At Seventy
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka
I need a frozen sea for this axe... I need to remember something...
but what...I need to remember that space isn't empty,
it's some kind of field...Particles pop up & then disappear
like those prairie dogs I watched in the desert...
Sometimes I need a desert...a mountain at sunset
where the old saguaros gather to lift their arms
to the mystery...I believe in the mystery...Maybe I don't need
to understand much of anything ...What a relief...But still
the water beneath my feet keeps churning...The past
keeps trying to pull me down like I'm hooked on a line--
isn't everyone?--by some patient undersea god...
blood in our mouths...So many rooms of memory
at the bottom of the sea...bedrooms, party rooms, family
rooms, ugly rooms the parents lay in, waiting
for the end...It's our turn soon...
But don't think about it...Think of the ice
in space, deep in the crevasses of the moon...
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto...
I have an axe for all that...if I could only dislodge it
from my heart...
Day of the Undead
2024 Election
Trump's winged Tesla is drawing near...Someone should start serving
their time...or the martinis....Halloween's over, giant skeletons disappearing
from the yards, ghosts folded & put away. The witches are still drowning,
going down like torpedoed ships. The headless trussed turkeys are drawing near,
the wild-eyed shoppers stagger into the deep, unlovely woods...Shaken, or stirred?
Red pill, or blue? Ever taken a pill, not knowing what it's for?
Let's not talk about politics ever again. I'm going to start fresh... I'm going to be a squirrel
among squirrels, hoarding my acorns & old pizza slices, stashing my sutras & moldy feathers...
I'm going to run from predators in a zigzag pattern, to avoid the slings & arrows
of disinformation. The pumpkin we carved is still rotting on the porch.
My squirrel kin have been at it all week, first the eyes & forehead,
any minute the jagged smile...The weather's turned colder
than a witch's IUD...A squirrel can smell food after it's buried in the ground
but no one else can...I'm going to just lie here quietly, interred in my sheer evening gown....
Monsoon Season
Here beside the enormous
silence of the mountain
the birds of Arizona cross on their errands
and the heat swells like an edema toward the clouds
darkening all afternoon.
The great herds of rain are set loose
to surge over the many-armed saguaros, the spindly mesquite
in the parking lots of restaurants and nail salons,
thundering toward the college stadium and military base
and the institutional rooms
where I want to believe
the very old switch on
like forgotten appliances and turn
their faces to the window,
tangled in the cords of memory, suddenly
electric and speechless with joy.
