As Mourning Doves Persist

                                    I imagine the desk a little lopsided, shimmed with love letters. The sun from a far corner blanching the wood yellow.    I picture her standing, leaning in at the desk  binding the pamphlets by hand. Bites in the darker wood where her hips pressed.  Rings like bruises where bottles of thin ink rested.  There’s a faint  scribble in the middle, sunken swatch where wrist and elbow worked. I imagine her sharp pen catching in the grooves. In the next room, ghost sounds, lead type dropping into wooden boxes  Her husband standing at the hand press.  Her fingernails bitten as she coins         phrases      jump the fence      sticks and stones Fingers sawing away at perfection. To get to  the brain bone.     Nowhere for the novelist to pause, whittling away at the wood of the night.    after a photograph by Annie Leibovitz

you were a girl then too.             I carried a red and black stuffed monkey.                         You slept with cats. I played vinyl Bee Gees crooning to save me.             You wore a headband and had a devilish little                         squint in your October eyes. I wished the wind would stop ruffling my bangs, all cowlicks. You               dared ski slopes. I was afraid I’d be thrown                         over the handlebars of a purple one-speed whose front wheel I could hardly control.             Neither of us was sure where our father                         or brother were. I lay by a neighborhood pool, teen skin turning to California brown and             remembered how we poured lemon juice                         onto our dishwater hair, braiding it wet to wave. You took to drumming circles before me, your true faithful             spirit still at home in the Ro

Science or story or just the unfolding of the sound of the syllables : I telephone my collage roommate whom I have known for forty years but haven't seen for probably five. She whispers almost without effect of the stage four cancer in the lung, near the heart, of her third husband. There are scientists about whom whole plays are being written today. There are dusty orange petals like tied tongues trapped behind our girlish ears. There is the sound of no sound to know how to respond. The confluence is profile, mine, and straight ahead stare, hers, heard through the wires of San Diego tributary electricity finding me in Santa Fe near a dirt rodeo, with all the things I could say. Dogs and cats and no rain. A heat spell on her coast. My husband plants displaced yucca spears in our side yard, willing them back to green from cantaloupe grey. And I hear myself saying to her "he's doing to die" as if she didn't already know this. And I prescribe whe

Would one be more prone to stumble upon and stay with my blog if it was less poetry and more prose?  On the rare occasion that I have mentioned that I ramble around inside the forest of what are limitless blog panes of nostalgia and blog house decorating tips, blog news of romance and exits from blog homes to new url addresses put to the screen like fine needlepoint, and someone says to me, oh you post poems? , I have to pause.  Still I am encouraged that among the fierce holdouts, women I know who swallow novels whole like savoring the last important paragraphs against the end of the world, even these smart ones are beginning to also dine on poems.  I mean let's face it, our insecure midnight diaries penned as girls and the jackknife initialing of picnic tables by brutish almost men, were those torrid entries not haiku ? Isn't the graffiti that adorns street signs, Stop War , Speed Hump Me , not a riddle which closely resembles a limerick ? And does not a limerick follow

I came up Rodeo Road to Yucca Street and there  they were, reminders of what   I wasn't really sure.  But the big yellow  cutouts of wings  were riveting with  the late afternoon singing behind them, and who can deny Halloween in mid September, candied truth according to anyone who cares to listen in. I was never quite so saved until I was startled into staring into the light of three angels on stilts, silent as mass in a playground when attendance is limited to the sane. 

She typed her entire novella on her smart phone. He ran around the hurdles instead of over them. They skated as if Olympic contenders. When they  spun  it was  impossible to know their thoughts. On the ladder, he climbed to the roof to retrieve soggy leaves from the gutter. There he found tiny cars with doors that opened and closed. They hadn't spoken since yesterday.  Colorblind, he wore tattoos of indecision  like a street  vendor, attracted children.  They held hands at the movies  clothed in the  same colors  in the dark  theater. She continued  stitching  spines. O ne at a time.  He cut out profiles of the  sea. R emembered sailing.

Last night a long time friend and poet asked me to write something for her. She had witnessed a life and death incident down a side road that she told me left her heart bleeding. She said she could talk about it but that her hand couldn't record it, not adequately. She asked if I might listen and gift it back to her. It had to do with a cat, well, two cats actually and the way she had seen and been seen. I will chew on the details and bear witness in short time, but this morning I think that there is a simple, ageless tale in the telling of the dark feral traits coupled with the dumb-founded forgiveness that comes over us when we least anticipate angelic visitation.  I don't have the words for her, for any of us yet, though I believe they attempted to visit me in dream last night - fearless wild cat pouncing and exciting the response to maim, teeth going in deep and infectious bookended by the arrival of a companion who covered me with slow, methodical, and unconditional em

                      for Delaney The one with violets in her lap  traces every contour of every girl  emerging before her. My daughter erupts at every anxious line, explores first boy under cover, forages for blue, ember eyes of spark. Lips of truancy ignore night's instruction. Her taut hands swimming not roses, her eyes not iris, but the smallest pluck of conversation before the bouquet flattens, hair curled in her hands wilting as if gripping  at secrets revealed in breathing in  intention will break hearts, break ribs. She all authority, and I recognize in her  the tiniest scent as when I was daughter  swooning.

Rising from the damp ditch of short sleep acequia lady picks up her traveling mandolin to accompany the boom box  bass on wheels  passing on the wet street. Bus comes by. Push brakes hiss at the rigid stop sign corner. Wistful 'o' in the mouth of the bronze mother in the artist's yard floats as if a piano in her esophagus is escaping. Accordion whistles through car windows. Down the block, one weary dishwasher steps out for a smoke. Cheap spoons a-jangle in his big, damp pockets... Excerpted from  The Shape of Caught Water available from Red Mountain Press or directly from the author (505.670.4327) http://redmountainpress.us/

                                 Sight of sound in the palm of the ear turning to the true face of the One in the room. With you, we are all toddling toward the sphere of the wave in our magnificent spin. Tuning the center of sound. Palms down. Pressing against the dervish    in the sanctuary                                   alcove,  the sight  of the music you have made  with  your heart in your ear. Stilling the wave. The spiral of sound traveling more slowly now as you center magnificently. Walking toward the two halves conjoined. Strumming  prayer.