Planting Peas
“I see my grandmother’s hand,
doing just this, dropping peas
into gray gumbo that clings like clay.”
“I see my grandmother’s hand,
doing just this, dropping peas
into gray gumbo that clings like clay.”
“Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon,”
“It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks
or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag,
a day of staying home instead of crowding away,”
“We became an altar,
An offering red as wine,
A wishing well.”
“When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony
preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost
souls of the heretics.”
“If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,”
“Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.”
“What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.”
“No one grumbles among the oyster clans,
And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer.”
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
“I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,”
“Peace lily, arrowhead, aloe—
the last time you went to rehab
all your houseplants died. Absence parched
the heart of your terra-cotta pots.”
“When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking”
“She does not know
her beauty,
she thinks her brown body
has no glory.”
“We have almost nothing left,
no ground in common.
At best, a brand
or maybe a miniseries.”