so much depends
upon

the red wheel
barrow

Tiffany! What did you give William at the concert? He's talking nonsense.

Raking leaves--walnut, maple, mulberry, ailanthus--
I saw how it was.

My dog Molly--sweet, skittish, a rescue--
knew the Aussie was the favorite.

She hid his favorite toy in a pile of leaves,
but not well enough--I saved it.

When we were finished, all the leaves at the curb,
the toy was gone, second time the wicked charm.

When you lose something--you lose the place you were
when you first saw it, who you were with, what you were doing.

Fragile things can fall and shatter and when you see them broken
your heart can break a little too--and there's nothing you can do.

I am thinking about broken things, lost things, hidden things.
The leaves have fallen, grown again, fallen again.

My Aussie is gone and the pure clear blue of September sky,
the lofted toy, and Molly too, have all passed.

Today I sit outside, careful with the mug on the chair arm,
even knowing that everything--and I as well--will fall in time.

Awake now
the bed's been made

with wrinkles
in the checkered spread
flattened out

no more calamity
the thunder and rain
gone

away

like magic if magic
was about

loss

Infidelity (noun) \ ˌin-fə-ˈdel-ət-ē \
Betrayal of a vow. Or whispered otherwise, the first time Coyote tasted the salt of my wrist, when lightning seemed to have waited to arrive. Grandmother would call it shadow-marriage, the reminder that paper rings and courthouse oaths cannot bind the spirit. It flowers soft and fragrant, sweet as mesquite after rain.

Myth (noun) \ ˈmith \
A traditional story, especially one natural or social phenomena. Or in another tongue, to be called Inanna while pulling my hair back, as if the goddess herself had crawled from shadow to breathe on his neck. I laugh because I’m no goddess- just a woman with cracked nails and unpaid bills. Still, myth enters flesh like fever, and we burn until the walls drip with story.

Body (noun) \ ˈbä-dē \
The physical vessel. Or in broken voice, the altar on which every promise is tested. My body knows what paper cannot: the way desire bruises, the way grief leaves its thumbprint. Flesh remembers long after the mind has lied itself clean.

Eros (noun) \ ˈer-ˌäs \
Passionate love. Or named differently, a hunger that follows, like a stray through desert parking lots, its tongue bright with need. Eros offers scraps, sometimes nothing, and still I remain, hollow with wanting, certain one day I will eat from his palm. He is no child, he comes like a jackal-god- wild, luminous, not easily bound.

Pulchritude (noun) \ ˈpəl-krə-ˌtüd \
Beauty. Or carried on another breath, the ache. I see him sketching a body not mine, tracing hips that could belong to any girl at the bus stop. I know beauty is a weapon sharpened against me. Still, in his eyes I find fragments- cheekbones my father gave me, hair dark as my mother’s shame- briefly holy, before the mirror cuts again.

Unravel (verb) \ ˌən-ˈra-vəl \
To come undone. Or in another telling, the way every thread between us shivers like a web in prairie wind- fragile, trembling, already near to breaking. Spider Grandmother whispers that love weaves and unweaves in the same breath. The art lies in knowing when to let the strands snap, and when to hold fast, even as your hands begin to bleed.

I didn't win the pageant
because those ******* wouldn't know beauty if it beat them over their 'do's with a porch plank.

My Mediterranean sultriness was not what they were looking for;
them with their politeness and their narrow-lipped smiles holding back the churning reflux that their hearts produce.

They are not human.

As a baby, I was different.
I spoke within minutes, asking for a mirror before milk,
and sharing Portuguese brandy with my father in the library before the month was out.

Let others become checkers at Target.
Let others slave in the shamba under a broiling sun.
They do not have my sculptured cheekbones,
and so must scramble and struggle while I laze under an awning in a cafe,
accepting the dazzled worship of waiters named Jean-Guy.

But look, it hasn't been all roses and honey, just the same.
I stayed barefoot until I was twelve, by choice.
I whipped all the local boys,
and was the terror of the American compound.

I first considered pageants when I was caught siphoning gas from a diplomat's car.
The diplomat took me inside and stood with his back to me,gazing through his wife's sheer curtains at the stucco buildings across the street, and said,

"There are other things
you could be doing."

Soon I was shivering,
my arm dangling boneless over the edge of the dining room table,
smiling at the patterned copper ceiling.
I had still been in command of myself when he lost all his polish and said things to me that were not diplomatic, but rather,
the shouts of a drowning man finding shore.

So anyway,
these ******* looked at me critically, as if I were a steer at auction,
each of them a little complacent fat cask of petty.
I knew I couldn't win,
and my mind turned, as it always has,
toward ways to rain down destruction on my enemies' heads.

I have a little French cahier
that I write down my dreams and plans in.
If the gendarmes ever find it, I'm so ******.

But never mind.
The world of pageants plateaus early--
you're done at twenty, turned loose in the streets to blink big-eyed
at the onrushing autobus that will flatten you dead.
Does this sound like me?
Does it?

I am a girl without an umbrella,
because it never dares to rain on my perfect creamy shoulders.
I own no pearls,
but I have six different divining decks,
one for each day of the week, and then I go to Mass on Sunday.

I didn't win the pageant,
but I escaped to Algiers and met a man.
In the morning, we start out together for Kilimanjaro--
I shall be barefoot, in my element once more,
and Macomber will have some sort of accident and leave everything to me.

Heft those trunks, bush guides,
I forgot my mirror and am keen to retrieve it
so that I may kiss my image as one would Cerberus,
if he were female
and as pretty as me.
___

These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air --
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.