Poetry

I’ve admired how they leave littleshells of self clinging to bark or edges of jagged leaf, their swarms pacing flightin packs of years. Imagine, every decade an upheaval. Farmers would knowof their coming yet could not stop it, the dark whirring cloud which upon passingbrought a homelessness that beat to bone. I could hear them…

Sonofagun, what a rambunctious sun!— Flaunting its feather boa of cloud, it’s Done with slumming behind the horizon,  It blazons and hastens the birds to what’s  Blooming. Our backyard’s a carnival,  Carmine and cardinal, ripe apricots  Chandeliering on breezes, ambrosial, And in this light I believe everything On this bright and ruinous earth, animal   Or vegetable, is a wonder, a blessing Made…

The wind is named, like us, for where it comes from.The road is named, like us, for where it goes. All winds are the one wind.All roads turn into other roads. Sometimes I think the road has ended,but it has turned behind me and gone home. Sometimes I think the wind has ceased,but it has…

Two thousand lightning strikes from last night’s storm.Nothing unusual but record heatand not the least parched godspit of rain.The clamor of photosynthesis cracks. But the young birds birthed in the last month, hatchedinto heat with a bird bath and feeders,shiver-begging, unsleek and disheveled—any adult will do. Droves of siskins, a crowd of red crossbills, dovechilds…

More and more, when I’m walking—and it seemsI’m walking more and more—I turn aroundBecause something has called to me and more And more it’s me as a child back there, walkingwith a friend or a ball or both—and he’s happyand that makes me happy, even when he doesn’t Seem to know it’s me he is…

The hour splits with dust somewhere between north and south.A pine tree sways, disappears.A palm tree sways, appears.I am an exile from the California of my childhood.Grass whistles between my father’s grave and mine. The wind raises dust on my mother’s house, cloaking the yard.I listen for water trapped deep in the aqueduct.Hawks cast shadows…

My father was a brown man.My mother was white. My father was a very brown man.My mother was a very white woman. My father was born in the jungle.My mother was born in an industrial city. My heart, my little lion—It beats faster to say these things Even after all these years, even afterIt is…

The light isn’t right.The glare from the windowspierces my father’s glasses and he squints as I pressthe button on my phone.Again, he tells me. Take it again. And I oblige,trying to find a positionthat would hold him as he is now though he isconstantly movingto avoid the light. I wonder how longwe will continue this…

A tiny scarab landed in my hand. I see how this works. God just shrinkssmaller and smaller with every chance you let pass, every opportunityto take the message that the horse delivers, “until God arrives assomething, in the end, like you,” I said to the scarab, and with that, asif having had enough, once and…