Ghazal: Some ways to live

This entry is part 25 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

One summer we hiked to my grandfather’s farm. Ninety degrees in the shade, sandaled
feet stumbling in carabao dung. I did my best to look as if I knew how to live.

Five days a week I used to teach in the capital, six hours from home. Riding the midnight
bus, I saw families huddled in sleep by the underpass; how was this a way to live?

Every now and then I’ll remember something with a start, like fruit I had in childhood.
Bell-shaped macopa: red skin, cool, spongy hearts. Their taste, hard to re-live.

A cross between indigo and purple— this is the star apple’s signature. A five-
fingered flower, pulp thick and sweet, encasing the seed that might live.

The waiter brings my usual bowl of noodles in clear broth, a pair of battered shrimp.
For the umpteenth time I tell him: soup spoon, not ladle— the mouth’s hinges would give!

I love the way light moves across surfaces: the floor beneath the bay becoming
honey, water rippling itself and what holds it in. A window’s essential, to live.

In a darkened room I stretch out and practice: slow down my breathing, arrange arms
straight by my sides. Imagine how cells quit movement, the compulsion to live.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

That shore from which we first pushed off, how far away is it now?

In the morning, by the kitchen door, paper-thin strawflowers hold out their yellow bowls. The brass bell I bought from a temple gift shop swings under a branch of dogwood: a little more weight every day, as shoots erupt and buds crack open. Even verdigrised, you’d think the light is mild, is mellow, brings nothing but the gooey oil of blessings. Who’s to say it isn’t so? And yet, and yet. Even when the wind keens like the tool of a glass-cutter bent on dividing surfaces into a liturgy of smaller parts, a screen assembles. Don’t add my name yet to the names of the dead on the wall. Don’t carve their letters edged in gilt on a crypt. Just today, I thought of how, in place of a fence to put up around a yard of my own, I’d plant jasmine— so when its asterisks of scent opened on warm nights, no one could tell where their beauty or their yearning for the other side began.

 

In response to Cold mountain (41): Whenever their final day arrives.

Devotions

This entry is part 24 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

“…Mothers weep in the corners of those paintings
while a man, each morning, sweeps the church floor.”
~ Connie Voisine, “The Altar” by George Herbert

Every day, dirt prints on the kitchen floor,
and under the furniture, thick new pelts
of dust. Perhaps this detritus that gathers

is the sediment of dried-up tears? Taking out
the trash and pushing the bin against the far end
of the driveway, I see petite roses in bloom.

Blood-red, pressed between the fence and the water
meter. Pitimini, once I heard a woman call them:
she made floral arrangements for the church, came in

the side door of the rectory, careful to take off
her shoes and coat in the vestibule. Unrolling sheets
of newsprint on tile, she laid out ferns, divided

showy chrysanthemums from tall gladioli; and, finishing,
tucked the slighter blooms in between the hardier stems—
baby’s breath, those miniature roses. Her hands did not seem

to mind delving into their cache of sharp hooks,
guiding scratchy stems into clear vases filled with water.
I cannot remember whether she was Isabel, or Delia, or Florinda.

She came to freshen the flowers every other day, before the sun
was up. I don’t know why the ghost of her name meets me here
at the end of the driveway, pointing out the flowers.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Rift

This entry is part 23 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Unto every one that hath shall be given, says the sky:
and so the flowerbeds spread their skirts lined with mulch,
and the odor rose into the air, mold of wood mingled
with the fragrance of budding things. And the frost
that earlier rimmed the outlines of each blade
of grass: overtaken by rain, so many needles
running stitches into the earth.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Founding

This entry is part 22 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Of brass and iron, of bronze or bell metal, a house
within which the clapper might sound— What slips

into the wind, sometimes slight as a prayer?
A warbler’s call before it fades,

the curl of incense bearing the names
of all we’ve lost, all we seek—

Hour upon hour is struck: diligent notes that echo
to the yoke and crown, to the waist and lip—

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Night Watch

And if I say heat, expected rain, lassitude— the hollows of my bones begin to mimic the throats of brittle plants. I was seized by thirst, reading a catalogue of inks: morning glory, transparent blue as raindrops on its cheek; moonlight, brazen crimson of azaleas. Purple berries, named after the lady-in-waiting who wrote the first novel. The names of women were not even recorded in her time. I think of her, restless on her sleeping mattress, mining the indigo shade of night after night for illumination. Green sentinels of bamboo; ochre fields, stalks bursting with grain— each pointed like a nib.

 

In response to New year's resolutions: the most beautiful thing.

Mountain Haibun

…paths worn ever-steeper by joy and sorrow.

Sometimes, on the one-lane road ascending through the cordillera, the vehicle is merely inches from the edge of the ravine. We listen for the sound of gravel, expect their skittering to hit the faces of rock below, but nothing: only the sound of the wind combing through pine, the trickle of a distant waterfall. The slightest press from fingers of fog, and the bashful mimosa curls, leaf by leaf, into itself. Before the sun goes down, the driver pulls up at a lean-to and the women and girls file out, squat behind its corrugated shingle. The men stand in a row, impassive before a length of limestone. This is a bathroom stop. It is at least four more hours before the township comes into view with its rest houses, cantinas, a lake whose name in the local tongue simply means “water.” Someone startles a flock of blackbirds in the bushes; there is laughter, the smell of cold bread rolls shaken out of paper sacks. Only the tungsten yellow lights from the bus cut through the darkness and the fog, arcing with each turn.

We’ve journeyed so far, suffered so much on this road.
Only the lizard, if it fell through these oceans
of fog, might live to tell the tale.

 

In response to Cold mountain 37.

Rituals

This entry is part 21 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

My hair has thinned, but it’s grown longer. I run a sheen of oil across the ends after a bath. That warm haze outside is pollen: floating archipelagos of amber, speckled marcasite, frosted orange. From the closet, I pick a blouse of cotton voile so it might breathe, another skin against my skin. A crow flaps up from the blackcurrant bushes: my first letter of the day! Later, the wind lifts the light higher. A green blush deepens on the hillside. Names of the dead sough through the branches, like needles of pine raining through the air.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Heartache Ghazal

This entry is part 20 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

There’s the sky’s bright wound again, open, gaping.
What time is it? Too long, too heavy, too much.

One can’t properly cook with a toaster oven. Tea with crackers isn’t much
for sustenance. But there are those with the gall to say that’s too much.

Would you really begrudge an elder a share of bread and board?
Would you yell at her: Turn off the lights, the bill’s too much?

There’s the sky’s bright wound again, open, gaping. And its eyes
are bottomless wells, staring. Too naked, too raw, too much.

How much evidence is needed? Here’s fortitude, and making do,
and doing without. At the end of the day, the ache of too much.

I’ve been flame for you, tinder, clay pot. I’ve been the fuse and the hunger,
the ticket and the ticket box. At the end of the day, all too much.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Ghazal, a la Cucaracha

This entry is part 19 of 55 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2012

 

Cooler and more overcast today; but in the parking lot at work,
a Blue Bunny ice cream truck circles, playing “La Cucaracha“—

Which makes me think of my friend Pinky, whose favorite way of saying
someone’s acting nutty is: Ay! she has a case of the cucarachas.

We know of course about cockroaches: in other places they go by
palmetto bug, croton bug, waterbug— all the same, a cucaracha.

An ant might walk with exquisite slowness; but have you ever
had to duck in fear of an armor-plated, dive-bomber cucaracha?

Fun facts: a cockroach can go without water for two weeks, without food
for a month. Squished, their slime might resemble green tea matcha.

And how about this: some female cockroaches only mate once and stay
pregnant for life
! That would definitely make me crazy, you betcha.

When I read this: Immature American cockroaches look like wingless adults
for a while it seemed we were no longer just referring to las cucarachas.

In my childhood home we kept potatoes and other dark-loving tubers beside
the rice bin under the sink, until a dark brown army swarmed over the kabocha.

It may have been the year I learned the Mexican Hat Dance for Field Day at school,
felt silly twirling a skirt with cellophane ruffles to the refrain of “La Cucaracha.”

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.