Planning the Trees

Odes & Offerings, Santa Fe, 2012

Easter. Words that reach back
in. Hosanna. Passover hope.

My friend mixes cinnamon
and apples, mortar that will

hold the walls. Books of faith
springing to bud. Light gets in.

Any morning now.

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Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing to certain bards in the back room, entering through the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the frame down to contain what we came to hear I have applied lipstick

Grit and Sunlight

What springs up: insistence in this persistent mother of mine (still breathing) Even busy ashes from a rescued urn float up reconstituted as morning dew She unfolds her tendril arms from shadow (shaking just five days ago as if in temporary surrender) (that moment when I am less certain of her longevity) this woman ever present (anyone’s mother) aging when even the most spindly clover of her fragile skin captures the sunrise light like anticipation’s shower blood underneath all humming bird or spores from her heart and in her mouth inhale (frightened) breath exhale grit inhale (certain) breath exhale grit

Protozoa

When we spoke on the phone there were dominant background sounds, crickets here that rhymed with the smoke alarm that went off in your living room and you couldn’t remember the code to shut it down and last night a moment of rain and I lay in bed unsure if I should go outside to set the orange bucket aside from the downpour to maintain the safe house there for the unidentified protozoa, my husband called them, naiant in the unlikely habitat - what I believe tadpoles beside a yard where I have never seen frogs but perhaps it is the sludge cry that I seek the sticky tar paper that lines my lungs and heart cavity weeping impending displacements, my father who may never button up his favorite green shirt again with philodendron etched on fabric nor walk out to the lanai at the back of his house with his third wife and we either joke or pretend we will take him to the beach when we arrive and that we must bring him a panorama, one gulp of a photograph of his ten

As Mourning Doves Persist

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