—forthcoming from
Language for the Living and the Dead
Parenting on Pluto
We two were once a planet, secure
in orbit around our sun, entitled in texts and
circled by moons whose dusty faces
stared at only us through the perpetual
Plutonian winter as though the universe
weren’t a black beckoning beyond.
Science has banished us from the roll
but we still rotate and revolve,
sure nothing has changed, and everything.
Dwarfs now, aware of eons & asteroids
that will mark us and pock us and
finally knock us off all charts, leaving
just the old models in museums no one
visits. This edge of the solar system
has always been lonely and we had just a
brief reprieve between discovery and
exile, a short span of years when the people
were aware and named us for gods.
Now that blue rock streaks away
on its own trajectory toward collisions
we can imagine or remember distantly,
thumbing the scars of our own,
the craters and gullies on our chilled
crust, the contours invisible from afar.
When the Buzzards Return to Crestone
We’d spooked a dozen dark cruisers
off perches in a cottonwood copse
ablaze with gold leaves, and they rose
prehistoric mad black, a flapping
racket ruining the creekgully quiet
and he said, Capistrano can
keep its swallows. I’ll take this flock of
turkey vultures any day. He couldn’t say
what brought them back to this drainage
off Sangre de Cristo slopes, maybe
roadkill on Hwy 17, though guts
lie smeared on many other roads.
I know it’s spring when they return, he said
as the carrion craft circled the grove
and one by one settled again on
limbs thick enough to hold them,
their ugly beautiful bald heads red
in October sun. They’ll leave soon enough
and that means winter on the way.
Nobody ever writes poems for vultures
except to curse them or render them
symbols of wretched death awaiting.
Winged hyenas, scavengers, call them
any pejorative term but remember
they can fly and you cannot, they
clean up the mess your car leaves behind,
they see their mates as lovely in the trees.
—from Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams
Dream of the Synesthete
You wake up in a bed soft as yellow,
aroma of crushed almonds wafting from the
number 6 on your alarm. Red dawn
wets drawn drapes coarse as sandstone. In your
dark dream, interrogators strained flavors from a
man’s tongue, one by one. He cried for mercy
and they gave him chocolate decadence
he could not taste, though his mouth filled with
vibrations, mellifluous woodwinds,
oboes and bassoons bruising flesh.
It’s a winter Tuesday, cold air so loud that
squirrels drop dead from branches
into piles of fallen leaves that sound like
musk, a smell sharp as an axe hacking
into a stump. Sweet orange juice
tastes cacophonous and scalding coffee
gutters in your mouth, a candle wick
dancing in wind. You smell the burning
too late, your body already afire,
emanating cinnamon and power chords.
Peaches hum, ripening in a bowl, and
morning tastes like a callused finger
probing your gelatinous heart. You would
like to know why the birds sing backward,
their tunes almost familiar as they reverse
between beaks. You’ve never been bitten
by the neighbor’s dog but it barks and you
flinch, feeling cold water splash your face.
Damn that dog, damn the sun playing
arpeggios of grape essence in your brain.
A bullhorn blurts your vanilla-flavored
name and two policemen made of incense
apply bright handcuffs that render you mute.