Series: Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

A while ago in the cool
shadows: an eddy of warm air,
then the scent of ferns.

What gleans moisture
from the blades, spreads
heat from leaf to broad

leaf, before morning
is even halfway gone.
In the receding shadows,

the scarlet flame
of a tanager flashes
once, then disappears.

Here I am, untwisting
threads from their
gathered knots—

to try again to lay
the winding straight.
So it is each day,

impatient fingers at their practice;
and only hope that time might
make things new again.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Seams, running: as callused fingers spurn
invitations from an open window. French

knots and ears of wheat, fleurs-de-lis,
slip knots; blind stitches for the veil

a bride might wear at a wedding. Slant,
uneven, overcast; picked, pricked, tailor-

tacked; featherstitched and darned.
Work on the willow’s whips of tiny

chain-stitched leaves, the peacock’s many
jade and sapphire eyes. Smooth the heated

iron across the sleeves and bodice, but leave
one end untucked. Careful not to spill

the smell of burning plastic on the breeze.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“I couldn’t have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.” ~ Lucia Perillo

Danger, Peligro, reads the sign by the orange
cones and yellow tape at the street corner,
where a man in a hard hat is now going under
to investigate the contents of the sewer.

Danger, Peligro, chants the ant at the head
of a line trudging through the gutter:
such industry, just to steal a shard of sugar,
bear away grain that gleams on your shoulder

like a chip from a prehistoric glacier.
Is there someone in file waiting to sprint
when the warden isn’t looking, waiting
to unshackle the chains around the ankles?

Smoke from barges heaving by on the river,
smoke from the paper mills smudging the sky.
Stroke on a corner of blue canvas: either a gull,
or a wingspan strung of honey and wax and twine.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

In my last dream before waking,
I couldn’t find
the exit from a mall.

It could have been the Mall
of Asia
(though I’ve never been there),

for the row of glass windows
all along one side
looked upon the bay, and a vintage

biplane overhead trailed a red and
orange banner
through the gloom, reading

“Manila Bay’s Famous Sunset.”
Not a star
perforated the leaden

skies, and a group of schoolboys
down by the wharf
were digging with spoons in the sand.

Or could it have been
a museum?
Now I am confused—

No, now I’m pretty sure it was the mall
next to the museum
named after the five-star General

sporting Ray-bans— because of the frozen
displays of mannequins
dressed in cheap fabrics stitched mostly

in Chinese factories. They stretched
their arms toward the cabinet
holding MacArthur’s silverware and

pewter, but his man-servant wouldn’t
let them near.
“I’m keeping these safe till he returns,”

he declared, perhaps not knowing
that in the lobby
of the rotonda, the man himself

lay sleeping next to his second wife,
a southern belle.
She was 46 and he 64 when he strode

waist-deep into the surf in the famous
Leyte Landing.
I’ve seen a mural commemorating

the event (his wife isn’t in it,
of course), and I have
always wondered but never remember

to ask museum guides why there, behind
the General, Romulo (5’4″)
isn’t up to his shoulders in the water.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Still, how beautiful and perfect
each raindrop looks— pearls strung
in that radial pattern, artful across
the web. Easy enough to think

each raindrop a pearl, a rhinestone
broken loose from a silken thread. And
the web’s an easy metaphor, just think.
Someone paces, paints, or writes all night.

Then something loosens: a sigh snaps the threads
that held the shapes, that filled and colored
in the light. Sleepless, write or paint all night:
then revise at dawn; wreck, rewrite. Begin

all over again— what filled those shapes? Color
that beguiled with absolute certainty of itself.
Revising at dawn, amid the wreckage of beginnings,
you find it’s hard to remember how love looked

except beguiling, so absolutely sure of itself.
Think radial patterns, think lines that artfully cross
with all you need, want to, remember. You know how hard to look
at what’s unfinished; proclaim it beautiful or perfect, still.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

You are the crab sidling out
from under another, to nip
the fingers closing in with tongs.

You are the kiss walking away
without so much as another glance.

You are the pair caught on camera
pretending to help the fallen one,
then rifling his backpack for cash.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Already the caterpillars in their one winding sheet
lie still as death. The child that picks them whole
in their wrappings wants to know what color, sheen,

or tissue will solder their wings, to make complete
their transformation: first mummy, then prismed unfold-
ing. The caterpillars wound tightly in one dream

build their wings in the dark, breathing replete
but mostly unseen. Convey them carefully; not bole,
but bit of leaf under each body, faint color, sheen—

Clear and cold, lesson lighter than a husk, complete;
elusive flight the body needs, before it turns to coal.
What other dream but for what’s bound within the sheet?

When it comes time to rend the woven sheet
will light bear down upon these bodies whole,
or splinter into spectral color, muted sheen?

So cold some mornings, evenings damp and clear—
All surfaces echoing the questions of their skins.
The caterpillars wound up tightly in one dream,
in sleep burrow more fiercely toward color, sheen.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

I don’t even know how I started this
letter to you. Perhaps it’s the smell
of smoke that hangs in the air, thick
in the morning like carded wool, or
vapors swirling in the glass vase of
a hookah. A bald-faced hornet propels
his smudged wings in dopey, erratic flight,
back and forth across the grass. A fire’s
been raging in the Great Dismal Swamp
since lightning struck a week ago, un-
erring like your hand. Old legends say
a firebird built a nest of flame there,
which later filled with rain. In any case,
now I remember what it is I meant
to ask you— what were you really
thinking in that small interval,
between all those times you raised
the rifle sights and the bullet hit
its target? No time for doubt to spin
like a dime in the air, a speckled
glass ball, a marked clay pigeon?
Clatter of the tin plate leaving
your husband’s hand, thinnest edge
of the playing card sliced through
and through and through again.
I thought that before I turned
fifty, I’d have learned at least
a few of your tricks— But here
I am, rounding the bend, squinting
at landscape that’s mostly peat
and water. Who is that, ninety
feet away, leaning against a dry
tree and lighting a cigarette?
If I aim true, one well-placed
shot will put it out. Or we
could all go up in flames.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.