As Mourning Doves Persist

She never quite understood her name , while she secretly loved its sound.  Speculated our mother had a dream in which the syllables  fell from a basket  in a scrabble  to   compose  the odd, monkey moniker that stuck.  Only  sister  joined by blood, first friend or pest, and sharer of stories,  witness to  bats  swooping night's swimming pool.  Always there.  With her  loose baby teeth,  grinning.  Hair akimbo as I tugged  and tucked my  cowlicks  under hard, spiky headbands.  T rick or treat tag-along,  sucking on Sweet Tarts,  three TV shows  minimum in the afternoon  as dusk sunk  Dark Shadows.  Gilligan's Island.   Bewitched .  Pot pies for dinner  or sometimes even the coveted poor girls'  waffles, soft,  with red,  seed-pitted jam.

Mississippi river.  A clothesline. Dry arroyo. Parents travel highways away from, down roads named for cowboys, paying tolls. Cadillacs appear on the horizon buried nose down in the ground sporting tiny fins like Martian antenna. We, three innocent bystanders, just tykes in the back seat playing “I spy”, count license plates from all the States. These the snake routes of uprooting, mistakes not really errors just changes on the dance floor as one young mother outgrows her once matched husband, escaping hometown and that mandatory thrust of high school graduation and other milestones, whole generations of expectations. This, instead, the Route 66 of unanticipated divorce. Separately, together, they move toward larger politics, new partners' scents. Prince Albert tobacco and dark lit corner tables for whiskey neat, or the shimmy of a new posture in go-go boots with different promise, shaking martinis in a silver bullet. Train of refer madness to ...

Second grade, we lived on  Cindy Street , cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders.  Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.  There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers...

Saturday afternoon, having returned home, nothing much pressing to do but lie down on the green sheets in fall heat with the ceiling fan switched on. I reach for a book. Just c ome from south side of town, El Dorado , where an 80 year old friend read her poems, restless lullabyes, while outside in the half demolished parking lot construction workers hollered.  Afterwards three of us pulled off for salad, burger, a potent porter in tall cool glass, and Shaker lemon pie - thin granulated citrus slices hidden in crust thick as the aired out top soil after sporadic monsoon. We talked of the mistakes that poets make. Downtown, fiesta . Don Diego, his court, and young unmarried  reina cross the plaza.  I drive the opposite direction, down Old Las Vegas Highway and spy the old ones, abuelas and their granddaughters pulling dark colored cars off to the side of the road, seeking shade. They exit with weathered sticks and flat, sturdy pillows. Together they will squat to sh...

I am the man asleep on the stoops of others, never to return to the warm places inside. Crooked in the morning, thirsty, the river freezes in winter. This is the mortgage of my homelessness. No leisure in this. No romance in nowhere. No shame in the hump of belongings on my back. Man seen and not seen Volcano of a world erupted. from the Shape of Caught Water Red Mountain Press 2013 www.redmountainpress.us

Forest of thin trees not so thin to not hide her. Dips  in the walk needles, soft, Light through feather arms,  likely no more than a man-made block but for this girl, it was Sherwood Forest. Long scream of hawk, wingspan broad. Pausing first at the pond with its pollywogs. Then entering. This limitless place -  not lost, no one  need  find her.  Caps of moss. Hooves far off . Honeysuckle  and her dull duplex  left longing with its barbie dolls  in small  travel cases with  pink  shoes,  always lost.  What grows  here is edible if you can identify. Patches and squares of timeless scruff. Missing  reference, she  names names - shirtless tree, paint can, pokey man, little sister's tease, her mother's favorite  poetry: Dickinson's slant of light.

How to describe the distance I walked for those six days. How I reached inside. What exactly transpired, meeting women who could tune the entire orchestra or craft a snake wrapped around a boy's ankles standing on a precipice, sweating. How to tell that one scholar had dyed a portion of her wispy hair electric blue and that another joined me in the farthest room in the library (always open) and that before she began writing, she laid out her utensils including a chocolate colored fan folded on the flat table. I typed with two fingers on the pad of an iPad inherited from my college bound daughter, evoking sixteen brothers and sisters as if they had just, after 59 years, been handed to me anew as a whole to hold up to the light. Desert light which under my green umbrella on the path brought less unsettling glint to gradually reveal the most frightening parts. Home now, I walk through the house shirtless and with knowledge. Recalling how on free Friday we paused only long enough t...