The fog drifts through the desert and what exists between is only half seen, playful enough to be made any monster or any dream.
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me
Image: The
Moon. Unattainable,
always changing shape,
disappearing and reappear-
ing. We look at it, imagine,
wonder, and pine—never fa-
miliar, continous provoker
of dreams. Do not offer
the obvious. Promise
the moon.
Brutal to give the prisoner a window— a blue sky glimpse— as if an afterlife existed. Brutal for you to parade in a body in the same room where I dream you.
They say your worth is in the way which the world passes in your wake, I feel the same speaks more to the worth of that world. Tomato, tomahto.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
Driving through El Paso to the gravesite of my grandfather I passed through a stretch of highway called Jardines Secos. The road was torn and white, and on the blasted wood sign of its name was an epitaph that read:
——————————————————————————————————
On this far road the flowers have long since died.
The desert don’t know their names
But its sand is of their pedals.
The sun is red in their blood,
Its fire unreasonable in their love,
And the dry air burns as it blows by.
On this far road the flowers have long since died.
——————————————————————————————————
—
Funny how much life skips a generation. Where my father never understood me, my grandfathers always reached close toward. One grew up quiet in Ohio, jumping off tire swings into forest lakes, and the other played with the bones of skeletons in Durango, Mexico. One is the most cool-handed and calm men I’ve ever known, and the other was a fiery card-room owning buddhist who’d eventually live in a monastary (I only remember him in monk robes). They both fought in Vietnam; one was a medic, the other wounded three times over and earned medals of bravery.
When I was twenty-one my father said something that I hold close and I’ll never forget. As I was leaving to my first professional fight he hugged me and said:
“Your grandfather would be proud of you.”
we foliate
and fall in batches—
she leaves always first.
The alabaster snow that blankets the lawn
Our warm cellar’s shade
How the ornaments wink when you walk into the room
The shadows on my face when I hand you gifts
You’ll never know what could have been
My white eye can’t see but three feet ahead of me, and a cloud rim, foiled like a lightning field, runs the burning circle of its view like ruined film. The sun, my favorite, annihilates me; the smoother moon isn’t sweeter, I can’t sleep anymore. The eye grinds my skull like a centrifuge of hammers in it’s lemniscate; soft dreams pulverize me. There’s a halo like a hangover over the world.
Last night was a sultry dream of dead matrimony; her willow dress, thin as this memory, rustled her skin as it waved in the storm. Before the witness of driftwood beached, the trees perched on eroded cliffs, and the sable sky above we gave vows on the sea-green shore. For a brief moment the assaulting drum shared the sounds of the crashing waves, and I held on to the dream against the beating dawn. They say your whole life flashes by before you die and I thought that was it.
I walk into a fight expecting to break my nose and both my hands, but never this.
I want to belong to you, like a name. I want to be a thing people have to know to know you.
Advice is always a confession.
What I’d advise of myself only memoirs
what I’ve never written and long since buried.
My name is but shallow ground, and retrospect
is a digger that I’d kill too if I could afford to.
