Dreams and Portents

Both of these poems appear in my chapbook Sackcloth and Ashes, put out in 2008...

Dreams and Portents

Sometimes I picture you a boy,
love a mere seedling in your heart, unwary
of storms, drownings, of bitter growth.
Unbent by acquisition and loss.

Did you lie in bed and dream the mornings,
before work roused you with needling
demands, before a rueful sun crested
Michoacan hills and roosters crowed?

Did love sidle up to your warm skin
and steal your breath? It must have been
clear as an opal, that heart, and soft as jet-black
loam, awaiting a romance, a real hermosura,

the day the page would turn to your own
life. I wonder if you ever imagined me—
however unlikely, had a faint premonition
in the x-ray vision of night? Or did you see me

in my hometown where you lived one year—
a stranger? Did you pass me on a California street
I walked two hundred times, meet my eye one
smoldering second and ask, Could that be her?

{First appeared in Sackcloth and Ashes, 2008}


Walking, Coldest Day of the Year

The sun loves days like this, seen
in a million new ways, each blade of grass
tipped with a diamond, light refracted
into myriad forms of honor. Whole fields

of crystalline white, patched in chartreuse
here and there, where the sun went too
far. Puddles frozen and thawed, froze
again into expressionistic layers, pod

forms overlapping, concentric circles.
I pass the woman I met at the Bookmobile,
and she waves through a window. My dog
crunches brittle turf under calloused paws,

and runs over threads of moss lacy with
frost. My mind lies resting in a small
pocket, future and past dissipate like
tendrils of smoke, and you are closer to me

than my skin. I hold you inside me
like a Russian nesting doll, and when I stand
at the creek, I know you hear its trickle
and roll. When the love all around shakes me

like breath on a reed, I know you feel
the vibration. Loving a blade of grass is
loving God, and loving God is loving you.
You are a fish. Love is water.

{First appeared in Sackcloth and Ashes, 2008}