Crying Coyote

Technicalities

2005-04-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

By now I should know
to build a fire
on a distant slope and fan
the flames so sparks
dance to the sky,
wishes on their way to wings,
and warm my bones,
old and getting older,
while the fire dies
low enough to belch these poems
into the world
onto the wind
furled up by a blanket,
not this glowing screen
and clicking keys
and fingers tingling
from the strain.

Mercurial

2005-04-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

All the papers, and my Internet astrologer
warned me about these days,
these uphill climbs to scant reward,
a view of a dull valley and another slope
to climb.
Usually I like things retro,
a round-toed pump, a seamed stocking,
a martini or Manhattan in a wide, chilled glass.
But this Mercury thing
is for the birds,
not even them, poor things,
perched like the rest of us
on a limb about to crack.

Found Poem

2005-04-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

Scrawled on a scrap,
a soiled sliver of sales receipt,
or maybe a slip from a cash machine:

"Remember the picnic..."

Did you?
Was it wonderful? Or plagued
by ants and other bugs, or cancelled
because of rain?

Below, in letters faded to some abstract, foreign
alphabet, spidery and thin,
is that a name? The one you loved?
A secret you couldn't have kept
any better
if you hadn't written
it down.

My Hands

2005-04-09T14:47:00.000-07:00

Wrestle the lid
from a pickle jar,
wring blood
from an orange,
wrench something like a poem
from a language less elegant
than the grunts and howls
of the jungle
before Adam gave names.

A Morning Poem

2005-04-08T14:47:00.000-07:00

Light is the first
one up, oozing
through canyons,
shadow cradles
where alder and cedar
sleep standing
in regiments,
sweating dew sweet,
like a fresh batch
of memories freed
from some grandmother’s attic.

Wake

2005-04-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

Words fall like raindrops,
inconveniently urgent,
unavoidably dense,
battering and pattering
like fingers
on my brain.

I shut them
up
out
into
a tiny metal box,
a talking coffin,
that I drop
overboard,
through the swirling froth
into the cold,
smooth,
salty
water.

Patina

2005-04-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

It starts with the smudge,
a careless caress,
an accidental embrace, trace
evidence of something between magic
and magnetism.

Then comes the darkness, the memory
of breath like tropic winds
painting swirls and smoke
along the delicate curvature
of that which is exposed.

Then the tick-tock, tick-tock time
of no reply, no sign,
no dancing lights from beach
to bower to bed.

Now rediscovery, a gentle nudge,
the polish of thumb on brass,
the breathless agony
of unlocking the genie
and knowing these wishes
must be good.

Water and Wine

2005-04-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

Some days are like water,
cold, clear, and swift, cutting
a path from trickle to cataract
with the uncompromising consistency
of a child's learning rhyme.

But today was like wine,
dark and mysterious, redolent
of fruit and flowers long since gone to dust,
a slow meander from bottle to goblet to lips;
a smoky memory and a passing glance,
a blur of motion just there,
just out of sight.

Power Point

2005-04-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

Now that the old man has died
they will do what they have always done:
candles, water, wafting smoke, the litany
of sainted names sung sweetly
over his cold bones and all the bones
of all the old men
who dared, like him, to talk to God
and man as if each knew
he needed
the other
to be real.

Time Travelling

2005-04-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

Each time that hour
slips away in the darkness, I mourn
the sleep or sex or sentimental journey
that will never happen,
not the way it might have happened
only in that fugitive space
between late and later,
between later and early,
between my cheek and the pillow,
between then and now,
when I write this poem.

Morbid Curiosities

2005-04-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

I checked the news all week, ashamed
of the crowd, the law, the cameras
poised to capture even the subtlest
intimacies, agonies better hushed
than scrawled on poster board and shaken
for emphasis and ratings points
on the nightly circus sideshow.

All week I stole glances, afraid
that looking longer made me
worse for wanting
a peaceful resolution,
a soft good-bye,
a secret, sacred moment
of her own.

I read the headlines, awed
by men who squander a generation
in a faraway desert
riding painted ponies to the unwanted rescue
of the accidental damsel.

I checked the news all week, ashamed
of it all, but most of all
of me
for checking the news all week

Postcard from Fool (No. 3)

2005-04-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

If I stand still
enough, stop my breath
to listen, wind becomes whistle
above a measured cadence, old soldiers,
ghosts of them, anyway, laugh
at this parade of painted, painting women,
sprites and sirens capturing the fort,
making war on gray and boring order.

Pilgrims

2004-04-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

"I'm a wanderer with a background in theology
and a penchant for quirky facts."
—Annie Dillard

I thought a lot about what things mean,
what hidden messages come in the intricate veins
of a maple leaf or the spots on the back of a beetle.
I suffered myself to search for the complex
algorithms left by whatever passed for gods
before people who thought a lot came to be.

Then I followed you down
past the tree with the lights in it,
past the row of Lombardy poplars
that grew outside your bedroom window,
beneath the moon you reached for
(I reached for it, too.)
believing enlightenment
could be so easily grasped,
down the winding path,
through the meadows and woods to the creek
where you rolled up your eyes to see
in a way that was not seeing
and I just took my glasses off
and saw the same
as you.

(Today is Annie Dillard's birthday. If you haven't already done so, please find yourself a copy of her most excellent book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and read it so you, too, can know what it means to see in a way that is not seeing.)

Teenaged Saint

2004-04-29T18:56:00.000-07:00

A little butch, a reputed virgin,
accustomed to the weight of steel
in her fist and across her slender shoulders,
she'd have needed voices in her head
to drown the cacophony of Abercrombies
poised like Harpies to shred
the flesh from difference
and pluck vision from the skulls
of the unusual.

A maid not made
for an ordinary life,
she listened to the voices in her head
(the ones prescription medications
with a litany of unpleasant side-effects
would quiet),
and made herself a saint.

Nota Bene

2004-04-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

the shimmering whispers
of winds dancing among tall trees

the crisp edge
of a page turned for the first time,

the fugitive sparkle
in your lover's eyes just before he smiles,

the creamy caress
of fresh Egyptian cotton

the nutty whiff
of distant shores in your morning cup

the buoyant music
in the laughter of friends

for now
is what we have.

This Longing

2004-04-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

"Take this longing from my tongue..."
— Leonard Cohen

No cup of coffee does
when sweet tea, blond with cream,
brews in the brain
as the cure
for the hollow,
the drop through the floor,
the feeling like someone pulled
the plugs and squeezed
to rush the soul right out of you
like stale air escaping, sending bubbles
to the surface like a letter
written in a language
the reciever cannot read.

Weeping Icons

2004-04-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

It started when Hitler's war
machine used Basques
for targets, bombing the Spanish town.

The media responded
with first-hand accounts
of carnage unimaginable
and images, stark jumbles
of black (for blood)
and white (for flesh).

The uninspired madman,
successfully fat and bored
found fire in the tortured shapes:
a woman, a bull, a twisted horse,
an all-seeing electric eye,

WIth something like that
to remind us
we should remember.

Maybe that's why icons weep.

Cynical Picnic

2004-04-25T15:53:00.000-07:00

Deep in a drowsy, sullen afternoon,
when promised sunlight teased
behind clouds as thick and gray
as a Soviet politician's eyebrows,
we decided on cynics
as the better guests
to a picnic than Romantics,
because they will see the ants
in their mind's eyes and
understand what may happen.

Those others can't imagine
ants or rain or scorching sun
or any other item out of place
in a simple idyll.

In the end, it's better
to have bug spray, umbrellas, and sunscreen
than unhappy companions
on a picnic.

E-nigmas

2004-04-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

The random text arrives:
"chemise similitude oligarchic meadow
suggestible bile wherewith clubroom frizzle."

The poet trapped
in some vile computer bug,
a victim, I'm certain,
of nefarious mathemeticians,
sends me hidden messages, accidental
odes to unforseen
circumstances and unwelcome
enticements, abstract pastiches,
beautiful, beguiling
in their incongruity

Days of Glory

2004-04-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

"Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."
—Wm. Shakespeare, King John (III, iv.)

This day's as good as any, I suppose,
to ponder loss and wonder what is left
when water comes only from a fire hose,
and he who thirsts is still as much bereft
as one who wanders in the desert sand
beneath the sun's most relentless gazes,
confounded by the emptiness of hand
after grasping for the sweet oasis.
What willow will not break if bent too low
by buckets, torrents of tenacious rain
and slide into the slurry, just let go,
dissolve to sticks with minimum of pain?

For us who are made of flexible stuff,
sometimes too much is worse than not enough.

Poetic Justice

2004-04-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

"Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave..."
— William Wordsworth

The news is in.

It isn't good.

Science declares with steely
confidence, the kind of calm
that comes with knowing
the Bible in your pocket
would stop the bullet,
that poets
(surprise)
die young.

Of all the sad ironies
ever scratched on paper
in lead or ink or even blood,
this shines supreme:
perched on the headstone
like Poe's cackling bird,
the last ignominy,
a fat cliche.

The Secret of Flight

2004-04-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

In darker times,
when science was magic
and the devil, not God, dwelled
in the details,
any woman ripe
for burning knew what to pick
from the hillside greens
to make herself
transcendent:
moonkshood, henbane, deadly
nightshade, mandrake, hemlock,
nothing safe or pretty
as the garden rose,
she picked and dried and ground
into oil and spread it thin
across her skin
and spread herself
across the sky, floating
like an angel
toward the moon.

Super Hero

2004-04-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Watching the Steller's Jay
that swoops and splashes
in the backyard birdbath,
his head a set of darkly pointed
angles perched above a body iridescent
and improbably blue,
I dream a hero, stranger
than a bat, whose raucous cry
sends villains scattering
like finches through the dappled
thicket and raises an alarm
to wake even a napping
cat.

Giornata

2004-04-19T15:36:00.000-07:00

Like a Florentine painter,
brown from the Tuscan sun,
I work in the wet, fingers
racing pigment into plaster,
capturing character in color
and line, catching gestures
subtle as shadows at noon
in quickening marble ash.

This day's work
is finally
done.

Forced Confession

2004-04-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Before I knew the simple truth,
that nothing had to hide
beneath the words
like a fleeting blush
on an anxious cheek,
behind the spaces,
like soft, gray mice
gnawing patiently at the wall
between the breaths
like glimmering minnows
darting through still, dark water
I tried too hard
to make the poem
work, not knowing
that the harder it looks
the farther it gets
from me.