said to my beer.
My beer said nothing
as I drained my glass.
Kokopelli
I hear his flute on the canyon winds.
Kokopelli is coming to town.
The young men practice the festival dances.
The old men count the hides and corn
they’ve kept to trade for turquoise and coral.
Old women smile and hum with the flute,
remembering Kokopelli’s songs,
remembering Kokopelli’s arms.
Down at the river the pueblo’s girls
are washing their hair with yucca root,
whispering of Kokopelli’s songs,
whispering of Kokopelli’s arms.
Kokopelli is coming to town.
I hear his flute on the canyon winds.
Park Encounter
I watched you pass my bench,
smiling sidelong at me,
many times before
you stopped to talk with me.
The wind tousled your hair
and pressed your shirt against
your muscular pecs and abs.
My pulse swelled in my throat
so I mumbled my reply.
You looked up at jets
writing vapor answers on the sky.
and nodded as though you’d decided
something. You smiled, excused
yourself, and walked away.
I’ve waited on my bench
every day since then,
but you haven’t walked this way.
Reunion
Lamplight splotched
the polished wood,
littering the table
with yellow lights
like lemon peels.
Our coffee cooled
in our willow-ware cups
while we tried to remember
why we once were friends.
The furnace noises
accentuated our silences.
After an awkward time,
he went into the snow.
I turned out the lamp
and was glad he had gone.
John Day Country
There the spirit may sing its making,
and the pilgrim wander the wind-kissed ridges
to commune with hawks in the high desert.
There I would go to get heart’s ease.
I would shelter with cougars in the shadowy pines.
I would sing with coyotes in a star-scarred sky.
I would chant with the rapids roiling through the canyons.
I would den with the bear and dance with the deer.
I would run with the rabbits through the sage and the sand
I would untwist the tangle of my terrors
and walk a free man on the wind’s highways.
There I would live, lonely and clean,
where the air’s so thin the eagle falters.
There I would sing my spirit song
The Hustler
A boy-man leans against the brick,
one knee bent, one hand on a hip,
offering youth for coin of the realm.
His eyes are green as ocean swells
I yearn to plumb their mysteries.
He searches my face to see what I want.
I shake my head. I will not pay
for grappled sex in a bathroom tiled
with puddled semen and weary lust.
He shrugs. His eyes glaze with boredom.
He turns to search the passing crowd.
I leave him there. I will not watch
some casual trick buy time with those eyes
not caring what self may swim in their deeps.
The Tulip Bearers
Two men bearing potted tulips
in the mall processed with uplifted hands,
solemn as priests presenting the Host.
The younger, who led, looked back to see
if his older companion followed safely.
The old man’s gaze was all on his pot.
He looked neither up ahead,
nor at his feet. He walked down stairs
and did not stumble. “Do they visit
the sick?” I wondered. “Look around,”
you said. “Potted tulips fill
the flower boxes. I think they’re thieves.”
“Walking so slow and carefully?”
“They’re too old to run away.”
For Don Wells
The crocus will bloom where the snow is melting.
The bud shows color under its green.
If Don were near, I’d invite him over
to greet the crocus when it comes,
but he has gone adventuring.
He left his house; the door’s ajar.
The stove is cold, the table’s empty.
A winter’s dust sits in Don’s chair.
Autumn leaves sleep on his bed.
He has other rooms to keep.
He’s taking tea and cookies with the saints
and telling jokes to the solemn angels.
Tomorrow he’ll fly kites with the Christ.
The crocus must make do with me.
The Clockwork Nightingale
I made a clockwork nightingale.
I cut the gears and shafts from brass.
The springs I bought at my hardware store.
I made the body and wings from copper,
and etched the feathers in the metal.
The beak and tail were stainless steel.
I enameled eyes so the bird could see.
I wound it up with a silver key.
I taught it madrigals and sent it
from door to door to sing for my supper.
A Nashville crow lured it away
with promises of country music stardom.
I have not heard it sing on the radio,
nor seen its discs in music stores.
I sometimes wonder, late in the night,
if it sings on Nashville’s meaner streets,
or lies scrapped in a dump in Tennessee.
Dictionary Flowers
My grandmother
kept her family history
in a dictionary,
because Webster’s stirred less controversy
than her mother’s Protestant Bible
in her stepfather’s Catholic household.
She pressed flowers between its pages,
mementoes she kept of her wedding,
and my father’s christening,
and maybe her mother’s funeral.
She never said which blossom
marked which event,
perhaps because she couldn’t remember.
I don’t touch them.
They might crumble.
Even the dictionary’s pages
are brittle and likely to shatter.
I breathe gently when I look at them.
I don’t want to sneeze
and scatter her memories
and the old definitions
among the dust mites
in this room she never saw.
Early Muse
One spring some forty years ago
I fell in love with her for a month.
I called her “Lady of the Lilacs.”
because she dressed in grays and lavenders
and gave me metaphors and rhymes.
She called herself “Child of Rain.”
and planned to die when she reached thirty.
I meant to live to be very old,
and promised to mourn her early dying.
We quarreled over some small thing.
I left her weeping in an April rain.
A class reunion letter tells me
she’s married twice, has three children.
No mention of intention to die soon.
Fred
Tangerines in a blue glass bowl
flamed in the winter sunbeam
dividing the dust in the room
&
nbsp; that day after the funeral.
She put a kettle of water to heat,
finding endurance in familiar tea.
She set out cups, and put away
her funeral gloves and black-veiled hat.
I murmured things to comfort her.
She understood my awkward words
the way I meant them. The sun went towards
the west. She brought the tea. The fire
left the tangerines and the sun.
The tangerines blended their smell
with the tea steam. We traded small smiles,
drank tea, and shared our thoughts of him.
Alone
I stopped to watch him wait for the bus.
He stood where turquoise lamplight fell
in streaks through leafless trees. The shadows
hid me from him. He did not know
I watched him strike a match to warm
on the snowy walk. He watched me come,
from the corner of his wary eyes.
Before I could speak, or catch his glance,
the bus pulled up and rescued him.
I walked on home through empty streets.
Grownups Talked
Grownups talked in the summer twilight.
They talked of ancestors they’d known
who plowed Kansas and mined Wyoming.
One told how timbers splintered in a mine,
mangling a father and the company mule.
Another’s carpenter cousin fell
from a roof and broke his back. One’s brother
died in France, spared the war
by influenza and poisoned blood.
An uncle, three years old, tumbled
from a car, cracked his breastbone, and died.
At nightfall, they turned on parlor lights,
bid me kneel to say my prayers,
and sent me to bed in a darkened room.
Mrs. Palmer
She was a neighbor we visited.
Her house was redolent
with liniment and coal smoke.
Even the spring breezes,
could not pass the screen
against the smoke and liniment.
When she came to our house,
her liniment and smoke came with her
and lingered after she left.
Time and age had raddled her,
marking grooves in her cheeks
and whiskering her chin.
She might have modeled the witch
for a book of Halloween stories,
except her eyes were kind and smiling.
Once she gave me seeds
for Hubbard squash.
I scratched a hole in a cinder heap
with a bent-handled spoon to plant them.
Against all expectation, they grew
a squash for Thanksgiving
and made a lifelong gardener of me.
Long after, she died in an old folks’ home,
a refugee from a brutal son
who drank her pension and beat her.
Her obituary revealed she’d been
a scandalous beauty, with a bastard son
whose father denied begetting him.
The old women of my house murmured
“God knows she suffered a bitter atonement.”
They never spoke of her again.
Flute Man
He was playing his flute
on a bench in the Zocolo.
He was not of us, an intruder.
He was a stranger.
I knew it at once.
I am of the village.
I know everyone by sight.
We call our town square the Zocolo,
though it has no plinth,
only weeping