Man


I don’t know if I am a practical person.

I don’t obsess over the uses of a watch.
It’s enough that it tick and the hands
move forward, even if I don’t.

When my dog paces in front of the door
I know I must walk him.  When he paws
my lap, I must feed him. He knows himself.

Today, I took him to the beach and
let him romp the shore, content like him,
to not know why the tides moves forward.

The tides are tireless and they go up and down
endlessly with a purpose  I’m not privy to.
My winding down bones know to let things be.

Today, the current matters. Tomorrow it won’t.
All that matters, this moment, is that my dog
returns the stick I’ve thrown and not run away.

Yet, nothing we accomplished in that time,
in all its impracticability, will matter
to all this ceaseless renewal all around.

Tomorrow the future will pull me from
my past even if my feet  don’t move,
even if my ashes are urned

I come to the creek path near my house, the one my wife doesn’t like me to walk alone, for fear I might fall.

I see mountain bikes riding through, a leashed  triplets of dogs of Goldilock sizes their caregiver behind, struggling to contain their strides.

My husky-chi barks at them, underneath a low growl  in the back of  his throat threatens to come out.  

He pulls me to the path. I pull him back.  

The evening concert of cicadas and toads in the overgrown retention pond between is just starting its clicks and croaks.  


Hours  later, on my beast’s last brief walk of the night, while most life is asleep and the path is still dangerous, I hear their deafening crescendo.

The creek is a gray smear cutting through the golden moon, the canopies of the night.  


Only the streetlights, the head lamps of a car turning the corner, show me the way home— but I think, know, only want the path.

A chill rolls in, so to the first drops of  predicted rain, of  the morning  fog and mist to come.

I unleash my dog and he vanishes into the path.  I hear the splash of water, the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves that lets me know he had crossed to the other side.  

There’s a small squeal, two long beats, and with it, the concert stops, then restarts in a softer refrain.  

My  beast proudly returns, dropping a field mouse at my feet.  I am disgusted, but being gracious, I pat my dog’s brindle head, tell him he’s a good boy. This is his nature and I am helpless to restrain it.

I stuff the creature into a dog waste bag, think of walking to the path, just to where the concrete and forest separate, and pitching it as far as I can, but then realize my dog would just retrieve it again.          

My dog snuggles against my leg. I put the mouse in my pocket, pet my dog’s heaving stomach.  

The path calls him- calls me. I clip the leash to his harness, prepare for him to tug me onto the path.  

Instead, he spins around without a snarl,  and starts to follow the scent trail of home, pulling until the leash tells him that I want to say.

I sit down at the end of the concrete path, my dog obeying my motion, but facing home. My fingers create a lazy trail in the muddy earth.  

When it’s deep enough for a small grave, I drop the mouse in, covering the hole over quickly before my dog notices the rejected offering— the present I can not keep or even explain to my waiting wife.  

A sadness wells in me- not for the mouse but for steps I will never take- the knowledge that I will fall and never get back home- the knowledge that I will not know the wild path forward, just the hard, white one behind.

My grandmother was my oracle,
speaking stained insights in a Spanish
I hardly understood at the time.  

My offerings were small but true:
kisses, hugs, “I love you” on paper scraps
translated by my mother for her knowing.

It was as if I had written them in blood and
it became a forever tattoo of her heart,  
a pumping cross, always giving and forgiving.

The yield was quarters, dimes, pennies
doled out from a repurposed wide-mouth
banderilla jar for the corner candy store tour.

She lived in a temple of rust seeping down walls, paint cracks, peeling checkerboard linoleum,
chipped ceramics, relics broken and glued back-

an unsanctified housing of brittle bones and
striations of hands and feet, sweet blood,
passed from thirteenth child to second son.

As my Spanish improved I was able to praise
the oracle with all the many spoken and
scribbled ways of Latin gratitude and adoration

under the watchful eye of my mother and
the care of twelve others who still lived
within the realm of her unwritten wisdom.  

When her vision stopped and her blood
no longer flowed she was relocated with
all solemnity to rest under a Boricua tree.

My mother doled out her oracular inheritance
whenever I stumbled, wandered, questioned,
encouraging me to write it all down.

Now, she is mere dust in the echoing wind
and I am a childless prophet who appreciates
all the oracles that came before my time.

The trick is to love life,
even when you have
no stomach for it-

even when your life
crumbles to burnt paper
in your hands-

your throat choking in its ashes,
embers turned tearing diamonds,
weighing you down in grief’s obesity.

“How can a body withstand this?”
you will ask, cradling your face
in your palms- your ordinary face

now, no dark smile, no deep black eyes,
just your ”yes, yes, ” uttering in
the rebirthing dawn “I will love you, again.”

After his deep illness
was over he laid
his body on hers—
the length of his body on hers—
all the sleepings, awakenings,
fights, teacup and coffee mornings,
their talks about everything and nothing,
the plummets, the joyous-awkward silences—

and with a tear, she beared his weight—
until it was gone.

This old house painted in faded  pride
knows me well.  I did not learn to walk here,
but I did learn to leap- and do it mightily.

The old dishes have been broken or thrown away,
replaced by new ones with new owners. The taps
stiff with old age and rust, surely have been replaced.

The comfortable chairs, the linoleum, the tile,
the **** rugs, the step up altar where my
mother was married, are probably leveled flat.

I can only see your outside and imagine your
many renovations in the sawdust of time,  
atticless, cribless,  old beds churning  to new beds.

While I lived there, you were a good soul
who kindly accepted all bidding, and I can see, donated your good bones to other’s  futures.

Other places I have lived have been less generous, tumbling into disarray, illness,  nature’s destruction before I could even build a future in them.  

I can feel the ill winds blow and know that this new abode will be more of the same, filled with unfated things never settling down into their rightful places.

I thank you, dear old thing, for your graceful love.

The pain is gone and
I am ready to write about
everything beyond the fear,

ready to bite into the
muscle and bone
of the world,

to put away the dagger phrase,
all the losses of my life,
ready to live in hope’s recesses.

I am poet enough to
make you taste
this hidden fruit,

see beyond all
the sutured sunsets
of existence.

It will not be all
kisses and music, but  
it will be terribly beautiful!