If I Could Draw a Celtic Knot

On the yellow-fringed curves
out of Crestone, a yak herd.

Two black bulls lock horns
at 7 am, joined by a third.

Slowing down to observe,
my eye floats above pasture,

looks down upon their rut-knot,
laughs at the thought

of drawing a triple head-butt—
a symmetry, a trinity, of yak lust.

2018

Swiping through Netflix

Swiping through Netflix
Nothing sticks. Wasted minutes
Better spent silent.

2018

Icon

On what felt like
and ultimately was
my life’s final night
with my father,
his fast yet failing feet
shuffled to the archway
and lingered,
voice stolen—
a stooped silhouette,
icon backlit by blue light—
to look into the room
where I lay in the dark
on an air mattress,
slowly deflating,
for a last look at me,
his breathing child,
who would
drive away forever
in the morning.

Just Before Seven AM

The naked Easter bunny puts on
Her husband’s thick cotton robe.
Upon sliding open the deck door,
Styrofoam egg carton in hand,
She hears neighbor children
In the upper octaves of delight—
Did you find the green one?
Here’s the pink!—and she is grateful
Her own children sleep late.
And she is grateful for the way
Sound carries on a mountainside
As she goes to work, hiding eggs.

2018

Colored Egg Artist

Sam had the patience I did not—
holding already lovely colored eggs
perfectly still in the oily dye, again
and again, half by half, side by side,
building a history, an archeology of color—
variegated tops, bottoms and bands overlaid
with mottles of marbleized continents.
As each masterpiece dried, I marveled. He asked,
“Is there such a thing as a colored egg artist?”
“There is now,” I said, surprised at my surprise.

2018

Happy National, um, Global Poetry Month!

It is once again time for the NaPoWriMo poetry challenge of writing a poem a day for the entire month of April... only now they are also calling it GloPoWriMo, for Global Poetry Month! I like it. Give me some good ol' globalism.

Confession: on April 2, I realized I had forgotten about the challenge! This is a bad sign of busyness. So, I've cheated by writing April 1st's poem on April 2 and posting it as though I wrote it yesterday.

All's fair in love and poetry.If you need writing prompts, visit the Na/GloPoWriMo website:

Selective Memory

In every era of my life
I focus on what’s hard, groom with sighs.
Embracing moments, sure—
A student’s shine, three small detours,
Two diving laughs, a friend’s door,
Her fire road, his midnight pledge—
All while standing on a great ledge,
The dark vertigo of what more.

My boney, endless needs.
Here and there agree to disagree.
From plains to hills
To plains from hills
And back to hills again.
Looking back from every here
Old ledges disappear
Or hone the beauty pain.

It seems my life is lovely, high or low,
And I’ll look back to now—
As black waves build to steal
My sweetest love into the deep,
And I am wind- and salt-stung, wading, braced—
And recall only the shore of him: solid, free,
Suction-soothed, grains shifting softly under me,
The moon waning in the morning grace.

Milky Way

Silvia Barajas-Ceja once said,
“No bad thoughts while you bake
Or you’ll ruin the cake,” but I mixed
An inexplicable sadness in with the eggs,
And the cake baked just fine,
Except for when it sank a bit when I opened
The door too early. Undaunted, sadness
Rose again like a chest after inhalation,
And goldened and fell again, cooling
On the stovetop. It didn’t matter.
You flip a three milk cake upside down
Anyway, and it should look flat,
Not domed. When my knife shagged
The wall of the cake and left a gouge
Right before I dropped it on the plate,
I didn’t care. Whipped cream hides
The dents, swaddles my sorrow
Like baby Jesus to feed my friends.
When they said it was the best cake
They’d ever had, my sorrow
Sparkled in their eyes, a milky way.

Event Horizon

“You are approaching the crone,”
small babes in the room announce,
bouncing on young mothers’ knees.

Or rather, my uterus makes
a cosmic joke, opens like a black hole,
an event horizon of information
setting up my babes to have babies.

I’ve thrown out my seeds to be swallowed,
Lent rough arms, blue eyes,
Wide face, strong back, tough feet.

My fractals zoom in yet ever recede!
My holographic birds perch in distant trees!
“Fly home, fly home,” this old body drones,
But my feathers have long been released.

With thanks to “Sidebar: The Holographic Principle,” by JR Minkel, in Scientific American: “Quantum mechanics starts with the assumption that information is stored in every volume of space. But any patch of space can become a black hole, nature’s densest file cabinet, which stores information in bits of area. Perhaps, then, all that’s needed to describe a patch of space, black hole or no, is that area’s worth of information. The idea is called the holographic principle, after the way that a hologram encodes 3D information on a 2D surface…. ‘The world doesn’t appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one,’ Bousso says. ‘The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times.’”

Piñon Doesn’t

Piñon doesn’t ask me how I am.

“Not fine,” I don’t say. “Tears have run
my eyes all morning.”

“Why?” its needles don’t ask.

I don’t say, “Because the one
I gave my life doesn’t want my hands,
Would rather fall alone.”

Piñon drops a cone.

2018