where all the fig leaves grew,
we built a club there.
Had to pass initiation and memorize
the creed: No Foreigners Allowed.
The rest, we turned to salt.
Ode to the Bar Code
At the Canyon Cash 'n Carry Liquor & Penny Candies,
between the soda pop chiller
and the other under the register
where cha ching came up 5c 10c 25c
and some dollar types through a peek-a-boo window,
was the best electric shock in town.
This was before we were all grounded,
before cable TV, almost before Elvis.
One hand there, the other there
swinging for a second on the two
articles of faith -
cha ching cha ching
ooooooyeah. Felt good. But bad.
Us kids made fine lightning rods.
Myrtle Wood hung the cash up to dry
on a clothes line in the back
like a christmastree garland.
The washed and pee'd on cash
and sometimes, someone's pants.
Ode To Baxter's Steakhouse
Right before the monsoon,
just inside that tunnel,
it's really too early to tell
the story, that story.
It will be our little secret.
Mercy on us all, mercy on us
as we make the sign of the cross
on the way out and the way back in,
across from the way up
to find mistletoe
when we need some
and oh we always need some.
I was never sure
what happened
between Baxter's and the beyond,
there was no safety there,
the father, the son, the holy ghost.
Ode to Brother John
Everyone sees you homeless,
out in their backyards, scanning
the new boxes by the trash,
DVDs, electric mixers, Playstation IIs.
In the old days it was you and me,
all the gonzalezes, dominguezes, chavezes,
we were the porteres, a real tribe
down there where raw hamburger in the doghouse
was like airplane glue in the Lyric,
angels singing in the choir loft,
you an altar boy and me your church going midget.
Always a little peach, always your brother hug
for the tears carried over the linoleum
in buckets like dirt in Dad's round-the-corner-mucker.
Being a poet is a little like being a horse thief,
stealing just a bit of mucking.
Ode to the Dirty Brothers both versions
It was, I think
Lee and Bill or maybe the other way around.
The Midtown Market with a shining star
at the intersection of a road leading
to Mexico in one direction and in the other,
to Mexico. They had the collections
and dirty meant dirty but it also meant dirty.
Buxom bargirls made of glass, full of bourbon,
Packards full of gin, Elvis held a fine liqueur.
Elbows knocked off ten packages of spearmint gum
at a time on either side of the aisles,
somehow tropical in the summer with all the umbrellas
in those days, in those drinks, swamp coolers on.
In the back, a refrigerator kept the meats cold,
(E. Coli wasn't really the issue,)
Bill and Lee had a reputation to uphold. Connoisseurs.
Abierto til ten. Stop light flashing.
You want to say, Cerrado.
It was, I think
Lee and Bill or maybe the other way around.
The Midtown Market with a shining star
at the intersection of a road leading
to Mexico in one direction and in the other,
to Mexico. They had the collections
and dirty meant dirty but it also meant dirty.
Buxom bargirls made of glass, full of bourbon,
Packards full of gin, Elvis held a fine liqueur.
Elbows knocked off ten packages of spearmint gum
at a time on either side of the aisles,
somehow tropical in the summer with all the umbrellas
in those days, in those drinks.
A swamp cooler hitting the high notes.
In the back, a meat locker kept the cold cuts cold,
E. Coli wasn't really the issue,
Bill and Lee had a reputation to uphold. Connoisseurs.
Abierto til ten. Stop light flashing.
You want to say, Cerrado.
Sunrise over NacoSon.
Ode to the Famous
I sat next to Ginsberg in 1979,
saw King Fahed being ushered into the ER
wrapped in a pink blanket to disguise him,
he pee'd on my friend in the ICU.
Jack Nicholson ordered coffee from me once
at the Little America Truckstop in Flag,
a pack of cigarettes rolled up
in the sleeve of his black t-shirt
(then he started marrying waitresses).
I lived next door to a man that was
beheaded for building Apache helicopters.
My husband ran into Gene Hackman at the Taj Majal
and Elvira let him encircle her for a picture
down in Atlanta at a convention.
Someone I know told me Goldie Hawn was a real bitch
in a five star hotel and Kurt was as handsome
as he was in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
(which I mistakenly called, The Computer War Tennis Shoes)
and Steve Pearl told me the Dalai Lama would visit
the city park and I hoped to be able to pet him.
Ode to the Fight
We invented kickboxing, the ethical kind
where if you came home bloodier that the other guy
you weren't treated as well as the Athenians.
You took off your glasses and handed them over
to a brother or a best friend (if they weren't
your opponent), then the lions leapt
out of their cage and hair scattered
in the air while the crowd
was already thumb upping, not in your direction.
I'm reminded that if I were born a boy
they would have called me Daniel.
Sometimes, I wish it had been the case,
but usually, I won anyway.
Ephesus a far away shore, the Bosphorus Blue.
Ode to the Garbage Man
He came banging around at six
you had to have it out there quick
or live with it another day.
Heavy mud clad boots up the boards
between the shacks,
Tuesdays, Thursdays and once in a while,
on Saturday, without notice.
You didn't want to go out there,
say hello, he was all the untouchables,
an odorous wrinkled old man
that never died although it seemed likely.
Down in the dump near the tailings,
fires burned here and there,
the whole city of Rome smouldering
under a mountain of slag.
He had a name and we always figured
he saved his cash and was real rich,
buried those bucks in our Clabber Girl cans.
Ode to the Lavender Pit
When the place had finally
burned down completely,
people started turning up
like clockwork Saturday.
Their heads would lean this way
and that way, their cars braked.
A Real Ghost Town South of Tombstone.
Everyone that lived there skinnier still
after the mine closed down.
All that was left in Limbo
was a few burnt down houses
full of people things
where the spectators came to stare
at all us spectres.
Rubberneckers and damn hippies.
Like in the old days when one would burn
we'd all head out in our pajamas.
A few of us made some postcards,
all our able-bodied friends
transferred to a pit somewhere else.
1,406 years later I read the Koran
and noted the part about when
you visit the graves.
Poor old Messiah.
Ode to the Mine on Fire
It is rumoured still
that the mine burns like a tree
in the forest of underground caverns
and inside there, deep in the hold
of the bridal chamber there are
the nameless stones from the jade tree
enveloped in fire from the Sinai.
In the ancient days of our people
we sat long hours away discussing
what could be done to enter there
without mounting the blinded beasts
tethered long ago to the long pines,
mesquite and red-barked manzanita,
towards the land of the dead.
The blind mules of escavations.
Without the yellow birds to carry
a light called our breathing
we'd collapse before even reaching
the steams, not even in sight
of the sacred door which we
guarded by never describing
how it looked and less so,
how it sounded in the days past,
the days when we first averted our eyes,
heard the sound of eruptions far below
our living feet passing the dead stones.
There would be no escape
if something should go wrong
in our descent, the luminous green, cup-jade
tea-china imbedded with geisha, uncaptured stones
would remain as would we, inside of the earth.
The stone more finely tuned than still hot
slag, more precious than all the stones
of Ceylon, save one, the solitary Alexandrite
hidden in the drawers of the market
where it is also, waiting for kindgom to come.
The price more than all of the diamonds
in bank vaults and Turkish prisons.
Just one stone from the perpetual fire
of that fire place will buy all
of eternity. We spoke like this, our people
day after day, night into night. Some
of them still mourning over hopelessness,
lapsing into march-like sleeps now and then.
Mine was to be given on the anniversary
of death by the dead one who had hidden the stone
from time to time, and from the eyes of brothers,
all the others. Hid it from her own hands,
distressed at the thought of the fire.
Turning in her sleep turning,
the one to whom it belonged, turning
gently on her pyre, this way and that
searching for her stone. Her opal
complained of the fire it had seen
tickled her hands, kept her quiet.
Coveted and stolen and coveted yet again
as it always had been, even by the mines.
Where it goes no one can tell but some whisper
"It is on the lamb", and the shepherd boy
guards it still, his dog skirting the edges of daisy.
Ode to Moore's Grocery
The cornerstone of all that is,
all that is visible from the alley
out back, the southerly direction and the bee hive
near the corner of the broken down shack
where the unknown woman died in simple anonymity.
All we ever knew about her is that she died
there, next to Moores, next door to the place
we found all we needed to survive. The trading post
outside of PD Copper's grasp. That morning we kept
a vigil from the front porch where we could
see the fire engines and the fire men
banging on the bee gnawed screens.
It was a Sunday so no one was carrying
paper bags full of butcher paper
and fruit flies out of the spring drawn door.
The Victorian lilacs in our yard were still blooming
near the metals that were rusting.
We'd just awakened from the communal dreams of Labor
Day picnics near San Pedro and peppered
chops. Evicted by God she was and the Slum Lord,
Old Man Thomas at the right hand of same.
The Cocaine Tycoon moved in with his Old Lady
and a spider monkey with human hands. The Great Gatsby
a few weeks later with late night noises
for mom to shake her head at, as if our sirens
weren't plenty enough. We felt the pillars of salt turning.
That damn monkey grabbed all our lunch money
on the way to school at Lincoln, a stone's throw away,
bit it with his speed grinding teeth and threw it into
his pile of peels and uppers with the nuance
of Bisbee Bob beating his old lady and her kid inside,
a kind of horizon we couldn't really approach.
The dead lady was better than this new wave of mothers
who all had a kid. Always just one kid with blonde hair
and dirty skin. All of them had credit too
up at Moore's to buy Shasta for a nickel although
filet mignon was free when Lonnie was three
sheets to the wind. He'd prefer to not butcher
on some days. Instead he'd be ragtiming
in his mother's salon next door where you could
hear him in the afternoon as Mrs. Sharp
launched into the vocabulary for the day.
His wife Betty would call from the store
when someone wanted a roast or a pound of bacon.
There were rumours of his infidelities
but that was just compensation for his success
with the jazz, Joplin and a barren wife.
The piano was slightly out of tune with a jug
of water just under the hood to keep it running
like all the others.
Pianos like this all over town, placed
at predetermined intervals from a long time
ago, from the top of the canyon to the Y
and everyone knew at least one place
to bang out an elementary pattern on real ivory,
Chopsticks and the intro to The Entertainer.
Fourth grade and the candy by the register,
slip a Cherry Bomb in your pocket for noon,
they'd never actually say you stole it, just give
you the Moore's kind of sad, sad look.
The one they gave to the single mothers
who filed into town by the dozens for the speed and low rent.
A family of bald girls lived in the northerly
from Old Lady Moore's. Their fence
had the quality of Kryptonite in Superman comics.
You couldn't touch their gate or their old man
would appear through his well tended screen
and just stare. He'd be looking at your hair
while his daughters combed out their wigs.
Their furry headed little brother on a trike outside.
The only clean house on the block and no hair!
No hair! We'd wonder all the time what that
would be like, to be a girl without hair
in a place like this! We'd wonder and wonder
then we'd steal something or set something
on fire. Always setting something on fire,
a Heraclitian fire whose odor permeated our skins,
coated our teeth, made them a sooty yellow.
At 4:45 mom would yell with the list for the last time
and you'd go, put the dog on a string or not
and run your ass up there to beat the lock out at 5:00,
the dog darting back and forth across Tombstone, the main drag,
barking and stirring up all the other barks and the cats
on the fences. Moore's door even knew you were coming in and sighed
in a long yawn punctuated by a dinner bell.
7-8 Potatoes
5-6 Tomatoes
1 lb ground lean
1 gallon milk
1 loaf bread
10 onions
on and on like that every day plus a nickel
for five of anything from the bottom shelf,
one of anything from the middle
and nothing from the top, a Cherry Bomb.
You'd charge the rest and sign, Porter and take the carbon.
Betty Moore would turn her back a little
on purpose because she'd had a miscarriage or two.
She didn't mind much about us kids, her eyes
just swollen and sad, a brunette Crawford kind of smile.
By 5:15 they were sweeping floors and talking kindly.
They'd locked all the town out, it was just me and them.
I imagine they were watching between the shelves
as I lay down on the ground, just after a linoleum
rise in the floor where a hole lived. Always open
but your eye had to come up close on it, it was real
small like a dime and they never plugged it up.
A telescope into the flash flood river running below,
full of pollywog and moss under a cloud of honey bees.
It seems like a dream to me now but I know, it was pretty real.
The Moore's Addendum:
They lived up near Higgins in a palatial Mining Boss Mansion
and had a piano there too. It looked like a country club or what I imagined one to look like, I couldn't get in the one we had down past the pit, where the rich kids swam away their summers. The real Gatsby
Mansion was the Loma Linda down in Warren. A new millionaire bought it in the seventies just after John Wayne bought the old city jail, for old time's sake I suppose. The Moore's got their house the hard way, they earned it. Adopted everyone in town plus two kids that they put in braces and taught to work in the store like their real kids were supposed to have done, a Biblical kind of thing. In reality, they adopted everyone in town and when old Ragtime Lonnie, the butcher with a sense of humour who would put sunglasses on the pig's head in the meat case got real sick with cancer or something equally vile, the new wave of poets that moved into town threw a benefit reading, sex poems. They were all on his tab and felt it was the least anyone could do. I was sixteen at the time, Birdman Ted was still the talk of all the single mothers but he liked a young one now and then. I sat in the back row waiting for my time to come. Birdman looking sideways in my direction. A Walrus Tooth dove around my neck, he'd carved it and given it to a friend who traded it with me, for my virginity.
Erotica. And it was. All of it as succulent as an August peach from the front yard tree, the old one, twenty feet from the lilacs and a few more from the gate. Over to the right, over the Chinese Elm, the corrugated tin garage, a bee hive past the wasp nest in the alley, it was there. You can see it all from here. About the size of a dime.
Ode to the Naco Lady
They call them Urban Myths
but this isn't one of them, it is true.
So many fallen around that curve
just because they didn't give her a ride
on their way home from the Blue Moon,
drinking until three, four, five
a.m., then we mourned.
One after the other, round that curve
by the dozens and two dozens,
each one guiltier than the next.
Each one heading on home to a wife and kids.
My great grandsister working the ER,
a magna cum laude, psirrhosis a mining town gene.
Ode to the Postmaster
On Main Street across from the bank,
behind the counter he stood staring
into a sea of a thousand identical,
numbered boxes and he knew!
Every family had a history:
unpaid bills, Aunt Marthas, cheese and jam gift boxes,
mail order pills from the VA,
good news in pink, bad news in green.
The first of the month was always cheerful,
everyone flush and by week two,
ordering personalized pens by mail.
Those were the good times but by the fifteenth
haggard and holding their keys
opening their locks to PO Box So and So
they felt a troubling time indeed.
All the news had to be signed for,
the housewives looked mean.
The man from the power company shared
meaningful looks with Postmaster Joe.
"They are down aren't they? This small town."
Shantytown miners, down in their drink,
and bad news comes in green.
Ode to the Two Pointers
Hanging up there between our clothes line
and theirs, a hand could borrow sugar
from our open windows, that close,
a two-pointer draped from his haunches, eyes all froze.
We came home running to see what was shot,
heard it all the way down by Old Man Riley's garage,
a two pointer, not a doe. Everyone heard it.
It was big news, big game and there he was,
hanging over the squash and winter iris
looking out like that, just looking.
A pressure cooker steamed inside
the kitchen window, it tooted and hissed
while he hung there waiting to be butchered.
Takes a long time to cut up a deer like that,
and longer still, to bag one.
Times were pretty lean, the winters pretty cold.
God is as an animal, our fortress.
Sow with the hand not with the bag said her
to Pindar. Be careful with the seed.
Ode to UDAs
You, Davy D were a mystery with a dog named BeeBee
and a grandmother who looked little, Japanese.
You were handsome with that metal plate
in your head, so they said
but you never did wrong, that metal plate
so strong. Across the way
a world-record Spanish Sword Cactus
grew in front of your old shack,
the one you moved right into without a lease.
Your no daddy no mommy dialect
was a kind of silence, a law
never broken, ask me no questions
I'll tell you no lies,
with a big metal plate in your head,
so they said. But once, oh once
in my lifetime I thought of you
in the hours after a trauma call.
The little thing in 4A was screaming,
the other eight were dead.
All us nurses wondered why,
so they called me over to speak Mexican
and this is all she said:
My mommy lost her head.
Spoken in the code on the border,
all of its transgressions.
Davy D, do you remember me?
Ode to Upchurch
He had all boys had he,
Bud Upchurch. Across from the godparent's
furniture store, a pegasus charging-up every time
you stopped in for some Mobil gasoline.
You didn't know then what you know now.
Just trusted all those boys of his
not to jerk you around.
Dad signed a slip and moved on,
drunk or not, you all moved on. The bills grew.
Wasn't far though, the Hitching Post Bar and Grill
next door to Bud's with a real hitching post
right out front, Patio orange for the kids.
All those ponies and Medusa buckshot, near the wheel.
Our Lady Vera of the Dragoons
Entered our life or we hers
due to an eternity of neediness,
a patterned drinking coupled
with her early ice pick rape
and the horror of my mother
as she witnessed her own father
commit suicide, as tawdry as that is,
when she was only four years old.
Vera moved in for a time
and brought to me teapot shaped
salt and pepper shakers with
Tombstone Arizona written on them,
and wads of thick mucous
which disturbed the pattern of
all our own demonstrations
as it left her throat during most of the day
and into the night hours.
It was that loud in comparison. She in my bed
and I'm next to my mother, fondling her pillow
alert to the symphony of tribal coughing
in an ecstasy of saints.
We were a group of old abuse.
Bodily and mind wise with clusters
of orphaned children and left behind
spouses on beds of ritual disarray
which were never straightened or tucked.
The class in which she is categorized
contains numerous entries:
Chucks, dogs, a Swedish barmaid,
three notables in the long line
of assylum seekers under our dismal roof,
near our windows, turning gray.
My mother wrote checks for some of them, later on,
when she was flush from the US Navy
or she talked them out of whatever it was
they were into and ended up
wasting my entire inheritance
on making those orphans her companions.
She took over an old dead woman's dog.
I was long gone and no one was home,
who could blame her? It wasn't much.
But Our Lady Vera of the Dragoons was an asterisk
because she had been raped with an ice pick
and that is not all that common,
even nowdays nor is it common to work
in the Crystal Palace covering all
the scar tissue she had, in lace -
and ex-husbands, bouts with Jack Daniels.
The ornaments she made for me,
gave them to me that Christmas,
the year before she died
still come out every year
and I think of how we were
all the rif-raf of Christendom
worshipping Saint Vera of the Dragoons
because we were still better off
than all of her stigmata.
I'm still sad thinking how she
must have felt and relieved
she feels no more.
Our people can be that way.
Ode called Where The Birds Go To Die
Where do the birds go to die?
There should be great stacks,
whole pyramids of bird corpses, and others
pyramids of different kinds corresponding
to the likeness of all of them, the animals
all the sea of things that breathe,
there they are somewhere and somewhere.....
They go there to sleep in that eternity,
a statue place where monuments cover
the avenue in shade and formula, the girl
with a hoop runs towards that point
following the shadows she has
learned by touch, the man with a tall hat
tipped slightly, avoids
his journey by standing like that, an arc
made of bird feathers on the cloth of bird skin
where they've all gone to simply be, flattened
into the thought that light is transparent
as much as the flight of where they go.
Watch how they go there all the time, watch
through the trees, the descent, the vanishing.
Ode to the Chain Gang
The guys on 92
wear orange and walk
priest-like with shovels
from the monastary of dare-
devils and no-goods, better-
off deads in a mist
of spit and smoke.
They leave our city
and side of the road
spotless and save
the town fathers
a dime or two
in revenue.
Some are handsome
and some are not -
young girls wiggle-walk
around them and their
your momma don't want
to know smiles and sniggers
while those same mommas
gun their Hondas
on their way home
from the D-E-S
past all those
lonesome daddies.
Ode to the Wolf Pack
It was about the walk in beauty
episode, the way past sorry
we are closed down near where
the down near where
between buildings up stairs
in the twilight before the gods died
but just barely,
the twilight of the twilight.
We only go to bookshelves now
to look for the dust of his ghost.
Ode to the Dog Tick
Never was a parable so small,
so blood filled as the legend
of the dog tick. Out in the garden
where butterflies tarry
and startle, those
who have shadows
meander by.
Remember when they
began one miracle
and another? It was
twenty-seven cacoons
resurrecting. Oh yes!
we were eating
our break-fasts. Woke up and just
started eating. All the noises
of the world rewinding
but not like the sound of a tick
as it burns and snaps
in the ashtray
as he moves on.
Burn tick burn, bother not the dog.
Leave behind your treasure.
We wait for the return,
the one on the wind, one
past the famine-filled graves.
Allah Kareem, the Most Generous.
Allah the Most Merciful and Wise.
The tick fasts and gorges and dies.
We only watch a while
as we wait and prepare
for the parable lives on.
