When I was younger, one of my co-workers
was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.
She was just always there,
a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--
some sort of salad.
She was just an ample,
stationary emplacement
as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin
to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties
still rumbling around Havana,
something you'd smile at
but not feel had anything to do with you.
She wore a cross that rested on her *****,
like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis.

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.
"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce.
I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.
What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather
blood and bone and breath
breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.
There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,
just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.
British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs
in grainy archive footage
as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing.
"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered.

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.
I still think of that day at the hospice, though
and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,
like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,
at that wind-down hour.
He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,
but though we protest that we were only in the middle,
we want to see how it ends
he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,
"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

In the day of the fever,
at the end of the war,
you'll take up my hand and I'll give up my place--
my customary place--
in the hall, on the floor,

to go riding with you.
Remember the days when willows leaned low
over the canal, where we girls used to go?
And oh, the things we liked to do.
But you, My Love, you already know.

In those days when the voices were sweet in my head,
the willows leaned low, as if putting babies to bed;
there were no air raids,
no rubble, cracked and sharp-edged--
just mama's little angels passed out in the hedge.

So now...what, My Pet?
Kisses to catch up on?
Rooms to let?
Do you want to love me slow and easy?
I'll take all I can get, I'm not so far gone
that I would say no to that.

In the fields at the far end
of the old road to town,
you can see the hulk of the Junker
that the home guard shot down.
I just like to think that it fell
from its bedding of clouds
like a baby...My Baby...
where the willows lean down.

I am now a natural gem,
A mix of murk and clear,
Different colors or shades.

I am now a healed piece of earth,
A patch of glow over the ashes of disease,
Diverse as I breathe in fresh air.

champagne broken dreams
clot yesterday’s bleak journal
i’m done with bleeding

The sorrow did not arrive with thunder,
it crept, a slow suffocation,
until the chest forgot how to rise,
until the veins pulsed only with silence.

It was not merely pain,
but a drowning,
each breath dragged through glass,
each thought heavier than stone.

Sleep gave no refuge,
dreams became ruins,
and waking was worse,
a return to a world stripped of color,
a place where even hope was ash.

This was sadness at its cruelest,
a weight too vast for flesh,
too sharp for memory,
a darkness so complete
it left the soul hollow,
aching, and numb all at once.

I teach your name to the breath of words,
to the folds of dusk, to the quiet cups of morning
then I turn inward to who we are beneath the surface of silence.
no thread of certainty but rhythmic pulses I feel  
the horizon’s glow is fading
I craft love from the certainty of unspoken fears 
I etch poetry into the air to sooth my eyes from absence