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.