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 ...

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                    ...

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 f...

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...