For heaven to find me

this flower is
the whole story
your story?
my story?
not because
this flower is
the Buddha
but because
the mountain
has never stopped
being a rabbit
the goat a holy book
on the table
that is also the ship
that carries all of us
toward our next stop
mind the gap
in the circle
I need travel
nowhere but here
to find heaven

Mountain Cedar

composed and posted February 24, 2025

I reach for the dead
and they reach for me
I like to think this
is the reason my hair tangles
so easily in the fingers
of the mountain
cedar tree when I kneel
to touch tears of sap
gold and tacky on its trunk
aromatic carpet of fallen
berries and branches fed
by water deep underground

Consider:

drafted February 18, 2025, posted February 24, 2025

we are neither the lamp
that illumines our material
nor the material illumined
by the lamp—both and none
at all we dwell only in the way
when they are left alone
they spend all their time
falling in and out of love

On Our 8th Wedding Anniversary

written February 18, 2025, posted February 24, 2025
For M.

I know now there is no cell
of me that has not loved you
replaced bone by bone and drop
by drop kiss by kiss this
ship of Theseus we call a body
we call a soul now cannot
touch any part of this world
without saying somewhere
in the light somewhere
in the blood I once thought
there was no end to loneliness
but who knew then I could
name the sun the moon
the wild trees the loping jack rabbit
the hum of bees who knew
then I could lose and lose
yet not prevent the New Dawn
of flowers who knew
I could meet you
through the death of all
I thought was I so certain

Bed Thoughts

for M.

I must share you with dust
and one day with loam

I suppose with roads 
even
and cars and by turns
translucent and polluted air 

earth trees and exhaust
flowers of course 
but this does not mean
I am any less reluctant

I must wake to gaze each day
through the window of your going

Marquette St.

drafted 2/22/2024, posted February 24, 2025
For S.

shoulder to shoulder our backs to the wall
your pull-out couch bed and altars stacked
to the ceiling we watched Priscilla: Queen
of the Desert on your laptop in your parents’
garage apartment the same apartment they
would not help you clean dirty only
because you were dying
in spite of this we planned 

what we would see next time
still sometimes I imagine the robot
you planned to build
from the cardboard you took 
from the mouths
of storm drains 
lurches itself from the corner
where you kept it like a retired school bus
in an untended yard
in the half-light leviathan
it shakes its limbs it rattles awake
I hope it haunts everyone who refused

to help you because you saw so clearly
they were afraid

Last Call After Morphine

For S.

in the end the Lady
when she came to your metal bed
with her hawk feather cape
was dressed in practical scrubs
she told me gently and firmly
I must leave you
since then at night
I see you often pacing
across the hills
your old body held
like a shed snake skin
in your left hand triumphant
as St. Bartholomew
in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement
while your right hand holds

doubled in the way of dreams
the long hair braided like wheat
of your own second
severed head
beard newly trimmed as you grin
beneath your cat mask
perfectly balanced in Crane Stance
your long red and black
lace skirt flapping
like wings at your ankles

VHS Extinction

drafted 2022, posted February 24, 2025

while the forests burn back to green
the ghost of the rare ivory-billed woodpecker
the first species I learned was extinct
from a VHS tape I rewound repeatedly
knocks like the last tracers of its footage
analog and distorted

this happens most often
in the evening when our old house cracks
as it loses its heat when our door settles
into its frame like a rabbit retreating
to a place it can pretend
it is no longer afraid

CODA, 2025:

even if we have been unobservable
to the people who think they get to decide
who exists and who doesn’t
this does not mean we are gone forever

Flowerface

Revisiting the McNay Art Museum

San Antonio, TX

I had a habit
when I was young
of going swimming
in ornamental ponds

it was inconvenient
for my mother
I always wanted
a nearer look

at the big orange fish
napping in the sun
to inhale the scent
at the center

of the soft deep pink
lily just out
of easy reach
I have never seen beauty

without the desire
to stick my face in it
I am too old now
for this to be charming

but here I am
still needing to change
clothes soaked
close to skin

because I could not
say no to myself
or to the flower’s
upturned belly

open to
our shared star
fragrant
and glistening

Hell’s Kitchen, Las Vegas, NV

drafted 8/12/2023, posted February 24, 2025
For S.

we honor you where fire eats the walls
where dusk makes brass filagree gleam
tall statues like anchors for a moon
that stretches light across a new forum
Romanum planted in the desert’s belly
beneath tall palms and taller mountains
we drink this gold of apples we watch
streetlights unfurl bioluminescent ferns
to garland a funeral feast mouths full
of ancient things legumes and lamb
cheese and milk honey to feed the hunger
I first knew when I descended stone steps
beneath the hill into an Etruscan tomb
the low door guarded by dolphins
a set of inner rooms arranged to echo
at a smaller scale the houses of the living
presided over by a laughing couple
who still for thousands of years lean gently
into each other sharing a cup with smiling faces
as they recline on the banquet couch
that is their shared sarcophagus in the neon
electric light they keep us company
as we speak your name once more before
summer turns and rustles back to sleep

Atlantic

I wish my father were able
to make his devotions at the altar
of this great water
but he is too busy working
talking with god
and looking for answers
the same answers
theologians want

meanwhile this ocean
is wild and cold and silver

meanwhile this beach smells of grit
and salt and is a home
for shells sharp-edged with light

meanwhile
we could all visit
heaven more often
if only we stopped
trying to make
this world bend
to whatever we secretly wish
to prove god is

In the Back Garden at the Sign of the Golden Goat

posted February 11, 2025

I do not have eyes the color of my aunt’s or grandmother’s
but when we ate together listening to the pale clouds
we were clearly related canvased together inside the glow
as if of a Matisse painting in my memory I cannot hear
the sound of the leaves or the low distant waves the flap
of the sun-faded awning or how our voices nestled like birds
against each other but I can hear how the light felt
as if my bones were distant church bells as if we three lived
inside the candle my grandmother lit before I was born
in the shadows of one of Notre-Dame’s side chapels
I see her there in the photograph my aunt took
black and white young and newly widowed
her mod trench coat textured like alligator skin
face luminous and pensive not quite like a saint
but perhaps one of the worried lay people at the edges
of a Florentine fresco anxious in their devotion
standing painted between the living congregation
and the mysteries of cities palaces and stables the artist
had not seen but nevertheless imagined vividly colored
as a present-day Easter or Christmas parade
must memory always have the urgency of flame?
now even that vast cathedral has collapsed in on herself
and must be rebuilt stone by stone into her own ghost
but my grandmother—my grandmother is free

Pluralist Realism

credit: Ganeri’s comparative epistemology
Posted February 10, 2025

there is no one way
to know a pear
even this one
which gives itself up
almost equally
to each of us
cold and slightly
grainy to teeth
juice too thin
to entirely reveal
its gold is both
the same pear
and a different
pear for you
sitting next to me
on this park bench
in the garden
of armchair
philosophers
we after all
we admit gesturing
behind us
between bites
walked different
paths to get here
came from separate
wombs read
different books
have holy days
marked by
our shared stars
sun and moon
but animated
by revelations given
by different sky
flying spirits
or gleaming
shimmers of serpents
admit we remember
different collective
triumphs violations
survivals
in the bread
of our tables
have each been granted
a tongue a taste
a unique history
of peaches
of plums of grapes
of bitter leaves
of milk and meat
note that we are each
glazed by the filter
of every preceding moment
yet stilled
by pleasure
attentive
in the shade
of fragrant purple
mountain laurel trees
we laugh
we continue
to share this fruit
fingers sticky
we talk we listen
we chew
we search our pockets
for napkins
to solve our shared
logistical problem
in spite
of our differing
firmly held
epistemological stances
we pause together
in this garden
made by people
neither of us knew
to companionably
exclaim to each other
my god
what a view

Summer 2021

posted February 9, 2025
For M.

your worn denim
tastes like detergent
I hear the scent
of your belt
metal and leather
your grip firm
and carefully
friendly at the base
of my neck
your fingers
a mother cat’s teeth
whether in
or out of the body
I know not
god knows
I am lifted
out of myself
my whole spine
a spool of thread
sewn back
together with itself
I click
like beads
pooled in your hands

What is Past

posted February 9, 2025

enough
to bury it gently
and leave it to compost
enough—to wait out

the slow cleaning
only dirt can do

enough
to find a small family
of mice
have birthed themselves
from muck

vegetable ends
and former skins

changed
in the shadow
of a plum tree
unobserved

to this warm and teeming
substrate of belonging

Our Lady Mississippi

posted February 9, 2025

with you I have no need to pretend to be
a stream or pond settled to translucence
instead wide with you I flow down into deltas
muddied and starred with shells in blank heat
dappled with trees the trunks of your knees
are long and lean the garment of your spirit
drapes without hurry where boats knock
against themselves docked at the clock of light
I keep time by the rhythm of their worn bones

even in my dreams I love you

Looking Toward the Sun

posted February 9, 2025

fat tadpoles in the trough
alive regardless of unseasonable cold
we joke they have discovered
in the ingredients of cows’ mouths
and algae and unbroken drought
a fountain of youth El Dorado
in the limestone hills secret
and ordinary as every renewal

Porch Light

posted Sunday, February 9, 2025
For M.

you ran to get me to show
the patterned lizard proud
on the rail puffing his orange throat

I had been buried
in the bones of an old book

it is good to see the lizard
lizard itself
it is better
that you came to get me

I remember I once told
the old woman
who was my first friend
a retired florist
(she often saw Jesus
at the altar and painted
faces made of smears
of all colors)
that the sunset
she wanted to show me
could wait
while I finished
my water color painting
she was quiet
and watched
the sky bloom without me
she knew she did not need
to tell me
I was wrong

heaven and time
would do it for her
brief golden impossible castles
folding into darkness

no less beautiful
when you call

I know now you invite me
to love you by sharing this world

this majesty of lizards
this porch light flickering
with moths with a thousand eyes
to announce the dead
this walk between
gate and door

our stroll through the belly of the sky
where each evening
we see the small hawk
dive precipitously
through the blue
toward what feeds it

Equally Hospitable to Angels

Posted February 6, 2025

for years I carried in me
the architecture of churches
on the off chance I missed an angel
as I drew endless ballerinas
in dervish motion in the margins
of paper programs while I perched
backwards on the kneelers
next to my grandmother’s low heels
the ones with golden buckles
neatly tucked next to her umbrella
until the celebrant went silent
and laid out the eucharist
this was the moment I most liked
to sneak out into the quiet
courtyard to sit in the sun
next to the columbarium
by the fountain that promised
living water in filagree gothic letters
above a calcified nozzle
and limestone basin filled
with dry earth and desiccated sticks
between pots heavy with petunias

it has taken me many years to make myself
but I am certain my new bones
first sprouted there beneath the oaks
that touched me with all the shapes
of light less colorful perhaps
than stained glass windows
but for all their seeming simpleness
equally hospitable to angels