Before The Hummingbird Sips
You surely know, too,
that time before
the hummingbird
sips:
you hear the sound
when gravity dips
inside the ear –
such thrumming,
that wingbeat
drumming –
and all it takes is movement
to make the moment
disappear
You surely know, too,
that time before
the hummingbird
sips:
you hear the sound
when gravity dips
inside the ear –
such thrumming,
that wingbeat
drumming –
and all it takes is movement
to make the moment
disappear
Strands
~After Jean Valentine
I think it’s about time we went fishing,
he said when the quicksand
of life inched up to her Adam’s apple
divorce is a dry canyon of one
winged birds
***
Gramps loved her all-out
Not many have what she had
Does he have a rub-off factor?
I think about him every day,
every hour, she said after he closed
his 95-year-old eyes and floated
away
***
the only soul I’ve cherished
thoroughly
singing to tadpoles
red salamanders darting
child-splash in the small green pond
torn knees of his denims
I mended with thick strands
raven, sunflower yellow
2011, a red traffic light at Westport Road,
while driving to the safety of a basement
during a Louisville twister.
My wife and I averted death, screaming
wildly, asking for a red light to turn green.
1939, the Loyalists of the Second Spanish Republic
burned his seminary to ash.
A poet, a deacon, sang at High Mass
when the school was shattered—scattering
the seminary boys and men who ran
to their homes, and all the girls in sunburnt Cadíz
flocked to greet them in the stone streets, in the
churches unlocked, and the horses watching
silently.
He spoke Spanish, French, and Latin—
he knew words as music, knew the touch
of voice on the heart. In the little village church
he played the organ, knowing all her pipes and stops,
this looming, found beast of rain gutter pipes,
and old doors and jambs—
often he turned sharply to see Incarnate God
in the verses, but then
for a time the only Word he could dream
was Nico, from the Zarsuela—
her lovely, white frocked frame adorned—a lucent
raven would sing Ave Maria while he played.
His notes carried her, a bird song, aloft in the nave,
above the aisles of whispering communicants.
Dreaming he thought not of any particular
or universal thing, rather a persistent dawning—
the husband, the father I could be.
See them folded across each other, roaming in Casas Viejas,
deacon and songstress, shuffling past the apothecary
and cafes, on the cold, knowing stones that
survived massacres,
and could bear one feelingly, the eyewitnesses to time.
Her heels: staccato echoes in the short streets
between the stuccoed buildings, and there were
gardens on the balconies from where the good boys
cast their sad gazes on the unreachable beauties
passing by.
See gold bands purchased to adorn this royalty.
Hear a song at Mass shared as one would pen
a tanka or a letter.
It is dancing, a swell and rise atop the pews felicitous,
talking of sons and daughters to come, better days, and
gypsy nights.
1944, this sleeping town of little old houses,
the world at war, a limping peace at the door,
in Nuestra Señora del Socorro
caring not a whit for what was lost,
or what could be,
this couple they married—
and 29 years later, dear Papí, I was born—you see?
standing on the carport today
eating
a cold pulled pork sandwich
with a thin layer of sauce
from a popular place
near the lake
the nieghbor’s gray-white cat
stretched out at my feet asleep
breathing slowly with it’s fur
teased up by the humidity
the evening had gone silver
turning the green world
a little darker than normal
and two of them
nervous black and white
chattering to one another
stopped at the bird feeder
watching one another’s
every single move
one of my children
came to door
and they took flight
I knew I’d never see them
again
I didn’t have to wonder
what made them stay together
for the rest of thier lives
it was something deeper than love
primal, knowable to us all
at least one single time
It came on a day when the sun was hot and bright
And filled the sky with salt and sorrow,
It came on a day when the tomatoes
were red and sumptuous, ready for plucking.
It came on a day when green leaves turned brown
And the vine hardened, snapping under their weight.
It came on a day when skin once firm and inviting
Became loose like the skin on an old woman’s arm.
It came on a day when that sweet citrus scent
Became musty like curtains and dust floating by the window.
It came on a day when spring rains stopped falling
And the earth swallowed it all into her belly.
We were lovers eating and drinking until the cup was dry,
Those aquifers waited for wells we never dug.
We turned to dust, blown away in the wind.
We are not even buried here.
