Jornada del Muerto 
(From The Red Drum)

All your life you have moved
towards this solitude,
towards the heart
of desert country.

Red and roaring,
rocks rear around you,
while you curve your body
cup the steady fire
move through the forge
of heat and sand.

You gather yourself,
taut as a bow,
and face the wind.
After years of choices
you hear what the dazzle tells you,
and the teeth of mountains grinding down... 

that endurance is the only necessary thing. 

Aliens

I see them, the small dark men
thin as birds, determined as earthworms. 
Guided by seasons, they move north in lines 
longer than imagination or belief,
a migration as surely as the birds they resemble. 

They stop at my door,
asking for work, for water,
and their eyes dart like tongues
around corners, searching for danger.

There is always danger.
It is a fact of their lives
like hunger and the roads
that burn through boots,
the heat that turns them old
before their time.

My water comes out of the earth,
not mine to keep.
I give it freely.
It is all I have.
That and compassion
for such simple desperation,
reaching out year after year
for life, like every creature,
every flower
in the field.

Lost Lambs

They stop at my blue gate,
a young man and the girl
he calls his wife,
though I doubt it.
She's impermanent,
fragile-boned as tumbleweed.

She says they've lost a lamb,
looking at my dogs as she speaks.
I don't tell her that, alone,
it stands no chance,
that lions or coyotes and not my dogs
will find it, bring it down
bleating in moonlight.

Last summer another pair stopped here.
A small man and a woman with a devastated face. 
They were looking for their son
who had disappeared.
They'd posted his picture everywhere--
the store, the post office,
on the rough surfaces of telephone poles. 

I said nothing then, either,
simply wished them luck
and watched them drive away
across the heat-fired plain,
knowing that under the brilliance,
beneath the yellow grasses
the thin stems of trees
and cascading yucca flowers,
the heart of earth beats
like a red drum,

that every species in the world
lies buried beside the throbbing,
white bones shaken into dust.

Sylvia at Two: An Ode to Joy

Sylvia laughs,
her asteroid eyes emanate radio waves
in orange bursts open without fear of crashing. 
There's the carpet to cushion her falls
and the waves she sends are full
hitting me, a bigger, dented, gassy planet. 

I want her to throw herself at me,
trust my gravity to take her in.
I respond like a rising Jupiter
pulling her back and forth.
Her lips, pursed and damp,
meet mine, my cheeks, my forehead,
my nose, hard,
and her arms hug my neck without restraint. 

She hurls herself out of my orbit
just to feel the pull
when I reel her back in,
and lifetimes go by.
The dinosaurs die one by one,
comets hit the earth,
history is written over and over
to match each tiny human gesture
or wide swat at the planets.

She pulls my socks and falls back,
and each of my greatest sins goes hollow, 
thousands of years are washed of guilt,
and every soul is saved
in the radio waves of her joy. 

Counter Balance

I've lost the stars
to the streetlights and the years
between knowing and forgetting.
My daughter doesn't see the patterns yet, 
but she loves when I take her hand, 
point her finger trace the handle and the four stars
of the only constellation I remember.

In this space,
our backs against the warm bricks,
hip to hip, we read about a silly bat,
lost and found on a night like this,
most comfortable in the dark.

Our knees point up to balance the dipper, 
tilt it down to pivot and spiral,
suck us into the dark matter.
The open black is for us to live in for now, 
and it's where we belong,
upside down by our toes,
our fleshy wings make the blanket
we will sleep in.

Trusting Pluto

I rely on that last little planet,
energetic in the cold, dark, out there
in its awkward orbit around our mediocre sun. 
Pacing itself, passes as a planet,
learned by school children in the mnemonic word play of elementary science: 
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. 

That one can leave, well, almost leave
the solar system and still belong
is the lesson of Pluto. So, I can waver
outside the rings of Saturn, past Uranus, cold, in want of orbit or stability,
out of the family of planets, away
from any sense of gravity --
my commitment to mind over body
as tenuous as Pluto's to the sun --
and come back, know the warp
of my spin will return me to the family of planets, mnemonics, the warmth of the sun.

Drink tea with me, Mr. Tombaugh,
and reclaim your discovery of Pluto.
When you were young, near the center
of science and life,
through peering curiosity and sheer luck you noticed a tiny object, cold throwaway
 rock on the icy periphery.

Clyde, I rely on my mind to make me well, to turn me from nervous energy, backaches
and fever, to the person whose eyes see straight into yours. Tell me about that planet,
the ninth and last, wobbling out too far one side of the universe, and inside the 
orbit of Neptune on the come around. 

You are old now, and the papers say
Pluto may not be a planet.
That eccentric pattern of pull and tear
may not be enough to ground an object to the sun in any permanent arrangement.

Clyde, you need to pshaw this new notion of belonging based on consistency and 
reliable orbits. We are all out there,
spinning all over the place,
like colorful tin tops.
Let's talk some more, drink our tea,
than tell me I can leave,
and always come back.--

Signal Home

On the south hill under a full moon
horses hover, horses dance
around me, nudge my shadow, rub
against my hair, my wing bones, my chest. 

I hold my breath, hold my sacred fear.
I want the sound of a voice
to signal home and I'll rest
in tall grass and quiet hooves.

Massive lips and velvet nostrils
twitch at my palm. Too late, too dark
to ride, the horses know I won't corner them, won't capture them, saddle them.

I catch my breath. Words and wind
roar past as I waltz
with dreamy mares in moonlight.


Dark Blue Music

A shot of sunlight catches the curve of his shoulder. A new man rounds over me. 
I curl, whining low. He licks my open sores, strokes my loss, offers me the trust 
a newborn needs. He might fit his hand in my mouth, reach down my throat and fondle 
my bloody hear, squeeze it back to a rhythm I recognize.
When he pulls back, his fingers will pause on my tongue, stroke my teeth, slide 
across my jaw and into my tangled hair.
He could be my womb, a dark gesture that gathers me, breathes you-are-god in my 
ear and down my back. 

Number Nine Road
        I.
Cattle gone
and the mows empty

of bales, the cribs
shoveled clear. Sweet decay

of grain. The fields gone
to cedar are haunted by deer.

I stay in the room
where I was conceived, alone upstairs,

my footsteps in the dust
and the chifforobe hollow.

From the bed below she hears
and calls out

her dream the old rhythm
of boots on the stairs.

        II.
Through a lighted window
women  my mother, my aunt
make motions, passing
bowls, platters, knives.
In a clatter of movement
they sign     O listen only to the rush
     pushing through your veins,    our waters within you. 

Can they see me
through the glass? I raise my hand,
open it. Taste of ocean,
the red crescents cut in my palm.

        III.
Tonight let the dead rise
into my body, bald
and tall. I will walk

the fencerows, the creekbed. Let the fields give up their bones.
I will make a jawbone ax
and a ribcage plow. My body, once

liquid, muscle, my hands.

Night calls
like Ronnie Sexton's guitar,
a sweeter rustling beyond

the young corn and sassafras,
in that time when we spread

quilts on the dew, lying back
to listen, a confusion

of distance. Some small falling,
lightning bug or star.

The country was so dark. 

The Open

Because he fears wild ponies
their hooves grown long

on flood plain paths, their manes
holding his sons. His daughters grown

bareback. Because he fears
his own grasp, he calls their loss

discipline. In empty stalls
one hand maimed by absence

lends grace to the other. Now ashes,
now whole. I think of him

as fields. First cedar, sumac
the fallow land clogged

with young. Cat-tails swallow
the pond, their edible roots

catching silt. In Ohio
what I fear is prairie

is sea, my grandmother
swimming naked

beyond my voice, her hair
a shell she pulls into.

How she learned
to hold my breath, the waters

long eutrophic. Her life
in my mouth, the tongue.

winter

half decayed leaf bits, persistent as wind torn ice wearily clinging just below 
the top of a barren ridge, caught below by this gutter grate, or a sidewalk hole 
from a busted out chunk of concrete, wedged under a sagging chain link fence, water 
freezing and melting, and kids walking always away under bony branches stretched 
after them, or after a blue, weeks absent from this sky haunted with sweet miasma 
of wood as far gone as warming fires of childhood, in a little potbelly now buried 
under a pile of dented, half empty paint cans and metal storm window casings in a 
shed out behind somewhere in New Mexico, under a dark sky with the last films of 
daylight draining into the western mesa, like an extinguished candle, its fading 
orange glow reflected in hardening wax, muted as east coast reflections, on a plane 
across the country, heedlessly slicing through winding grey phantoms, trailing slowly 
their ways upward, before descending over shear rock cliffs and yawning plains of 
desert grass, heathered golden against the snow, to settle into this arid wind-shorn 
landscape

suffer the children

pushing through the ring of cheering pushing to get a better look, the teacher 
feels an elbow to his hip and his foot stomped before breaking through to pull 
Josh and Billy apart with a fist in his stomach and jack you up in his ear so that 
his glasses almost fall under their feet before he can take them to the principal's 
office for a time out while she pulls Tommy Woltrips's file to send downtown to 
the detention Home, gang division, where he's down with the West Side homies and 
an eleven-year-old has a special guard after a night of crack, guns and your mamma's 
so fat left blood discoloring the faded yellow loading zone behind the Stop-N-Shop 
where two weeks later the cashier will find herself just a pregnancy short of her 
perfect prom night, but the dumpster out back takes care of it so she can forget 
about it and join in a crowd throwing rocks at a bird with a broken wing

Constancy

I, John, saw computers
crash, spill sparks
smoke, leak electricity
circuits, binary bits and
bytes, code pooling on
linoleum, around chair legs
seeping into cracks
of Malibu tile floors.
Gore-Tex membranes
faltered, kept out
Seattle rain, but let in the acid
melted polyester, acetate riddled
with holes-sidewalks lined with shed
North Face Mountain LiteTM
parkas-all Bright OchreTM.
Safety glass laminated
a Detroit automotive plant
improving crash durability
by 50% at 55 mph, but dulling
machinists tools trying to cut through
the glass to seat valves, bore cylinders and cut breathing holes for the workers. 

I watched a Washington paper eruption
fill the sky with a white cloud, rain
pages of bank statements, litter the streets with minutes of disciplinary committee 
meetings pave the White House lawn with calculations -5.0% cost-of-living increase, 
2.4% middle-class income tax cuts 7.1% inflation rates-and drop sections of the new 
Dawes-McConley Act (protecting 0.73 million acres of Montana grasslands) into Brookside 
Park across the street from the Bureau of Land Management federal office. Forty-seven 
people left homeless after the concrete in their houses' foundations soaked up all 
the water from three days downpour, returned to its liquid beginnings, and flowed 
down the hillside, a slippery run littered with wood siding two-by-fours, fiberglass 
insulation and Spanish roofing tile-the worst mudslides to hit northern California 
since 1985-the local disaster shelter wired to the internet, and all safely in new 
homes on hillsides newly erected by www.tragedies.newhomes.com. 

I saw an Idaho doomsday cult
release into the Boise city water supply 40 gallons of untrained water causing 
massive backlogs at the end of every open tap in the area -the water refused to 
jump from heights over an inch- and widespread fear this would begin to affect 
other liquids as well, drilling companies hired to dig into the aquifer, relentlessly 
cut into the earth their shafts sinking deeper and deeper in twenty-foot carbonite
lengths dirt that refused to bleed the hunted water burrowing ever deeper, flimsy 
aluminum doors slid open for the first time in years, families gathered rusted 
picks, shovels, even hoes, clumps of brown grass set aside, swingsets toppled along 
fences, foundations exposed-neighborhood yards turned to pits, neighborhood strip 
mines lined streets, excavated piles of dirt, dry as a city's hope, spilt onto 
asphalt. The Albuquerque factory recalled all GEÒ light bulbs manufactured within 
the past three months because of holes found in the bottom which allow light to 
leak out before the bulbs can properly fill to illumination capacity, at first 
only a few bewildered complaints, but soon entire towns flooded with light, shadows 
drowned, interference patterns through keyholes and venetian blinds, people unable 
to work-too bright to sleep, car upholsteries burning drivers, sidewalks melting 
the soles of shoes-televised pleas for any and all opaque donations, and government 
warnings to wear 100% UV blocking sunglasses at all times. In a rush Wednesday 
pushed a little too hard, ruptured Tuesday, jammed both so that repair crews couldn't 
even reach the tear to patch it, time pouring out, repairmen swept away in the 
current, people bogged down in extra minutes, piles on desks undissolved in the 
sea of seconds coating shriveled heaps of trees decayed in excess time, their sap 
too viscous to flow through parched xylem, roots too frail to sink deeper, unfed 
by crystallizing phloem, families gathered together all their cassette, CDs, video 
tapes, huddled around their electronic players, continuously set on rewind, vinyl 
LPs spun manually in reverse. 

Then I saw a crowd of people rushing to a neighborhood church, some fell to their 
knees along the way, most surged against the locked doors, crushed their bodies 
against the heavy wood until it gave way with the splinter of oak torn from steel 
screws, people pushed over prostrate doors and bodies to fill pews, throw themselves 
onto kneelers, onto the floor before whatever cross, statue or icon they found, 
to wail, moan, berate their sinfulness, individually and collectively, some stripped 
shirts from their backs, raised in vengeful right hands splintered sections of 
oaken door they had picked from under their feet, anointed palms from the sacristy 
behind the altar, black leather whips with sundry strips from home, flayed iniquitous 
flesh, individually and collectively, flayed wickedness and weakness lurking under 
skin, undershirts and lacy red bra straps       a jostling crowd threw chunks of broken
roadway pavement through the window of a bookstore, squeezed past fragments of 
glass left in the casing, bloodied as the crowd pushed through, cleared a section 
of two shelves, grabbing ripping at the books, a few scraps of koran bagavadgita 
torah scattered underfoot, a clump of revelations wadded on the floor, stepped 
on, kicked into the corner, under people's rushing toward every "Employees Only" 
door they could find, push open, return through, hands empty as when they arrived, 
then the people returned to the window, each for a shard of glass, then to the 

other shelves, drew their slivers and their hands' blood over books, as those 
with religious texts read aloud, their strong voices, diverse passages, fused 
in communion    seven women in solid white bedsheets bound themselves kneeling on 
top of Phillip's 66 gas pumps-three self-serve, three full-serve, and the diesel 
pump-as watchers in burlap laid sticks at the bases, propped them all the way 
around, a medically-anointed high priest examined gynecological records, nodded 
his head, and people filed by to place candles they held at the bases of the pyres, 
chanted "money krishte hare padme ohm" repeatedly as the wood began to catch fire, 
the people unrolled small pieces of carpet, cloth, blue jeans, knelt, rubbed handfuls 
of oily dirt and gravel over their chests, their faces, their hair, bent low, 
prostrated themselves toward the pumps, hands stretched out beyond their heads, 
toward the wood and steel altar, dark smoke rising from rubber hoses consumed 
in flame, billowing black opacity, orange hydrocarbon spectrum, muted voices' 
chanting, deafening boom of oblivion, lifted in communion up to the heavens.

Stilled Life

The dark red wildroses
are back.
A string of them
curls over the black,
glistening grill
like a study
in a studio--
except that we're
OUT doors.
Nearby, movements
of leaves, birds,
a cat
lurking in tall grass,
butterfly flutterings.
I could actually
stand up and walk
out of this canvas
and the life
would go on


Birds Of A Feather

Somebody turns forty
and I'm supposed to feel

sorry for their loss.
Somebody's always
manipulating me
to notice them, whether it be
a too-tight skirt which,
ironically,
blurs the outlines
of her cheeks but does
suggest
I should desire her,
so I do.

Like the others, I'm
a misfit too,
craving someone else's
interest, unfit to live
completely
for myself.
Anybody perks me up
the way a dog wags
automatically
at any other dog.
Same-species recognition
blinds me
to whatever, lesser,
things there are.
Even this poem wants
desperately
for you to read it
with some interest.


Unsuspected Shore

Early morning, reading
a book outdoors,
when, unexpectedly,
the ocean
sounds
around you,
and, looking up, you notice
boughs of tiny locust leaves
waving, thrashing.
An invisible disturbance,
waves of air
have come
rolling in over your backyard
trees and grass, and you're
at the edge
of this ocean,
basking
on its unsuspected shore.


Disorder

I'm bothered by
predictability,
doctor.
What can I do?
People, dogs, and cats
and grackles
are such
animals! One thing,
then another.
Needing to be cared
for, then
caring.
If not inherited,
learned.
If not voluptuous,
neuter.
Loving it, then
leaving it.
If only we'd been
spawned directly
from the ether--
then--!
a million stars,
and each with a million
sand-filled beaches.--Joe Somoza

First Horses, 1519

We were thrown into the sea
at the Horse Latitudes.

Our manes spit foam at the moon, our hooves
plowed salt from our lungs

until we heard the last syllable
of the grieving Arab's lullaby.  

Then we rolled like opened wooden chests over
the black floor of the Atlantic,

we were death looking for a white sail.

Those of us who lived 
went through the green door  of a New World

where we where slaves.
Gentled men and women who'd forgotten
their own secrets.

We kept what we forgot 
locked in our eyes and we rode into cornfields,

into war, under the heavy thighs 
of men we wore like silver idols.

Among the first laws of New Spain, it was ordained
no Indian could ride us.

We heard them tell the Indians we were immortal.

That we were the lower part of a riding God,
and they must build corrals to hold us back

from devouring their human flesh.

The Indians watched our captors ride us with saddles
inlaid with silver and gold,

watched as our captors slept with us like silken women,
ran their tongues over the lashes of our velvet eyes,
made us beds next to their own.

The Indians went to war with us.

They burned us alive, or filled 
us with arrows and ate the flesh from our necks
and left us among the gramma grasses. 

When the first Apache chose one of our fastest 
and rode away into thorns and pink hills,

the enemies of our enemies became our friends.

We loved those men who spoke into our manes
with sounds that had no word for king

and many for wind.

They sweated on us and rubbed our sweat
onto their bodies
until we were one.

They raced us and cast cords around our necks.

When winter weakened us they trapped us
in canyons or against bluffs

where our eyes rolled with the memory of salt waves.

They breathed into our nostrils until our spirits mingled,
and we gave them our speed and flesh 
in exchange for their language 
of wind. 

Later, the horse-whisperers stepped forward, they were men
who were horses, too, of all colors.  We chose them 

for our healers, we 
made them forget they were men
whose descendants would be born
inside fences, hospitals.

They almost made us forget the lightless bottom of the sea,
where our deaths are still calling like white sails.


Otter

Once we were saints, not ghosts, on this river.
We leapt one thousand times over the yelping coyote's back
until he ran for cover.

We were tender with our own. Tucking them like brown nests
among the cattails 
and reading the tracks of wolves and lions in the wind
through old cottonwoods. 

We lived through centuries, more joy than the sun's tassels 
in rusted traps sprung on the heaviness 
of rotten leaves. 

The rivers flowed with fish whose bodies held the mysteries
of God's blindness. We ate those fish and would not see 
the time of gentleness was over-.

We await our resurrection in the wild
eyes of the Holy One.


Mountain Lion, 1936

I was his shadow. The one Ben Lily hoped to kill
that morning he died in the poorhouse in Silver City.

I escaped, ran free from his dogs who were mourning
against the adobe wall, the iron of my blood
lost to their tongues.

I was his shadow. He first saw me in the Louisiana canebrakes
and killed my brother the black bear with a pocketknife.

That was fifty years ago. He followed that hawk bothering
his wife he called that daughter of Gomorrah's chickens,
and kept going.

He tracked me state to state across the west.
Mountain to mountain. Killed thousands of bears, hundreds
of lions. Saw my golden twin sister swaying

in the highest branch of a tall pine and shot her paw.
Drilled her heart when she was halfway
to the ground.

I was his shadow. He forgot his money paid by grateful
ranchers in banks across Texas and New Mexico.
Wrote checks on the fragments of bone
for what he wanted, maybe once a year, in December.

He slept with his dogs beneath dried leaves. They unburied what I killed,
cooked it in fire for the strength to hound me over
rocks, pine needles.

Rested only on days Lily suspected were Sundays.
Then he sat and read his Bible. Walked solemn
through pages of desert valleys, deer and blue water.

I called him The Judge.
He called me The Devil.
Because I could wreak evil in these piñon and juniper hills
and was not ashamed. He never stopped his human talking, kept it
up like a prayer. I called him Shame.

He called me Cain. On nights he slept I crept close to his face.
Studied it and almost loved him like a brother.
On his forehead there was a mark
like a smoke stain on an altar.


Rain

I'll fall where I damn well please.

And I please over the wild grasses and their doves.
Over cornfields, and horses that are padlocked,
and horses carrying away their own thieves.

Over mesquite, orchards. 
Jails, cemeteries, banks, sidewalks, gallows.
Valleys wide as summer.

Over the candlelit dinners of the governors
and the dark camps of fugitives. Over murder, and birth.

Over the tall straight lines of clapboard houses.
Like whiskey on the faces of good women. 

Because I'm against chastity. Against holding out, playing
favorites. I'm for the desert crocus that opens to any
hummingbird's clear passion.

Verge

This morning comes like Spain to my house: suddenly the sun slashes between the 
two houses across the field and strikes through my kitchen window, across my table, 
and into the sink. The goldfish is stunned in the bowl.
On the orange crate the odor of thick woods waits in the fern's leaves. My pencil 
is suspended above clean paper. The ocean has pushed out one bright drop that 
hangs from the spigot. I will move
when the fish moves. 


Soccer Match
(For the Michigan Hawks, USYSA Women's U-19 National Championship Team, 1989.) 

Today, my daughter, you let the ball
fall from an arc
twice as high as our house,
slide down your right thigh,
knee, the birthmark on your calf,
ankle, the bruise on your heel,
and spurt into the open grass,
the space toward which you had already moved, then somehow touched it once again
to place it right before the left wing's foot some forty yards away.

I don't know how you did this.
But, then, I marvel at my own walking,
tying my shoes,
lifting a cup to my lips
and setting it down,
clicking the radio on and off.

I think I see what this means:

the miracles we are.
And how miraculous
to be miracles
together. 


Cetology of Words

Before you dive to sleep
you bind a dolphin's brain to your book
pages float open to light
sentences drift, hover over your eyes

you become the words that glide
dart around the room
then settle
blessing your lover beside you with their touch 

your touch your words
spilling over her flesh entering her body where you read her streams currents 
countercurrents how love billows in the blood

to spin the story of your lives
the way you glisten twist and rise
hearts breaking the surface
to arc your leaping signatures in the air --F. Richard Thomas 

"60 TRY SUICIDE IN 48 HOURS"
"Most had failed in love, or final exams, but a summer heat wave with temperatures 
as high as 109 may have played a part in their despair."        -AP Report, Tehran

Oh, the shame of one of sixty, mostly adolescents in Tehran. I explain my failure
in love, the final exam,
but they maintain the heat shapes
my despair. They tell me life
is difficult when hot, that l09
is an impossible number, whether measuring degrees, days in a locked room,
the score on a test
or consecutive minutes of joy
with her. Yes, the heat is difficult.
When I gripped the gun, it blistered
my hand. I wanted a quick pain
in my chest or brain, not the absurd scorch of juggling fingers.
Did you know
sleeping pills will melt?
And the knife skidded
in sweat from my slippery wrist
to glide like oil on the floor.
In the closed garage, the air stifled me, threatened to suffocate me into a faint. 
You recover from that. I could not breathe long enough to start the car and lie beside it
until I could not breathe.
I tell them this.
We sweat in agreement. 


Birthday Ghazal

I will speak of menopause as I'm at the age. 
(See Kizer: "Pro Femina" for stolen tone.) 

"The belief that menopause can turn virtu- ous women into sex maniacs still exists." 

Where are those who lust for the gifts of wicked women, femme--d'un certain âge
--fatale entre deux âges?  

Germaine Greer would rather we didn't have sex at all. Where is her pleasure 
of yesteryear? 

Black Cohosh, Mexican Wild Yam, Chaste Berry tincture flow through the 
homeopathic hands. 

The medical profession invents a test
for fertility. I'm trying to fail it.

We're supposed to be freed for work, leadership, contention--priapic measures 
for success. 

Or we're bound by hot flash, headache, violent emotional surge, crones with 
black cats. 

I'm no more freed nor fettered than before, neither slavish nor conquistadorish.

I shall borrow Byron's attributes--KWest at fifty--! "Mad, bad and dangerous 
to know!"--Kathleene West 

Adventure

Just before sunset, black birds float down to grow like leaves on tan bark
beneath the quiet scribble of airplanes. I cross over to the desert scruff and 
climb the hill calling the sky peach, or roseate, that poetic name.
All but one tree below me is black winged. The dropping sun reddens stucco 
terra-cotta-- these little houses in browns--
and other crayon colors, rust,
rouge.

I try on these fine gradations
for the day's adventure. A cat sits
on the edge of a flat roof looking
straight up as the sun whips its tail
the blue cube of sky.


Still

These gravestones rise to look across
the river and through the trees,
a cooler view of Kansas now
for this great-great grandfather from Wales. 

Rachel, at 10, seeks out newer burials,
shouting out over a mound of dirt:
"This one died in January," or "2000,
and still muddy! I want to look under it." 

She toes a clod and says: "You shouldn't have to give up your only life."
"But you live on in others' memories,"
I answer, dutifully.
Why are graveyards soothing? Everything's set, trees, stones, grass, the wrought 
iron gate, the often lofty view you have to die to get, but not the small warm 
hand squeezing mine. 

"Still . . ." she says.

Tomasino

Who was a good man in some village
where I lived, sometime, who knew
the secret names of the hills, the valleys. 

When he spoke of earth, it lighted
like the yes that he carried always
in his eyes, his hands outstretched

in welcome. A poor man. Tomasino,
who lived a frugal life on his farm
but his arms were strong, his face

even today, long after, is the flare
of a match struck to light a lantern,
or the race of brown water down

a furrow when the irrigation gate
is first opened among the spring flowers. 
So do I remember him, standing in a field 

saying "It will rain soon, the tomatoes
will grow and the winter will be late
this year, the birds will sing songs

and not eat tomatoes." Most of it
didn't happen but such was the faith
of Tomasino that I can see his eyes now. 


The Token
ligera, ligera
tu cuerpo es la huella
de tu cuerpo....
-Octavio Paz

In a dream my long dead uncle came to me, he of my name, with a heritage as 
twisted as the swollen Pecos in flood time.

I was giving a poetry reading somewhere, we drove into the town, I saw the bare 
hill behind the town. Later, a message came:

"Your Uncle awaits you at the Grand Hotel." I was driven to the huge building 
that now covered the same hill. The desk clerk said, 

"Hurry, he's waiting in 301." My aunt, living the opened the door and 
impatiently let me in, indicating a closed door behind her.

I open it and there is my uncle's whole law office, walls filled with walnut 
desk, leather bound books, him sitting, his grey Stetson on, behind the desk. 

Taller than I remembered, his face
greyly elegant, with sharp aristocrat
bones, pale blue eyes looking far off.

Gray frost crystals powdered his cheeks. A force like the pressure of water
compelled my lips, I knew the crystals

were death, yet I kissed them, my uncle
never looking at me, his eyes distant
certainties where strange birds flew, crying. 


Lem Lyons

When I get as old as he was,
I sure hope I hang on to the same graces. Prospector, hermit, he always made me
welcome when I hiked across the mesa.

Fixed me coffee, keeping one blue eye
on the falling sun and just on time
he'd say I'd better be heading home
and I always made it--as the shadows
led ahead of me I would see the light
in my mother's window, the pale aura
of her coal oil lamp on dusty glass.

I don't know when he died. I was gone.