Voyage

Rains come from the south at sunset

They come down the hills

they are ropes let down

from an unseen helicopter

The ropes descend on a midnight ocean

Swells heave their colossal sighs

a light bounces in

from the other side of a wave-crest

Through breakwater is the blink of a towering ship

bearing children and the people who love them to a new world

Acocoxóchitl

Who doesn't see

these things flicker through their dreams?

A campfire smoldering in the wooded night

the cook-pot boiling over fomenting the flames

This is Basque country, 1936

thirty years later in Ñancahuazú

Who doesn't see these things?

An Iraqi boy

his dark face luminous

walks past the barrel of an M16

The bleary-eyed gunman careens at his post

he's a good-old boy who's forgotten where he is

He's picturing the girl he never asked to dance

when his eyes roll back and his trigger finger slips

The gun flash bursts into riotous dahlias

red dahlias flourishing through the boy's skull

Who doesn't see?

Who doesn't see us marching

through the fields, all of us

marching through fields of red dahlias?

A Song for the Times

After Bertolt Brecht

There is a girl in Lima will never close her eyes

Her eyelids were singed when her rapist changed her

Changed her to flames to light his way home

These are the days of manufactured light

Of righteous declarations to blot out the night

These are the days we make ourselves heard, and heard

No one speaks at the trial of a man

who's murdered a 4 year-old through brutal penetration

And who is not penetrated?

Who is not victim here? 

Who is not utterly guilty?

When a teenager points his .45 into a baby carriage

into whose role are we cast?

We cannot be the audience

Let us no more be the audience

They say the first conquistadors to view Quri Kancha went blind

All that gold under all that sun

There is a pedophile in Cajamarca

whose flame at this moment is lighting the neighborhood

What human figure is not fully dark

when crowded near that fire?

There is a girl in Lima will never close her eyes

Visions of Qosqo

I.

The Incas

moved these mountains

all through deathless February

leveled them

plane-by-plane

for every arable inch

Step by massive

stone-packed step

this sodden earth was borne

tilled in tiers, gone

to seed la oca, camote

manzanilla, ch'iri ch'iri

These walls sustain

the centuries, stand

sentry in the clouds, clouds

comb the grasses

rippling

untold green

 II.

Epochs of history

written

in the mist

there was a time

when men left

lyrics in the wind

women wove epics

in kettle steam

and kiln smoke

there was a time

when rivers told us

what they knew

Tomes of species

their seasons

scored beneath the skin

dates of the harvests

they track

in the marrow

Europeans starve

with the loss

of a single crop

harbor different hungers

on that lady's eastern shores

Stephen

White light I want

Of the Library

Sharpen the shadows

So flakes fall pure,

Flittering aureoles dancing to the floor

Plume of breath this raw

Old man winter this raw night

Cassy skips over

Her smile I love

The page I can't make out

Is Kelsey's ultrasound

'They're thinking of naming her Cassy

Look at her barely there

He'll be a great father'

Suzanne has bad wine 

And we're going to the TRAX

We play there footrace the train

To the next stop

Quick pass sip

Taping copies of Cassy maybe

To the windows

Suzanne smacks my butt

We jump out and hope

They catch a light

We miss a stop

If there are we drink with hobos

Other passengers hide their eyes

Or Delta Center they laugh

On the train red trickle of chin

And Cassy kissing Suzanne

I like to see her this way

They don't kiss before

The guys, not Kevin

Their lips cold flow of an old river

Take witness my eyes and those of strangers

Old Man, Trout, Occurrence

Spring Lake before dawn, a canoe sets out

On a swift, even glide—bow knifing

Surface, its wake a curtain opening,

Soundless. The paddle, parting water,

Echoes a trout nipping at a nymph

And missing. Great mouth of river deep

Welcomes man and boat downstream. Currents

Weave the only order ever was

Or could be:  threads ripple and still

Whisper and hush, lead past morning's first casts.

He solves, then, to witness the stream exact

Its vision—unhurried telling of the

Endless present….when the line pulls, pulls

Again—he slowly, smoothly, reels his catch.

Bob and whirl, glint on steel, homage to

Patience in every revolution.

Soon the lucid fathoms lend sight of her

Opaline body, each body, draws

And is drawn—boat and fish—to the finite

Point of their union. Rainbow brought to light

Port-side, her pregnant belly cradled

So she doesn't think to squirm. Deftly, now,

So deftly, she's unhooked….this release 

So fluid its memory goes with it.

June, Lydia

Solitary bough in a menacing sky.

She'd never known blues so boundless, grays so

Totally black until she saw them stalk

A Beachwood at the height of its bounty.

She feels the pressure change in her womb,

Comes to Battery Park where the clouds glow

Sinister—sheet lighting striates the hues

The interim dark holds powerfully still.

Thunderclaps toll concussive and sacred

The winds astonish everything they touch.  

Lydia watches, makes herself watch

Abundant green awash in the bedlam.

Some feel shifts of air on a broken bone

She feels the weight of the world in her womb.