As Mourning Doves Persist

You’re in a boat on the ocean, your head on the lap of your lover. Your hands skim the surface. No wait. You’re in your black Volvo delivering mail. The sun is coming up and there’s a deer strolling across the highway with nowhere to go, but you could be eating oysters with red sauce on the city square. Reggae in an adjacent caf é. Cars parked at angles. The radio is but static. Your mouth is moving to the tune you’ve long imagined. In the sky, a painter’s neglected guitar. In your lover’s arms, an ocean of musical notes and his damp seiner’s sleeves. The sun comes up slowly. The moon never so round.   Your drink tastes picante. There’s a melodic clatter of shells on the floor of your car. The doe in the road knows you. Her eyes resemble your lover’s. You are strumming his arm. Water laps at the hull.

In this travel, a hint of light wisteria crawling to the second floor. Our daughter’s aqua baby book tied and retied with mended bands.   Then in a broad crimped pocket nearly hidden, the looking back. Her unborn siblings. And laid out on top, first memory of the man, her father, who walked into the bookstore with blue eyes and his wounded silence questioning everything. I wanted him. To forgive all the other men, their letters folded between the pages. Exercises in cursive pen and epistle pencils of regret. Must not forget my black suede wedding shoes and burgundy headband of antique pearls. For the larger valise, all of my brothers and sisters, even the stubborn ones. Pressing down to fit young whimsy speed of driving cross country to dry places where we once lived, in anticipation of desert rain.   I will pack my mother and my father, even as they carry their own remorse, but I will loose them from these sorrows befo...

The distraction of disbelief is large. Broad as the sea from a single woman’s perch, staring out and across at only blue. The possible dissolve is not easy to strip down or shake off. Hole in the sturdy  back of baby planet. Right before the eyes of all who have nurtured the communal body to carry her the distance. Shivering now in the delayed projections of freeze ahead.  Or of heat. What can I possibly pen to my father today who taught me about protest? About acceptance and tolerance. It’s challenging enough to form encouraging words for my daughter, repeating what I have learned about how to treat others according to the Golden Rule. Fortunately, she understands and took to the streets last night to march with others in outrage and  dissidence. Marking the poster board of her disbelief with halting words, crawling on the front hood of a stranger’s car for witness. And so the volcano wind of the unexpected blows across the sea. Onto the ocean where my f...

There, a memorial on the corner to three teens killed as their coach drove them home from a tournament. The other anxious driver, reckless, failing to halt. Timeless  photographs on filigree crosses at the intersection. And here, a tattered man with a sign in his hands in the grocery parking lot. Cardboard indicating that any kind of work would do. There’s a certain stretch of road coming home from Vegas where one brother nearly died. His broken neck mended with halo and surgical screws. There, where another did succumb. Motorcycle forgetting to curve at Cimarron. Internal compass cracked, or perhaps, ignored. Alcohol poured onto the fire of what he finally could not forgive.

O noble capitol     house that Peralta built    you are long inhabited      fortress and palace promenade If trees could talk     they would whisper handfuls   multi-tongued through thick adobe walls     Spanish    Tiwa    Tewa    bugle of Confederates and curators talking of lattice and lace    wide dining table for history     you whisper us into a prince’s room Old is the adjective     First born on the square Fringed by burros carting firewood to winter casas Occupation is your middle name    Po’ Pay’s revenge for all the icons taken         Wallace’s respite muse crucifixion written in secret light Fiestas in the front yard      Wagons in the courtyard Yellow leaves still falling as legislators eased horses into stables lined     ...