As Mourning Doves Persist

Rising from a slice of dark night  crow and hobgoblin dreams of doubt, a petite bright eye turns over in her crumpled morning nest. There we witness the work of trickster dared who has plaited and placed a whimsy crown atop the unconscious slumber of this precious nuthatch noggin. Is this an exercise , starling coos, just waking unanticipated occasion to be other, taller, more majestic? I needed a little trim , she warbles to herself, just to take the extra away  but instead  this natural extension, perhaps, is the pristine, greener me .  Imagine what the pufflings and keet will make of me now , formerly hidden within the party, wishing secretly instead  to wedge with swans. (for my friend)

Morton repeats his stories of naval days again to no one in particular as he chain smokes in the room where we are seated.  I was on the USS Missouri when  the Japanese surrendered, and there are  the black and white photographs on the wall to prove it, he sputters pointing with the tip of his cigarette. Though everyone in the photographs is about one quarter inch tall and I had little to no knowledge of history much less ships or sea despite a decent high school education.   His wife holds an ice cube to my left ear as she prepares to pierce the virgin lobe.  Their son, my crush, cruises the neighborhood to score a five-finger baggie of grass which will likely be mostly stems and seeds. Back then we were only so particular.  Morton is three sheets to the wind at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and gets mighty angry when interrupted. Their charcoal myna bird in a cage in the corner of the den repeats family expletives. After a while this isn't cha...

Begin with the sounds of my husband in the kitchen pouring freshly boiled water through a beige paper filter that folds over and hisses just the tiniest bit in the insignificant mishap. He yelps like he does to himself, and even from two rooms removed it irritates me like he’s a person touched and unstable, and I get up and shut the door to my study and pretend I don’t know him and am anywhere else where the coffee is dripping perfectly or waiting for the lightest press of palm against top against spring, against ebony grounds, and an aroma of pungent perfection is squeezed heavenward; Start again. The full, running water in the bathroom where our daughter showers, the most Olympic shower in the history of twenty-one-year old girls, like swimming the length of two oceans to achieve both cleanliness and a certain sheen of muscular endurance raising her arms to lather and rinse, lather and rinse again;  straining the patient endurance of her parents who, when the utility bi...

Imagine President Mandela steps through  your grocery store.  He bends to speak  with the children like Jesus, h andles  the smooth curve of a single red apple. He remembers something he’d nearly  forgotten that he loved -             cone of honey colored sugarcane             pomegranate, tough and succulent. And he turns back into the fluorescent aisles, says             please, move on              up in front of me   nods at the cashier, t aking note of her name –              Audrey If Nelson Mandela shopped at your supermarket he would leave a handprint on the freezer doors, he would bend to speak to the children. Excerpted from  The Shape of Caught Water available from Red Mountain Press or direc...

for Tracy The heritage of spoon life is selfless. Pinch of control. Drops of gratitude. Recipes lost, recreated. Sugar bowl broken. But hold the filigree between three fingers as witness to  the low places rubbed tenderly with repeated use. Middles revealing favorite  spoon. Not straw. Not knife. Not pencil. Hollow shaped to baby’s early palate. Cupped hand feeding heart and medicine. Nest. Morsels. Head on straight. Body tapering to obligation, to waist and silver flare of hand picked dress. Necklace fleur de lis and necessary scoop of chicken soup. Teaspoon of anxious soothed with thick, sticky honey. History of food fights settle in this slingshot. Instrument and measure, these utensils  we pull from the shadowy bottom drawer.  Patient is this tea bag rest  after hours upright working.  This spoon and all its forever conversation is yours now.  Spooning up a brand new decade.  Old things and shiny replacements. S...

I pull my metal chair up to this glass table with my morning cup and unshakeable sadness. The violets in their plastic pottery spread and droop, withered heads of blood and rust curled in on themselves, ready for burial like composting beautiful, spent fruit. A single silver strand arches and shines beside me on the porch. No visible web, only this simple sturdy thread, tiny rope from which the morning spider must have propelled itself. Or perhaps its construction was made in the night and abandoned with day. Tiny bowl of orange, body mostly belly, skittering into hiding when the humans wake.  Here a burst of sage burns in a shell atop a red shawl spread on the city’s plaza. Priests and politicians on the bandstand.   Around the city perimeter, native yucca sends up its tall, protective spikes. Century plant’s tightened coil unbraids itself, surrenders shoots nearly drained of color now. The opposite of surrender: fists exploding. At the scene of the shooting, we ar...

To select a favorite stone to set in silver is to know your knuckles and the years of cobalt and opal      you have held your hands under cool water, inside this wintery place. The songs you know by heart, melodies of movie musicals in which the angel father brings a star of cyan from blue heaven for his daughter The full, blue moon, your head bobbing to jazz drum shuffle All this aquamarine and fall blue, late snow that lands on the azure underside of desert earth where aspens molt and the evergreen trees are nearly navy when squinting to see driving in again for home, from far. Tired and blue Blue where rickety houses hang on to the edge of the earth Secure now as seen from a deep denim galaxy, you, working blue, Mother, and I had to leave you to return to your enchanted place To your worn, cool hands jeweled with blue. To dry waves of juniper, jays, and the hues of landscape as runoff spills over, blue bottles......