An assignment

"The lady's eyes met mine, / And held them, knowing / Very well what it was all / About." -- Gary Soto, "Oranges"

"Man is not a god, that's what you said / [. . .] I never knew a man who loved the world as much as you, / And that love was the last thing to let go." -- Gjertrud Schnackenberg, "Walking Home"

"Love what you touch, / and you will touch wisely" -- Rita Dove, "For Sophie Who'll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000"

--- ---

Another poem,
another notch on my office-sheet
bookmark. But

this one reminds me of
frailty
of life, of death and
clinging to moments,
living through actions and
words each day,
knowing the both devastating
and unsurpassable strength of
love.

This one reminds me of
youth,
and this imperfect, unkempt
world which we pass on,
which I save gingerly,
like a frail flower cupped in my hands,
to show to my
children.

And this one reminds me of
happiness,
tenderness in chasing dreams,
that shock, disbelief
when
they are realized.
And lastly, of course--
of course--
romance.

It's all here,
found out,
exposed--
harshly sometimes. These
feverish minds,
part mine, part yours.

Meditation

[Composed vocally while traveling the salty marshes of western Utah.]

--- ---

I feel it,
this power,
binding, pervasive.
it is real,
it is love.

I don't know who I am addressing:
it may be you, or me, or us, or it.
I realize that my life is facilitated
by countless unnamed others:
scientists, laborers, doctors, philanthropists,
inventors, farmers, activists.

I feel I am an individual,
but I am not distinct.
I am unique,
but I am not whole--

I am part.
We are all part.
And only together
are we

whole.

God is good

Papa died Sunday, and I understood.
All dead white boys say, "God is good."
White tongues hang out, "God is good."
-- Sam Beam of Iron and Wine, "Sodom, South Georgia"


Folk music and new snow,
warm heater vents.
Driving past that office building
(which I both despise and strangely love)
to visit an old friend--
a good friend--
a continent away from his home.

I pass schools and stores, gas stations.
Few cars on the road.
Halfway there I park in a cemetery.
Some graves are decorated with tiny lights,
glowing yellow--
determined beacons of the afterlife.

I think of mortality,
higher powers and purposes,
opportunities and how to squeeze this wondrous world
for each one--
how we must earn them.

I cry, not for death, loss or stagnation,
but for the unknown, unimaginable
walkways that lie broken and perfect and endless
between tonight's empty black skies
and these lighted plots.

Seeing sentences

I see a big beautiful world.
I see people.

I see pain, heartache, hate and sorrow.
I see religion and belief, pacifists and zealots.
I see clouds moving like ocean waves over cold little desolate valleys.
I see daily routines.
I see aimless wandering.
I see comfort, but also complacence.
I see compassion and hope, people dreaming without regard for practicality or limit.
I see a little piece of me in everyone.
I see God in everything.
I see love,

it's as lucid
as a white full moon coming up
out of the black sea.

The view

It's interesting that I get to sit here in an office building
so early in the morning
and stare up at a massive snowcovered mountain.
This mountain is nearly 12,000 feet tall;
I can see its peak through my little window.
It's brilliant and white and has
sloping jagged shadows strewn across it.
The streets next to me are busy, swarmed with cars.
The houses on the hill have frozen snow in the
nooks and crevices of their rooftops.

My heart sometimes feels swollen and bruised and it aches.
It makes me think of slapmarks,
or pinkeye,
or Indian burns--
something that leaves red where it shouldn't be.

That's how my heart feels sometimes.

Stalemate

I prefer how it was before:
carefree, uncomplicated,
happy.
But a single all-night conversation,
a confession,
burrowed our quaint little dreamland
into a sinkhole.

I chose communication, catharsis,
knowing full well the outcome,
and now we lay back to back,
both our faces wet,
haunted so much by the present
that the joys of the past
seem like the faded sheets under us,
worn thin and forgotten,
unimportant for the
weight pressing down on them.

Library night

For my 291 class that I took online, one of the assignments asked that I write a sonnet. So in ten minutes, I whipped up the beauty that you see below.

Rhyme scheme is abba cddc effe gg, which is one of the forms Wyatt used--technically English (Shakespearean), but really kind of a mix between the English and Italian (Petrarchan).

--- ---

The moon is smiling shyly overhead
like Joyce's shell half-buried on the shore.
I study words, but she whom I adore
is waiting there, half-covered on our bed.

Imprisoned in this building made of glass
and brick and filled with books and endless thought,
wishing I were somewhere I am not,
instead of reading pages for a class.

She waits there patiently, so sleepless, still--
and when I crack the door she'll welcome me
with the warmth of arms and face and body--
but only if I leave this place. I will.

Biking, soundless moonlight searing bright,
I ride toward home to steal her from the night.

Lying in beds

Tonight I put my hand on your face
as you drifted to sleep--
it covered nearly all of it.
I felt your pulse pushing softly near my thumb,
your cheek warm and bare
against my hand and fingers,
our skin traced in faint lines and marked from
the slow years,
but plain and naked the way we were made.

And it came to me,
how all these other bodies
lie in beds with faces exposed,
yet my hand is on yours,
touching the lines where you smile,
feeling your heart settling slowly,
watching shut eyes dream.

So I put my other palm against my own face and
held it there,
connected us with my hands.
I felt the pricks of wispy auburn hairs
sprouting over my cheek,
as warm as yours.

I thought of the many
other things that try to connect us:
waves and wires and digits,
devices and lenses that capture us,
transmit things through blank screens,
fuel to relocate us;
how these things are powerless
and trivial--
they are not like two faces, bodies, hearts and lives
connected by two hands
in the dark space of night.

Divorce (or small dark scars framed in white)

I miss the sounds of children,
their warm hands slapping against my cinderblock walls,
the same walls that caught their gentle breaths,
sheltered them asleep at night;
and heard their voices--
the way some deepened and boomed,
while others grew tender and lovely.

I miss the midnight pool lights,
lit up secretly during summer,
their droning neon buzz and the parade of moths
that continually danced in the pale lamplight,
the quiet laughter and excited splashes,
the way the lights turned off abruptly
from the inside once discovered on.

I miss the cavalier pursuits of youth
under the stoic gaze of adulthood,
the unconcerned and the desperate
trying to balance themselves within my walls,
in a house where love and joy
made occasional tidal bursts
instead of steady even flows.

I miss the lost looks of the parents,
staring at their reflections
in the bedroom mirrors, the bathroom vanity--
I watched them age,
wrinkles widening, greying hairs lengthening;
I watched their eyes darken into hard black pinpoints,
their lips pursed tight together
as they came and went
and passed each other wordlessly at night.

I miss the hollow hole--unrepaired for years--
hammered through my back bedroom door by an angry fist
and a rough cry of shock and defeat;
all that sleeping in two separate beds,
two separate rooms when I wished it were one;
and the dinnertable quarrels around a checkbook,
because it was all the conversation they ever had.

I miss the moving men,
who carelessly scraped paint from my doorway
with the edges of the old chestnut dresser
(the one with the burnt black incense circle),
making small dark scars, framed in white;
the look of the bare orange kitchen tile,
those once-crowded countertops useless,
all closets empty, walls and carpets immaculate:
abandoned.

I miss those same voices I once loved,
so vacant, so feeble and hollow now,
mechanically announcing quick arrivals and quicker exits
(ephemeral, the way a child can become an adult
and then quickly pace down these old familiar hallways
after so many years).

I miss the sounds of their engines
as they drove away,
separate cars into separate worlds.
The lifeless bonds that
time and remembrance forged between us all
forgotten,
left with a SOLD sign like a headstone
and a small stack of flyers
strewn across the naked kitchen countertops.

Lit paper lanterns

My knees up at my chest,
under striped rows of
turquoise and cherry and hazy emerald.
Our reflections hover on
the curved charcoal screen that faces the bed:
Amy in her rosecolored robe, book open,
belly full; and there I am,
knees up, watching the blank television
like we're a scene:
where romantics lie on the bed in bathrobes
and they read and smile and love, and nothing
is wrong and their bare feet touch barely
under the striped Spanish blanket.
Lamps on either nightstand shine together;
they light the string of olive paper lanterns overhead,
illuminating the pages in our books with silhouettes
of bamboo stalks and leaves and branches.
And the tapestries behind and above us stretch and hang down
like stomachs, like a small child is lying in each one--
like pushing up round and warm under a quilt
where hands rest softly and silently,
and that lump groans and stirs and makes subtle movements--
a Herculean youth.

And I stare straight at the slanted screen,
at our two or three shapes connected by lit paper lanterns.

From the steps at the one-room schoolhouse

Lambs graze the garden-green hillside;
they bleat and call and share warmth with their woolen necks,
and the bells around them clack--hollow, harmonically.
The forest smells of wet newfallen needles,
clumped in little mounds under the pines;
a late-afternoon cold soaks in with the shadows.

The preacher's lips touch gently the microphone.
He is pleased but dutiful; he speaks quietly,
hints of how to defy time with powers more sincere.
Celebratory music guides single-file walks.
There are pledges of union and love,
a prolonged kiss, arms in the air, leaps from the stage.

But with their backs to me, crouched behind it all I sit,
admire the life that lifts its eyes skyward
from the damp earth--like persistent wildflowers,
that when hewn down, push up again
from roots sown in hidden pockets underground--
where some source of love resides.

Because pronouncements and circles and titles
are just symbols, outward appearance;
they are ceremony, ritual, leaps from a stage.
And the provenance of it all
rests in those souls--thriving under skin, pulsing of blood,
inexplicably coursing chemicals through synapses:

the things that can't be recorded,
the sound of bells, barely ringing in the winter,
round the necks of hillside sheep.

The christening

Update: This poem placed first in Artella's January 2007 Poetic Idol competition.

--- ---

This morning I rode home
through falling leaves and fluttering snow,
with crimson forearms and a drunkard's cheeks.
The clouds hung in black quilted cotton overhead,
dirty and heavy and close.

Stormwater stole up from the streets in a haze--
a low-lying steamy fog,
a locomotive apparition without an engine--
heated by the still-lit streetlamps
in the dim morning twilight.

Droplets fell from the trees on my face,
and brittle grains of snow,
like the white gypsum sands of New Mexico,
settled on my bare arms and I slapped at them,
stung them with wet palmprints.

But high overhead, far above me in the west,
a small clearing lay open in the sapphire sky,
and a star shone down on that sleeping city
(where industry often outshines everything):
Sirius, star-king of the night,
muzzle of the great dog.

And on his right I saw his master,
an unmistakable shape, those stars I knew by name:
Orion,
the shaman, the peaceful warrior,
man of the mountains and of animals,
kin of Enkidu.

That celestial figure,
an arrangement so familiar to my love.
The name we had discussed,
that I had thought of as a boy,
that we had agreed upon--

because at home, her belly is
swollen like those hanging clouds,
filled and ready to burst, to release.
And the small boy within--
he is at once ours,
growing, fantastic, mythological,
and yet still one and the same
with that watcher in the sky.

Doll at the supermarket

I went to the supermarket today
to find the doll my daughter had lost.
The clerk in guest services searched
through those unmarked bins of unclaimed items,
but returned to me with only,
"I'm sorry," and/or
"Someone must have taken it."

It's not that my daughter will be much distraught,
or even remember for that matter--
it's just that now I can't be her hero,
bearing the spoils of a victorious crusade.

My sister said

[This was selected to be read at BYU's September 11th 5th Anniversary Commemorative Service remembrance (is the name really that long?) on 09/11/06. 13 poems were selected overall, but only two of those were selected to be read. Just thought I'd boast.]

If you had seen it, she said,
you'd have cried--
how the sun is blotted out
and everyone wears a mask.
They gave me one, but I gave it up to the couple
standing near the mound of brick and glass.

I did see it, I said,
all over television.
We watched it for hours at work,
didn't do a thing, because we couldn't--
just stared at the tumbling images
over and over, all day long,
sitting in shock--everyone cried, made phone calls.

Everything's a mess, she said,
you can't get anywhere.
None of the phones work,
(except payphones like this).
And people search your face as they pass;
sometimes they walk past again, just to make sure.

Everyone's so glad you're safe, I said,
Can you imagine? Could you ever imagine?

Yes, she said,
I can imagine.
And we should be thankful for life—

Because you should see it, she said,
how everyone's lost, everyone is family.
A woman came up to me and hugged me,
buried her face in my shawl
and wept
little muffled I'm sorrys into my shoulder.

We embraced there for a moment,
while the people streamed past
and dust clogged our throats and nostrils,
both telling each other it would be okay.

And everything will be okay
we have newfound unity;
we have newfound love.

How I came to know everything

In a patch of dying grass
sheltered in the shadow of a pine
I sat, back pressed up against the tree.
And in a bed of its green acupuncture--
under the darkening clouds as they gathered overhead--
I began to know everything,
and I dreamt--

...

of the clinking of china,
and my mother's plastic plates that bore sketches
hand-drawn by my brothers and sisters and I--
I had always been secretly ashamed of mine--

of submersing in black water
at midnight in the summer,
the endlessly long wait and subsequent drone
of the one flickering outdoor light

of thin layers of snow on a worn wooden deck
and the burning comfort of a stove fire--
such excitement for a world that was larger then,
than ever imaginable today--

of broken valuables
arranged neatly on my father's dresser for him to fix,
next to his fabled pile of loose change
and the drawers full of batteries and handkerchiefs

...

It was then that I remembered my own dresser at home--
that same, unmistakable dresser--
drawers stuffed with notebooks and socks
a box containing unfinished tasks on top
a stack of torn books and toys in need of glue
and a pile of loose change.

I saw my own son's hand
clutching a treasured quarter,
placing a disassembled flashlight in the stack.

I saw that excitement
for snow and for ocean in the eyes of my daughter,
and the flash of fear as the thunder shook.

I saw crayon drawings turn magnificent,
and height-notches crawl up the wall,
growing taller with time--

And the world spun in place,
grasses grew,
dust collected
and the strands of twinkling lights
on our porch went out one by one.

...

The rain filled my boots with mud
until I awoke with a shiver
and a numbing agony,
as if something had just left me.

And at that moment I knew everything.

Malt Shoppe 3:00 AM

So I wait for you,
accordion straw in a cold shake,
with granules of ice and thick with cream,
watching them from across the counter.
And how she laughs,
keeps one hand on his knee,
and he in turn reaches to slip his arm
over one soft shoulder.
You must have forgotten,
been distracted, unaware of time.
("He has patience, it doesn't matter much,"
the contents of your thoughts.)
They sip together with dual straws
in one towering fountain glass.
Hands clasped I'm sure, under the tabletop,
thumbs locked in gentle caress.
The clock refuses to pause,
to wait, though I've willed it
to forget to advance, to ignore the silent
ticking of its own hands.
I watch as her eyes remain,
never wavering, a subtle stare
of devotion into his ochre eyes, his sickly eyes,
those eyes that I hate.

For there is no hope in mine,
not with you there across the counter,
your head unturned, never looking back, not once.
You have forgotten,
in memories I never inhabited. Idly I stir the
frothy contents of my deliquescence.
Like myself, dissolved,
marked by the invisible assailants of morosity,
divining loss for all.
For him.
For you.

For me to give

Smile, and fuel the flames that keep me warm
through all these winters,
the ones that have come and gone,
and all those waiting for us.

Speak, and send me searching for something to say
to try and match your cleverness.
An impossible task, one inevitably
rendering me speechless and amused.

Laugh, and clear the clouds from the darkened skies
that sometimes find me,
in afternoon moods or on dismal days,
when I should certainly know better.

Walk, and leave me longing to walk with you--or to dance with you!--
to forget my misgivings
and pretend we are written by Jane Austen,
and that we've never been otherwise.

Tire, and come to me close, so that I can hold you,
to soothe you and warm you,
and watch your sweet eyes shut so calmly.
It's all that I can do, really, in return.

Sleep, and become that beacon of peace and comfort and hope,
lulling me into slumber next to you,
in a bed never meant to hold just one of us,
where we can dream each other to life and it never stops.

Love, and teach me the true meaning of the colors of the sunset,
the brilliance of snowfall,
the quickness of the rivers,
the forever deserts,
the cascading mountains.
All of it is in you, from you.

You, as you are,
you are all that was ever pretty,
or joyous, or thoughtful, inspiring, captivating, creative.
And you build me inside, because without you--
my design is desolate.
Forlorn. And I am nothing.

All that loves in me is yours, for you.
Because you've shown me how to use it,
and it's mine to give--so I give it to you.

Journal entry #1, of that should-cry emotion

There was a sliver of the thumbnail moon, shrouded amid the glow over the rolling lumpy hills that stretched and leapt past the growing little fancy town of El Dorado Hills. It was barely visible and looked much like a cloud wisp. Frilly parts of other clouds were illuminated in an odd gray-white by the not-yet-risen sun. The sky was amazingly clear, given the massive torrent of rainfall that had dropped over the past few days, weeks, months. I'm not looking forward to Saturday's 100% chance of precipitation. The rain is important to me; what some take as a burden I try to envision as just another necessary step in a cycle that involves me and the sad sky and the sprouting ground and oxygenated breaths and so on, which it is. So when it comes, I opt for a mood of joy, or at the very least, indifference. But sometimes, say when plans have been made and cannot be easily changed, and to weather the weather and its fickleness would require extended purchases and slower driving and more difficult, colder outdoor excursions to apply vehicle chains, then I find myself becoming less and less accommodating. 100% chance! And it's only Thursday morning.

We made great time from Placerville. I can't ever really force myself to be on time, to leave early or actually strive to feel that elusive awake-feeling that some strange individuals revel in, especially when I don't want it. Plus my stomach acts up in the early mornings; it needs to stumble awake at at least eight o'clock to feel well-rested, available and opportune. So we left at 6:24. 24 minutes late.

In the carpool lane we resided. I was completely out of gas. (I thought I had a 12-gallon tank, it turns out it's probably 14, because once I finally filled it up on my way to work it took 13.5 gallons, a new Sentra record.) But onward, without hesitation! There's something amazing (have I repeated myself yet?) about watching the sunrise. I definitely appreciate the sunset - I love it and could watch it every day and never tire - but it's so routine, so expected. The sunrise I scarcely ever watch, unless it happens to be on a terrifically long drive from Utah, the likes of which is starkly beautiful in a way that changes each color of the landscape into something new and completely different, a special effect of the tantalizing rays of the newly broken star I suppose. This morning's sunrise was quite similar, and as we breached the Folsom Hill, the cities were spread out at our feet, a welcome mat for the valley, the all-night lights still blazing, birds charming the daily commute's air, peak to peak with washboard trees, picturesque blue skies, all strewn about the clumped walls and brick substructures of sub-urban activity.

Because my eyes hung so drearily still, and my ears were sensitive as they should be during the 6 AM hour, I kept the radio low to endure conversation - casual but indicative of the lack of need for anything at all above casual. Traffic kept itself at bay, eluding even the most unhurried of travelers, another morning blessing. We arrived at the Greyhound station far more quickly than I had predeterminately anticipated, and with no available curbside in sight, I ignited a right-hand blinker and we paused. He gathered his things up, nearly forgetting the new smokehole-infested coconut piggy bank from the thrift store, and again we paused - there's never much to say when one's in a hurry and the bus in the traffic lane behind you is gaining ever so slightly and a ticket must be retrieved and gasoline must be purchased and moves must be made and work must be done. So with minimal goodbyes, he departed and I departed.

I felt like I should cry. That should-cry emotion. Sometimes there are those moments when this happens, you feel a strong emotion, which may or may not be tied to other goings-on but most definitely strikes you at that one particular moment. But I didn't cry. I just drove on, steadily, characteristically going the wrong way, passing through the emptiest Old Sacramento in my memory and taking the other way, eastward again. Past 65th Street where I logically should've gotten gas, past the new huge apartments-or-strip-mall complex off Mather Field where they're adamantly attempting to redefine Rancho Cordova as a new, hip, up-and-coming realm of desirability. Past the occasional walker, the construction workers, the barely-active gas stations, over the canal, to Costco for gas.

There the sun hadn't yet overtaken the horizon formed by the buildings off toward White Rock Road. So I sat and read with a green hat perched precariously atop my head so as to obstruct the blinding sunlight once it revealed itself. I could've slept possibly, but instead I read, for oh about 15 minutes. There was that should-cry emotion again - while listening to "Oh Comely" - but I know that it just keeps coming because of everything, and that soon - so soon, too soon - I'll be moving and on to not bigger, not better, but different things. In a land so completely foreign to me I find it straining to even tell others of it. And I've lived there before! It baffles me, I have no need to be 'from' this land or 'living in' this land, yet I'm going there regardless. To learn some things, no less, things that I may or may not come to own, to love, to feel.

In the halo of that should-cry emotion, I trekked to work, alone, like a dog retreating silently to the owner that so recently struck him, with my new backpack and my glasses on, uncombed hair, my brother dropped off for a melancholy journey on a Greyhound bus bound for Santa Cruz, California, with a full tank of gas, an empty pocketbook and a mile-high mound of debt, and the knowledge that in time all things come to adapt and find themselves comfortable - a comfort I wish to steer clear of, avoid, a bottomless chasm that leads straight for the molten heart of derelict pressures and the remote opportunity of habitual contentment. Somebody save me. There isn't anything left at all.

Compass to the north

Few things twinkle greater than the stars.
But I know some. Yeah I know some.
And in frequent spells I stop and stare
at their excellence. It's excessive and yet
it's unfair

to those who are without.
There's precious little they know about this town,
or the eyes of the girl in that velvet nightgown.

Hold tight to keep the shivering down.
I'm knocking knees and locking teeth.
Avoid the downcast looks and doubt
from the pessimists, all the narcissists.
But it's okay,

those others are without.
Lost alone in the fringes of the crowd
with empty stares not worth guessing about.

The years drift by, the view keeps getting better,
like the tide rushing sand or magnets toward each other.
Like a compass to the north or a lighthouse for a sailboat--
saltwater at my hull, she keeps this sailor afloat

for now, at least. It's victory.
There're deserts to cross and seas to see.
We'll burn our fears and hitch a ride
past the summit peaks and the changing sky.
And that's fine,

not much defies the sun,
or the way its light scatters horizon
and the twilight lingers just before it's gone.

But I know some. Yeah I know some.

It comes around

I am birth.
I am that which blesses hips and lives,
sending souls into the arms of mothers,
with hematite eyes and newborn cries.

I am the light.
I give color to the fruit,
turning skin and hair and smile,
forming memories in electromagnetics.

I am the soil.
I harbor nutrition and water,
yielding it up to the reaching roots
that explore the depths of my kingdom.

I am a clock.
I change everything, yet I control no one.
Without beginning or end, indifferent,
I wither the eldest of trees.

I am a pathogen.
I am not evil, my intentions are to thrive,
replenishing myself and my children
as a fortress grown strong and impenetrable.

I am medicine.
I am homeopathic and pure,
rushing along in the endocrine
to mingle with blood and adrenaline.

I am the surgeon.
I perform modern miracles on the willing,
grafting body and bone alike,
breathing a delicate balance of life.

I am a river
I stretch my arms wide and run deep,
the visage of eternity, evolving,
facilitating the cycle of water.

I am death.
I am hated by all, but my heart weeps while I walk,
for I did not choose this profession;
I am not without emotion.
I am doomed and I wander alone.
When my job is done, who will come for me?

[Originally posted on The Reluctant Conquistador.]