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White Reflects the Sun
A Collection of 17 poems
eChapbook, 2005
1. from Chopin's Memoirs
My hands are scarred
like all phalangeal histories
that start in the sand
& end with dreams of a young girl
taken at the waist.
On her lips
lives spent
gasping & grasping
at a bird flown East.
With my hands,
I make arpeggios cry-out
for Mallorca.
2. 100 Points of Stress
Certain weights, like the death of a spouse,
knock you out of the game for a bit.
You survive under ice.
And let’s assume that great romances
like handicapped horses, are all equal at the races;
so Win, Place or Show makes very little difference
if we pack poor replicas, bricks none so truly as
the red-oven-fired-type.
At that thought: one hundred points of stress,
I build a brick fortress deep beneath her sea.
3. Econ Ends In X
Every thirty days or so
I rededicate myself
to looking for a few extra lifelines
in the candlesticks
and saying last month
will be much like a month
two years from now.
Economics,
she’s a wisecrack:
her deep knee-bends
the unfashionable measure of output.
How very strange.
Imagine Smith or Keynes
dreaming up such things,
when as youth,
all they too craved
might best be summed
in a three-letter word ends in x.
I have survived monthly dips,
the Hell of year long losses:
true love’s weird math-
in it for the riddle
as much as I am the equation.
Her and I figuring in
a commonplace ripple,
short selling tomorrows.
My chest held to its bones
by cheap threads sewn from the lamb’s wool of antiquity.
4. My Navajo Child
His joie de vivre is not that of most little men
awaiting the freedom found in a Mustang,
a mechanical horse in place of his childhood sled
on which a perfect white blanket of Navajo winter snow
gives him clean slate to slide there on.
Fathers,
tell him of the wildside,
the nights cheating death,
of women and their ways
long after,
he skips along tree tops like a spider monkey
&
long after
he convinces teachers
that he's no average fluke two deviations out.
For now,
he's just out in the Navajo winter snow
invoking celestial spirits that may carry him
across that wide expanse to adulthood
in a chariot, instead.
5. Sadly, A Madness Awaits
If I have learned anything at all
it's that, I'm there
hands butterfly-spotted purple
living lives over & over again
like Dante then Caesar
the Hell in dying so bloody
whatever,
I see an old man
a boxer
and his dreams once dreamed on Demerol
him winning big races
giving birth to every woman's fantasy
knocking the shit out of someone who deserves it
feeding other nations
weeping at graves
like I said,
I see an old man
pen in hand
eyes cued for God's knives.
6. The Dark Rivers
Now
I'm moving over them too,
the rocks God lay on a
slippery slope of moss.
From night sweats
I awake,
drawing a bead
down river one knot.
Into her harbor,
I am a cautious whale.
...and should I find clear passage
in the counter currents
safe from the swells,
with paddle, with prayer
and beyond the mysterious
clouds that swallow the Hebrides...
then into her harbor
I'll gladly go knowing
Moses too traveled these rocks
without putting a bullet in his heart.
7. Lovemaking
We’ll spend two decades building some unbreakable colossus.
Our perfection be then held in a garland of daisy chained weeks.
At the beginning and the end…an infinite fire of glorystars.
And that fire is and was as all lovers have had and will have.
8. A Cold Oracle
I have back-peddled
through snowstorms:
finally able tell someone
about the blizzard of ’76,
all night billiards in the basement
and three long days spent
warming up the neighborhood tomboy.
Handsome checks
my father had framed
for pushing God’s crystalline stars
from one end of the world to the other.
9. Along the Ohio River
Hitch hiking Appalachia--
imagine how lost that could be:
twelve hours down a long dirty road,
nothing but dulcimer prayers in the cottonwoods
and every car speeding into Blood Simple.
Locals crave that big city drama:
some boy dressed in a tam.
In the wood shacks near Kenova,
men make very scary things:
like love songs for girls gone to Austin.
10. Anniversary
I’m sick of petting the pillows she slept on
and letter-crafting like Beethoven
to a dearly ghost lover;
for there is no winning at this at all.
Friends warned of the burn rate
that miles and miles of worry brings:
each year I am tapped dry
like one of those syrup-makin-Mohicans.
And still,
my wedding-cake-and-lace-thoughts
fuse with that once festive waft
of Latin jotas, clapping and guitars.
But at night,
her hair of gold swims towards silver.
And the days age us against one another,
crudely from afar.
11. Basin Motif
Out West, you’ll hear the guinea pigeon coo
at sunset, when God rakes his colored leaves
and throws them wildly broncing through the sky.
The untrained eye paints a thousand horses,
a thousand tumbleweeds sculpting the sands,
a thousand gaseous balloons. And when dawn
titters at your throne, all the starry pets
give way to the silence of Tahoe’s moon.
The brave will eat at the Sierra’s underbelly;
and the more saddle sore they are by noon, the grander.
@ published in the Midwest Poetry Review, August 2001
12. The Apple, His Eyes and the Silence of Ten Years
He’s dead. She needn't hear the phone ring.
Her insides have bled dry at thoughts of such a jump.
Sure, some dads make great playmates,
even drunk and incestuous ones:
the deep-dark-drum and bass kind who seem
less mindful of serenades and plum tarts
and shamefully get stuck on “nigger” or “wetback.”
Ladies, you needn't hear the phone ring.
He’s floating around waiting for a shoulder tap.
She’s running back and forth across the big red bridge.
To die like Kees:
a cold-quivering shipwrecked life.
A daughter dreams of sea angels.
The foghorns cry.
13. Girl at the Cafe
Like orange,
men sweetly suckle your eyes
to find nothing my dear, nothing
for which you rhyme.
Yet, I have been giggle-jigged from the get-go.
Haven’t you heard?
You brought a weeping willow smile to life.
I’ll forever send you postcards
with the musk of the Alhambra;
and the rasgueados from six silver moonbeams
will someday bring you riding.
14. Germans
Inspired by Kathe Kollwitz
In her threadbare smiles
and starving poors
she brings to life desperation’s sad grace:
the peasant, beggar and crippled thief
cast tragically for the world's play.
And we seers see them!
and let guilt trick our fool into vicarious dances,
repeated stabs, isolation and fasts.
And we celebrate humanity by imitating her!
And we sense the unwanted hate teeming
inside those unmothered kettles.
15. Helix
Not, what he meant to say.
Not even close.
I understand some men’s dilemmas
Chivalry and pestilence,
a helix bread in their sternum after a thousand years.
I understood my dad’s metallic tongue
to speak,
to give reason
to the studded-belt-bent-over-knee
fourth course of a three course meal
that had little to do with the lineage of man,
the hunt, masonry
or any other dereliction of duty justified by
this week’s lover’s apology.
Not, what he meant to say.
Not even close.
16. Caught with Mina Loy
Days upon days [in a private hideaway]
deep ochre drunk
to the river’s sound.
Heals dig-in [as serpents in the sand]
to give each other
the gift of fire.
We aviate blue skies [like Prometheus]
mindful
of the smoke signals cast.
@ published in Sakana, October, 2004
17. One Good Roll of the Die
I just wanted to tell her
that I’ve made all my mistakes twice
and none that could kill me
but some might follow me around for forty years
slapping my knuckles with a commandment.
And I just wanted to tell her
one last time
that I buried the gun out back in 1999,
next to Scrappy, the beagle brother and I
found frozen to the crick.
I figure his second chance
much like ours
fell down from high atop a church in Reno
where we all got one good roll of the die.
finis
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