SPEAKING OF ANGELS AND GHOSTS WESTERN TANAGER
for Fenton Johnson
Back from hiking the far mountains, I find
your desiccated body perfect, black wings
tucked under the slick yellow back,
orange head intact but for eyes eaten by sky.
Slim sarcophagus you bear no wounds.
Neither owl, cat, or hawk tried to eat you.
Your petrified beak cocks its last song
to the invisible sea beyond Sombero Peak. Sleek,
your mummified carcass offers no clues.
Were you smashed to earth by monsoon or
did our picture window lure you to secure
branches growing in glass?
Beauty, I can’t bury you, won’t disturb your solemn rest
on the picnic table among presidential lies
in the New York Times, bellowing his urgent need
to build a twenty-foot-high steel wall to secure our border
from unarmed refugees. You nestle with turret shells
from the Sea of Cortez, a sand dollar said to
contain the crucifixion, lovely beyond belief.
Lithe acrobat
too rarely have I seen you flip
through memory’s eucalyptus leaves.
Where do you sing?
A full moon collapses
like the Halloween pumpkins on the porch.
I gentle you weightless to my shelf.
Time never rests,
its ghost prints leading us over a horizon giddy
with insistent light
we cannot conceive will ever end.
MORNING COFFEE
In my mug the ghosts of berries,
cut shine of rubies handpicked
inside burlap bags rocking on burros
upslope in Colombia, berries grown on trees
speaking the old language of clouds and poverty, seized
each afternoon by the hands of rain,
and shaken like children from dreams.
It starts here while the toucan sleeps
in rain forest squeezed by ocean and Andes.
Coffee is the eye of Cortez widening to burn herons
and flamingos in Aztec aviaries, coffee
the hand of Quetzalcoatl trembling as he lifts
a smoking mirror to see the blond giant, murdering.
Coffee does not run light as a gecko
across the tongue so much as curl between teeth,
waking me to a neighborhood of sirens
and domestic screams, to the sheet music of a mother’s laughter
plaiting her daughter’s hair, to the insults
of politicians on TV hydroplaning like car tires in a torrent,
to my fingertips drenched in caffeine
tapping like centipedes stampeding my kitchen table
under which the sleeping dog of reason breathes.
WEATHER CHANGE
for Terri Harvey
Wind slithers through oleander leaves like schools of salmon ghosts,
the iced relics of steelhead fins or silver lining rainbow trout cheeks
I held long ago as a girl. Sky chills even hidden scars.
The voices of desert birds are far away water trickling over a granite ledge.
Call out the colors of clean air, sweet, filling
the cancered lungs of my brother in the last veteran’s hospice bed.
Call clean air for the lungs of women in Damascus or Kabul
who secretly perm the hair of other women in their homes
while husbands cloister, click beads, tongues lashing from tight mouths,
ignoring the slight breeze of words lilted by wives smothered
by centuries of swaddling cloth, by the slavery and comfort of veils.
Call sweet air. Fresh air for the mother bent into worry’s hook,
air for the premature baby whose moth-wing lungs
struggle for flight in a neonatal unit across town,
air for the homeless man wandering paved drives
in our foothills community still asleep, his shoulders
drenched by a daypack so grimy its history is the cruelty of char.
Air for the pit bull snoring in a treeless gravel yard, chained
to a stake broiling in desert sun while his teen owner, a new
father, bags meth in his mother’s bathroom.
Air for a child’s hands closing on the first baseball of her life,
for the proton in the eye of the observer that changes
what a woman sees as love halfway across the globe.
Air for all of us, breathing memory’s luminous mind,
the way quietly it says goodbye
from a river we will wade long after we say goodbye.
REFUGE
for Terry Acevedo
Since January, sun can’t stop shivering.
Hope shakes her head, refuses to step inside the front door,
so we drive to San Xavier Mission smudged with mesquite smoke,
the thousand melted roses of perfumed candle wax.
Worn out, we retreat from paranoid tweets,
the confused sleight of hand from the Commander-in-Chief.
Who knows how many Russian pockets the President has lined?
Incarcerating migrant children along the border is the strategy of lies.
Under white bell towers, time reverses its hungry grind
patted by the hands of O’odham ...