Re/Solution

The first one didn't quite
solve so gotta redo
gonna re-solve
a re/solution
this new year.

First, write.
Check.
Second, solve.
Second again, re/solve.
Third, learn
to count.

Imma gonna make a list
makes me a makealist
sorta like a realist
but not really.

On that list everything I won't eat
exercises not to do
people not to see
music not to listen
thoughts not to think
the first time
only the second, the re/solve

complete, the second time around.

Gift

Feet climbed into stockings, into shoes with wiggling toes, as though heavy-lidded eyes on the tips of five snakes darted to and fro seeking communal entrance to a sheltering cave.

A sigh, a groan raced up the telephone wire nerve interchange from those grounded feet, rising through an upside down pachinko game, pinging and slinging sideways then up through the knees - those two half-pendulums - up thighs that once spread to planted seed and later to bear children and then, on occasion, to form a lap, through the swinging hips that knew how to expertly buttress a glass-windowed kitchen door, up the laddered spine with its rungs of pain, past a neck longing for sober kisses or even drunk ones, slotting into a cerebellum with its own take-a-number turnstile: take a number, aching arches, compressed toes, get in line, you'll get your turn of attention next time we assemble at the shoe store.

For now, get on.

For now, for fifty years of now, slipping the shard ends of bone into wrapped leather taught Grandma a chief life lesson which she then gifted to me. Exhorted, even, when she finally put up the "Closed" sign on serving food to mostly paying customers.

"Always buy good shoes."

She looked at me with clear eyes that pierced like sewing needles, stitching me up against a hard world. With a glance she could see down to cold bone, but her half-smile was never a smirk.

"Always buy good shoes, and good scotch." One for standing up, one for sitting down.

Some gifts come at Christmas, some on the day celebrating when your mother did all that work pushing you out into the embrace of others, but maybe the best come any time, for all time:

"Pour me a Scotch, hon', and yourself too, and come sit, and have a drink with your ol' Grandma."

Would love to, Grandma, anytime.

Wherever you are - Merry Christmas.

Bait

After it rained the other night
getting in the car
taking the boys to school
stepping from curb to street
over the gutter with water still flowing
Lang noticed several worms
squiggling like fish squirming
as if asking to be bait
which he wanted to collect them for
save them in a jar
Where would you keep them
in the fridge
until Saturday and then
to the jetty.

But we had to go
get bagel sandwiches before the bell rang
and Jax scoffed at the fridge idea
said Come ON Lang let's GO
so the boys scuffed into their seats
crossed their chests
safety belts like a talisman, a blessing
to keep them safe
until they get to school

where everyone is safe

Meanwhile those worms
probably didn't make it back up to the lawn
since the waiting crows
winged down in my rear view mirror
from perches closer to heaven
black in the treetops
patient as night
whispering as they descended
with open beaks

it's never safe

Kiliminjaro

I'm going to stumble through
all the tense verbs, imperfect
simple future present past

There, floating, hanging
like ducks in Chinatown, every word
dead, waiting to be chewed, spit, shit

Sometimes I turn on the foreign language channels
to see if I can lip read
any better

It rained no it didn't
so much as cascade, proverbial buckets,
adjectives, nouns, adverbs insufficient for the torrent
on Kiliminjaro's flanks
post-climb, all 20 miles down from the highest huts
where I'd left my red guts
back to base camp in a single running descent
to keep the jelly in my skull from exploding.
We walked beneath the canopy, all I remember
is brown mud, brown bark, slate wet, a green leaf wall,
black shadow, tan thatch, charcoal shadowed doorways
silence silken as falling water
(learning that Gore-tex was no match for this rain)

and then a hand reached out
beckoning us out of the deluge
into the smoky cool beneath a thatch cone
while on the brazier fire, sized like an old Folgers' can
fire is the wrong word, it was much more efficient
a pot, a ladle, some words
they were speaking some words
perhaps Swahili. Jeannette tried French
once English got the head shake
and a bowl was offered, accepted.
We sipped. How many faces were there?

If there is shame, it's that I don't recall
who these people were, how many, their names and faces,
we were the strangers with shoes
and coats that cost a year's pay locally
but still couldn't keep out the rain
yet still swept in, sustained with a smile,
shared with

they would not accept our paper money
as the sky slipped away.

5, 10, 15

It's this
week again, where we lose
time and people
every year the same
loss

5, 10, 15:

the 5th was Roberto spinning off the earth
into the ditch when the square inch of bike tire
no longer hugged the road
and his brother Carl's arms
couldn't hug life in

the 10th was Caleigh not quite seeing light
stuck as she was by the midwife's needle
when we trusted not knowing Lori
kept fear loaded in the syringe

she would have been 15 this year
maybe she's wearing a quinceanera dress
decked out in rhinestone
stars pulled from heaven

I don't quite know what to do
with the quiet
echo of his laugh
and the hanging moment
when the doppler was silent
5, 10, 15 seconds, no heartbeats

no heartbeats after

Thunder haikus

Kisses on eyelids
like raindrops, more, many more
kisses like wet stars


The sky groans, so long
since last released, dripping wet
flashing everyone


After the rain, who falls?
Gods, men, angels and devils?
What grows, what comes next?


She moves off, thunder
in the far, like god or love
faint ghostly echoes


Today, someone leaves
to thunder, arcs light the way
while others arrive


If thunder brought you
kisses like yesterday's rain
would you recall me?


Lightning rainbow pure
white fills the sky, letting loose
liquid thunder tears


The gods roll big dice
close at hand, while the losers
weep for lost chances

Space

I try to imagine all the space
she would have grown into
pink baby shoes, leotards, size 6 heels
the depression
in her chair from sitting
liters of sports drink, drunk post-soccer
hair clips, shampoo bottles, ear plugs

my hands are still
empty, a few seconds of seven pounds
nearly fifteen sun circuits since
and I yet wonder
what words would have filled the space
when I tucked her in at night

Wet

I was born wet
as were you
drunk on our mother
her belly, her
eyes, lips, nipples
her guts, her brave

and then the air came
light crinkled us
then as now wrinkles us
as we squeeze in, ex
hale means healthy
but still wet
but how many are still
couer

It was in a movie
we found her
heart
a wet mouthed
twenty seconds of courage
I'll forget
tomorrow

today
I'll toast
being all wet and air
finding courage
every twenty
every seconds

Three

They say memory is three
quarters smell
so for every remembered touch
for each ringing note, fallen silent
three scents must be attached.

All these photos must have changed things.
All these images must have taken
up the space where my nose would have stored
yesterday. Maybe it's only my brain
that forgets, maybe everyone else's works

that way. I had pneumonia at 19
and couldn't smell anything for a year
I didn't know if it had gone on holiday
or moved to another country
without so much as a Dear John letter

until, like a scratch-and-sniff postcard
walking past a street person on Telegraph Avenue
the pungent stench of ammonia startled me, for weeks
I stuck my nose into roses and bougainvillea
but got only thorns for my trouble.

Suddenly, acrid eucalyptus from the wildfire
fresh cut onions, frying
fresh baked bread
espresso
smell had returned.

I hope he had fun on vacation
and sauteed mushroom butter, rolled in rose petals,
cranked peppercorns, stomped grapes at harvest
all with his eyes closed
and his ears shut.

Maybe it's not memory
but imagination, and that's why there's no scent.
Were I to lose sense again
not fairness, or balance, or curiosity
and definitely not imagination

so even if I forget what love smells like
I can fill up the rest
with my eyes closed
and I'll still remember
you

From above

You have a girl
you have a boy
you have another boy.
She's an angel
whose wings get regular dustings
and every so often a prayer.
Meantime her brothers groan
from growing bones

so you keep getting reminded
there aren't many days left
until their eyes count
your gray hairs
from above.

He grew two inches taller this summer
with a darkening upper lip
revealing an ephemeral baritone whenever he speaks
to an adult or orders take-out
but when he bosses his brother around
a teen tenor.

He took up fishing, now
tying knots and devouring fish
books while throwing back the catch
patiently casting and trolling
often reeling in nothing
but smiles.

Their eyes count
tears still, though, sometimes
from a load of homework, more often fists or taunts
and every once from missing

her

Dirt

Beneath, dirt
and in the air, in the water,
dirt.
We're mud, wet moving ash,
temporary bone.
Time will crawl
circles around us
with our closed eyes
so let's build into the air
clatter up the stairs
in our fleshed skeletons
fashion words from ancient trees
and rasp through lips while we can
before the leaves crisp, and crumble.

The sun will still beat us
tear out every color until only bleach remains
leach supple skin, brittle
yet that seed, poke a hole
tend tenderly, moisten, wait,
wait, wait until green snaps sun
into waiting veins
as though flowing sap, or blood
means anything in itself.

It doesn't
matter, only
love comes
from dirt

Creek

The bed is cement
a flood control channel
keeping the stick houses that crowd the banks safe
except where floods broke the walls
and they brought boulders to fill in
where ever the relentless wet pounding had torn it apart.
But most of the year it's just thin
a meander through accreted silt and sand, tires and junk
as reeds strain to drink the sun
or feed the sturdy and opportunistic egrets and ducks,
gulls and crows, swallows and coots. Each spring wings
and beaks lay claim to another nest
which must be hidden in the warm.

There's no place to drop a line in the water
no overhanging trees to give shade
it's not deep or clean enough to swim
no surprising bends, no flats
an 11 year old can cast in,
and the beaks don't really make much sound.
But they will stalk what little fish scurry, float
the fluff chicks - a tiny, downy fleet -
whose whitening shells still litter.
In a few months the nests will wash away
when whichever caretaker rain god
concludes his pact with Ceres' lineage
and brings down heaven.

It's then the creek remembers
what it's like to pulse and growl
free, for a bit, to muddy the bed
and not just lay silent in a civic collar.

Surface

It began as tension
swirling on the surface
of a soap bubble
a thesaurus of blues
pinks that might make a flamingo green
with envy, purple majesty
the shade of mountains at dusk and thistle at noon
a cascade of yellow like my heaven star
red as a branding iron

I was the skin of a planet
in orbit around your heat
plates shifting, center magma cooling
so quickly I had to wrap myself
in burning oil
when you took your sun to another universe

I learned to carve
runes and scars with fine tipped
words, ever more intricate
a symphony of cuts, incisions that sang
so high that dolphins and bats replied
echolocating is a human skill
you find every nerve
responding if you slice finely enough

I took out thread and needle more fine than flaxen hair
sewing nimbly, looping colors like magnetic solar flares
like a medieval tapestry weaver, patient as a beetle
focused as a lens
when the welts finally heal
and you slide fingertips like reading braille
along the textured surface of each story woven
into my skin

will you remember when I was every color
your eyes ever wanted to drink in?

Spin

Yesterday Jax and Lang ran
laughing all the way into my gut again
catching and throwing a frisbee in the park.
When the grass is fresh cut, it lays down in clumps
and poofs into the air with each step
releasing that green scent
the one that smells like summer.
Folks walking dogs stop to chat
about the coyotes who live in the scrub
and the occasional poster for a "missing cat"
that never goes found. We step among rabbit pellets
but it's too small a park for deer.

It's my favorite part of the day
(except for the skeeters)
lining orange cones 5 yards apart, putting them
through the paces to teach them Ultimate Frisbee.
They only grumble a bit at the sit-ups and pushups
lunges and footwork, more so at the sprints.
I'll be the Pied Piper with plastic discs
paid in smiles and watching them grow
knowing how that spins back the dark
mine,
theirs, setting goals and scoring them.

One dad paused, wanting to bring his own 13 year old
home-schooled boy to join, and maybe ask the new boys
who just moved in, maybe the soccer girls next door,
all of them to gallop like meteors across the sky
and flash teeth like suns. He doesn't get out
much to socialize, maybe it'd be good
for him to meet other kids his age
he suggests. I encourage, Bring him, them,
next time, it'll be good.

Maybe it'll be enough to keep
the roughest part of growing up
from spinning out of control
maybe it'll keep them
from pictures on a poster that's never found

Embarcadero

That time, missing the last BART train leaving
me in the Embarcadero at night, no cab fare:
tire treads grew speakers, every window melted
into a speeding mirror, and footsteps
are never Swiss in the dark.

Even with slit eyes
I wasn't the brave cat, I didn't have fangs
or a cape and my Doc Marten's were half
a size too big to slink with stealth.

Shades and voices grew
inversely to my belly
or somewhere lower
and I was too indecisive
should I stay standing beneath the streetlamp
or scamper into a dark doorway
before they came into view:
spiked hair, four knee high boots, leather motorcycle jackets,
stepping into the light beneath the lamp
laughing at something I didn't make out
and then, stopping, two
girls with shining eyes, the shorter one
casually looping her arm round the other's waist
and inclining her face, kissing
as though nothing else mattered

not the pending bus ride across the bay bridge
or the skinny geek, or other throats echoing, or the cadence
of passing cars thump-thumping down the street,
not harsh yellow light or sharp long shadows
or tomorrow or yesterday or the tangy salty smell
barreling down Market - nothing intruded
and suddenly the dark felt warmer,
though I didn't step closer
they made the night feel safe.

Spark

So with 7 billion souls
in the rear view mirror
what happens to the population
of angels?

Or how about tuna? Or tigers. And corn.
Now there are 14 billion grasping hands
(minus a couple) with 70 billion fingers
(counting the thumbs) so how many plots
need digging when we finish
the last bit of breath and toast
before this life spark that comes from

where does it come from, again?
that spark - was it pulsing in some earthworm
tunneling rich loam in support of a french fry?

I haven't crumbled moist soil between my fingers
for years we haven't played in mud
preferring starry hotels to dirty hands
and the drive-up window to ninety nights
waiting for harvest. We let others dig for us
out of sight, pulling the spark from land
without putting it back, much
but that still doesn't answer where extra angels come from;
haven't heard from mine, at least
I should try digging, maybe
they're stretched thin, covering so many people.

Or maybe there's an asteroid where they grow, somewhere
in the heavens there's a crop waiting for the spark
to keep growing fingers instead of fins
but when I was ten and already falling
away from the church in part because I knew
contrary to what I was told, dogs *do* have souls,
don't they have guardians, too?
So maybe we raided their angel supply
which explains what happened to the last Javanese rhino
and all the elephants.

Search

When I learn to forgive
myself I'll post the answer online
so I can search
and search and maybe find
a thread to stitch it back together.

Identity is like a circus car
all those painted-on smiles spilling out without end
here's the smile you want
no, here it is
dressed up in fancy big shoes
a new red nose, a new blue 'do,
some striped duds that fell off
the last issue of GQ
if GQ was written by clowns

I can never forgive myself
for not being the coolest clown

so if you figure that out
please offer it for cheap on ebay
we'll sell a million copies make a million bucks
I can buy new face paint
scrape my chin blue
maybe that'll make me a clown
memorable enough to never forgive
and not just forgotten

Belong

We all belong
to the dead
soon enough, dear
but until then
gargle that red
pulse, eat black
as though cancer
is anything more
than an expressway

Oh, murder you
say? Of what
kindness, of health
or innocence kept
at the end
of a leash
or a whip
like in beauty
magazines that don't

forget the jealous
and the frightened
who clothe us
in their hatred
of anything different
as though demons
planted in childhood
grew full flower
grown up mouths
filled with poison

But also remember
cool green mornings
an orange sunset
how blue arms
hold up heaven
remember open doors
kind encouraging words
smooth brown banisters
and one smile
just the one
time is all
when you belong
to the living

Yard

Open my front door, cross the crab-grass lawn and narrow street,

Crest Avenue, as though it was the edge of the living world,

hop the chain link fence beneath dark green cypress,

scamper over the broad emerald meadows

then called the 17th and 11th fairways

and there we'd find piles of extra dirt that no longer fit 

into freshly dug graves.

Games to play: dirt clod wars (with the occasional pebble or chunk

of sod); find the oldest gravemarker (something from the 1880's);

jump across a newly interned resident; hide and seek; peek-a-BOO.

Golfers frequently shanked 4 irons into the graveyard;

we'd find the dimpled white balls on our explorations and pretend

they were eggs from some alien creature

or maybe a seagull

before polishing them up like alabaster gems

to try to sell them back to the notorious cheapskates who strode the fairways

in awful tartan slacks and the reek of cigars.

Especially as dusk snuck in with the rolling fog 

and the fog horn lowed its sonorous warning 

like a giant metronome, every minute,

to meandering ships that might wander too close to the hidden shore,

we'd stare upwards as the tip of the flagpole disappeared, 

and nearby the sodium lampposts would flare a futile yellow into the gloom,

while pigeons cooed their lost love songs

amid the old, dripping wet, grey pines. There

above the bones and cherry wood coffins

our voices might drop into silence 

but we could still breathe and laugh

as though tomorrow held no meaning

which, come to think of it,

it didn't much. On occasion we'd vacate 

while the hearse circled the road and women

in black strode clutching bouquets, kneeling, falling away.

We didn't have tomorrow

to worry about, even when the marker

didn't go past a month: Here Lies

someone we didn't know

gone before tomorrow

as though it never happened.

Elixir

Poseidon sends foam
lips to kiss my feet each time I visit.

The drops say: watch this! and proceed to grab
bits of stone, pebbles, boulders
when I don't notice
grind them every day
until I look up, or rather down
at the crumbs now sticking to my ankles
to be reminded by the rumbling voice
Here you are.

Sand is a liquid
he says
the elixir of memory
where else do you remember
the blinding glint
the scent of coconut and salt
your love's hand
clenching at the snap of a wave
when else do you face eternity
(he ignores Zeus and all the stars at night, of course
and Hades' freshly dug dirt)

He makes me smile when he talks that way
mouthy wet sand
memory sticking to my waist band
and irritating when least expected
but which, when finally washed clear
still returns
here you are

Wigs

G can choose from six wigs
though now, a year post-chemo, mostly it's her own hair
she lets fly in the wind.

There's the blond bob and five shades of brunette
all short compared to R
but a couple lace down to mid-back.

She says there were days she had to find some way to rise
and feed her kids during three hundred days of treatment
so she did, wig or not.

She says her skin, like her clothes, sloughed off her hips.
Photos show her staring at the camera, daring it
to say she looks anything but alive.

Vitiligo developed across her upper chest and back and face
but somehow a heart appeared on her right shoulder blade
about the size of nearly touching your thumb to ring finger

it's still there
although the heart that grew on her face faded.
I think she grew extra because she has more heart than most

anyone I know. So now when she wears spaghetti strap shirts
and the sun comes out if she forgets it turns the pale heart pink
which seems appropriate, if risky, for a cancer survivor.

Still, she smiles when I trace my index finger on the perimeter
like tracking a route on a map of her heart
while her own hair smells of coconut shampoo.

She says she loves Halloween
so maybe the wigs will come in handy then
when she can hide amidst everyone from D.

Memory

If I make a sound
it's an accident
like the rustle of leaves on a sidewalk.

My voice croaks like a toad in reverse
unfurling its long tongue and letting go
a king.

We're petals and wings, we are
bits of color unfolded from the black
self-made origami
excited utterances
that slip back into hiding
whenever the light burns too strong
only to re-emerge, pushed out of the dark
by a breath.

We're dirt-encrusted seeds
secret turns that one by one become leaves, pistils, stamens, flowers,
and seed again
while seed memory - a flower, a heart - flirts with hovering flies
enticing with sweet exhales
until one alights to be stealth painted in pollen
freeloading to the next seed memory.

That's all there is
when the air arrives to lift a wing into flight
or brushes petal lips to catch a scented kiss:
where you once had eyes for me
there is only memory.

One small step

He passed the gate today.
Neil Armstrong soared and we followed, when we could
though so many cage ourselves in
rather than see what might lie beyond.

I didn't see the moon or the earth as he did
a fragile blue-green dot peeping through the starry black
or maybe I do since we learned
(some of us)
that the universe is much bigger than a few hairless apes.

We can peer through the bars.
We can see the birds
still attached by gravity but able to, for a while, leap and cavort.
Maybe that's what he did: allowed our spirits to fly
even though we know the inevitable.

Do you know what field expands on the other side?
What lingers in the fog?
When will we be brave enough to close our predictions
pass through the gate
and let the cool, green scent of grass guide us?

Nape

You can't know
every girl's heart. Some want to reach
right in and grab the beat

while another might smile
as she blows a hole through you
before mounting you
on the wall with her other trophies.

Wild isn't soft.
My nape isn't downy, it's bristly,
matted with dirt, flea-bitten, mangy,
sleeping under boughs and stars
in the rain, eyes downcast, in the heat, panting,
nibbling at grass or wild roses
or tame roses if they aren't guarded by fences
because thorns or consuming beauty don't mean anything
when you're hungry.

And then it's over
not how you thought, is it,
Diana was the Huntress
and led her pack, arrow notched,
standing up to Apollo.

Don't mistake fair.
Don't turn your back
since we may as well face what's coming:
inside every smile is a slice

Average

When you take the black
letters, hips jutting provocatively
from the placid white page
smooth them out, add then divide
like some emotional accountant
filing notes on a spreadsheet
an average of love
spikes from your heart
they puddle into grey

Average is where we land
it's the law
standing in pre-sized shoes
forgetting the bright sun that bathes us
like that time at the zoo watching the new baby elephant
already wrinkled and snouty
but acceptably so
grey its nature
nature its habit

And night's luxury, magnified silence, absent
light except when is light truly absent
if you can pull the sheet over your eyes
blink so hard stars appear
like some private heaven
piercing silver and gold into the muddled black
the grey that won't stay
still

trying to collect
and recollect if being lumped in together
a bumpy hash, with all the others,
is something you do
to yourself

Explaining

I could try
explaining
then the word spreads out like an oil spill
letters stretch more than an old waistband
that no longer quite holds in
what it's supposed to

"Ex" as in former
"plain" as the nose on my face or that place
where rain falls or not-vanilla yogurt
"ing" as in dyslexic gin I should be drinkgin

and it loses
what it was supposed to keep
this explaining
dropping keys down the culvert
butter-side-down floor toast
a quiet confidence

The look in your eyes
if I could see them, if you could try
blinking the wet out of the word
me explaining
and let me see them again

but I can't make sense
the syllables jumble themselves up
a sibilant S, a glottal G, a misshapen
word too often leaked out
explaining doesn't spell
trust

Hands

I don't think she ever got a manicure in her life.

I'll have to ask. Grandmom's fingers were twisted from arthritis, red from ten thousand pans of hot dish water and heavy pan lifting. At market, she expertly knuckled tomatoes and peppers, gingerly held up ginger and mushrooms to muster eye-level confirmation of her digital inspection, and in kitchen she still firmly grasped the very well-honed chef's blade.

She left Mom her knives. The tines are still good. The handles have seen better days, and the 10" blade is now probably 8-1/2", with the thickest part sharpened down to barely more than a paring knife. But it cuts.

Everything made it through multiple uses. Plastic bags ended up rinsed, inverted on the dish drain or hanging by clips from a line. Paper towels, rung out, draped over cups. Tin foil was crinkled and wrinkled, folded and creased before being replaced in a drawer. New towels sat unused in the drawer, so each visit one or another of us would spirit an old one out when she wasn't looking. They had no fluff left, no absorbancy. They weren't even good for washing cars or dogs.

The knuckle tips on her right hand were askew perhaps 30 degrees from the main digits. From scrubbing? Gripping? When she curled it around the scotch tumbler she had me pour - "two fingers, dear - you're having a drink too, aren't you?" she left no doubt that the glass would remain firmly grasped, whatever the color or angle of her fingers.

At 93 she finally let loose her grip, before I would. As she lay in the bed at CHOMP, many of her offspring milling around the waiting area, children hanging over the benches to look at the koi in the indoor pond, adults doing the low-volume huddles here and there, seated in the neutral-colored fabric chairs, I took my turn at bedside. My aunt, a physician, patiently explained to my younger son what each of the tubes were for. "What's this?" he'd chirp, one after another, fascinated at the dials and fluids and, oh, GG, who was awake and smiling. I gripped her hand and looked at her face and she said, finally, you can let go, when it appeared I wouldn't.

I think she smiled. It would make sense if she smiled. I'll remember it that way, arrange her lips and mouth just so, put the words in her voice, in my mind's ear. We'll hear the timbre and the silence and feel goosebumps and it may as well be her hands that held mine and let go, finally, when they finally let go.

Joshua Tree

The Joshua tree stationed next to the driveway sagged in the Victorville summer heat. If he could stand tall. If he could, like his brethren who hopscotched across the desert floor, but here roots were cramped by cement, and instead he crouched like he would spring free at any moment. But he never did. And the crouch became a slouch.

His was a crown of crow diadems.

Red velvet curtains lined the living room window. Every morning he greeted them as they faded from black into blood. Faintly, he once heard them referred to as hooker drapes, then laughter. The brown haired human who turned the lights on and off, and who every few days dripped a water drink on the brown dirt, that would be her laugh.

He did not have hands.

He did not have fingers to brush her soft cheeks, or a mouth to speak with. Only his many arms could stiffly wave, when fickle Wind chose to visit. Not so fickle, perhaps: the human brought out a stick with thin twigs and brushed away his fallen skin, which Wind would shake free on her visits. His skin, once green, then yellow, then brown, would snap free and flutter. They could be butterflies, if they could fly upwards, couldn't they?

His other skin was also his tongue and nose and ears and armor. Its name sounded nothing like the voice of the black and white creature who squatted and made water and who had a mouth. He had skin that fell away and drank the sun and changed colors, and he had skin that had long memory and was constant and rough.

If he had had fingers that could have caressed her cheek, he would have found it soft as the underside of a new leaf. For her kind, she was old. Sometimes her acorns came to visit, parking their cars on the cement shoe that kept him contained. They would slink past him on the walkway carrying bags and boxes, commenting on the drapes, on the bright, on the dry air. He knew their names. When she watered his roots, she talked to him, words tumbling from her human mouth. Without a tongue, he became adept with his bark ears and listened.

Once when she was young with child she had sailed across the blue water and landed among dark haired people. There she had more young with black-brown hair, five in total who knew of each other. If there were others that didn't breathe, well, he had no mouth to speak for them. He listened as the bombs fell and rose in her voice, between the tinkle of water splashing from leaves to earth. He heard the march of millions of feet, and the grumbling hunger from millions of mouths, and he was curious why they didn't just turn skin into leaves and drink the sun?

She stayed with him for a number of turns. He was not old for his kind; trees don't count so much as live. He paid no attention to the flickering box that somehow deafened all the people. He didn't use soap, and if he was happy, it was when the damp earth cozened his skin and he could stretch another few leaves into the sky, and breathe in the wind and the sun and the sharp stars who kept him company in the dark.

Cabinet

I put all the hurt words

here and here: they have four letters.

Name them.

Keep them like keys in your pocket:

unlock the rusty tetanus cabinet

and scrape them across the floor of your heart

so deep they gouge the floor

well up in red tears

scar over like railroad tracks into your past.

Catch!

Keep ‘em.

I’ve pried open the window

so sunlight and the smiling moon can peek in

and don’t need them anymore.

It’s an old house; used, the doors

have been kicked open and banged shut

but the cabinets here are full

forgiveness and trust aren’t just words

they’re utensils: used daily, a bit scratched

love is carefully dried and returned

even when it gets bent.

I won’t rebuild the foundation – it’s got good bones

even if I’ve pained or painted it wrong sometimes

there’s no need for keys anymore;

there are no more secret cabinets

no more silent hurt

no love that can’t be shown to friends

no trust that can’t be mended

when it matters

Air

Like every night, the windows are blacked out. Snippets, mere slivers of light invite whistling then silence and stilled breathing, then the end of silence and the end of breathing, for some. Others will scream into the void, into the brick returned to dust and mounds.

Black is safest, but it’s not really black: the moon still shines, starlight twinkles, and from heaven the bombers can see silhouettes like in a child’s school performance in a darkened theater: enough to illuminate the crouching figures, enough to see what waits.

Pass the popcorn (there is no popcorn). Turn on the light (for god’s sake don’t turn on the light! Can’t you hear the engines’ whine?) Momma I’m scared (hush, hush baby, it’ll be all right.) You want to breathe again but the pilots might hear you. You want to breath again but closing your eyes is like a bear hugging you too tightly, it’s like that time in the swimming pool you got held under the water and fear ripped out your heart and you wanted to breath, anything, open your mouth and suck in water just to fill your lungs with something besides fear but it’s still dark. And the planes are still overhead. And you want to check the corners of the window to make sure no light can escape, like picking a scab – it won’t change anything for the better.

Time doesn’t pass with the sweep of a second hand. It doesn’t freeze like the top of a swing’s arc, the moment you leap into the void, and you see how the nearby tree limbs sieve light through dust, how the baby’s red hat sticks to her head, how far away lies the earth, how your heart is overhead until all at once gravity reaffirms her smooth embrace and your feet ache to find the ground, and laughing you land and roll and sound re-emerges from your ears.

It’s over. The all-clear sounds.

How do they know, Momma? What, baby, know what? To sound the sirens. How do they know it’s safe?

(Fill in the blank)

I want to dig
words from the blank earth
with my two hands
plunge into hearty loam
trade places
earthy loam
rich, ready to grow
Jax' beanstalk to the giant sky.

Someone said it's a gift
making words like a mental assembly line
like a factory wordker
canned laughs and empty boxes
waiting to be filled with hope.

That's what these words are:
hope. They're like sticks
you gather in the lee of tall trees
the fingers they shed when the world grew too heavy
to support new growth
and so you fetch them
bits of kindling to announce your pending fire
sometimes sputtering, smoky, timid
until your heart catches
and it burns up
love leaving like a smoke offering
to the silent muse whose outline
you can just, almost, make out in the haze.

When the flames douse themselves
when the words become ash
and cover up your heart
that's when I'll dig
with a spoon if necessary
water it with whatever I can find (you fill in the blank)
and wait.

Smoke becomes earth, eventually, doesn't it?
You fill in the blank.

Fathom

You don't say
anything
I can hear.
The window is closed
and rain falls like books from shelves
in an earthquake: I read
into each flat splat
as though the sound left
a hole too deep to fathom.

I don't even know what that means.
Do you?
I'd ask
but you don't hear anything I can say
the hole is too deep to hear
anything from the bottom
so every rain drop that ever lived
could pour in and pour in and pour in
never filling it
we could read about it in books
the forever rain in the bottomless hole
like love
unrequited.

Draws

While she draws
blood, hold
his head still.

Clenched fist averted
eyes breathing
shallow as a puddle

the sinuous red line slurps
and he can't turn away
from the two vials

until like a magician pulling the tablecloth
she slips the needle out
replacing it with cotton

he can't hold
on anymore
before the trash can

the floor accepts his stomach
in little bits and a torrent.
Later he asks, why was it white

I only drank water?
It must have been the bagel I say.
Oh, like paste, he replies.

But I won't eat that
laughing a bit.
Wipe my chin, Dad.

Lang's nose and upper lip are raw
where the floor punched him
after fainting.

If I don't like this
that quivering lip and quaking voice
telling the doctor about tunnel vision

knowing he would soon pass out
trying to kneel
so he wouldn't be hurt falling

before he woke, cheek to tile
I like this:
after I put out two tupperware tubs

to catch any more barf
he looks up from his pillow
commenting, I just thought of a gameshow:

Pick Two Tubs of Puke
and gently chuckling to himself and me
he gives up

to sleep

Brown haired ghost

Chatter and laughter: the fall of evening and the ascent of night. Mirth mingles well with bright lights: all those shiny faces and gleaming teeth and the pulse of conversation supporting crescendos, between sips or swigs.

The baby bounced with her amah after grandfather had doted: he rolled her feet like soft dough gently in the long fingers of his two hands and blew kisses onto the pink nubs, quite unseemly for a man of his station. He smiled. Jean beamed in reply, if her sisters-in-law froze their faces.

Candles dotted the sideboards and the mantle blazed; the chandelier blossomed like white fuchsia. Ice clinked. Heels clicked on teak. The windows reflected rivers of red, a blue chiffon torrent, an ache of frost frocks against arch black suits.

Whispers sound the same in every tongue.

Drinks were trimmed and replenished as if by magic, the night was magic, the din was only voices and yet the murmur kept the march of war at bay.

Joe kept council in the sitting room with old school chums and the lieutenants. His narrow face and sharp chin jutted like a single large tooth from beneath his straight, black, parted-in-the-center hair. Jean could see when Joe reached into his vest pocket for the silver cigarette case. He always held it in his left hand, clicked the clasp open with right, and slid out the white stick in a quick, fluid motion. She loved his hands. He’d snap shut the lid, tap the cigarette once twice, hold, once more, then place it between his dark-ruby lips, while in a single motion replace the case in his pocket and pull out a packet of matches. Flare; inhale and brightening ember; flick out the flame – what to do with the spent match? Jean watched Joe’s head swivel and glance land on the tray of a nearby server; he motioned him over and exchanged a snifter for the extinguished match. He saw her looking, held her gaze for a long second, then returned to his companions. Jean wasn’t quite sure if he smiled at her, or as he turned away.

She stood out. The white ghost, dark brunette hair, the American girl. Joe’s bride. They all spoke with British accents when she stood with them; her English was flat Philly, with drawn-out “o’s” and “ewe’s” and no intonation. Half a pace away, she might only have turned her head, and the conversation might veer suddenly back to Cantonese, quick as a shadow. She wouldn’t understand. Not the slight; not the content. Trilled laughter; Jean’s smile seemed coincidental.

C.T. attracted his own coterie: ministers and their wives, colonels and generals in regalia. None expected him to don traditional garb, a silk robe, ponytail; he did not. His suit was more charcoal than coal, however. His roundish glass frames shined subdued gold beneath his close-cropped pate. He still wore his wedding band, though widowed nearly a decade. His eldest son looked, long face expressionless, across the room at the man who stood conveniently at the center of the glow cast by the chandelier.

He told a joke, evidently: the gathering laughed. Jean, standing nearby, laughed, not overly loudly, but clearly. C.T. stopped and turned to her; suddenly a bubble of silence expanded outwards like an island in the stream of voices that still ran through the room.

Jean became conscious that her father-in-law had inclined his head towards her, eyebrows raised, expectant. “Why do you laugh, daughter?” If his son’s sisters frowned at the familiarity, the possessiveness – the acceptance – no watchers made comment.

“Why, your joke was funny, father.” Jean beamed.

He was still, and a look of amusement crept from his chin, across his expressive mouth, up his cheekbones. It rippled upwards into his eyes and brows and forehead, and he tilted back his head and laughed. “You understand!” It was more a confirmation than a question. “I am delighted!”

It was barely four months since Jean, her baby girl, and her prodigal husband had landed on the eastern shore at Shanghai. Four months of standing in the kitchen with the cooks; trailing them to the market; sitting while they bantered and laughed at the goings-on in the house of the Ambassador’s son, his father the emissary so recently returned from China’s participation in Hitler’s Olympiad. This brown haired ghost who sometimes shared the bed of her husband (when he came home) had sharp ears.

The island sank beneath the waves of sound and laughter; the moment passed. C.T.’s smile remained, however, throughout the night. Color mixed with the hours and alcohol and affixed itself into memory. The brown haired ghost had painted herself into her father-in-law's heart.

Joe kept silent in the sitting room, smoking. He shook off conversation, watching Jean, as she sometimes watched him: as though behind one-way glass. She didn’t turn to look at him the entire time.

It's like this:

It’s like this: Pete will take it. Mom won’t say a thing. You go out, sew all day, have lines in your fingers from where the needles press, a couple of dollars and some dimes and he better not find out you kept a dime for yourself.

Don’t let him kiss you when he leans in. Stand in the doorway, don’t step through and for God’s sake don’t stand with your back against the wall or the icebox or the door. Have air behind you.

Maybe keep your overcoat on, or a sweater, even in the summer.

He’ll smell like onions and garlicky lamb and sour yogurt if you’re lucky. If he smells like beer or it’s after 10 o’clock or the lights are out when you are walking up the sidewalk, I don’t know what to tell you.

Have the cash out, I guess. Don’t make him wait. OK, that’s what. Have the money out.

Get up the stairs and close the door and turn the key. But listen for the door in case I come home later and unlock the door for me when you hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t come out looking if you hear the door but don’t hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t cry, Jeannie. Don’t get that look. I don’t know why Mom… it doesn’t matter, it’s how things are. Come here, hug me. You look nice, honey, when you smile. Try to smile. See? I’m smiling, it helps, doesn’t it?

I think there’s a new movie at the RKO, with Cary Grant. Do you want to see it?

We should go now.

Whistle

You want to learn to whistle.  You’re six.  There’s a bird, the kind that were silent when it was loud with bombs, and then when to make a sound meant the humans could find you to eat you.  Now, the war is over, at least the war against the emperor.  The other war is still marching: there are still soldiers over the hill, or over the next hill.  But still far enough away so that the singing bird makes you want to whistle.

You purse your lips like a duckbill. That doesn’t work. All that happens is a whooshing noise like you’re blowing out a birthday candle (which you won’t see for another three years, but you don’t realize that yet) or rather, just a candle. You hyperventilate trying desperately to make the whistling sound. The bird calls again. It is a mockingbird even if it’s not a mockingbird: the sound stings you.

Light falls between the trees like arrows. Among the trunks other boys play; your older brother is ganged up with the other bigger boys. You are always the Indian. Your younger brother is sitting on the porch, again, wide eyed. You know how to whistle now, remembering that day in Hong Kong when the whateverbird taught you that sound is a choice, even if you don’t yet know how to make it. You learned that you can choose to purse your lips like a duck and someday a bird will fall out, on command.

You have knock knees, skinny thighs, and socks with no elastic. You have hair the color of coal and teeth like full moons. You can trace circles in the dirt with your toe. Like a dancer. Like the dancer you will be someday. You can whistle low, tunelessly, to make yourself happy. All your older brother can do is growl.

“Hey, Frank!” You turn toward the familiar with only the briefest of hesitation. You have come to learn that hesitation equals an arm punch. You don’t want to turn. You know, you can hear the heavy breaths, four or five of them. Joe isn’t in the lead – you can tell he wants to be, but defers to the oldest boy. When no one else is around he is the boss, but has learned to become obsequious and deferential, in a sneering way. “Frank, we’re playing.” It’s not a question, or even a command. It’s just a fact. It was time for you to become the Indian again, to slip among the trees and disappear down dirt paths if you didn’t want to be the bottom cushion to a gaggle of fists. Before they can organize you take off running, dodging in case a rock flitters by like that time two months ago when Joe actually got in trouble when Mom visited, because of the welt and blood on the back of your head. Joe only smiled when you’re in pain, you realize. You hit the treeline 15 yards ahead of the pack and slalom like a rabbit. A laugh escapes and you whistle in bursts, laughing that you can’t whistle. It doesn’t matter what happens next: you’re running and laughing and every so often a bird escapes your mouth into the tiptop leaves, heading for the sun.

Night (continued)

Every child is a shadow. Like any mother who is a sun, she cast her children from her until one, then two, and finally five shadows lined the earth beside her against the sky, as time furrowed nine years of days into her forehead.

Shadows have neither mouths nor gender. They make no sound and never leave the earth. But if a shadow does leave, it becomes a shade, and only visits at night, or behind closed eyes. The mother of a shadow? She bleeds and cries and when there isn’t food or a roof or shoes, if bombs fall and barren earth disputes with a loud sky over who, who is to rise, who is to be left behind when the guns shut their spitting maws: the mother of a shadow gives her shadows mouths and ears and empty tummies and feet to run with, and beds beneath someone else’s roof.

That is where she ended up keeping three of her shadows: beneath someone else’s roof.

They grew names. They grew into real boys: no escaping, like Peter Pan’s tried. They had sisters who stayed up nights, sometimes, wondering what it must be like to go to sleep in a dorm every night. They had a father who may as well have been a shade; every bit of daylight they saw, he saw just night, since he lived on the dark side of the planet. They were shades to him, still ripples, cast like stones into a pond. They sunk when they walked up the gangplank to the ocean liner destined for Los Angeles, and he never had to look or listen again because, as shadows, they had no mouths, no ears. He didn’t have to fear them: hunger pangs, eyes silent as night fell, the clutch of small fingers into his palm. They had a father with nothing at all to fear from them.

What are their names? Does it matter? They are no longer boys; one is now a shade himself. They have names and voices and eyebrows and pent-up memories, like a locked chest with the key dropped down a well. If they speak their own names, or their brother’s, it’s only because silence so long can only be interrupted by a bellow. Raise fist against the sky, father: where were your ears when our mouths asked for food? Where was your shoulder and strong back? Where are you buried, now, still silent?

Joe was his father: extra women, strapping children, until he rebuked the name and reclaimed the initials of his grandfather, in the Chinese tradition. Joe could pass as white, though, and married a white, and his white children with the Chinese surname must surely still surprise any who cross paths: the blond Wangs. His own guilt must be strong to so tightly claim the mantle of Christ; isn’t it said those who protest the most, are the most defensive, have the greatest fear? What were those nights like, the oldest foreign boy who might have just passed if it weren’t for his name and his foreign looking brothers?

Night (an excerpt)

How many nights did she sit, tumbler finger-wrapped, pupils wide to catch whatever faint light the lone streetlamp filtered through the flat's dingey windows?

The circular wooden table was drenched in a faded, tidy gingham. She knew which floorboards squeaked, where to step silently when she pushed back to rise before falling to dent the already-slumping mattress.

For now, just her fingers moved. She slipped knuckles round the rim like hands on a clock: a day passed, a year, an eon, while the seconds ticked off between arriving home exhausted to tumble into bed, and tomorrow returning early.

Squeaks sometimes escaped, like a kitten or pup or three boys rumbling. Unbidden her left hand reached up, touched her temple and the locks cupping her ear: she remembered running hair, flowing hair, short bristles or longer bangs, each belonging to a pair of shorts and skinned knees and shy lips.

The girls slept.  She could hear their even breathing – no simulacrum of slumber, fake inhales and exaggerated exhales - but the steady rhythm of chests rising automatically. Would she dream of flying tonight? Of sitting beneath the orange tree guarding the edge of that orchard? Or would whistles and klaxons blare, and the dirt rise up to coat the street like an angry wave of soldiers?

An eon ended, and Jean raised the whiskey to her dry lips, sipped, swallowed, and placed the empty on the cloth. Tomorrow she’d clean it. As she rose she changed her mind and took the glass to the sink, swirling cold water with fingertips then placing it on the rack. Her toothbrush was there, somewhere, but she ignored it.  The board creaked when she stepped but not loudly enough to stir her daughters. She glided through the doorway, slipping off her dress all of a piece with removing her shoes, absently draping it over the chairback, before carefully removing her hose; they ran so easily.

The thin blanket swallowed her as best it could. Another night and her sons slept in a dorm fifty miles distant.  Her heart floated out the window, covered in moonlight and rain and swam against the night current to brush the brows of her non-orphan sons who lived among orphans; if only they knew to feel their mother’s touch enough to murmur but not wake with its brush.

She wondered, do any of those lost boys remember the silk of their mother’s hands?

There isn't time

There isn't time

There isn’t time

for fear in war.  You just react

but what do I know

never having fought

fairly

just unjustly

like when I leaned heavily

onto my brother with fists

and words.

We are bodies

pawns to minds

ours, others,

sometimes we go along

sometimes our backs ache

like we’re straining against the load

was that my command

that this body dislikes?

Who disrupts the flow?

Whose voice do I hear

echoing in my ear

like some football coach headset

but on the inside?

It must be mine

or God’s or some demon’s

or Coca-Cola or Miles Davis’ trumpet line

or was that Coltrane? A Love Supreme.

It’s common

knowledge we learn all our lives

isn’t the same

as wisdom; we don’t know

what we don’t know

most of the time

like how my heart doesn’t beat

with time

with your time

anymore

not because

it’s just

because

our time

timing wasn’t right

just like a stutter

our time

timing wasn’t right.

All of me is not me

All of me is not me. These hands are not me,
these eyes. This crinkling, whitening hair,
the teeth crowding closer together,
laughter slipping from between my lips
are not me

because if they were, I knew you,
but since I don't anymore, and they did
they can't be me.
That me, that memory me made up
of fingers and skin knew you.
Not this me.

I used to know your name.
Hafiz whispered it between stanzas
he picked out for me
to read to you.

I used to know how your back rippled.
Your bones and muscles and supple skin
reached for my hands, asking
if we wanted to know, and we did
both without hesitation.

My fingerprints say it's the same.
They claim that, by typing, I'm the same
person as the neurons firing in my brain
that remember the you-ness
who you once were

but I know better. That was once-you,
not now-you, that I now know.
Now-you is a recorded voice.
Now-you has lips
that don't reach my ears.  Now you
know that all of me is not me
not anymore
than you are a photograph

or I am a memory.

You would

If I couldn't see
you would
you still be beautiful?

Imagine blind

Imagine dark the size of your eye
scaled to forever

Now, subtract sound
if I couldn't hear
you would
you still be beautiful?

A cup over each ear, not even the ocean
sounds like silence.

Take away scent. It's gone
anyways until you pass an open door
and perfume or fresh bread reminds you
so plug cotton in your nostrils
like you're not breathing

Touch left long ago, hand in hand with taste
Tweedle Dum Tweedle Dee

All that remains is feeling
if I couldn't feel
you would
know by the absence

memory is a scar

memory is a scar
on the pale skin of hope
it ripples and crinkles each
time we act

a grainy crunch, sand in the waistband,
waves in the air
that we can no longer see
yet we still see

If each morning I waken blank
unbidden my page fills
like a player piano melody
before I rise into the day
all that happened before
this moment rings
into the space behind

Alzheimer's is another word
for having no past

is that what we want?

I've laid down every day
like a ripped page, scrawled,
sprawled like wrinkles across my bedsheet
grateful for the texture,
fingers grazing the welts
your words
and then your silence left behind

Last

My father died 3 years ago, last week.

 

Last          3/10/2009

I picked Dad up at the discount
crematorium next to the ersatz Taco Bell
across from the lumber yard and going out
of business furniture store almost
kitty corner from the brake shop

Why pay more? asked the flyer on the counter
before the black dress girl wearing pierce blue
eyes came out and asked my license and two
signatures I guess to make sure I could drive him home

Outside the door the shaggy hedge last
trimmed from the look of it last
fall sprouts pink and white blossoms
guards the glass door from the park lot
while inside choice pendants urns and little memento boxes can
peek meek from cases

what’s it like to work with death every day
what do you go home to
what do you do to unwind
punk rock
blood red walls
any flowers, do you like flowers
still if you see them every day?

The black dress smiled in
clutching a white bag
the kind you bring to a birthday party when you’re too lazy to wrap
and a memento, cap screwed tight,
it’s been paid for, she said, pierce blue staring kind of light
for 77 years I commented 3 pounds?
more like 6 she said, passing
Dad to me

I put him in the front seat where he always sat
called Sue got the machine
told her about hedge brake shop
remembered picking up my daughter
writing her eulogy
writing all those eulogies
who knew it’d be something I’m good at

she was lighter
maybe that’s why I was sadder
maybe that’s the ladder
you climb several eulogies further up
from the tears that flood the earth

Sky Current

Here, it rains.I won't make it sad:
it feeds the soil so the earthworms can do
what they do and not dry out
until later, after the rain stops
the sun comes out
to bake the sidewalk but the worms
didn't get the memo
and try to sneak, little squiggly ninjas
until I find them like pieces of shoelace
or blackened onion slivers that slipped out
of the frypan when I stir too vigorously.
But for now it rains
I won't make it sad
I imagine my face there, upturned,
welcoming this version of a dried-out me
basking in the sky current
like heaven's love
before the inevitable
drought

Love Dog

I carried him, black hairs furring my white shirt, into the back yard and sat him down on the grass between the Meyer lemon tree, redolent, and the red delicious apple tree now busting out a hundred pippins, and together in the dark we surveyed his domain. Over there behind the prickly bush he used to spirit plastic bags, until we finally (large brains and all) figured out where all the bread was going: he was stealing it from high off the counter and sneaking it to gingerly devour in his private dining room, hidden from view, until the detritus of perhaps 40 bags (we're slow learners) leaked out from behind the bushes and his secret was revealed. Heads together, we looked at the blackberry brambles now filling the blank spaces between the black fence bars, the slender blueberry stems straining for fall, the tall but not yet productive pear tree. We looked at the bits of birch cones that always found their way onto his fur and into the house. This was his yard, and he sagged into my arms.

Where did those seven years go? Eight nearly, in people years, so for this sweetest black lab, was it fifty? It was a life lived at breakneck speed and long, lounging sleeps on the couch or bed, happily resting his jaw on the sofa arm, or especially as he lay down on his green checked dog bed, he moved his paw and arm over mine while I scratched his chest, and sighed that doggy sigh, heavy enough to flap his lips and make that whinny. He struggled up, not making it, so I propped his haunches and he stuttered a step, two, resting again until I swept his old bones and blood dotted with something else and tuna-smelling breath and that curly black fur into my arms that can't hold him enough, and held him, not enough, back inside to his bed, leaving his darkened yard behind.

He won't be greeting me in the driveway, tearing from lawn to lawn and spinning like a dervish in love and devotion, and I won't be chasing him back and forth like a six year old, and it's too much for him to sneak a loaf from the table, he wouldn't eat the pesto, even, offered like to a gouty Roman senator. The chemo ended Friday and he was spry, Saturday he aged like clay in the oven, Sunday his right leg stopped working and his eyes sank, and Monday his rear haunches announced they no longer cared to walk. Last week he was sliding up onto the couch like old times, if no longer chasing to meet the neighbor dog at least he'd saunter. Time is leaking out of his life faster than a bee swarm. The yellow flowers from the pepper tree out front litter the driveway, those bees are relentless, they smile their secrets into the pepper and bring forth pungent and color and a brown stain on the concrete and those yellow florets dropped onto his fur and into the house, and soon there won't be any more spins of a dog on his lawn or on the brick living room floor and I'll have to lay down to gather those bee's lunch remains and pretend Jonnie will be sniffling up to lick my chin and ask for a scratch behind his ears, and these years and moments that swim before us like silvery minnows as we drink up, drink up, drink in the water of our days in the heartbeat of an old black dog.