Evening*

You already said you

Waited on an ocean for me

Cupped a sonata to your ear

While I let it

Slip away trust me it can’t

Slither too far because when

I run out the end of the dock

You’re still standing on the sand

Somehow stars play chess at night

But honestly it’s just the reflection

Off your glasses when you drive

Me home the car idles

An uneasy guard dog you

Hand me music as it spills out

Your right ventricle you appear one

-sided now and your voice is tinny

How exactly did you prepare

The turkey? Do you still shuffle

Cards in the bathroom line

Do you still use the bathroom

With my toothbrush staring

Starry-toothed into your glasses,

Which I spot from the end of the dock.

---

* after Frank O’Hara’s “Morning”

jackinthebox[1]*

Sometimes I need to take my brain off the record player & listen to it skip because every now & then

You pop up you jackinthebox with a trombone

It would be nice if a little jazz every now & then

Could cure this internal beatbox but it’s more than your things I miss it’s the smell of your deodorant on your neck & that pause between conversations when we’ve talked ourselves into the record player it’s right then that you are intimately in you and

I am intimately in me every now & then

Your face gives me pause because it carries more than dimples & glasses they have always shone back other countries & other languages & other everythings where you & I could go together

I’d like to love you the way Frank loves Vincent but I was always more an impressionist than an abstract & the impression of your jackinthebox on the sill

Makes me dizzy sometimes & sometimes that pause

Returns to the back of my neck & you’ve arrived

In time to slow my brain down to a crawl.

---

[1] After Frank O’Hara’s “Poem: Ά la recherché d’Gertrude Stein”

* published in Catalyst, spring 2006

Yolanda Says I Can Write Whatever I Want

There is peanut butter on my t-shirt

Of Shakespearean insults.

Yolanda says I can write whatever I want.

So I want to say that Vicente Fox

is an appropriate name for a shivering Chihuahua.

A Shakespearean Chihuahua licks

peanut butter out of an egg cup.

I worry why my six speed bicycle

has an imaginary seventh gear,

one I wish could double as a transmogrifier

and turn me into the dog wiggling across

the table from me. Then it wouldn’t matter

that I smell like peanut butter and acrylic,

and that no matter how many times I braid my hair,

it slides out, wild and unruly, like

a shrew that Shakespeare once tamed.

In Memoriam

Mt. Shroud (Pantoums for Sarah Bishop)

I.

I saw her last on an album cover

Her life a recipe for Mexican hot chocolate

Pinned up in her best friend’s coffee shop

I found her smile lying face up in the street

Her life a recipe for Mexican hot chocolate

She jumped a train from Portland to San Francisco

I found her smile lying face up in the street

Sometimes she appears in dreams, smiling

She jumped a train from Portland to San Francisco

When she fell I was in the Emergency Room

Sometimes she appears in dreams, smiling

My father later said, “Your body knew.”

When she fell I was in the Emergency Room

Pinned up in her best friend’s coffee shop

My father later said, “Your body knew”

I saw her last on an album cover.

II.

In our family there are many cousins but few girls

I remember admiring her unshaven legs

Every mountain I see smirks like she used to

I thought of her while climbing Cloud’s Rest

I remember admiring her unshaven legs

When she slipped on my waterski

I thought of her while climbing Cloud’s Rest

The Oregon fog has become her shroud

When she slipped on my waterski

Some family law was observed

The Oregon fog has become her shroud

I picture her kneeling in my grandparents’ garden

Some family law was observed

Every mountain I see smirks like she used to

I picture her kneeling in my grandparents’ garden

In our family there are many cousins but few girls

Family

Adulthood*

Sunday, eleven a.m.

Aunt Cissy flirts

with the fridge.

She fingers a chilled

Corona, offers it

to the doily in front of me.

“Your father tells me,”

--she smiles, reapplies lipstick—

“you can have these now.”

---

* published in Spectrum, spring 2006

Sri Lanka

Still Life

Somewhere far away a wave

has flicked over cities offhand,

like her father playing cards.

Survivors peer out of the tv

with hollow cheeks.

In drier climates,

her classmates drive tanks,

salute a caricature,

because everybody knows that

all liberty is ransom.

Huevos

Huevos*

There are times when you want

to squeeze the world in an egg cup.

Wouldn’t that be perfect?

You move aside the salt and pepper

and prepare to drain the Atlantic.

It’s not so big.

The sky is grand but the clouds

rein in the sun, shell over yolk.

You can roll the world in your hands,

all color coordinated continents

and chocolate dipped mountains.

You want it to be smooth,

but it crumbles.

You want it to be round,

but it slides across the table:

spilt milk.

The world jiggles, pops, sizzles,

burns, grooves, tingles, aches, longs,

oozes—

messy, perhaps,

but more beautiful this way.

Eggs are better scrambled anyway.

---

* published in the League of American Poet’s A Treasury of American Poetry II (2005)