As Mourning Doves Persist

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...

On my back on the table in this your calm room             you caress my ankles and will my body tributaries  to rise up and meridians to exhale  Your knowledge like pulling taffy with buttered             hands   Your strength redirects my body’s river  which you lift and stretch       Then you place a wafer of a small white pillow over my eyes             that I might entirely succumb     to your warm hands draping  like weighted blankets over each of my resting shoulders    With intention    drifting toward chest      measuring every              underground hillock in these my pliable appendages...

  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 ...

  The admonishment at age 6 was this:  Pull your lower lip in, or an elephant  will come along and step on it .  My grandmother of the always clean,  passing the felt-bottomed collection plate, allowed no pout.  Sadness was for others with less, without silverware to eat. No picking at the peas or potatoes. My lip and lump    in my throat forbidden, hidden. Stick figures  populating a children’s book. Spine affixed with silver adhesive tape, a stringy makeshift mend, once belonging to my father, her most obedient son (Just swallow that ball of  irritable.  Good Manners Can Be Fun ) I defaced the aging pages,  scribbling my crooked name sloppily in pencil, and then rooted  for the tiny pachyderm in a blue star-less room   Nose-trunk growing like Pinocchio caught in what he wanted  to believe. That he was a real boy. That these elongated faces  make visible sense when we are lonely and no one is listening...

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...

For she who hatches swatches of what she sees. Snaps through a window  faster than her cat in crouch. For she who measures the trees from the top  down with a lens. Hatchback, glass track. Saturday’s tables captured.    For with her we will learn the bird talk, the staged songs, switch backs and sidelong glances. For she can organize a bench of twigs on which to sit. An easy  hors d’oeuvre  p arty at Marcy’s, mixing friends like fledglings    come to settle mid-exhaustion in an oval of feathered rest. Or watching  simply for what rolls across the road and comes to a stop. Nest atop.  Refreshing shadow in this summer heat. Soft pecking from inside.

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   ...

We are tethered to one another with invisible wires. I type the words into a flat screen, “I am relieved” in New Mexico   in my red chair and my sister in California receives them at her kitchen table overlooking redwood trees heavy with their separation someday from solid earth. We each hold a morning cup and relish the sip. I am sensing the past in scent and sensation more than I have before. And wonder if I passed through a tunnel or under a magical lamp post I have circled for 67 years. Now I own an old woman’s nose. First piqued sense is smell. A headiness that is potent but brief. I go back to it throughout the day like a diary left open on the bedside table. Sun hits puddled water. Water spills from table to concrete. Runoff trickles toward the base of tree. I am a child in a wading pool again. In a bucket are prickly weeds that my husband pulled. An age-old slime replicates on the surface, resembles algae along the perimeter of an inland river. My father, fly fisherman, exh...

Today I barely pick up my slipper feet but amble outside. My cupped hands suggest holler clear across to ridge where cars on the farthest ribbon float like toys or tin angels.  A fence runs its length in front of me, pocked with afterthoughts —                                                 niches carved in the wall.                          Four separate fist indents.  I ache for treasure.              A locket to bear a tender face.   Above my lazy vacation sightline, hunchback mountain  shadowing me since girlhood  with pastels so ...

ran into things  His equilibrium subject to the heat and pressure deep    in the earth between crust and core –   and then he dropped  into a Snow White sleep Many fretted the potential shearing off of  his historical edges – but then he woke   his vision once burnt revived  expanded –   diamond tough to make a kaleidoscope catalogue now of his eyes   chronology of roots and flowering trees   Heavenly names that came before to pollinate reveal the thin, scraped soft skin  the surface of catching up of blowing burst dandelion kisses   Tiredness relinquished     Garden dirt turning again in his receptive hands.

As if with a newborn again in the house I rise to guide my elderly mother after her surgery Slow slog from bed to bathroom, and back again  From muscle spasm to dropping  Her hands in resignation, skin pocked like aspen bark Just a few moments of balance brings night breeze  Three cautious steps in the dark before the pain ascends again Up from the tightened grip of her right foot all the way To cut buttock and wilting thigh after    Posterior replacement with titanium hip, and its cry  Unrelenting bedfellow we did not anticipate Her groggy arthritic former piano playing hands    Flutter and press against the skin, as if ironing away grimace She wears a silver and turquoise wristwatch band which she Refuses to take off, measuring sleeplessness I attempt to smooth her taut face, respect spit and clench If she’s dreaming, it’s mumbled nightmare having returned  To temporary recline in a room of pillows and pull up bar   A window where a mo...

My husband leaves each weekday morning at seven. I hear the door to the laundry room open and close. Then sense a gremlin draft  from the adjacent vacated garage. The house goes quiet    for nearly nine hours. He rarely leaves a dirty dish in the sink though  lately  he hasn’t made up the queen-size bed entirely. One corner of  the sheets  pulled back like a welcoming tent flap. Returning, he stacks his most recent hardback library acquisitions  on the blonde end table next to his burgundy wingback chair,  and retrieves the same blue bowl nightly for a dinner salad   which he eats alone. Hungry earlier than I still typing. He walks the hallway with a minor tilt and two clenched fists as if  balanced oars.    This, a recently acquired mannerism. Together we are kitchen dwellers. Gritty lemon pepper granules and orange juice sans pulp. Eggs on the weekend. Subtitles on the television in a r...

                         A car stops and the door opens                                               -   Linda Gregg, Bamboo and A Bird   A car stops and the door opens and sound  escapes. Splash that was not there before.  Into the air, jazzy brush on drum. Lullaby with rouged plum sky.  Snippet of guitar strum, winsome sonata.  Sound propels me to see all the cars parked  under the summer night’s street lights.  Cars with bodies inside sucking smoke and  reaching for one another.  From my vehicle determined closure  as my mother zips her weighty beige  purse shut. Dangling from her left hand.  A single tube of lipstick having fallen  onto the sidewalk alongside us. Its descriptive clink like dropping...

Her ghost comes around.  Makes small popping sounds.  Her death, ricochet of many questions.   Around us, landscape on fire.  I add the Bible to the box in the back of my car,  early plans for potential evacuation.  Scripted inside, tree limbs of births and deaths.  Those relatives I remember  yet the milestones harder to conjure.  We were married in the year of our daughter’s birth.  Hammock between occurrences.   Ledger of access for those left behind.

  No god is secure from the lofty flight of mortal thought .       - S or  Juana Ines de la Cruz   Un-attach your leaden wings. Replace them with survivor scalp of  post-chemo down. Speak to the angels in your sleep. Assure your daughter you will always catch her. What we’ve grown from such compost is splendor. What we chant still are the ABCs. Washing our hands up to the elbows. Poetry Postcard Festival 2021  

  The dreams that found me here induced by others.  Temporary rooms where the anticipated inhabitant  never returned.   We rummage for lost things. As I pack  I survey this  cottage into which I’ve spilled white coral and cords for charging.    My dreams once home again will likely be of hibiscus, blood  pink  pinwheels, and the Willi Willi bloom stitching the limbs of highway trees -  yellow and orange and fading. I will awake to remnant archipelago green; roosters’ wild calls and tea cup sized mourning doves somnolence interrupted by soot black lava  reef and north Pacific wind little sips of the narrowing cave of my father’s dementia as we shared nightly dinner visits here. And on the rental lanai, the sun setting above the lucky  horseshoe tip of the other side of the island,  dropping from brief chimera.    There will be rain. (Haiku, Maui, Hawaii, August 2021)

Six women arrive at the table. Cup remnants of waking dreams in crowded, dissipating wisps, faceless characters and confusing maps. We arrive to decipher together, mouth groggy snippets over biscuits and bacon. Outside, snow that could just sigh. We've returned to our previous seats. Forks placed to the left or tossed collectively into the center.  Last night we drank at this table, over  Scrabble tiles. Making up rules. This morning, one early riser emerges from the day's weather. Sock monkey with down on her brown cap.  We start a new game. Acronyms are not acceptable, we decide. Directions  no where to be found. I slowly stir my drink. Another undresses  to hot tub on this vacation patch of Colorado cottonwood and pine.  Red cars turn white in the driveway. We reach for the names and  favorite sayings of bygone partners as if a clue inside. How we arrived here. Fortunes scripted on our tea bags.  One continues to whip farm fresh eggs.

If I cut my hair approaching chemotherapy  let's refer to it as fruit tree blossom scatter anticipatory lightweight valuables windy decision making ahead

                                                                                                                                                  for eb Who knew leaves could land like this. Twin silhouettes  on wet pavement. Half a century of travel to meet again, sisters. Water and sap through veins. Decades of San Joaquin Valley orchards of orange fed by concrete aqueducts. Leafless hedges like  oversized bonsai in the hundred degree heat.   But then, under San Francisco Bay’s sky eucalyptus scent so heady it’s medicinal, this arrival on spindly fronds. Your familiar intonation.   Such root pressure ...

At age 12  there was a park hill going down   To join my family gathered around a rugged table with refreshment I began  to descend     slowly at first               proud to master space     But gravity and determination were not well-matched and propelled me speed began its pace    to betray me And once I reached the level bottom  where grass and concrete met    I had fallen bruised I hoped no one had seen  the disaster of such eagerness Scuffed    there was no brushing off Standing revealed stiffness of one such  solo hands  my tentative but able brakes and then other’s hands to lift me up Laughter offsetting ego’s red Oh that I had learned to drop my self indignation then but it would be 50 years befor...