From across

There she is again, the woman with a basketful of mabolo. 
Velvet fruit that must be animal,kitten furry on my hand
Yesterday it looked at me with eyes that meow, meow, meow
Is what the kitten said meow, meow, meow. The woman said

Be careful. Kitten is small and so is the velvet apple
Like puppy head pat, pat, pat. Love, love, love woman said.
She is waving at me now from the other side. I see her
Smile waving her hand. She crosses the water, knee deep

Waist deep, too deep, she says I love you I love you 
I love you and we are on a paper boat
She paddles and says Look! Look at the fish! And I swim
And my skin laughs because it is water, not

So loud, I laugh and laugh and flap about but I don't.
The woman said very good you can do it. I find my hands
Into a circle tracing dots into a heart, Who am I?
The woman asks. She is crossing the waters and there is 

Ripple behind her, there are sounds, there is a car
Brooom, brooom, brooom it is loud and the triangle
On paper is sharp I try to cover it blue, blue, blue
Because it is noisy and loud and sharp and bright

I squint my eyes and see the line and clench my teeth,
Hold the pen, fingers like this, catch a fish, want 
The wide and flail my arms but I don't. The woman said
Very good you can do it I love you I love you I love you.

There she is again, the woman with a basketful of mabolo.
Across the water across the table there are sounds
Something moves at the corners of my eyes, it is breeze.
There are suns on my paper and we are on a boat.

Who am I? she says. She opens her hand and there it is
A mabolo, velvet kitten puppy fish circle dots heart. 





for An

where stars are

Soon, he knows, he will start writing about stars
the sky being a single dome under where they all are.
Not very original, in the same way at one time
someone wrote it is the same sea where they were
wading their feet together merely few hundred miles apart.
He doubts writing about stars would help.
He doubts poetry helps.
Suspicious of words now, finding them out
self-entitled ants proclaiming able to make anything 
better: soul, world, future. Who listens to them, poets?
The heart has finer than fine a multitude of strings

Does poetry even matter against the literal onslaughts
to the body? Real bills, real houselessness, real hunger.
He doubts poetry;
doubts himself, a fool.
But the stars were, are, will still be there. Themselves
mocking the ephemeral fears of his temporal body.

Corniche

The road appeared first
before the two packs from the glove compartment
rolled like boulders that fell, one on her lap
the other into the abysmal dark floor. Condoms

two packs of it and in her mind's eye, the corniche
was where they were right that moment, 
perilous turn 
the only thing visible through fog
feet away by headlight; everything else gone

the traffic marsh in the middle of M___ Avenue
and the dinted hood of the car beside theirs.
A woman wading through chest-deep traffic
and the faint honk from somewhere

made it through the window, the glass, to her ear.
Her husband felt the quake, the landslide
saw the boulder on her hand. "Whose this?" 
Not mine he said and gave a name

familiar to her; loose dirt and gravel
she tightened her grip on the phone
searching for the letter and remembering her son
at the backseat with the girlfriend.

All of them supposed to be merry after dinner.
It was all too much a scene from TV
might as well be fiction but the ringing
on the other end and the name's voice answering

"No, not mine." 
Your husband's. 
The tires skid 
and everywhere dust and fog by the cliff 

impossible to see, to breathe--how far deep
was it below--she felt the impassable narrow 
just beyond the turn
anytime now they were to run the light.





For V