salt (a suicide meditation)
my mother stepped into the sea
somewhere else
so we didn’t see this
same sea held us
had us after we’d
given the voices all
verse & chorus
of all we’d fleshed
& withstood
until we thought
we could
no longer
my friend Jaya was there
his cinnamon stalk body
swaying in status
three letters sounding
as if the body might as well
give itself up
finally
to the water
there’s reason
there’s salt
& such span
you’d never know
who else is there
stung & possessed
by loss
its promises
its required letting
go
& this is a hard
poetic turn
but there is singing
deep from the floor
through phosphorescence
of magnified quadrillion atoms
each armed to beget ceaselessly
& unceasingly ring
their small bell bodies
into our belled bodies
& we & we
& we & we
&we &we
&we
Note: opening lines taken from You Try and Hope You’re Wrong by Blas Falconer
July in St. Helena
vine workers pass like la brisa calma
through my windows
as i ease up on the gas to San Francisco
an hour away
one dirty white man against a newspaper rack
by Walgreens waiting
for anyone to look
i will but won’t say sorry
i don’t have a job either
& poetry doesn’t change that
the slant of sorry
doesn’t ease his tightened throat
when the vine worker hears
there are five too many & he
may be one of them
saying in his mind
mi hija mi hija
like Hail Mary without the beads
now dangling from his rear view
what is want what is need
what’s sweat without the breeze
my stepfather would say
in his wide brimmed hat staring
at how delicate i would always be
how scared he was of that
After Katrina
There’s no Sabbath in this house
Just work
The black of garbage bags
yellow-cinched throats opening
to gloved hands
Black tombs along the road now
proof she knew to cherish
the passing things
even those muted before the water came
before the mold’s grotesquerie
and the wooden house choked on bones
My aunt wades through the wreckage failing
no matter how hard she tries
at letting go
I look on glad at her failing
her slow rites
fingering what she’d once been given to care for
The waistbands of her husband’s briefs
elastic as memory
the blank stare of rotted drawers
their irises of folded linen still
smelling of soap and wood
and clean hands
Daylight through these silent windows
and I’m sure now Today is Sabbath
the work we do prayer
I know what she releases into the garbage bags
shiny like wet skins of seals
beached on the shore of this house
An Old Man Carrying His Catheter Bag
white-haired vapor
in khakis
shuffling down a street
held it waist high
a flag
signaling the body
solid liquid gas
the body comes
to all three
I am bile
as I am wit
I drink to live in this body
See to it that you revere
this gold
this gold
Uncut
When the clean-shaven one
with the black Porsche asked me
not to clean it
I understood the poetry
in his appetite
whatever would gather until Saturday night
the yellow and white of it
how he’d pull back the skin
one stanza at a time
I’d look away from his trembling fingers
his foraging tongue
and swallow