Longleaf Press
Methodist University
5400 Ramsey Street
Fayetteville, NC 28311

If you're looking for truth, it lingers
in the past with little girls twirling
in princess dresses, boys in cowboy
suits riding plastic horses; honesty,
even in costume, will be recognized.
Soon we don the grown-up disguises
left to us, join the great masquerade,
dancing, falling until our facades wither,
the waltz ends, and innocence reappears
in our unmasked eyes.

You said I was a genius who wrote beautiful poetry
but you were from Florida and never read Auden
or Stevens or Larkin. Then you said I was the best
you ever had but you'd only slept with two before me
and one was from Tallahassee and the other ended up
being gay. Before I had a chance to forget your face,
I met a woman who would talk over me; interrupt
my daydreaming with demands for money; refuse
to read anything I, or anyone else, wrote.

staring out of the window
on the eighth floor
envies
the beaten woman
staring out of the window
on the first floor:

the former is pitied
only by lost,
hungry seagulls.

I watch the strobe lights blink in silence
above impervious clouds, eleven time zones,
and mountains like crumpled paper in the distance.
I wonder about the lives of passing towns.
And as we approach home, the land I love,
its deep-veined rivers and emerald plains,
I think of things we try but can't let go of,
of time and change and what remains.

Back when I was a quinceañera
I had my name
written in flowers
on a altar where I was queen

As a quinceañera, I ruled the night
everybody paid attention and homage to me

Because I want to know how many ways there are
for you to name my hair, because I want to see if I
can see it growing through your fingers, because it was
a dogwood whose petals and red seeds and gray leaves
and voice of my grandmother brought the first poetry
to me, and because the only thing I believe in is that
there is a place where those poems still exist, and we
can walk there, we can take my life like a bridge there,
and the words will come back to me with the noir films
of our finished evenings, ...

In Roman times, the household gods kept watch,
dispensed advice to those who'd paid with sacrifice
of scattered crumbs, daily prayers of thanks. Penates
touched the bread to make it rise,
they kept Vulcan's fires alive inside the hearth
and whispered in the ears of the devout:
Hide your gold. It's going to storm.
Hold your tongue and wait.

Long before dawn, solitary,
you were working the water,
casting the net of your reflection,

hauling in the river until,
come evening, even the sun
is spooked and hides, wary

as a speckled trout or shy flounder,
slippery hermit of the wandering eye,
under the whiskey milk of the bay.

the girl with her hands in the margarine
was singing a sweet and empty song
slowly the night streamed through the vent
and froze the breath
of the girl with her hands in the margarine

smiling almost frozen, the girl watched with empty eyes
the chattering midnight flock
in the dead of every night—
the flock which would slice the night into downy
and black pieces
like a sour cherry pie

He strode from student
to student smashing down
imperfect cylinders they'd pleaded
upward out of mud.

Think of this in yoga class, aching up
into the seven-hundredth downward-
facing dog, still comprehending only clumsiness.

I never had the time to write
about the loneliness of waking
at 4 a.m. to the certainty of my own
early demise in my father's eye

that wrote me off like a painless
new surgery for cataracts. I never
had a minute until my brother's cat
that ate the canary grin drove all day

This frozen rain has made
the highway slick.
We're stalled in traffic outside Corpus Christi,
accident ahead.

Ice blinds the road signs
and swells the pools along the verge.
Styrofoam cups bob like geese heads
in drainage ditch slush.

On the Bangkok sidewalk, it pecks
a pink gum-smear.
If it has a soul, it's a crapshoot
     whether
its karmic trip is going
up or down. If souls go down,
they may get very small or
have no size at all,
unthinkable as the primordial
zero universe which we
believe, but can't conceive.

even if I lose myself.
I want to be part of that view
I've come to recognize
as you. I want to be
the soft shadow that clings
to the underside of trees. The dew
on the violets
thriving there. The secret
sent from leaf to leaf
to leaf on a summer morning.

Sharon, who keeps toddlers in her home in America,
discovers the eggs on children's heads
after finding them on her own. While the rest of us
haul supplies to San Pablo, she stays back
to wash them with Rid from the mercado.
Lice, she tells us later, circle
down the sinks like black sand.

Inside archways inscribed on metal,
gorgon heads or scorpions dangle; letters in arabic
crawl the rims of shallow bowls made to hold
water into which keys have bled their rust all night.
Drink in the morning to be cured of terror.

Whipping the kitchen door shut,
he kicks through the garage and rips
the power mower into a roar. Shoving it
down the driveway's edge, he turns and scrapes curb
to the neighbor's boxwood hedge, spinning the mower there
as if swinging a rifle into a crowd of wives.

Let cowbells, sterno-heated goombay drums,
conch shells, trumpets, and trombones
regale past dawn, immortal one.
The birth of god be now our song, no sober doctrines of demure decorum,
but white rum, the undone
business of shaking all shame from the seat
in a few days' leisure from service.

It happens at a crowded corner, waiting for a light
or in traffic so dense it stops us:
a face presses to my window, a scruffy child,
boy or girl, difficult to tell.
Roel clears his throat, looking at me
in the rear view mirror, and I see
disapproval moving In his shoulders.

In a strange cemetery, I wander among the lambs
and random carvings of tulips that never fade.
It is spring here, the grassy hill beyond the shade
alive with wildflowers and insects though on the coast
where it is winter, the small stream near
our house is frozen silence.

Just off the road to Snowbird, North Carolina
a Dodge truck is rusting in a field of green onion weed.
The hood is open like a mouth in the rain.
A tuft of dry day-lilies has blossomed from the windshield.

"Snowy white," the tar baby promised;
her eyelet pinafore immaculate—beaming
on the soapbox, beckoning believers
When no one was looking, she seemed to wink
at the washerwoman. They knew it never snowed
in July. The washerwoman shoveled detergent
like a grave digger, buried under soil
of other people's sweat. Squeezing lemon juice
and rubbing salt into a stain, she snarled
beneath her breath, "Rich folk sure is filthy."

On a bleacher at Robbins Field,
July sun dropping
like a high fly to left field
she thinks
it's just one more baseball game:
in the outfield a boy
picks grass off his glove,
waves to his grandma who's
leaning on the fence.