Chapbook Selections From Web Del Sol
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A POETRY COLLECTION
A WHIFF OF CHAOS in a caesura between now and then we cling to the time when looking back was sweet a dream of open space of nights fragrant with feathers and a carapace of stars instead we've a series of snapshots soaked in vinegar and honey the failed revolution and days gone to scrub the car's lost in longterm parking our pockets flapping inside out there's dust to water down sheets to air and the mirror no longer casts its spell but so far the sky's still there sunlight climbs from the latest dark as the new day hovers like surprise and before we lie in the stone throat of sleep we breathe the scent of buds nippling from branches of ripe mornings random as vines or listen to the terse comments of rain, the exquisite business of birds and marvel at the luster of lightning bugs or a thread of spittle sparkling in a cat's yawn it's the best that we can do not much unless it's everything A FUTURE THAT RESEMBLES NOW In a continuum of clean sheets and white nights I sleep with my watch secure on my wrist and balance on the year's narrow edge. I know some small things: the first frost sweetens, the second kills. In my secret world, light shines like dandelions gone to seed in a moonscape and a single tree draws me to the ferny underbelly of woods. As birds wing in old departures, I'm ambushed by petals, leaf mold, earth crust and a shock of sky. In a future that resembles now I learn to pat death like a dog, it's growing so familiar. When I pick flowers, they root in my palm, tendrils lace through fingers. Long after they fade I'm wrapped in their silk as I rest in the tall grass absolutely still like a stone warmed by the sun denting the earth. NOT YET VISIBLE My father balances on scaffolding high above our games. Each time he spits a nail and drives it in a wall goes up. Room dividers rise from hopscotch squares the whole house framed on stilts. He climbs the ladder waves from every window until I catch his signal return it and find myself waving from our top floor at his bent frame growing smaller as he moves along receding avenues. I look out signaling my sons who for a moment recognize me, signal back then shift into a new position straining to see something not yet visible. AFTER THE FAILED REVOLUTION, 1905 After the hunger march to the tsar's palace begging for bread, after the slaughter, father sleeps in dialectical paradise and mother packs the samovar, the china, the ruby glass, the children. Her face carries its tribe just below the skin and somewhere they are spinning the thread measuring its length and breadth, poised with the terrible shears. She restores the hair on her head, gold teeth in broad smiles and dreams of a land locked in amber. Desire curled in her fist, she sails for America silent with all the others. No wheel of miracles just the hand which is, the eye which is and the long nerve of history. Breathless and sunblind, mother tunnels through bitter earth into salt of heaven. She builds a fire to warm her children and the flame is bright, the shadows dim. Learning English from the book of exiles, she mouths words, tonguing, polishing until they grow liquid. Then she nibbles on chicken wings, gnawing bones clean. Her thoughts tug at their moorings: the half-light of childhood, daybreaks bursting like seeds, a forest of old tongues telling stories, winds rattling obituaries, and the past spreading its stain. She whispers names out of time until the new world arrives fresh with heat and light. Flesh tones of memory fade as she stores the children under her heart. Alone and growing wiser, mother undresses the dark and sleeps with moonlight resting in her palms. SPROUTING ORNAMENTS she made a party for everyone we knew and those we never knew drank new wine ate fruit out of season and sat on the ground the smell of damp rising rich between her knees and remembered everything we'd done or imagined told stories of a woman who wore her flesh like armor of a child who swallowed its reflection in the mirror of a man whose clothes smelled like travel we talked to the sound of baroque violins walked into rooms our heads sprouting ornaments and later went back to doing what she always did THE CLEANSING
Kneeling at his feet, mouth pursed, shoulders sloped, she lifts his right foot, then his left, soaping between the toes, scooping dirt from under nails, doing what must be done, scrubbing in unleavened silence. Pale glue of tears clinging to lashes, she licks her lips tasting the instant when she was none other than herself sitting in the kitchen curtains drawn, floor swept, dipping into the curve and coil of wife, practicing until she got it right. The night before, she dreamt of spring shoots pushing purple tongues through earth's skin, of babies swimming toward her slippery as tadpoles her unskilled hands can't capture. And in the morning, she awakes to pinpricks of sun, birds blading against the horizon. This is her wedding day, air thick with accordion notes, swirling skirts, embroidered shirts, the smell of borscht and vodka. He sits like a boulder in the sun. His voice makes him taller. When he bends a listening face toward her, she unknots a smile, sips the air takes one last look over her shoulder at childhood so remote it belings to someone else Nothing left. Not a ribbon. Not a thimble. And lifts the basin to her lips. UNTIL LIGHT GROWS OLD Last night we slept between two winds under a ripe moon on the other side of nowhere until thin skeins of dawn reveal a white room, a mirror, round like the mouth of a child. Outside the morning window, summer's yellow pollen whirls below a white-washed sky. In the scald of afternoon, we learn the dead man's float and one of us tries flight. The first whiff of autumn is the smell of cut wood under a rough palm, fruit ripening into scent, and everything is musk, silk, wordless smiles. As air turns to spice, we savor apricot desire until light grows old and the weather vane grinds slowly on its swivel. It's the dead season where emptiness grows feet and there's only one demon in the attic one death in the town ---and ah we still mourns Pavlova, her touch of calculus and honey, a breathless moment in our lives. Her death so light, we held it in the palm of our hands. we're one hour lost and one day thinner alone in the middle of America THE DROWNING it's that time of year and all that's left a cool remembering again he's drowning and the Red River takes him in mother rooted to the bank her voice floating over water we're waiting supper for you bread and milk lie heavy on the table where sisters stand strange to one another it's that time of year nudging memories of water with its wet shine his face streaked with summer and the house where no one survives love with darkness opening like a white door 2 summer nights we'd sit on the back veranda planing down the hours with small talk stories flowed in a spill of old pleasures sweet and tart and light on the tongue the air was fresh the weather excellent the room radiant with the dead WINDUP GRAMOPHONE Music hides in the spaces between tracks until the wooden stylus strokes the spiral threading sound through the air. We sway in gat-toothed wonder at Cab Calloway's hi-di-his and ho-di-hos, swoon to Galli Curci's velvet and velour "The Last Rose of Summer", marvel at Caruso's muscular "Celeste Aida". When a scratch holds the needle in the groove, it churns and churns the same broken sound trying to get it right until a hand releases it in a sharp geometry of motion. Moments on the verge, shellac records gleam, crank handles poise midair and needles rest in cups for the ready. Music seductive as silk spills a little island around us. Its scent sticks to fingers, lips, and eye lids: tunes old in the known ways like basil and lemon unguent on the mouth. Juicy underbellies of love songs melt on the tongue like Paradise plums, our mouths and faces open to what's lost and what's left. We float on notes above the staff to a whirl of Strauss waltzes, Souza marches brassy and insistent, lullabies rocking in the night's arms. Crooners in vaseline-slicked pompadours tongue us, the air's dense with red hot mamas grinding out the blues, Dixieland struts past. Tunes tapdance on the ceiling YA-DA-DO-DA-DITI-BOP. Gershwin sings with love inside the octave as we dance together cheek to cheek until the rhythmic scrape on the label like a bass note drifts free. NIGHT'S OTHER COUNTRY Before the great winds come and the white noise of night, we'll cut loose from clocks and stand in fields spread out to nowhere singing mantras. Before the quiet waits in garments of goodbye, we'll bridge the silence of guitars and float sound to its center. Before hours burn to ash, we'll wrap ourselves in wind, in raw strips of light, our bodies wild as vines. Before land's end, we'll swim in all the rivers of the sky, and drown in sunlight, inhaling love as sweet as candlewick. Before our final season, let it be summer resonant with wings, vermouth of old sunrises, mountains growing slowly in the rain the light around us ripe and round and if it dies out, let it be extravagant, a marvel of darkness in night's other country. REPOSITIONING THE MATTRESS We pivot around each other not even our shadows collide. Dust lifts and settles like the first snow as we shift through margins of air and islands of time. Flipping it over, each wrist with its bracelet of flesh, each finger shaped by its bone, we're upending the days, exploring the spaces between. After the long night and porcelain dreams, after rivers of sleep, morning hangs by a thread. Face to face, we imagine our bodies stored in hollows, secret deposits deep in the foam. The day has no beginnings- sky goes everywhere at once in turquoise innocence. Warmth rises. Sweat gleams and the echo of our interlocking rhythms pulse through vacant rooms. This house is what it is, each wall stands alone each window with a sky of its own and we are reaching backwards, love, in a seethe of memories that ache like static from another world. This old mattress grown heavy with meaning, lopsided with usage, slopes into a cave where we tumble like children in salt waters of the heart. GHOST STORIES since I have learned not to kill them things have been easier though I prefer my ghosts to inhabit the dark if they come by day I'll leave all the doors open i watch them mouthing secrets smiling as if there were two heavens I recall simple equations in the heart's circumference each sum exquisitely fixed in my memory women in sweet and sudden rages for fear the future comes when they're not looking children claustrophobic in their skins fanning out like fish bones younglings piercing love's delicate membrane to taste the fleshy center friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn and the ritual smile in their company the hours pass until a spill of sun a sweep of shade and under the ashen stars my dead are growing old BENCH SITTERS Bench sitters on upper Broadway count passing cars and pavement cracks spilling over into empty lots gone wild. Store fronts tilt, weather-scoured like old customers leaning on carts in Safeway aisles waiting for the round-up back to one-room lives. Light dies out. The street steps into darkness. They stand on sidewalks drowning as the past leaks in. Then, like a slow coming-out of sleep, they shuffle back, cook the same soup bone down to stock and vapor, empty the pot and wait for a surprise. They didn't plan it this way. Nothing for the ears. Nothing for the eyes. And night tapering off to a shirt hanging on a nail and a saucer filled with all the cold mornings ahead. SOMEWHERE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY she spends half the night caught in sleep's undertow or on the surface staring through scars of light trapped in windows where sky is half the world and everything moves with care past guard dogs and dead bolts past triggers hidden in the hearts of strangers and Guernica just beyond the view nightprowlers no safe houses and a handgun follows her up the stairs ~ somewhere in another country a trunkful of old love letters burns a singed hand rests among the ashes a woman sleepless among the sleeping moves from room to room testing the weather of her breath she stands in the cold kitchen each pot in place and looks through the window she has no other dress except the one mother made walks in serious shoes and when she's tired sips scalding tea joining all those mute and smiling women she keeps her heart hidden in her fist ~ she rummages through the alphabet for friends files away the past checks the stove turns off the lights and comes late to mother's funeral talks to death like a next-door neighbor listens to the hours grinding their gears and counts days detaching themselves like loose buttons barricades the door against waters rising assassins cruising the streets and night hovering dangerous and close ~ she dreams about the sadness of doors and windows limp curtains fading light and in her dream it is the brown month of November the month of sand in streets cracks in pavements windblown trash she dreams about cold mornings people rising early to tend the earth spread out holding up the sky she dreams about summer in the country long-leaved and green before winter hurt the flowers and veined the earth with frost water weaves its thin thread through all her dreams and under a spine of stars her dead are growing old ~ She imagines waking into another life: caviar for breakfast slick black coating the tongue. She imagines a hope for the evening: crystal goblets wine immaculate table cloth a fever of flowers in every room. Sultry scenes unfold like paper flowers in a water glass as she readies to go out, scarved and starry-eyed but something's always left behind, her head forgotten in a shower cap hanging on a hook, her hands resting on the coffee table. She finds a safe place on the slow lane, seat belt pulled tight, her mouth's the small shape of worry. In the corner store she catwalks down corridors, pushing her basket while hidden mirrors swallow her image. Undecided on aisle seven, she stands on one foot while the other sleeps. The bag boy nods to her and if she speaks at all, she speaks in whispers. On the sale counter she looks for day old bread, cracked eggs oranges spotted with decay. Sorting through spoilage, she uncovers the world. Passersby warn her: It's old, riddled with soft spots. She buys it anyway.
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