As Mourning Doves Persist

After the collective reading, mixed bag, the visiting poet laureate speaks to hangers on, his right hand holds his cheek as if he needs perhaps, a cigarette. I wonder if it’s the Rocky Mountain altitude or remnant alcohol that stakes him, dreamy and distanced, even as he stands present as if imported, fragile. Wearing the anticipated blue-gray, he pours critique and future itinerary while around him the working hosts break down the folding table and chairs. Our tired stares transport us temporarily out to sea in this landlocked state. Still, I wish that I was standing on a remarkable table elsewhere, reading bawdy song, advocating we set fire to the menus, all too familiar now. May the river of collective angst and honor take to slicing rich portabella mushrooms, grill steak, and listen instead to our wise children populating contemplative classrooms in another city, making tiny documentaries of what they see on the horizon in front of them.

As we drive straight home again, five hours crossing, you remember the moments when your father began to hum in the car. Passing an invisible ditch or bridge. Coming home to this far northern tent pole of Oklahoma. Not my mother then but a girl upright in the backseat. Temporary shelter on wheels with hard back book spine companions. You listened, on alert because your mother knew just when the homesickness would fade and the whistling begin and she signaled with a whisper. Soft grin on the preacher's face. Her nearly perfect husband. We pass the familiar, identical sign on sturdy posts fashioned from local black lava stone that marks the state boundary and evokes this spoken story. History in a hymn like the sound of wind singing through the spokes of steering. Wheel held with my hands today that will likely outlive this telling. Script scribbled in the margins of bibles, your father making his itemized lists on a Saturday before he took to the pulpit on Sunday. Today, cousins...

"Do you realize you're often having three conversations at one time" my friend tells me, laughing, as she aims to keep up. I think it's a bit like directing traffic, avoiding collision, one hand on the wheel and one in the air, gesticulating. My thoughts are generally on heightened alert. I live in a 5' 1" body in rooms built for people closer to six feet. I reach and dodge at the same time. It's just what the poet does. We come to the beach and climb out of the car. I still and quiet as if a lullaby has entered the equation. We walk the wet sand barely noticing the water as it overlaps and pulls back. We have been friends so long the conversation need not stop. Thirty years wide. We trudge and pause, build things together. My feet covered in the damp blue black sand. You wear your overcoat unbuttoned. I remember the profiles of faces of people you name, and we laugh at what we can and cannot recall. There is fog crossing over the bridge nearby, thrummi...

This is the table of tart and strong. A birthday breakfast made for myself this morning. I pry biscuits from a can whose sides split and pour hot water through biscochito coffee grounds from this state I know as home, sans sugar. A friend's gift comes unwrapped (yellow paper with florescent pink skeletons dancing in their flexible bones), and her universe joins my own at the evergreen cloth table top. A postcard of three Buddhas perched against a vase of stargazer lilies flash peace signs. Am I showing my age? I'm sure that I am. A day ahead with work calls and deadlines, in other words no day off for this responsible daughter. Even my father's card blows a sparkly horn proclaiming its heritage gifts of patience and efficiency. So, who am I to question others; all of us pushing, pressing, breaking and anticipating. Cranberry chutney on white bread. Coffee in a sturdy black mug. Heat shuffling through the rooms. I am a reliable companion in need of a haircut.  Tonigh...

                                    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...