Leaning House, Canyon Rim

for children everywhere, broken, homeless & disabled

My eyes are brown and green as the mountain's piñon. I wear
thinning, purple long underwear in the morning and warm socks

sometimes late into the day.You probably don’t know my name,
but it was stitched simply. Perfect quilt of father and mother.

Occasionally I fold up inside myself. Doesn't everyone?

What I love best is laughter, cold water running through my hands.

I should have been a whole boy with no mystery inside of me,
but others don’t see me that way, look straight through me,

except my mother who will always love me as I am.

Firecracker in the closet hidden behind someone else’s shoes.
Too many times I could have been disowned. But I know
the newborn ghosts that haunt the corner hotel downtown now,
once the hospital of the nuns.

Many of the piñon are dead on the mountains. Bugs.

Safe quilt slowly shredding at the seams. My father, long gone,

whispers to me, telling me to stand up straight, secretly praying

that his funny son is always fed.

That no one else will ever tear down his leaning house. Someday I will
come in safely from the rain, enter through the garage with the ring of
trusted keys, having carefully parked her car, and give my mother perfect
roses, my laughing smile softening her patient eyes.

Comments

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 fr...

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 ...

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 ...

As Mourning Doves Persist

Search This Blog