1    
I eat thistles to do away with
my hunger for green life,

capturing in pixel ****** what
my prying eyes can not evade.

The forest offers no inheritance,
every branch has its best name


                          2
I wish to learn and know the work
songs of smaller, silent things,

blend not into the shrubs but rocks,
the mutes of this dry and dying land,

join the procession of farmers mourning
the lost voice of closeness to the earth.

                          3
These hands that  no longer clasp or
knead are but the repeated gestures

of an uvulating tongue that knows
that the egg in a pool of oil will

yield a dry dough of double thistles
in the purple slanted sunsets to come.

I fall back into the comfort of our once existence.
every time the  other sibs cry out your absence
in black texts- how they MISS YOU SO MUCH.
And yet, your stories are my memories.
In their writing down I am there with you, so much.
There with you -mom- in that old faded yellow Chevrolet
traveling the black top of highways and backroads-
you in the driver seat until it was my turn-
the white lines coding out our secret message-
GO- LET US KEEP GOING.

I found the city a pitiless thing.
It smelled of steel, concrete and the bay.
I use to sit on the sea wall that edged
my old college condo, the one I shared
with a black cat, and sing Otis Redding-
skipping the whistling part of his song
because my lips could never purse the
right tune- and watch the tide roll in
catching rainbows in the sun’s glint.

It  was the inhabitants I couldn’t take,
all rude and loud, smelling of salt
and stale fish scales and crab shells,
so snared in tiny toils, frail and idle,
their itching needs thirsty and *****.  
I lost my wonder in the traffic dust,
the night haze and starless nights.
I avoided touching that life less
it should defile me in its lost light,
night terrors and phantasms.

Then, in the small church in
the out of the way corner,
I found her, a strange vision
trembling, ready to emerge
just past the reach of my mind
and the urge of my will. She existed
beyond all jaded aims and
drab  dissemblements,
something unfounded, unbuilt
but ready, waiting to be built on.

On my birthday she bought me
a lounge chair to grace my
unfurnished balcony, on the
very day I purchased my own.
And there we sat (my desire),
watching the city unseal itself
across from me in a sweltering love,
constantly revealed, being
forever built and rebuilt on
in pain and unfathomable will.

The ramshackled town falls quiet
to the artist’s eye in the retreating light.
The old houses will truce their aged lumber,
antiquity, for the invading dark beauty of his creation.

He lived here once as a boy, in the sadness of his angels,
held hostage (he thought), by the catechism of  church
and steeple, becoming  a refugee from sawdust and faith,
believing being an exile will open his eyes to the truth.

He had returned from his long sojourn in the East
after seeing and experiencing the freedom of the world,
determined to posses this tract, once green space,the mountain beyond— to surrender it all, to the truth he  knew.


The canvas submitted to his violence.  The brushes
knew again, the small wars between mind and nature.
The hunger, the hunger, the hunger of eternal creation  
that rises from the wanderlust in every artist and poet.    

He did not listen to their prayers for mercy.
He wailed in his starvation “Come! Come!”
The shades of town, mountain, flower, deer, came.
And, as he must, he destroyed and devoured it all.

Time’s diminishments adds its own beauty
in gratitude for moments that are not ours:

the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroom
and silently witnesses her comb her hair,

later listens to her snore, transferring to
them the transient lyrics of the song of life-

the lines that survive  the well of nights,
the rose thorns to bloom in their mouths

until it’s stamped in their bodies—
this trapped time to live all over again.

My mother’s name is lost
to everyone beyond her children.

“She was beautiful.
What was her name?”,
others would say to me  
when shown her image
hanging silently on the wall.

In the chanting of it—their wind
echoes my death back in a cloud
of disinterested kindness
and muttered miseries.
  
They know only their faces,  
the renamed mountains and rivers,
the new language of their exile.

Not that—
she was wind born—
knew her better name.

In that living moment
the bullet goes right by me—
and in between all my prayers
and my eternal gratitude —
the child behind me dies.  
“Why did it  spare
me and not him?”,
I think over and over again—
counting the lifetime of wishes
that now will never
come true for him.—

It goes right by me—
penetrating present and future—
—dreams and nightmares—
I will sleep an hour more tonight—
—tomorrow, an hour less—
less—less until the end of my lifeline.
Out of all the others who’ve died
I will remember this child— little boy
in the depth of my veins and
the light rain that continuously falls—
even as the bullet goes by and bye.—
pass the fence to his grave.—

The bullet goes by me—
cutting through my words—
my sad attempt of an elegy for him—
all the grief that my soul strives to forget—
It goes right by me—
chance— unsmiling me for a lifetime.—