Ghost dweller—
That niggling spirit
who at the end of things
pointed out that reborn
monarch butterflies are night
peacocks screeching obscenities
from the hardwood trees of sorrow,
despair & decadence.
Spiritual ladders
of error, heresy &
madness recycled.
I’m up front watching for logs, Conrad at the wheel.
In the middle seat, my daughter, bored already,
no screen to keep her mind busy,
fussing with the straps of her life jacket.
She wants to give names to all the minnows.
She hasn’t seen what we do with the hook.
A heron rises slow and prehistoric
and crosses the lake, complaining all the way.
Finger-bone stumps rise out of the water.
We tie off to one, slip a hook through a minnow —
my daughter cries on cue — and cast our lines.
Hours. Untie, cruise and drift.
Crappie aren’t biting, or we have
the wrong bait. So we cast close to the bank
hoping to scare up some bluegill.
Still better than a good day at work,
Conrad always says, and I always laugh,
and because I’m laughing, she laughs, too.
Tap-tap, the bobber dances, then goes under,
a big hit, ten-inch white crappie — at least
there’ll be something for her to remember.
Gray clouds move in, there’s a devil of a storm
brewing above the tree line.
It pushes a welcome cool breeze across the lake.
Now it’s a race for the dock and to get off the water:
she drags her fingers through the wake.
stir the meatless stew
in an active stance-
legs spread open wide
barefuoot on the shore
anchored to the earth-
empty open sky.
“It’s like walking into a dream. As though it is someplace else
entirely and not simply another
tent…”
– Celia, “The Night Circus”
Days indicating heat, by degrees
above record, and now, newly night—
a breeze—like a breath—
fresh air like secrets whispered
from strawberry moon full to the lip
of this glass of cherry
moscato
I drink; I sink into summer
and red cushions seeming black
in the dark of a familiar
deck, one languid sip
at a time
of my choosing.
Somewhere, a boy
in the shape of a man
fashions ice
in the shape of a garden
that is not this
garden
below,
but someplace else
entirely, and not
simply a new place
to live. I breathe
humidity like water
like air, grounded
in the fires
of imagination
and call it
a gift;
a future.
I compare my depression to a hijacker.
“Using your metaphor,
let’s think of the hopeful passengers
who desperately need
their voices to be heard.”
Or… let’s not.
What difference would it make?
I’ve never seen a hijacking
with a happy ending.
Eight years old on the Puget Sound fishing for flounder,
up out came an enormous,
parasitical specimen
one could only call a
spotted great white
I fell backward in the boat crying. Who did this?
Why? He flopped
there, seconds from death,
in the bottom of the white splintered boat, gills reaching
for water, fingering the air
I was happier before we
caught it
When the flounder quieted and
was unhooked, he went back in the water,
but didn’t swim away. Papí looked like a stack of sad Christmases,
he was flying back for work in seven hours,
and I could only cry because I loved him so.
I cannot translate
everything
into poetry
for there are
some pains
that there are
no words for.
