Poetry
1. I knew, but didn’t know—extent, sprawl,
continent-wide bird with great shadow-wings
hovering over a whole nation’s knife-opened birth—
talons and curved-hook raptor’s beak coming
for my heart, which is history,
which shields itself and hungers
as though truth were a flock of season-following geese
from whom I choose how many to bag,
how many a season requires. So many
moments sound like gun-shot—
sound cracking the ear with its own hammer,
pummeling some dark priest-hole in every mind,
fists on doors, slammed hatches on ships,
iron coming down so hard on a deck it loses its clang,
a skull punched against echoing wood, snapped branches,
snap of a jaw-trap around leg bone.
An eagle cannot feed its young its young.
I am the border agent who looks
the other way. I am the one
who leaves bottled water in caches
in the harsh borderlands I patrol.
I am the one who doesn’t shoot.
I let the people assemble,
with their flickering candles a shimmering
river in the dark. “Let them pray,”
I tell my comrades. “What harm
can come of that?” We holster
our guns and open a bottle to share.
Save for the sun, the nearest star
is more than twenty-five million
million miles away.
What has a single star
shining in Bethlehem
to do with us?
Darling of Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs, cochineal
conquered the ever-expanding world—
borne of female coccids boiled, dried, and ground
fine as dust, then woven with water, coaxing color
vibrant as any pink peppercorn, dye so prized,
long before Spain came, natives bred the prickly pear
on which the insects fed to bear fewer spines,
so, horsetail in hand, they could brush the parasites
I am Peter at Gethsemane
where I wake to oak
branches suspended,
spinning like hair in water.
Flora’s night
blanched, a prophet’s
chanting, every caesura’s
quiet steeping, transfiguring
grief to alms.
Why wouldn’t they drop by, stare up
approvingly at the point of the minaret?
Perpetual connoisseurs of the loving work
of centuries, the stacked stones, nails pounded
until synagogues, temples, shrines
little houses of worship rise from the land.
This seep of droplets sponged by moss leaked
from a cleft in the rock; the waters in the cleft
rose osmotically from earth:
the aquifers of earth rained down
from cloudburst skies;
A white blossom, purpled
at the edges like penance,
lies under an unbloomed tree.
You can’t blame me for flinching
back against the wall
when a small boy points his
pistol at me and yells “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
I am lying back there somewhere
feeling the sidewalk as if I’d never touched
sunshine, pumping out my urgent
puddle
In deep thirst, a desert stag will tear
open saguaro ribs with his teeth
and gorge on succulent heart, living sap.
This morning desire and grief for You
are the same ache. Welcome, hurt.
Enter and feast on my flesh. Become love.
I know you believe you are doing God’s work when you ask me
“Are you a Christian?” and instantly retort to my “No” with “Why not?”
I know you do not know how the hairs stand up on the back of my neck
when first you question my failure to embrace Jesus as my Lord and Savior
and then interrupt with that world-weary “Ahhh ...” as I say,
“Well, my mother’s family was Jewish— ”
“The last will be first, and the first will be last.” —Matthew 20:16
I know what I am:
an earthen vessel guiding cows, goats, and sheep’s
chaotic feeding, their chorus of maws bleating,
baying, snapping open and shut a celebration
Be still. Don’t forget how the Earth shifted—
dinner plates with clean breaks in smashed boxes—
and lands became continents, broken homes.
On your mother’s side Abyssinian slaves,
grandees from Spain on your father’s.
How could someone dark
as a Dominican’s cappa with a burnt
oak face and a halo of knotted hair
be the patron of holiness?
Barbering and sweeping were not
causes for sainthood.
I am the tiny, irate, scolding person
standing in the dome of my own skull.
She shakes her head again, arms crossed, again
disappointed: I’m clumsy, struggling, dull.
Then there’s the shattered wine glass,
an afternoon misspent, a dinner gobbled,
rank laundry, unpaid bills, uncut grass,
and, I suspect, one lovely friendship bobbled.
And yet, I’m here. Alive.
When we lose our dreams
To be educated
And are afraid
Of being incarcerated
We pray to you
Dios te salve, María,
When we don’t know
Where to go
To be a Sitting Bull
Or a Standing Rock
We pray to you
llena eres de gracia,
When your naturaleza
Showed us no mercy
And the politicians
Shut down our Borinquen
We pray to you
el Señor esta contigo.
When we’ve picked
All the grapes
Without an actual
Bathroom break
We pray to you
Bendita eres
When our hermanas Negras
Are being maimed
And ashamed
By racism, sexism, bigotry
We pray to you
entre todas las mujeres,
When we fight for
Farm workers’ rights
While hiding from
Our men’s grips at night
We pray to you
y bendito es el fruto
This mourning begins with eyes:
ours which open
and the eyes a gun closed,
the barrel a chamber in which there is found no heart,
for every latch and mechanism of the machine moves with menace
and every finger entangled and wound around its trigger
draws closed the stage curtains of peace.
This mourning begins with flesh—
our stance under a persistent sun
as a body stretches across a coroner’s table like the hide of a deer.
In such an occasion, a body’s bullet holes
become mouths. They speak of the perils our muscles
hope not to know. They reveal what it’s like
to be whole and come undone
and linger like litter.
Parkland.
Pulse.
Emanuel.
Columbine.
For you, we combine this mourning
with the mournings that have become before it.
Prayer is invisible and advisably secret.
If we could hear the inaudible contents
it might sound like the roiling of a mighty river
over scrabbly rocks, or the whirr of infinite
prayer wheels generating the world-winds
atop some hidden mountain.
All I know is that the breath of the heart
escapes its bounds.
The tail of the comet streaks into the ether
burning faster than any silver bullet.
It doesn’t stick in the brain to recoil and rewind,
but flies like a light-arrow toward the stars
by force of desire returning home.
Before the bow-string stops vibrating
it has traveled around the world three times.
Here, nobody stands
for the national anthem.
There’s no debate about
universal healthcare,
no talk of bigger border
walls or who will pay.
Here no one snapchats,
sends selfies or sexts. Google
steals no one’s idle hours.
No political parties here,
no signs to say white
lives matter too: everyone
gets it here. There’s no
NRA, no second amendment,
no bumper-sticker zealots
declaring “if you can read
this you’re in range.”
No,
here at the Pilgrim Home,
just across from the summer
play of a city pool, it’s all
cut-granite reverence
for beloved son, daughter,
dearest husband, moeder,
madre. On this level
expanse no fences
separate black and white,
they enclose. In this green
space the Mexican lies down
with the Dutch, and under
fresh rectangles the refugee
rests with the rich.
Here,
old, sleepy spruces cast
long layers of shadow
among the graves. Lilies
and orchids and roses revere
each silent name and date
and the brief dash between—
briefer than an evening walk,
than a child’s splash.