THE RED AND GREEN OF TREES AND WOMENSeptember of my forty-first year blazes to the edge of fading. Autumn's women--
blondes, brunettes, redheads--streak their hair across mountain shoulders.
My mother's boozy movements flash the red that runs through her hair.
Struck by high sun, her flamed veins make me love her more than I want.
In my veins, those highways of passing on, little red trucks pace their histories,
carrying their freight across borders, to babies sleeping far away from me.
Babies shove red trucks across the shag carpet. The movement of new muscles
makes the old reddened oak melancholic for its next greening.
O something that passes for God, give me strong prayers muscles.
Take away my obsessions with fall-fired trees and the ebb of everything.
My mother's thin slip lays slumped over the dull, thirsty ficus, near her bed.
While she sleeps, her blood plots and uprising: to leave its circuitous movement.
The anxiety of blood leaves me thin on sleep tonight and thirsty.
I pray for the calm of circuitousness. I wait the breaking waters of my granddaughter.
Cuttings in the water glass wait their first dirt. Next year, planted and in their first dying
season, they'll suddenly recollect. Their thin switches will blaze and drop spent.
Today, I watched the sea lettuce flow and ebb in the prayers of waves.
Most days, I am mostly uninspired and leave everything unfinished.
first published in SILKWORM 2008
QAHWA ‘ARABIYY
For
This morning slides in on greiged
There may be nothing after this place. It might be Heaven looks up from our pots and cups. I will drink this cup: black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love, boiled the way of days gone by: vessels set in the rolling Thar sands of my grandmothers, brewing—by earthy heat alone—rich black dust. I drink with you and to you. The copper pot burnishes over heat as the boiling point comes; dregs settle as the saucer readies to reveal my next ripening. I tell you, last night I dreamt the cups empty and all the Malkoas had flown away.
First published in the Equinox 2008
"Qahwa 'Arabiyy " means arabic coffee.
The line "Black as hell, strong as death , sweet as love" is a persian saying about the region's coffee.
Malkoas are Pakistani cuckoo birds. The cuckoo bird is said to herald a new fate
LATE WORDS FOR
The world is falling like collapsed veins, sinking into the spent skin of itself.
The juice of summer retracts like a drawn back needle; all around,
quick pulsing branches of Sugar Maples drop their hearts like losing tickets.
How many years since you shot yourself? The engine of seasons moves on.
A little death in the grand scheme of every death recorded, yes, still—
mine to carry every late fall, when loss comes wrapped in muted rapture,
even though I love that process too: all the realization and love for the vanishing self,
nothing more than a mess of muscle, seam, and problematic heart.
