Summer Retreat

We were never

what we wanted to be,

at least there, in time

obscured by smoke,

by hallways leading

to mottled, painted, concrete

floors.   In the years,

the bump and jar like

lightning I never forgot

when I cut my hand at the saw.

I can say I’ve seen

the Northern blue grackle,

and the hot little starlings

that frequent the green

eastern lawns--of the desert

where I knew you, no one

remains.  There's just

one old goat of a man,

my brother the ghost

who writes to me about

the times we shared,

old roads, warm

beer.  Are you better

off?  I saw myself

As free as your world was free,

a world I loathed

like the animal you

thought I was.  Nothing

scrapes clean anymore.

Whereas the water was bright

now it’s like the past, a murky

pool filled with god knows what.

You say you see fish, but to me

they’re tadpoles, turning

into frogs--this endlessness

ending as we grow old.

Not nostalgic days, now

no days at all considering

what I've been up against—

you know the stories from

other poems, other times.

Of my life with children who sleep

soundly under rain clouds

I can never amend.  They are

as big as chiefs and amazons,

each alive for what I did

or didn't do one winter when

the palms were dripping

with figs and berries—

it was time to breed

like the animal I was.  Born

to secure my bloodline, mestizo,

Chicano, Sephardim,

I could not live for you.

Did you know Felix is dead?

That he drank himself into depression,

cancer, because he couldn't

stand the world ?  He wanted you like an animal too,

while his beautiful wife spread bagels

for us every Sunday morning.

So there is no rerun. No bargain

to speak of.  Your fury against

me not withstanding would be

one thing.  I have no urge

to touch or mingle under blankets—

it was as old as high school then

and we tried on so many masks.

Having revealed myself

I understood you thought

you had no mask, even as you

shifted in mild schizophrenia

that only some of us saw

late in the dark desert

evenings when the stars

shot out like hot points

for us to name.  But

that’s not the same

as staying up all night

while mi wifa, wary, in labor,

moaned and cried until

the doctor arrived.  There, I watched

the birth of my son.

Much later, I stood in the earth

in the sacred circle

barefoot with mi otra, mi bruja,

watching the back

of the Milky Way slide by.

What would Robert Lowell

say?  I've walked among

the cheerful masses

on Boylston and Newbury.

I returned time after time

for years to spend

with you, blue- eyed

woman I left behind,

who I no longer loved.

I have walked through

Lord & Taylor after

having smoked weed

with your brother in law

on a causeway leading

to Copley Square

where we'd take the T

for all sorts

of New England adventures.

I watched as his little dogs shit

in Back Bay bushes while your sisters

shared Marlboro Reds, afraid

they’d smell like smoke when they got home.

You know, broken windows and whiskey bottles

have won awards for their ability

to forecast the future—fracture,

broken history, no need or want

for mirrors here, right now.  I’ve just

got to let you know how the one dog

died of cancer and loneliness

after we gave his companion

away to an old woman who was

heiress to the local newspaper—

she told me that he’d cry and cry

at night and I can never forgive

myself for that.  He’s buried

somewhere in upstate NY

on a farm where the winds

blow through the sycamore,

friendly gusts announcing

the future.  Of his kind

there are many more.  Now I have

a Weim who acts like old Parker

but is invisible at night.  He sleeps

curled under blankets while

his mate the Boxer sleeps on the floor.

What I am most interested in

concerns the location of your

heart in relation to all of that.

No so much the sad and lonely

animals, including me, the

dark animal inside of me,

then I suppose what is left,

the remains, broken

glass at best—shards really,

not meant for the eye or any

part of the human condition—

outside of me, not my mirror any more.

So I beseech you in the common

language of elegy—

the tragedy is that you won’t

respond except to note

I’ve made this poem

for you—first there is the fire of love

then there is the ash.  I’ve not

come all this way from

the high desert to the wooded

hills of southern Ohio

to know what you know.  Only to seek

some kind of remittance, from you

O holy stranger who I once knew.

Still the world is changing

and I, lit by ghost fire

at midnight when the moon

is just vapor, I need

to tell you somehow

the magnolias and crabapple

tree are done for spring.

Somewhere in the deep

Northwest another friend

is gone the way of old

pine, all of you and all of me

gone now too, gone

like a sweater l left on a boat

ride long ago, the sea thick,

green.  Will you ever welcome me?

There's a street light next

to my house that blocks

out the darkness.  In the

indigo evening the newly

green trees are like dancers

unfurling robes.  There is

the incessant pink crabapple

and the dwindling Ohio

red-bud.  And the sounds

coming from neighbors--

baseball games on cable, long shouts into

the night.  When the right

time comes I'll find myself

alone with the hum of crazy

air conditioners running

all summer, for the heat,

from the heat.  A small

wind is whirling through

the oaks and maples now—

I can’t be bothered.  The rain begins

without knowing I was here.

This poem first appeared in my book, In the City of Smoking Mirrors.

A Letter to My Brothers and Sisters in North Korea

    Where will all the music go if you bomb us?

    Do the fashion magazines lie?

    I hate to be serious, North Korea.

    But there are stations playing all night here

    and sometimes the disc jockeys spin

    old dreams of love

    almost no one knows, awkward frequencies

    announcing us to the stars.

    I've heard of your masses

    starving in railway stations.

    Your cobbler sick hue

    won't keep me from calling you.

    I don't have any apples.

    There's no way all the TV stations could lie.

    Your cobbler sick hue

    won't keep me from calling.

    North Korea, in one of my magazines

    there's a girl without shoes. In one of my tea cups

    a .30 caliber bullet, an indescribable lotus

    blossom wrapped crudely in wax.

    It's for when you cross the sea

    in your rocket

    of the thousand petaled sun

    so bright, so bright.

    But before that happens

    I'm calling your sons and daughters

    to tell them that evil red communism

    never happened here--

    we're happy watching beautiful

    models and basketball players--

    that evil red communism

    failed here and will always fail

    here because we have the Dodgers

    and full supermarkets

    and lovely green rooms

    under the Rockies

    where our warriors sleep

    in their own slow radiation.

    But this argument, too, has ended.

    Sadly, and terribly

    atoms conspire against us

    generals conspire against

    all of our favorite songs

    to keep us from knowing

    our bodies, our hands

    how we might mingle

    or touch.

    Radios are a must, North Korea.

    For if I choose to love you

    anymore, with your winter

    hats made of coyote fur,

    and the children you drop off at the zoo,

    I'll have a song in my head

    for all the dead ever did to you,

    a gift from the stars

    that sounds almost new.

A Map of the Body in Love

Each of us has a map of somewhere

stenciled on the body--it's just

a matter of who will see this nearly

spiritual self getting activated

under a sign in the sky that looked

like doom--there it was, a lost

comet heading for the sun.  We were

dumb enough to assume its aim was

the trajectory all of us take, getting

lighter, getting closer

to heat each time

we pass each other.  What I'm saying

is that there's no way to see

what you see but I know

the galaxy's spine like I know

your brown back sometimes,

touching me in the night 

of our newly found sleep.

Huitzilopochtli watches his twin carry father’s ashes

My father,

who didn’t live to see the apocalypse

is resting now

on the sun deck of a silver yacht

named Zen Master Echu. 

It is the evening

following his internment,

and in the land of the dead

he’ll eat the sweat

ripe flesh of a grapes grown

on Andean foothills.  He’ll swim

for a while in a clear green lagoon

that looks like somewhere

in Puerto Rico.  They say my mother

will be waiting in a hotel room

overlooking the Atlantic

where souls go sailing by

in the clear air like clear sails.

And he will have choices:

no longer existing in air, or for sunshine,

he’ll listen to the great ghost band

his father commands in one corner of the graveyard—

You see, the land of the dead

reverberates with the strained music

filtered from human memory,

scraped from hands that once held

babies, joints, and saxophones.  

For the Old Habit of Writing Letters

O, letter writers beware-a time's
at hand when even your band
will disappear from the earth.
Even though I’m one of its fertile
reminders of god as are you & the grass.  I am

writing you because
I don't want to appear lost,
although that's what I'm thinking
these days.   Turning like a yellow
hot dime, our sun, as they say,
brought me in but doesn't care—
I mean besides the lack of air,
I 'm a tranquil meteor going nowhere.

So in this late afternoon ramble
I meet you head long, having done
a million sacred penetrations
and watched the newest perturbations

appear on my screen
as if to confirm your presence.
Like the astronomer I am who I am,
cutting back on the view
to enjoy the blur.

So what song did you sing tonight?
There's been a bunch of folk walking
by and the light over the Miami
is thick with golden autumn light,
the light we'd like to say is like
a song, a perfect whistling
that never goes away.

O, letter writers be good!  Let
the hornet honey feed you wildly
so that you grow in the woods
like a bear.  I have nothing for you,
not the seed, not the time, not
the little ride we made
when we were young and full of grace.

In the holy holy space of the page
I am like the runner going by,
forcing myself into the cold air
for something that's really
unattainable-- aren't we all
forged from heat?  Don’t we all

here the same song in the wind,

in the woods all alone?

Like Shade in the Shadow


The darkness at the end of my tunnel is a bad darkness.
All told, it is swirling with desire and instinct
Like a tree in autumn wind, unleashed, perhaps
Going nowhere. Like the train I hear in the distance
At night when everybody else has gone to bed.
In my head, there will be dreams later on
of lawns and tranquil sheets of red leaves
spread on lawns, in the shade, where it is
thick as briars or ivy that darkness which invades
my head. And as if someone’s asked me to name
it specifically, I know I can only conjure the rich
deep greens of late summer, the shade
on the other side of the hill which is wet
with life, where the yawning end of the world begins.

Galaxy 27


There are still
voices there's
the quiet
whisper who
is like a distant
fever or even
the hot
blanket you
suffered under.

Then there is
the iron
hot from the fire
which does not know
us even though
we know of burns
and smoking woods.

Somewhere in between
these two galaxies
sound carries
on & there are
radio waves making
it across the dark
spectrum, which
sings in a hard
dry tenor deeper
than you or I
could ever muster.

The other war


That never happened
is curious
and alive-
the super dirigibles,
the jumbo jets and Roy
Lichtenstein in charge
of it all. And where

are you in all of this?
I've noticed you've
missed my fragmented
way of doing business,
or say, the
nice collection
of particles of sky plucked
when I was up there
last time—here this

one's as blue as
Navajo turquoise—
it tells stories,
likes your eyes,
tells me if you're
true enough.

And the last thing
in my plastic menagerie-
the war now inhabits
these jewels of experience
we've shared
all the way from
one home to another,
back when the summer
was a real twist, an opening
that made us glad
as cornflowers.

Lightning 23

What ever is
left of it
In some damned
Dimension
cracks like
Orange lightning
Sometimes.  In
My swirling specs
Or just a
Note about
Lunch.  And
The wet rain
Returns the
Present to
Something livable.

What is it like

What is it like to live in Milan?
I live in the thick green suburbs
Of a rusted Midwestern city--
O, you can hear the freight trains
Blowing past like they really have
Some place to go, at night, like they
Really care about all the dark little
Patches of oak rushing by.
That what the American night
Is all about.  So that we all get up
In the morning to wonder if there are
Other cities among the stars,
Other songs making the air a confusion
Of stories.  Do you go to the park
To sit in the sun?  I've sat on my
Porch for ages waiting for that to happen.
Right now, in the eternal state of Ohio
I'm just home.  Dinner is warm,
Outside the silver maples have been
Absorbed by nightfall reduced
To items found at a garage sale--
It's all become a church pot-luck,
Where you can never be sure
Of anything once the sun's gone.

A ghost contacting other ghosts

It too late to be learning
About Wagner's leitmotifs
And shifting tonal centers--
That's for the new world
To discover if it wants.

I am more for you than you
Know. Even the Rilke you read
Can mean the great sun is
A fabulous golden symbol
For what was known, what
Was conquered under the stars.
Sure I spread her thighs in late
Summer and she told me
I made her glad as fall is wet
And ruddy.  The season
Twirling toward us, no reason
Except the animals to go on.

So as a ghost calling you out
From the forlorn burned -out
Center of forgotten Ohio
I hold the censer
I reek of smoke and have tasted
The burnt offerings left by
The former tenants.  There
Against the wall is the lizard
That some poets hated, although
This one is fat, obscene, filled
With god knows what.  A power
Of the everlasting, for which
This ghost, me, is in retreat.
I cannot mention
The desert without

What ever darkness

What ever darkness
You want, then earth
Is the place to go.
The slow conservative
Flowers, the wild
Strawberries clumped
Behind a local gate-
You twist a ring
To get in that yard.
And now the night
Cut by sirens, the Rolling
Stones song in the kitchen
Worn down like you, drowned
By the night howl of fire trucks.

Dance Azteca

No matter how hard you try
you can't bring the eclipse back.  Listen--
yesterday morning
there was a grackle, a starling
and a cardinal perched on the silver
maple and I was on the porch
talking again, the same old
game, the sun where it should be
the birds taking it in.

Out of respect for the forlorn
you go on, fully expecting
thunder, some kind of light saving
plasma to effect renewal,
a change in the weather that we used to call
happiness.  But what was once happiness
is a now a bitter river meandering

past you every night from the darkest
zones of the heart.  It knows a million

imps and lions onshore & when the lights flicker

it’s only swamp water
darting in your ear.  In my space

the shadows never-the-less
increase.  Time empties
like a bottle.  Over here, in someone's
room, the broom is shedding its secrets
into the fireplace.   What you call
goodwill is spilled upon the road.

These 3 new poems, following, were written in response to the exhibit Changing Landscapes:   Contemporary Chinese Fiber Art, as part of the Ekphrastic Poetry Reading at the Dayton Art Institute on May 11, 2012. 

From THE MEMORY OF AUGUST by Zhao Dandan

White crystal moon of flowers
You're giving me powers
To imagine your stainless steel
Crescent swings in the sky
 loved by all the other moons
While you emanates from the dark
Powers of space.  Far away
I can see you shining like

A field of clear white clover and your

shining cradle holds what should be
Heaven for most of us--a field
of flowers like a bedspread,
a sense of the cosmos
Tied together with thin polyester.

When I first saw this crescent from another

space, cradled in the sureness of lunar gesture

and unlike our stark white moon in orbit

I was alone.  Not even the museum guard

could touch me as I circled the satellite

like the saucer from a lost in space episode—

it was this glittering polyester

landscape that I flew over unlike a moth

but knowing full well that other moons

in other places exist, some more beautiful

and compelling than others, some harsh

boiling pits like Europa, some frozen

disks, unlike our present subject—

queen of its solar system, a tricky turn in the sky.

Poem after THE ORIGIN OF THE RIVER by Wang Kai

The soil turns year after year, chthonic
Spirits slipping the loose bonds of earth--
Piled up, they are tools grinding
To get back to the deepening fields
Where the earth and water combine into the brown
Loam.  Singing out this passion, river

Spirits speak soft notes that rhyme with the river

on several levels:   the green earthly

level, the sound of the ground and the fields,

the air where dirt meets the sky and grinds

against heaven.  Oh yes, there are chthonic

unions in the soil.  The earth is brown

and as perfect as love.  The water is brown

and as perfect as love.  What’s remarkable, what’s grinding,

is the movement of bodies, celestial, chthonic,

water-bound in filaments of fiber, in the earthy

imagination of the artist.    The river

speaks to the land, the fields,

row after row of hard or fallow fields,
approaching the horizon, the earthy

end of this world.  We are here watching the grinding

formation of spirits in their attempt to contact the brown

space between planets,  heavenly opposite to the chthonic

patch we call Earth.  Even at the river’s

forking into three distinct rivers

the truth of the land and it people is an earthy

truth that comes to bear much later in the brown

spirit world that surrounds us all.  Grinding

its way to the heart of the matter,  the fields

are alive with dancing and ritual to the chthonic

sequence of the seasons, the dusky chthonic

customs flow forward like the river, a brown

lesson among the sweet orchards, a grinding

of fruit into cider.  In the meantime, we await the earthy

rendition of fate to the promise of fields

the sweet song of rivers.

And it is here I’ve seen the brown, grinding

fibers and earthy colors reminding me of fields

of rivers, of the chthonic impulse.

Hey, Hey

We watched one afternoon and smoked a hundred cigarettes—
Andrew’s dad was a retired beat cop from Manhattan
with a nice TV hooked up to a Sony Betamax. He also owned a little schnauzer named
Heidi. This all happened when we were young and didn’t know the world,
the outside, I mean, except through movies and song. The film in question
was Yellow Submarine. Even now you might not know the title

unless you’re over 45, and certainly if you’re over fifty you might re-title
that part of your life from any number of Beatles songs. The question
remains: do you know of all their variants and offshoots? The rough Manhattan
copies, the simulacrum of Monkee-land? Of Davy Jones I briefly speak, cigarette
in one hand, my other on the keypad: there were young beats named
for open windows in hell’s kitchen who frequented Los Angeles, too. The world,

for them, was like a bright blue sun-scorched sky. As for the others, the world
wakes more often to forgetfulness than any other condition, be it in Manhattan
or Los Angeles. The next day the new kid, Mitch, told us his mom smelled cigarettes
and pot smoke on him, although we’d been smoking mostly questionable
chunks of hash and Marlboro 100’s. If you could give us a title
back in the day, you might call us into question

concerning our lack of true beliefs. For example, we all questioned
whether or not god was dead or if the universe spun endlessly in quantum-named
waves and particles. At least we knew some science: one part of the Manhattan
Project had been located out in the desert, on a sagebrush flat, on an end of the world
road twisting out to the hard ruthless peaks and plains that had names and titles
like “The Journey of Death.” At a place called Allsup’s we bought cigarettes

and went on the black road heading north. We couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes
as the dim stars rushed above us and around the 1971 Nova Fastback titled
in my father’s name. We knew for sure that the car wouldn’t make it to Manhattan,
but was good for going back and forth between Albuquerque and the small world
of desert towns some of us came from: Gallup, Mentmore. We all questioned
the light, our return to light, if we’d come back to these places we’d named

in part because the feelings had no names. What can you name
the sensation of your first cigarette, your first deep inhale? Do you know the world
any better after chugging a couple of Coors Banquet Beers? We’ve all questioned
the return to normalcy that follows quite turbulent years: song titles
stick like broken records and the sensation you got from watching Manhattan
isn’t quite like what Mickey smoked with Valleri afterwards, a cigarette

probably dipped in hash oil. A cigarette made and rolled in Manhattan
where the pretty girls are there for the song titles, questioning
the world, what means what, where to locate god’s name.

Caves below the mountaintops and in our lives

Some of us went right up
to the mouth of the cave,
It was a long walk through
the hottest part of the day,
and someone imagined
pools of blue cave water
lit by uranium as the sun
lingered in the west
like a bad penny. This was
where some turned back,
where others hung back
smoking Marlboros, picking
at the nearest rocks for fossils.
I tell you we were there
watching as the climbers
pulled themselves over
the lip, into the darkness.

Of course, a few returned with tales
and some didn't come back
at all. Someone with a lantern
thought she found petroglyphs
at the far junction in the main cave,
someone with a geologist’s hammer
brought back handfuls of staurolite.
Even after it was found out
it was the devil lighting
the far end of the trail, the dirty
plaintive woods and even
the rocks themselves--I am
no longer anxious to cross
and am rightly ashamed
of the time I left you all there
so I could wander the far eastern
meadows below the peak
where ladybugs grew by the thousands
on granite outcrops warmed
by the summer sun.

The Bureaucratic Dangers


One time I told a guy
it was a big deal that
I'd climbed down
from the Rockies
to live in the deep
wooded valleys of the Miami.

I'd driven a red truck, towed
a short u-haul trailer,
lived all over the place,
discovering gringo
America in New York
villages and small
Rustbelt towns where

I was just another dark-haired
foreigner until I spoke,
told them no I didn't
want their jesus
or a way to heaven
that meant reading
another book known

already to me as tinder
for the fires my friends
and I burned to feed the huge
devils on our backs.
Like throwing chingazos at the moon
I come to you expecting
nothing. By hiking the deepest trails
of your heart I am burned
by the light I find there.

Letter to the full moon from Huitzilopochtli

Tonight, I pray thee shine somewhere

brighter than you have before, salt

the sky with your presence. The thick

skin of our backs. The hard

moon rays beating down on wide

fat nipples. That summer I spent

in the forest, along the rocky creeks.

Drank beer all day, some of us

chasing girls, chasing boys. In that

long stretch of ponderosa and

white pine where there were rattlesnakes

wound up like bike tires left to rot.

As sure as the stars in the sky

were beacons of the unknown, for destinations

unnamed, O dear Luna, cover the night with your pale

light, that it may be the last reminder

of those years before the din and racket

of the outside world let us in the rough

door, the skin droor and the smoke roaring.