I.
All through elementary school
blonde beautiful lip reading teachers
would try to correct my “th”s by snaking
their tongues between their teeth and
holding it there, ripe cherries
tempting me to bite into them.

This was the one thing my withdrawn self
throbbing with the first thrusts of male
enthusiasm couldn’t stop thinking about—
all those thin throats with patchouli scents
wildly, willingly, whispering interdental fricatives
like a throng of French kisses to my thirsty lips.
I thoroughly desired the apples of their necks—
to chew them, **** them, swallow them,
eat them all -all of them- all of it,
every one so meaty-sweet and
erupting with wet dreams.

They would undress themselves,
my harem besides me on the river bank,
their white stomachs dewy and shivering,
the ribbiting Croquis behind the marsh
chanting to me to instruct these chicas
in the ch’s— chas,  cha-chas, chochas
of the Puerto Rican mating call
with no use for this, that, these, thems,
just the rich vowels of legs parting
telling them each where
ella es hermosa como la luna.
(She is beautiful as the moon.)

Once Senorita Lujuria brought to class
a persimmon plucked from her garden
ripe with the musky  smell
of what the girls thought was chocha
and the boys imagined was ***
that she sliced into two equal suns.  

Knowing that it wasn’t ripe or sweet
I refused the first bite she offered.
I watched the  others spit it out,
their palms full of bitter disappointment.


II.
When I got home my mother was cutting
off the crown of a pomegranate, scooping
out the core without disturbing the berries,
scoring just through the outer rind, until
it quartered and could be gently pulled apart.
I stuck out my hand and she inverted the skin
until the berries fell warmly filling my palm
and then into a red plate

Her body was a bruise, especially her hands
I gently rolled her wheelchair
to her cluttered room
where she sang an old Spanish song
asking for the ghosts to take her away.
Her song swelled and she cried it out of her
heavy with sadness and sweet with love.

After she had passed I stumbled upon
three scrolls tied with purple velvet string
folded under a down blanket in the basement.

I unrolled three paintings done by my mother
in the Frida Kahlo style.
  
The first was a self- portrait of her holding
a quartered pomegranate in one hand,
a sliced persimmon in the other.
The second was of her staring out at the ocean,
her body bulging with the idea
of my joyous conception.
The last, was an ****** tableau
of her and Senorita Lujuria
in a forbidden embrace, signed and
dated two years before I was born.

The first two painting had the deftness
of a thousand skilled repetitions,
the taboo one sprawled with arthritic loops
but still hathe talent of muscle memory.
My eyes teared with the knowledge that
my mother never lost the things she loved,
her son, the colors, scents and textures
of all the persimmons and pomegranates
so neatly sliced and lustily devoured.

The sentinels stand silently
guarding the monuments
from rioting against their shadows.
One guard
counts the sunshine,
the other the dark.
The **** and ****,
the broken glass
can never be really
cleaned up.
The stench
just follows the tour
through the
purple velvet queue.
The glass bleeds
the feet of those
who sold their shoes
for nothing.

The greatest where’s Waldo paintings to be
have him the tiniest spot at the very top
in a population of near clones.

After searching everywhere he will be
the last thing you’ll  find,
the last thing you’ll see.

Your life will have meaning again
after generations of
searching and playing the game.
                 —————
In every Picasso there is
a copulating couple
waiting to be discovered.

In Guernica, you won’t find them
above the third eye
of the bull

or between
the neighing horse
and the illuminated light bulb.
                   —————
In Hitchcock’s Rear Window
the gaze to find that one point
where meaning and ****** collide

leads inevitably to the next obsession,
not solved until the end of Vertigo
where the same blonde in the same style

in the same fog and confusion of The Birds
is  saved from the ****** of crows
by the man she didn’t pull from the ledge.
                     —————
Freud always makes a background appearance
because Salvador Dali never got paid
for any of the watches he melted.

Picasso never forgave Dali
for the bull’s eye he stole
and sliced with a razor.

If they both looked up at the
tiniest spot at the very top they might
have seen and understood everything.



Note:

Freudians have been looking for hidden copulating couples in Picasso for a long time.  
Like Trump’s claim of election fraud none have actually been found or verified.  But his paintings  are deep and big so they have to be there somewhere?  At least, that is how the rumor goes.  

Dali and Picasso did hate each other and their respective work.  The bull’s eye story is just another unproven rumor.  The eye sliced in
Un Chien Andalou was also reported to be a bull’s eye and not a real human eye.

Rear Window, Vertigo and The Birds were filmed. and released in that order.  All three featured blondes and Hitchcock has been rumored to plant Easter  Eggs to the other films in  both Vertigo and The Birds.  Some film scholars treat Vertigo and The Birds as either sequels or prequels of Rear Window.

We birth a thousand
destined broken things:

chair legs detach from their seats under  
the weighted repetition of sitting cloth

itself threadbare from
the rubbing of muscle.

We glue together the
blue China fallen in grief.

The silver nails of the crib are
reserved for our rusty coffins.

We mend the holes
of our tattered souls.

We reattach old soap specks to new
and shape them into a bath ark.

The fallen pecans and apples are
hoarded for the sweetest pies to be.

The broken necks of pollards
make our most savory stock.

The new rug turned ***** is beaten
until dust flies like stars.

We shut the curtains in the
afternoon to cool the room.

Mothers iron, singing in their reverie,
folding neatly, stacking all on the chair.

They listen for the passing mail car
so they can mark the new catalogs

with the dreams of their families
cruising to a distant, distant  land.

Everything under our houses is just
the dust of every housecleaning before,

the joy of  parents knowing their children
will move out and be blessed

to reach their Jesus year and know
the sanctity of resurrected dust.

“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder
spoke to the younger
over the phone,
knowing that his child
had inherited all his demons.

“I will support you
if you want to do rehab,”
he whispered,
that old Harry Chapin Song,
Cat’s in the Cradle,
about fathers and sons
circling in his head;

his son’s new one,
Harlem River Blues,
kicking it off the loop:

Lord, I'm goin' uptown
to the Harlem River to drown 
***** water gonna cover me over  
And I'm not gonna make a sound …”

“I won’t,”  the son
promised his father.
A click and a dial tone
was the final statement.

That night
Justin Townes,
named after
Townes van Zandt,
the folk oracle
that was his dad’s mentor,
died alone
in a Nashville apartment.
A mixture of  
******* laced with fentanyl
was found in his blood.
He was just 38.

When a child dies
the father no longer a dad,
no longer
the parent of Justin Townes,
or just J.T.,
his first little boy,
adopts his own identity back,
rears it fondly in memory,
burying the child’s legacy
until the erosion of time
files him down
to his birth name,
just plain old Steve-
Stephen Fain Earle
from Fort Monroe, Virginia.

When Townes died
he did a tribute album.
When his old demons returned
he released a tribute album.
When grief surrounded him
and the whiskey bottled beckoned
Steve mined J.T.’s  catalog
for a ten song tribute session
that can be done with that rock sneer
they both shared.  

The only thing that mattered
was that it be released
on the day of what would
have been J.T.’s 39th birthday.

He would concentrate on
the songs whenever he wondered
why he stayed clean and J.T.  couldn’t.
Why did he survive and J. T. succumb?

Steve didn’t hate the fact
that J.T.’s songs
were better than his,
his guitar fingerpicking
was more mind blowing,
that musically J.T. could play
Mance Lipscomb blues
in a way Steve was never  
able to figure out,
not even that J.T.
had a way better voice.

He was always reminding J.T.
how proud he was of him,
how much he loved him.

No, Steve hated that it wasn’t
enough to save him,
that he was the stronger man.
that they both shared the same disease.

Steve sang, his craggy voice
the perfect underscore
for the dark themes
in J.T.’s ballads:
a drowning death
(Tell my mama I love her,
Tell my father I tried.
Give my money
to my baby to spend);
the phantom-limb ache
for a former lover
(Even though I know you’re gone
I don’t have to be alone now.
You’re here with me every night
When I turn out the lights.)

It was therapy not catharsis.
Steve always sang
because he needed to.

J.T. was the opposite—
dressing in retro style,
reveling in the notoriety
of his intimidating talent
that was always trying to
eclipse his more famous parent.

Steve wanted this to be a memorial
between father and son.  
No guest singers, especially
those ******* enablers
that helped **** him
with their nonintervention.

He never included J.T.’s songs
about absent fathers
and single mothers.
He knew only J.T.
could rightfully sing those.

Steve was expecting it to be
a horror show emotionally.
He felt sad, but not disappointed
when it was just business as usual.

When it came time to perform
John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man
he deliberately emulated
J.T.’s fingerpicking.

He felt jealous that his son
was able to write
the John Henry song
he always failed at.

When it came time to record
the album’s last song,
Last Words,
the only song
written by Steve,
and like the
more sentimental
Harry Chapin one,
a heartbreaking synopsis
of a father’s journey,
from cradling his newborn son
to speaking to him for the last time,
the pain returned and
their shared disease
pulled inside him.

By the time it was on tape
he knew it was the only
song he had written in his life
where every single word
in it was true.  

Last thing I said
was ‘I love you.’
Your last words to me
were ‘I love you too.’


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FXgtD3jfikk&feature=youtu.be

No bad guy talks alone
to a Bible in a hotel room
with a gun in his hand.

“If a man commits adultery
with the wife of his neighbor both
the adulterer and the adulteress
shall surely be put to death…”

the good book says or
he thinks in a cold sweat.

That’s how he met Cynthia.
She was fearless.
That’s how she became his whole life.

He’s not humbling himself.
He’s not learning.
He’s not even listening.

It offers him words of love.
“YOU ARE NOT ENOUGH!”

“God loves you
with his whole heart.
He loves you.”

He looks up to the ceiling
and lifts the gun up.
“Can you save me?”

It comes like He came
on the longest, darkest night
of the longest darkest year
proclaiming all
the glory of God and the
beauty of planets and suns.

The old gods have been
exiled to the sky
and their movements
are barely the echoes
of the Grand Breath.

Apollo and Selene
have long since danced and
and their brief kiss
eclipsed the day to night
prompting the Huemul
to seek the Araucaria’s shade,
the Hornero the Ceibo’s lower boughs.

The Geminis brushed the
skirt of Europa with fire
and Orion’s arrow
glowed brightly
in the harsh dark
winter air in anticipation
of their passing.

Each score years,
in the nadir of winter,
Jupiter and Saturn
form a conjunction
barely the width
of three full moons
in the southwest sky
that shone the brightest
two millennium past
in the Bethlehem dark
and blessed the child
gazing up at
His Father’s  creation.

Would be tyrants
may clumsily plot
the overthrows of countries
but the stars remain
fixed, determined
steady and unmovable
to even the strongest
push of Hercules
and indifferent to
the troubles and strife
beneath them.

Yet The Breath
impels the planets
to revolve around
a million suns
and hope is greater
than those who angst
over tomes that proclaim
the end of everything
and the prophets
that declare
the end of all time is nigh.
  
The barred owl who resides
in the old knotted elm,
who persists to live in the hole
despite the attempts of crows
to chase it away
knows that the generosity
of every inhale and exhale
is but the revolution of a
breath greater than itself,
one with no beginning or end,
just the explosion
of the original blessing.

Jupiter and Saturn will always
revel in their holy conjunction
and take delight whenever
the sun and moon
breathlessly play tag
with each other’s shadow
knowing that its light will
shine score years
over a thousand Bethlehems.



Notes:

Selene is the Greek moon goddess.

The recent lunar eclipse was the brightest in both Argentina and Chile.

Heumel and Araucaria are deer and tree
species of Chile.

Hornero and Ceibo are bird and tree species of Argentina