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Autumn Migration

Early in my teaching career I was arm-twisted into being a cheerleading coach.  I spent 3 years with 55 girls and 7 boys shepherding them to games and competitions.  They were awesome and the pace was grueling.  I learned to catch a falling body in mid-air and finally understood physics.  This poem is structured with 8 beats per line – because that’s the count in cheerleading.  And in case you’re wondering – the picture is a layout and you should be pretty impressed at how far below the hands are waiting to catch her. </em></p>

To the Men Asleep Under the Dogwood, 1958

They do not rest, peaceful as fallen petals
backs pressed against hillocks of new grass
overcoats smelling of lawn onions, hooch,
the quarter for a bath they did not have.
They do not speak companionably, men
on an outing, chums, passing their stories.
They close their eyes against the limbs, the sky,
the landlady – her key, her lock, her rules.
She’s a minotaur tugging the curtain
with her hoof, her nightgown ripped by her horns.

Limbs catch on the insides of their eyelids;
the cross-hatch becomes the river Elbe
on a mortarman’s much-folded field map;
or slim brown legs tangled in sheets, not his;
or the cracks in the mirror’s silvering
as it hung above the bar where time ran out.

The men rise up from the earth, now specters
from tales told by my elderly neighbor.
Their failures cling to me like the fallen
petals I’ll find buried in my knotted hair
when I wake in the early morning hours,
asleep in my nightgown, feet bare, chilled,
the house key against my palm, my failures
forming shapes in the tangled weave of limbs.

Poetry – The Night We Danced Sequence, II

2. Evensong

La Rosita cranks up for the after-game rush –
the heavy smell of corn oil hanging over the parking lot
drifting toward campus, slick tendrils sliding
toward the bleachers. Masa coalesces
into the hands, slippery and smooth, of three sisters in the back
who slap the balls like new babies
into the churning tortilla press. Their father handles the long wooden spoon,
leans his face into the heat of the chile verde,
testing with his nose for cumin, green chiles, garlic.
Their ears perk for the roar of the crowd’s choral
lamentation or exultation depending on the score.
This is their science: put the carne asada on the grill when the marching band
thunders into the first mournful notes of the alma mater.

We agreed to meet after the game – sit with other faculty –
bump our fingers into one another reaching for the cilantro.
Maybe the garnishes in the Styrofoam bowl – sour cream, juicy tomatoes,
jalapeño slices, translucent onions
make me reject the safest choices,
see in your eyes a brightness, a delight, a delirium.

Eating cilantro for the first time is an act of faith.
The small chopped leaves so like clover, the long, long stems
still with the smell of damp earth – these things should taste like the lawn,
should be grassy, sharp, bitter, but instead they infuse
spicy foods with the mellowness of morning sun on soggy fields.

And the air, as it often does with these things,
sucks itself up and away in the crush of teenage bodies
and the hum of victory dances,
when you take my elbow and steer me out into the busy night
and toward the empty campus, to the low white plaster buildings
done in the smooth, old, Spanish style, falling
against the wall under the shadow of the eucalyptus,
and into your hands, slippery and smooth,
“Come Inside. Come Inside.” you whisper.
And I reshape myself to your palms.

Notes on Evensong Evensong is an Anglican tradition dating back to the 1500′s. Evensong is the choral service sung at vespers. In this poem the singing of the crowd triggers the events of the poem.

Poetry – The Night We Danced Sequence

I. The Night We Danced at the Promenade

In the blue-walled ballroom of the Hotel Don Leon
the boot-black sky served in slices at the open doors
and citrus blossoms hanging thick as seed pearls
on the specimen trees espaliered on the courtyard walls
like men before a firing squad,
we were not yet lovers.

Forehead to cheek, we kept the distance demanded of our charges.
Fevered teenage eyes watching us, suspicious of our dancing grace,
their own gyrations rumbling the parquet loose from its glue,
shaking the chandelier in the ballroom below, raining
small bits of plaster onto wedding plates.

This is the only acceptable public embrace
we’ve jotted into our conduct codes
as our longing unfurls among the crepe-paper roses
and silver-sprayed ivy.

The dance ends and our bodies part, hands lingering.
Out on the balcony the pierced-tin sky tilts and spins like a shuttlecock.
The dry air browns the orchids in my corsage
as the petals drape their arms around the curled ribbon.

Notes: This is the first in a series of poems done as a cycle. I’ll put them up over the next few days. The cycle has six poems in it – each playing with a poetric tradition of praise and longing, whether in form or in device used. The arc of the cycle is from the inception of an affair through to the distant future. The device in use is sound – lots of “o” and “a” and other sounds that make for a sigh. Prom is something most everyone remembers – fondly or not – but it’s not just the teenagers who get taken with Prom. Most teachers are required to chaperone at least one dance per year and in my time as a teacher I learned that the faculty is every bit as much under the sway of hormones as the students are. High school is a stew of longing. I’ve been working on this cycle for years and haven’t really ever done much with it. Why tonight? Because it’s been a horrible day – probably the worst in a series of bad days, and what the hell – why not.

Abujerar

August in Wildwood Canyon

The mountains around my hometown are on fire. Again. In October of 2003 my dad’s house up in the San Bernardino mountains burned to the ground. My sister and I watched it happening live from our houses in Atlanta on CNN. We recognized it from the street sign and the windows. The pictures on the right are of the house taken from CNN. Fire is horrible. The path is unpredictable and the destruction immense.
While I miss mountains and canyons, I don’t miss fire (although I’ve chosen to live in a city renown for burning down over and over again, go figure, probably my Aries nature to always be close to the flame).

I wrote this poem about me and my sister as teenagers dealing with a sudden wild fire in the middle of the day while we were home alone. When you grow up in a canyon you live with the knowledge that a wild fire or an earthquake could strike at any moment. In the back of your head you have lists of what to grab because the fires move so fast through the dry chaparral that you often have to evacuate very quickly. I have a hard time doing this poem at readings because the emotions of that day rise to the surface very quickly, like they are this morning as I’m scanning the web looking for news about Oak Glen and Yucaipa. I’m praying for everyone in my hometown this morning. (I’m not, however, lighting any candles)

August in Wildwood Canyon

A hawk riding the hot wind passes us
as we sit eating burritos at the kitchen table.

We do not speak. At sixteen and thirteen we know
only soap operas, suntans, and rivalry. Our silence

is filled with the whine and roar of the discer
stalking the brittle grass on the canyon floor.

I am the first to draw breath at the acrid scent.
Fire. We race to the edge of the deck.

The hillside drops a hundred feet until
orderly iceplant gives way to sage and grass.

Flames race up the power poles. Lines snap
and fly like arrows. The abandoned tractor roves

in circles around the live oaks. Now talking
nonstop, moving quickly, we heap left-overs and jars

onto the kitchen floor and, packing photographs
and films into the refrigerator, we preserve

our childhood, but cannot agree on what goes
in the car. China is too fragile, silver can be replaced.

We race back and forth from house to car,
throw in quilts, yellowed wedding dresses, a box

containing a fall made from our great-grandmother’s
loosely braided hair, our grandfather’s college yearbook,

my box of notes from my best friend, my sister’s softball
glove and uniform because she has a game tomorrow.

All but our mother’s last canvas fits into the trunk.
Planes are filling the air with loads of water and the white

walls of mom’s room flicker pink as we grab her jewelry box
and join the line of cars leaving the canyon.

Chunks of ash drift onto mailboxes and fences,
settle in small piles. I need headlights to see my way out.

On a safe plateau we huddle together, watch flames
line the ridges, the smoke shift from white to gray.

At dusk we are allowed back. The wind is changing.
The fire is trapped on a ridge high above the canyon.

My sister and I are quiet again. She refuses to ride
with our mother and sits stubbornly in my car.

The line of cars, longer now that parents are home,
winds back through the naked and smoking hillsides,

around curving roads, charred front yards
and back decks burned black. One home is lost.

Not ours. We ride the hot wind back to nothing
that will ever again safely belong to us.

Autumn Migration

Autumn Migration

Throw up your dinner at the break.
Beside all the gawking starlings
in the bathroom, you’re a macaw,
fuchsia stripes and ruby slashes,
but under the stadium lights
you look healthy. Rub Vaseline
on your teeth so your painted lips
slip into smiles. On the field
the minutes march away until
the band cranks up Louie Louie
as the players depart to pray.
and you count into position
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . .
When you feel the base’s hands grip
your hips, you stop hearing music,
the crowd rumbles away. You bend,
his fingers pinch your waist until
he raises you up in the air
like a falconer. Your feet rest
in his hands for a four count, then
you stick it, right foot in your palm
and left foot gripped hard in his hands.
You squeeze your cheeks until your thigh
becomes a rod of hardened steel
pinch a penny, pinch a penny, pinch a penny
Even from this distance you look
in the eyes of parents, stoners
and old graduates in the bleachers
and see them bound to the earth,
their bulk absolute and leaden.
Out of the corner of your eye
you see the other flyer tossed
like a released homing pigeon.
She comes out of her tuck, touches
her pointed toes, then swan dives down.
Later, she will tell you about
seeing, over the crowd and past
the bleachers, the long line of cars
on University. Eight counts
left, but his hands begin to shake.
One count early you feel him bend
his knees, propelling you airborne.
You twist into a perfect V
and ride down into the cradle.
Pop out of his arms, wave in time
with the waning beats of the song.
Only some have bones light enough to fly.

Notes on Autumn Migration
One of my favorite aspects of being a modern poet is the ability to play with that almighty ruler of poetry – Form. Just as poets in the 18th and 19th century took to and used hymn meter because that was the rhythm they heard in their daily life, modern poets can take whatever beat they want. We’re not as constrained by the notion that there is one right way to apply form.

This poem is about cheerleading, of course, but not any cheerleading – the basis is the gravity-defying aspects of doing stunts. Throwing another body into the air – or being the body thrown in the air – requires a certain mental toughness and a deep belief in your partner. It’s hubris in a short skirt. The manner in which I tweaked form for this poem is in the line count – each line is 8 beats – which is the count in cheerleading. Every motion is dictated by that magic 8 – so I wanted this poem to fall within that hard and fast rule. When you can get the form and the subject matter to marry so closely – well, that’s pretty satisfying. The last line is not 8 counts because the stunt has ended.

Oh, and a little inside tidbit. The cheeks in the poem are butt cheeks. Every flyer is taught the mantra that they repeat in their head – and sometimes outloud – Pinch a penny. They have to squeeze their butt cheeks as if there’s a penny in there and their life depends on keeping it in place. In order to defy gravity the flyer has to keep their body within a single plane – if they move any body part out of that plane then the base can’t hold them and they fall. Watch ESPN cheer competitions some time and you can catch a few of the flyers mumbling up there in the air.
Pinchapenny pinchapenny pinchapenny.

Holding Tight

Pacing at 2 am with Telia

The neighbor’s house is nothing but black geometry
as I walk the floors with my infant daughter —
lost in half sleep, in the desire to dream.
She reaches, grasping at my hair,
and anchors herself as a moonflower vine
grows small spikes to find purchase on a wall.

Of all the strange fancies
my grandmother keeps in boxes
what she wants the most is her mother’s hair,
arm-length, chestnut and tightly braided.
A marvel to hold when I was a child.
The trophy none of my friends could top.
I find it on a high shelf in her bedroom,
muslin wrapped, looped with silk lily-of-the-valley,
plastic case clouded, label smeared.
Seventy-five years it has lived with her.
Fierce desire for this one thing
has been triggered by a recurring dream –
she’s sixteen and come home from school
to find her mother on the edge of death
her knee length hair gone by order of the doctor.
That long braid, turned gray by age, sickness,
was buried with her body,
but the switch, culled from a hairbrush
and used to make elaborate coiffures before the sickness,
haunts my grandmother,
makes her reach out to hold
the brittle strands in her trembling fingers.

I’m posting this as my first poem because it’s about my grandma. I stopped blogging last year so abruptly because my grandmother fell and hurt herself. She was 94 and the fall she took ended her life after three painful and hard weeks. I just sort of, well, entered a mourning period. So, I thought it fitting to “publish” this one about her as my first foray into getting my writing out in the world.
Because I’m a teacher I have to give some explanatory notes for each poem. Were I giving a reading I would do the same thing for the audience to introduce the poem. Here’s the deal with poetry – it’s mostly meant to be an interaction between the audience and the poet. It’s okay to say what a poem is ABOUT. To me, poems where you have to delve deeply to figure out WTF is going on are just an excuse to not pay for therapy for the poet. Some of what I write is autobiographical and some is fiction – the switch in the poem is real and a pretty cool object when you think about how long ago my great-grandmother died.
The style of this one is a pretty modern construct my favorite professor, David Bottoms, is the master of. The first stanza is an in-the-moment riff, then there is a break, and then the second stanza reveals the meaning and the theme. The two sometimes look like there’s a big leap in logic or a breaking of the space-time continuum, but if the poet has done their job the two halves form a circle that reveals something powerful without coming out and saying it or hitting you over the head with it. It’s sort of tied to the stream-of-consciousness movement in fiction, but there’s a more formal aspect to this technique in poetry.