Star-Isle

When the gods first looked down
they saw our sea as sky, our islands, stars,
so far away thousands of light years later
we could only imagine their perfection.

The Catholic saints of childhood were closer,
more adaptable, even helpful, your mother
urged you to ask for help from St. Anthony
in finding anything lost, and St. Christopher,

patron saint of surfers swinging
from his silver chain, signaled who went steady
with who. Now, if you’re still looking
for a god, some say        

the encounter is in the unconscious,
that sea, everything outside the story
you’ve told yourself, everything
you don’t want to know

clamoring at the threshold
where when you step through
each night you find an old woman
who lives alone stumbling toward death,

a bomber walking into the crowd, the mother
who pulls two shifts to keep her kids
in winter clothes, the speeding car,
a man driving his wife to the hospital

the soldiers firing, the driver killed,
their child born into a common nightmare.
Then, if you could look back,
you’d see the life you remember,

your waking life, that place of order, the star-isle
those gods looked down on, tiny in that vast sea.

The Wilderness

On the wall the openings: a photo
of the house on 97th, the dirty screens
and large mouth of the garage
where I sat in the coolness
with my cut head until the bleeding stopped,
a window I painted which is the window
I am looking through to the roses
tied to their trellis,
the archway of the church at Chamula
ordinary, blue, as the blue stone on the desk
though the other night I dreamt it in shards,
blue until the doors under the archway
open to incense and fire.

A stairway did lead somewhere,
a city lay beneath it which I sat above
some Sundays, the grid of order below
already yellowed. At home
I made a girl and stabbed her with knives.
All Catholic children suffer at night.
Days I was afraid.
On the playground walking through
the layer of rising heat a girl said
another girl had scraped
the white junk out of her privates.
I knew that meant something beyond bad.
I pretended I was lame and could not dance.
I did not understand the feelings in me
but I can see them in the Judas masks,
 mouths gaping, placed
next to the empty maw of the garage.

I made a monster girl
who grew fat and snarling. I picked up
a hot brick and blistered every finger
of my hand and hid my hand. I had kissed
my father when he told me not to.
The lighter fell and burned the flesh of my thigh.
It did not bleed, the fire ate my flesh
and when the dog bit deep into my palm
I sought no comfort. I took my shirt off.
I had no breasts but understood
I was an animal. I ate food
other children threw into the street.
I peed for pennies in David’s backyard.
I squatted, shat outside the bedroom window.
I wanted to be a river where nothing had awakened
where wholeness poured into and out of me
and what remained, remained untouched.

The Odds

The night I called my mother obtuse
I watched her turn to me
face flushed with anger as she said
Don’t use words I can’t understand.

I’m remembering as my father and I
sit on a bench at the Veterans Home
and he says thoughtfully,
“I might have been what you call illiterate,
might have forgotten how to read
if I hadn’t kept reading after I dropped out,”
and I recall the stack of books
he’d take with him
even as he closed the bedroom door
on a Friday night for a weekend binge.

Now he’s asking me the meaning of tenure,
how it works, what I might aspire to,
finishing a trade we began some minutes ago
when he explained the odds to me
because he’s betting on the Oakland A’s
twenty to five in the World Series—
our voices rising
because it’s Veterans Day
and the Vietnam Veterans on Harleys
are circling this usually quiet plaza
revving their engines,
raising their fists to the older guys
who have come out of the wards to watch—
and as the Vietnam Vets snake their way
around this green enclosure,
I say, “This can’t happen again,”
but he replies, “It will.”

And I’m still thinking of that night—
both mother and I were just off work and Bobby,
the kid next door who’d dropped out,
had left that day for Vietnam. We’d argued
about the war all the way home and arms
full of groceries we stood at the front door
where, once in, she’d go to the kitchen
to make us dinner
and I’d go to my room to study:

I already understood the odds.

Fear

What am I thinking
when I stand at the counter?
I am chopping, adding onions
to the pan on the stove,
listening to music
and noticing
the days darken earlier now:
I am thinking of the body of a woman.

I am cooking
as my mother cooked on her day off
and what I am feeling
is her standing at the counter
and then she is moving around her house
as I move around mine:
I am thinking of my mother’s hips,
the flesh of her stomach, did her body
loosen when she was alone?

And as I lift, turn and chop,
my hands busy with the air,
I can smell
the bleach from the cleaning
behind the scent of the cooking
and see her dresses ironed and hanging
from the doorframe:
I have entered that moving
I could not enter
when I came home from school
and opened the door to a woman
bound by motion
and I see that somehow these gestures
steadied the fluttering
that must have risen in her
as it rises in me now
when if I could I would call to her.

Instead I have learned to call to fear itself:
I have learned to name it,
the word she was walking with,
because as I say it
I can feel the edge of it
resist the end of the century
she bore me into the middle of,
and then I remember
this was the word my mother did not say,
it was the thing that rose
and fluttered in her,
rose and fluttered.