The Story of How We Survive

After 2 dry weeks of 100 plus degrees I turn off the window unit,
open my midnight window to smell the 30 minute rain.

I have a home with 30 windows. Some cracked.
100 and 4 years of many paned inefficiency.

I don’t always keep the floors clean, or doorjambs.
2 dogs and 3 kids. Moths pee red on the walls.
How many surfaces count as walls? I don’t count them.

But there are windows and doors and walls.

Even a 1-room Colorado cabin in the foothills firefighters saved.
They waited for flames that never came across the dale.

That woman in Rolling Stone living in her minivan in Santa Barbara,
who used to own and operate a desert friendly greenhouse before the crash,
drybrushing her teeth and spitting at the edge of parking lots—
she has windows, doors and walls too, countable, and rain, uncountable.

I want to ask her to live in my unfinished basement. In wet years,
it leaks. But I have a futon bed for her, even 2. The asking is a dream.

On the street, handing out her resume, she earns more if she cries.
I’m ashamed. Have a 40 grand job with summers off and complain.

White paint peels off my garage. Plastic carpet peels off the porch.
The garden almost burned up the 2 weeks I was away.
The patchy lawn is green from the road.

My van now sits empty on the street. Last week on the way home
from Seattle, my daughter and I slept in a Walmart parking lot in Idaho.
At midnight we heard a couple argue. He got her pregnant
and wouldn’t tell his parents, she screamed. I slept through it.
My daughter couldn’t. In the morning I drove while she dreamed flames.

It was a bargain luxury, I see, to live on 50 bucks a day plus gas,
to vacation on a futon in my minivan, scouting my child’s future
as a fire fighter in a place where it almost always rains.
The men tell her she has what it takes. She reads the books they gave
and prays for upper body strength.

We stayed in the northwest for free. 3 strangers took us in.
The family you can find online! Travelers on the cheap.
Because we have a numbered home, they gave us beds.

When you live in a van no one trusts you, Santa Barbara said.
Despite the resume, the woman looking to hire a dog walker
changed face: How can you not have an address? Money? You’re 45?
The rolling stone took her hand and cried, I’m still the same.

Parking between 2 safe lines, she vacations in the views.
Today the choice is mountain or sea.
Which direction will she face? West or east?

The world dreams a dream in which it is not our home.
Home is a house. The homeless know the lie.

Home is the space inside the story of how we survive.

Featured in The New Verse News, July 15, 2012

The New Snow White

Even the white
horse whose mane
you clench
hunched galloping
in fear
of ugliness, of crackling
death,
must be abandoned
at the black bog.

You save yourself running,
by accepting love.
Its scent is not
what you expect.
Its hands are dirty
or too clean.
It may not know
how deeply
you need watered.

You leave
your mouth
open.
An experiment. A kiss.
You watch
whether fronds
unfold again
over crispened feet.
Of course they do.

You are saved
yet save yourself
like the new
Snow White
written
into the world by new men
who have everything
to gain in your wakefulness,
green heroine.

2012

I could make a religion of coincidence.

The famous book and doughnut stores
we hoped to visit: blocks apart
on the randomly chosen road.

The part I told him I once played,
Stella, the night before: scored
by the lead in the new Almodóvar.

The book my daughter
thought better of buying: abandoned,
curlcovered, on the nearby grassy hill.

I could believe in a hidden order,
a way to know I am in the right place,
a way to say, look how the world aligns
for our amusement. Stop planning. I don’t.

2012

seaside

waves roll ever forward
white tumbling fingers gather
greygreen water, fall flat and thin

my wordbody begins
and ends like this

broken, beneath, always opposite,
the blind undertow

something indefinably me pours
back into the deep. red things

scurry sideways, seek escape
like ridiculous clowns
with soft guts and too many hands

2012
Seaside, Oregon

Orvis Hotsprings Elegy

People are known to walk
on red stones without clothes

fragile animals
pink tipped gravity

sprawled across wooden chairs
gently gesticulating

up to their necks
in warm water

arms afloat
sideways gaze

one or two look
straight into your naked face

nude, there is no need
to exchange professional smiles

we read truth in folds and curves
crisp or blurred tattoos

everyone changing shape
toward the dead

willing to lose
everything to be seen

except me in my black bikini
you hiding between your belly and knees

we save such revelations
for the bed

2012

The Path of the San Miguel

The constant exhale
of the San Miguel

through every word
and easy smile
and ten exhausted
summer eyes at day’s end

lends mountain peaks
and bridal veils,
white places I’ve seen
but never been,

crawling through rocks
that make the water red.

2012
Placerville, Colorado

As is your mouth

There is only one reason
hummingbirds
found us.

Red.

The rest is all
drunken
sweet breath.

2012

Enter the Western Slope

When water wears me
down, what shape
will I be? Canyon, spire,
sharp walled butte?
What is loose falls scree
at my feet. Sage grows.
You can’t find firm ground.
Angles are steep.

It seems wrong
what is hardest
stands so long.

I become a landmark,
some kind of sign.

Don’t be fooled.
Impossible toothy leaves
sprout from my fissures.
Roots a fine filigree,
fingers seeking pinholes
I’d rather ignore.

Every blind spot is a war,
a tiny door where I fall out of myself
to let you in, slow and thin,
one grain closer to nothing
but air standing there.

2012

The Eclipse

1
How can one give another a solar eclipse?

Too many instructional text messages
and fumbled cell phone calls,
mandatory interstate pull overs
when thunderheads finally clear,
driving further east out of shadow,
stacking three cheap pairs of shades
on one face and peering through one ply
of facial tissue. Pass the stack quickly.
Hold the tissue an inch from noses,
sit in the back seat behind tinted windows.

That’s how. With five layers of protection.
The wrong tools. Some will go great lengths
behind a guise of exceptional experience
or edification, afraid of being forgotten.

2
If only one could become as permanent,
as rare as a memory of crescent sun,
or better, sunring—if one finds oneself
at just the right place on earth—
one might be remembered at least
every so many years. Remember when she…?

It takes dedication, eclipse chasing.
Ambition to stare down immortality.
One could go blind, one could see
some kind of lingering bitten light
burnt inside closed eyes, bright holes
wherever one looks. An irony of focus.

Don’t worry. Vision returns to children,
lovers, friends. Eyes and skin adjust
to absence and never again.

2012

Doggerel for Lost and Found Wisdom Teeth

Until I slurped soft food for most of one week,
rice baby cereal, yogurt, Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup,
I didn’t know the deep, joyful animal of my teeth,
or how long it takes to thoroughly chew a bite of food,
or how mysterious the cavernous corners of my jaws,
or how far my tongue can reach, dislodging
vanished crumbs from fleshy wound and crease. Who knew
these tiny, precious bones nestled in such tender pink
could beg and plead ferociously: feed me something
wild or tough, let me earn my keep. Now I know
my wisdom teeth have always been my secret leader.

2012