Poems from Rota Fortuna, Part II

Rota Fortuna

Galway, Ireland, August 2007

Away from home, wandering the centre

alone, past pubs and Nora’s house, and down

along the river run to Galway bay.

To the place my family left, I’ve come

to escape starvation from hungerless

famine. I hunger with feet, hunger with

stomach filled of chastened grain, whiskey filled

and whiskey hungry, following down, down

along the Corrib to opening bay.

Young lovers throw a loaf of bread in bits,

gulls circling above the rushing stream.

The casual toss of crust from the girl

laughing, sipping bottles, poorly timed or

intentionless, pitiless toward unfed

birds, blades in the ceiling fan eating none

or eating all, the same each time around.

The bread bag empty, blown about, the gulls

fed or not, dive in empty dark water

to glimpse the place where there is only cold,

no hunger, nothing to hunger for, where

there are no fish, no lovers throwing bread.

Dismantling the Shed in Morning

The back wall is on its knees,

shingles shot-up with termites and wasp holes,

hollow planks crumbled like toasted bread

in carpenter hands.

Inside, they’ve left behind a dresser of children’s clothes,

two beds, a stove and pots, one

coverless paperback

with a yellowed photograph bookmark.

Dislodging beams on a second wall

opens another nest of wasps too cold to fly.

They crawl out from rest to see

who turned on the light.

All sides stripped of board

we find, not scattered homes of wasps,

but a four-walled nest

on an empty lot.

In front—no mother, daughter, grandmother, son

swatting intruders from their failing home—only

two piles: wood

and trash.

Elegy for a Suicide

for E.C.

They gave you a plastic sign, like grass to keep off,

shaky and blowing, stabbed into loose dirt.

But that is permanent if any stone is.

Years you lived like that grave-marker,

trembling and shallow-rooted as the grass—

who could go on so long like that?

Even our family, so unforgiving, can’t scorn

guilt forever, and they’ll lay granite at your head.

You may never have wanted it, though,

for there’s something in the responsiveness

of plastic, some strength,

a blessing, not just to move, but to be moved

by breeze or torrent, or hide by mere inches of snow.

So unlike a gravestone,

the inattentive, unmovable, cold. Nothing.

How they live in it and never feel it,

a nothing that you knew too well.

If they are human, bearing only so much reality,

then you are Sisyphus bearing

the weight of nothing, the heaviest burden.

The School of Faith and Happiness

The week began with the rape

of a teenage girl

and ended with the shooting

of two boys and their mother

as she met them in front of our school,

Fe y Alegría.

The Mara Salvatrucha gang, I learned,

was deported from Los Angeles,

discarded like the trash bobbing

in the eddies of San Salvador’s

Rio Acelhuate.

Friday after school a young boy

whispered to me to bring him paper.

He led me to a bridge overlooking

the littered banks of the river, saying

I am safe here,

here I can forget,

our paper gliders falling faintly

into the water.

A Soldier’s Childhood II

It seems we had so long defended tree-houses

overlooking fields of sun burnt grass, trenches

mulched and daffodilled yellow as yolk or chick.

That smirk years later, almost sinister,

as if you knew a secret,

wedded to so much of my past—

the first memory of guilt, the night

pleading mother for absolution, refusing arms

until I found it. But there was no discharge

without confession.

How did I not see it sooner?

Charmed by tulip dancing bees, you waited

for them, pollen-drunk, clapping unafraid

of sting, then brushing lifeless mush and counting

how many you killed that day.

Dissolution

She looked as if she might close up,

clatter like a folding chair.

The thin hair over her scalp,

the pull of her cotton shift

over curved back,

her skin hidden beneath her bones.

All that was left of her

were parts that make

a terrifying sound­–

skeleton, eyeglasses, teeth.

My mother was suddenly old

but became more than her body.

Then I realized how deeply

my simple affections were injuring me.

Each small jar of scented lotion,

each bottle of perfume,

each nightgown.

Purgatory XXVIII

According to Dante

it never rained

in the garden.

The flowers sprouted

petals, the river flowed

from an endless

unseen source, the trees

had everything they needed

and bred fruit.

The cycle of water—

the river, the cloud,

the rain—

wasn’t necessary. Perhaps

that is what was missing;

it wasn’t fruit

or knowledge

they sought, but

something to hide away from

together under a tree, somewhere

to be carefree and laugh,

somewhere to dance.

Poems from my collection Rota Fortuna, Part I

Child’s Sestina by Water

We stand in shallow whirlpools, freshwater

ankle deep, throwing smooth stones

pushing and laughing friends

until, tender from soaking, our feet are worn.

The sand is soft on your shore. The water ripples.

We must never think of death.

At home I will see the frogs’ little deaths

and catch them. Across the glass water

you net tadpoles atop your stone.

We jump like frogs until we are weary and worn.

You sat still on a rock, unmoving as a friend

to see if the water wouldn’t ripple.

There is brotherhood in the consecutive ripples

of a skipping stone.

Three circles echo as the middle befriends

the first and last, which aren’t acquainted except that water

I realize, bonds all things. And death.

Water and death and everything is worn.

I remember what was worn

by my father in the water

that day I resisted death

by learning how to swim better than the stones.

He showed me that people can make the most ripples

but then, he was my only friend.

Before you were my friend

Father said he needed a gemstone

to give to Denise because she was worn

with us. So I dove under the ripples,

but she never came back and that is the meaning of death.

I looked to you then for life across the water.

Sitting on the gravel pile by night water

with salt-cracked hands, his eyes worn,

Father’s face was mine when I think about Denise’s death.

I wanted to be like you because he needed a best friend

and when he had his elbows on his knees and ripples

in his cheeks I offered up to Father my precious stone.

Worn and fallen to my knees, I can feel death

rippling in these waters

as you, my friend, stand casting stones.

Return to Water

December 25^th 12:00am

They’re waiting for those

late arrivals, the processional clustered

by the arched wooden doors twice the size

of a man. Each looks for one to follow—reader,

altar boy, purple-robed priest. Follow the aisle

toward a gold-cast Christ blooming

above poinsettia gardens red as torturers’

robes, and no sign of Peter weeping at his feet.

But by the pond,

brown blood burns your tongue, your throat,

tickles your stomach like soft feet.

You say it’s the latest the old

folk stay up all year to avoid the church

crowds tomorrow. You throw a stone

to tell me your father is lonely, it’s not a vacation

for your sister in Maine, even your mother

has lost her faith.

You cast in arcs; the stones touch one surface

and sink.

Two Imagined Deaths

The first time I imagined your death

you left the house for errands

saying you would be back in an hour.

When it passed I turned off the television and dreamed

that was when you died.

Some minutes later you found me mourning, returned

like one mistaken for dead who opens the front door,

hangs her coat like any other day and thinks

of the dry cleaning that needed to be picked up

or the uncut grass. The family waits,

saying how they expect her to walk in the door

and knowing she won’t. Only she does

come in, calling I’m home

without looking up, and hearing no response,

looks to see her family at the kitchen table,

lost for words like you were a child born

of a virgin. You couldn’t understand their grief,

even when explained, because you had never left.

But you’d be wrong. You were gone

and were not coming back.

So I waited on the couch, TV off, five years old

wondering how I would tell my brother or

explain to my father that you had died.

It was fear then, death was to be feared alone

because it could be avoided, always escaped,

something that was only an accident.

Now though, when I lay awake imagining your death,

it is never fear, never the terrible pacing,

but dread. Thinking instead of dreaming.

Night

She is accustomed to the dark

and my face and to my breathing.

She breathes my rhythm

because she cannot beat it in her chest.

The roses on the wall curl downward, color of dried blood,

and another bee dances itself to death between the windowpanes.

In the morning my arm will be blue,

the pen exploded in my sleep

trying to scratch my dreams

into my arm.

Searching for a word, or a name,

between smeared fingerprints and cat scratches,

I’ll ask did I say anything, she’ll say

you never do.

How long could you watch me writhing in the sheets

before you touched my hair and whispered

it is nothing darling

it is only me?