Flower moon, frogs chanting in the mist.

Clutched in a verdant shawl of branches,

Apple blossoms sift onto a burbling creek.

Air to air like threads through a loom,

Breeze fabric of woven scents:

Bruised moss, wet earth, and hyacinth.

Abacus of days rattles,

Raindrops delaying dawn

Beneath this green penumbra,

Slumbering primavera dreams.

My mother told me she saw Jesus when she was six

And slipped outside the farmhouse one autumn night to ***.

A bright moon shown as she squatted, but feeling a presence,

She looked up: He stood smiling down at her.

She says this slowly as if turned, still looking

While walking away.

Matins have come and gone,

shadows drift through phosphorescent halls,

Reluctant light clings to wick,

Fluttering farewell to something that survives it.

Mornings emerge, afternoons withdraw.

Distance dressed in faces, chants breath

through shadows to the next moment of mirage,

Or revelation.

I want to go home now.

The sisters have been cordial.

My room these years:

Bed, nightstand, lamp, dresser, table and chair.

Spending my days in the convent garden,

I rise by four

At the footfalls of Sister Anne on the corridor stones.

She rings the small bell,

A brass hummingbird cupped in her hand.

Then Chapel, songs and prayer,

Clandestine before dawn.

Breakfast of Menudo,

The Mexican Sisters hungry doves,

And me, pecking out the hominy.

In an emergency we may whisper,

But only to Mother Superior.

In the garden, I speak

To radish tops and celery cavorting in the breeze.

Wildflowers cluster,

Defining my corner.

I let the sun massage by back

As I ease my fingers through the soil,

Crumbling its fragrance into the air.

Grass bearing seeds bends to earth,

Fireflies mimic brief constellations.

Crickets sing in my bedroom curtains,

Everything begins in silence,

And back into silence it sighs.

Abacus of days rattles,

Like these remaining leaves.

Breeze forgets to breathe,

Calculus of silence.

Shelby speaks with her hands,

Signing for the deaf in church.

Pale palms cupping silence,

Fingers sewing air with sense.

Sculpting phrases, weaving words,

Massaging messages from gestures.

She carries each meaning like a fragile package.

And leans her hands into stained glass shadows,

As if caressing the face of God.

Edgeless night possessed by spirit mists,

And forests made from shadows,

Awakens my inconsolable pulse of longing.

Enchanted, the fragrance of love wanders

The lost village of words.

Unutterable hope, fugitive as the wind,

Enlarges all of darkness where my heart,

That blood-soaked planet, twists in unfathomed remoteness.

Exquisite agony of being

Annexes echoes from beyond the sighs of clouds.

Finally, this fabric of faith

That drapes my life, each thread of desire and belief

Stitched with time, cannot conceal my nakedness,

Empty gestures and stink of lies.

This darkness we named light

Is simple pain and regret.

My skin is my shroud,

Death is illusion,

like love and peace.

It’s my fault I believed in barley,

And dreams conjured from smoke.

This morning I woke up mumbling ‘hopeless’

from my most recent recurring dream.

The one where all the lights go out, and I’m pitching head first

Down some adrenalin crevasse.

I ache but I don’t know why.

Perhaps the slow-witted are most brilliant,

They know the unknowing of God.

I only know that out of the sky I fell

Into a cloud,

It was my name,

All these storms in my blood.

At waking, I step through that scar and my dreams wash away.

The end is in the beginning,

The beginning is the Way.

Darkened locked churches and dripping black branches.

Rain whispers to windows after another Sunday.

People at the laundromat stare at nothing,

Holding magazines like communion cups received empty.

For us who have buried and listened to that hollow sound

Of dirt thrown down on a coffin,

Only memories survive.

Ernesto told me how his sister slit her veins

Lengthwise in Chihuahua.

He woke up to take a *** and found her with roaches in her blood.

She had dropped out of school to take care of his brothers and sisters

Because their parents were working in the U.S.

To pay for their education.

Her hair smelled like gardenias, he said.

Beneath my patiently dying Jacaranda tree,
Shadow-less light reveals exquisite decay.
The remaining cloud of blue blossoms spin faint fragrance
With each flower spiraling onto the grass.  
My eighteen-year-old dog, Pal, died in his sleep last week.  
Today, an arbor specialist informed me of my favorite tree’s approaching death.   This afternoon, an expert oncologist  
Gave me the brutal data of my own notice to vacate. 
So I slept on the chaise lounge beneath a drifting blue shroud
Of flowers and dreamed of nothing.   All I longed for was
Peaceful emptiness closing on silence,
Serene in its elegance, eternal in its timelessness.  
I drifted beneath blue shadows,
Waiting for nothing and wept soundlessly,
Submerging into sleep,
While shadows of shadows shifted
From darkness
Into darker ness.  
Moon rise reawakened me.  
Angel’s Trumpet’s
Intoxicating scent seeped through faint breeze
With iridescent Moon Flower’s lullaby redolence.  
Nightshade’s bouquet of wonderment stirred me,
So I limped back into my silent house. 
But hunger had deserted me, a symptom of my disease,
And I wandered through empty rooms,
Touching and staring at things.  
I stopped and listened: an occasional car passing,
A distant dog barking, my old refrigerator’s compressor
shuddering to a stop.
Surprising myself, I longed for fire,
Not the flames that consume, but the flames that imbue,
And so went out,
Not to drink, because I was already oddly drunk.  
I felt like I might levitate
At any moment
And glided through empty streets,
Convertible top-down, caressed by ineffable  
Moonlight, benumbed and numbing still,
Intent on feeling again.