I sprout like the potato in its greedy gloom.
Yowl like the black cat howling with its rowdy need.
Shut up! What I want is to be
saved like the lucky fuck
when the gypsies arrive in the nick,
their bandoneónes and violins
releasing the prisoners of the brain’s Bastille!
Why not? I’m for emotions running amok tonight,
breaking china and getting fucked.
I’m a regular Notre Dame, I tell you.
Little braindoors and gargoyled gutters,
and the frothy mob with their machetes and clubs
wild about me, I tell you,
positively screaming blood.
Night Madness Poem
There’s a poem in my head
like too many cups of coffee.
A pea under twenty eiderdowns.
A sadness in my heart like stone.
A telephone. And always my
night madness that outs like bats
across this Texas sky.
I’m the crazy lady they warned you about.
The she of rumor talked about—
and worse, who talks.
It’s no secret.
I’m here. Under a circle of light.
The light always on, resisting a glass,
an easy cigar. The kind
who reels the twilight sky.
Swoop circling.
I’m witch woman high
on tobacco and holy water.
I’m a woman delighted with her disasters.
They give me something to do.
A profession of sorts.
Keeps me industrious
and of some serviceable use.
In dreams the origami of the brain
opens like a fist, a pomegranate,
an expensive geometry.
Not true.
I haven’t a clue
why I’m rumpled tonight.
Choose your weapon.
Mine—the telephone, my tongue.
Both black as a gun.
I have the magic of words,
the power to charm and kill at will.
To kill myself or to aim haphazardly.
And kill you.
I Don’t Like Being in Love
Not like this. Not tonight,
a white stone. When you’re 36
and seething like sixteen
next to the telephone,
and you don’t know where.
And worse—with whom?
I don’t care for this fruit. This
Mexican love hidden in the boot.
This knotted braid. Birthcord buried
beneath the knuckle of the heart.
Cat at the window scratching at
the windswept moon
scurrying along, scurrying along.
Trees rattling. Screen
doors banging raspy.
Brain a whorl of swirling
fish. Oh, not like this.
Not this.
Amorcito Corazón
Ya no eres
mi amorcito
¿verdad?
Ya lo supe.
Ya lo sé.
Fuiste
y ya no eres.
Fuimos
y se acabó.
¿Cómo les diría?
¿Cómo se explica?
Te conocí
¿y ahora?
no.
A Little Grief Like Gouache
Without a ping
Or pang or knuckle rap or
Notion
Tobacco-stained
How do you do
Thrum without a name
Droopy as a sunflower
Delinquent as a god
Full of riotous ache and goofy
A Van Gogh ocher
Drizzled did and giddy
Left me
Light-tippled dizzy
Fled
Full Moon and You’re Not Here
Useless moon,
too beautiful to waste.
But you, my Cinderella,
have the midnight curfew,
a son waiting to be picked up from his den meeting,
and the fractured marriage weighing on your head
like a crown of thorns.
Oh my beauty,
it’s not polite
to keep me waiting.
To send me reeling into a spiral
and then to say good night.
I smoke a cigar,
play a tango,
gulp my gin and tonic.
Goddamn you.
Full moon and you’re not here.
I take off the silk slip,
the silver bangles.
You’re in love with my mind.
But sometimes, sweetheart,
a woman needs a man
who loves her ass.
My Friend Turns Beautiful Before My Eyes
Sir Walter Raleigh,
dimity and damask,
rococo and arabesque,
batiste and challis,
handkerchief and crumpled glove.
Love, I don’t know
how you suddenly grew lovely,
why I never noticed last
summer, nor the summers before
when the hard sun died
anything before it bloomed.
My seasonal lovers have come and gone.
And you were there, friend,
cold as porcelain,
mute as the milk moon.
I was afraid of you then.
Did you notice
I never hovered
in the cab of your pickup
when we good-byed,
when the pecan trees
rustled and shushed.
A pink lantern burning
patient on my porch.
Nipped kiss. Screen door
slammed. I danced
barefoot with the cat
when I was alone.
Glass of wine,
candle, my brush
across my hair a hundred
times. And now,
here you are.
Little asterisk, little
How-I-wonder-what-you-are
upon my linen.
Incest! Error!
My head split in two—
half of me preening its feathers
the other watching from
a stool and sneering—
Fool!
Perras
I can’t imagine that goofy white woman
with you. Her pink skin on your dark.
Your tongue on hers. I can’t
imagine without laughing.
Who would’ve thought.
Not her ex-boyfriend—
your good ol’ ex-favorite best buddy,
the one you swore was thicker than kin,
blood white brother, friend—
who wants to slit you open like a pig
and I don’t blame him.
Isn’t it funny.
He acting Mexican.
You acting white.
I can’t imagine this woman.
Nor your white ex-wife. Nor any
of those you’ve hugged and held,
so foreign from the country we shared.
Damn. Where’s your respect?
You could’ve used a little imagination.
Picked someone I didn’t know. Or at least,
a bitch more to my liking.
Unos Cuantos Piquetitos
Here—the bull
’s eye of my heart,
snappy red
flag against bone
white page.
Here, that electrical
cord—my jugular.
Looking forward to the
guillotine precision.
Here, the easy wrists.
Quick, neat, convenient.
For your comic amusement,
that Dodo, my womb,
pinched
from disuse.
And here, gentlemen, ladies!
mis palabras.
With Lorenzo at the Center of the Universe, el Zócalo, Mexico City
We had to cross the street twice
because of rats. But there it was.
The zócalo at night and la Calle de la Moneda
like a dream out of Canaletto. Forget
Canaletto. This was real.
And you were there, Lorenzo.
The cathedral smoky-eyed and still
rising like a pyramid after all
these centuries. You named the four
holy centers—Amecameca, Tepeyac, and two
others I can’t remember. I remember you,
querida flecha, and how all the words I knew
left me. The ones in English and the few
in Spanish too.
This is the center of the universe,
I said and meant it. This is eternity.
This moment. Now. And love,
that wisp of copal that scared the hell
out of you when I mentioned it,
love is eternal, though
what eternity has to do with tomorrow,
I don’t know. Understand?
I’m not sure you followed me.
Not now, not then. But I know
what I felt when I put my hand
on your heart, and there was that kiss,
just that, from the center of the universe.
Or at least my universe.
Lorenzo, is the center of the universe
always so lonely at night and so
crowded in the day? Earlier
I’d been birthed from the earth
when the metro bust loose at noon.
Stumbled up the steps over Bic pens
embroidered with Batman logos, red
extension cords, vinyl wallets, velveteen
roses, pumpkin seed vendors, brilliant
masons looking for work. I remember the boy
with the burnt foot carried by his mother,
the smell of meat frying, a Styrofoam
plate sticky with grease.
At night we fled
the racket of Garibaldi and mariachi
chasing cars down Avenida Lázaro Cárdenas
for their next meal. At La Hermosa Hortensia,
lights bright as an ice cream parlor,
faces sweaty and creased with grief.
My first pulque warm and frothy like semen.
On the last evening we said good-bye
along two streets named after rivers. I
fumbled with the story of Borges and his Delia.
When we meet again beside what river?
But this was no poem. Only mosquitoes
biting like hell and a good-bye
kiss like a mosquito bite that left
me mad for hours. After all,
hadn’t it taken centuries for us
to meet at the center of the universe
and consummate a kiss?
Lorenzo, I forget what’s real.
I mix up the details of what happened
with what I witnessed inside my
universe. Is it like that for you?
But I thought for a moment, I really did,
that a kiss could be a universe.
Or sex. Or love, that old shoe. See.
Still hopeless. Still writing poems
for pretty men. Half of me alive
again. The other shouting from the sidelines,
Sit down, clown.
Ah, Lorenzo, I’m a fool.
Eternity or bust. That’s how it is with me.
Even if eternity is simply one kiss,
one night, one moment. And if love isn’t
eternal, what’s the point?
If I knew the words I’d explain
how a man loves a woman before love
and how he loves her after
is never the same. How the two halves split
and can’t be put back whole again.
Isn’t it a shame?
You named the holy centers but forgot
one—the heart. Said every
time you’d pass this zócalo
you’d think of me and that kiss
from the center of the universe.
I remember you, Lorenzo. See
this zócalo? Remember me.
I Awake in the Middle of the Night and Wonder If You’ve Been Taken
At any moment, the soldiers could arrive.
At any given second, Sarajevo could surrender.
One could give up as well the nuisance of surviving.
At any moment, a precise second might claim you.
At any decisive point, God might not give a damn.
You’re there, in that city. You don’t count. You’re not history.
In my own bed of down and vintage linen,
beside an altar of Buddhas and Madres Dolorosas
and lace and Storyville mirrors,
I’m here. Awake from the bad dream.
I’m a woman like you.
I don’t count either.
Not a thing I say.
Not a thing I do.
Small Madness
I swear, I will not
let go to these
small madnesses
at two a.m. I will not
be manic as a
Marilyn Monroe
seeking her savior-
executioner. I will not
love like heroin,
be martyr of extreme self-
inflicted grief, nor
romance myself into a
tired “Fin.”
This I swear this near
year of my life’s end,
my life dangling,
a live wire, some
fierce and likely
trick, a Mexico City fire-
eater’s deep and desperate
breath. I swear,
life of mine, thick as a
foreign coin, beautiful
as money and as brutal,
you are my first allegiance.
I have no other lover.
I press my mouth to yours,
my faithful wife-beater,
and stifle this mariachi
howl.
Heart, My Lovely Hobo
Heart, my lovely hobo, you
remember, then, that afternoon in Venice
when all the pigeons rose flooding the piazza
like a vaulted ceiling. That was you
and you alone who grinned.
Fat as an oyster,
pulpy as a plum,
raw, exposed, naive,
dumb. As if love
could be curbed, and grace
could save you from the daily beatings.
Those blue jewels of flowers in the arbor
that the bees loved. Oh, there’ll be other
flowers, a cat maybe beside the bougainvillea,
a little boat with flags glittering in the harbor
to make you laugh,
to make you spiral once more.
Not this throbbing.
This.
I Am on My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For
Your name doesn’t matter.
I loved you.
We loved.
The years
I waited
by the river for your pickup
truck to find me. Footprints
scattered in the yellow sand.
Husband, mother-
in-law, kids wondering
where I’d gone.
You wouldn’t
the years I begged. Would
the years I wouldn’t. Only
one of us had sense at a time.
I won’t see you again.
I guess life presents you
choices and you choose. Smarter
over the years. Oh smarter.
The sensible thing smarting
&
nbsp; over the years, the sensible
thing to excess, I guess.
My life—deed I have
done to artistic extreme—I
drag you with me. Must wake
early. Ride north tomorrow.
Send you off. Are you fine?
I think of you often, friend,
and fondly.
Cloud
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadow of a cloud crossing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were a sky without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line.
And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle. You were the spidery María tattooed on the hairless arm of a boy in downtown Houston. You were the rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueberries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.
And when you opened your wings to wind, across the punchedtin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.
Tú Que Sabes de Amor
for Ito Romo
You come from that country
where the bitter is more bitter
and the sweet, sweeter.
You come from that town split