morning after, sweaty, clammy queue at la llantera
perforated tire after flattened tire heaved onto apparatus
nails, spikes, screws washed into streets
extracted with pliers
plugged, like bottle of wine corked
pump harnessed, air inflated
hissing sound antithetically conjures up breath sucked out.

felled mangos litter gardens, bruised skin expels sweet
reek of carcasses in shallow, sandy graves
sea breeze gust disperses, captures fish smell
shrieking gulls, redolent of vultures, bottle pickers scrounge
shredded algae hurled onto beaten up beach shore
clouds, like ship masts, vaporize over horizon
over the edge, as though earth was flat
Baja sun rotates into magnetic field
dragon spewing fire, undulating steam
- incubator for malaria, dengue fever, death.

The window is a time-lapse lens gutting
people in the street and there is nothing in this
room but pain curetting round the curtains and a nurse
every few hours. No news or names for things because she
is dying the slow way.

Pain is a diving bell and every night she could drown
if I wanted. But the body
in the other bed with the signoidectomy
just shat the floor and the night
sounds like a sordino violin.
There are no words here because we can’t speak
the dead speech of health and words
are only words if you use them.

the Tulli gum girl in the late 70s? That’s me!
“A blast of hoocheekoo/ in every chew.”
That gig lasted almost five years. I almost married
Troy. Daddy, wheelchair-bound in the Friendly Waters
Retirement Community since mom died, freaked.

“You won’t marry that black guy. I’ll die first.”
I might’ve married him, but marriage
felt like a show that closed after a dozen performances.
The empty theatre, wickets shut. Sexually,
I like women better,

maybe. Some women. Men often rush,
like I’m a station they’re channel surfing through
on the way to see the Giants snuff the Packers.
Not Donald. Considerate, he probably
wearied of my good girl schtick, didn’t lay me

for our first five years. Heavy petting, yes. Acting
took me everywhere from L.A. to London,
kept us apart. Now I’m in, get this,
Ft. Wayne, Indiana, left overpriced New York.
I do local plays, play old grans. This week

I’m performing Nanny in The Effect of Gamma Rays.
Each night I drive back to my ranch house,
sing along with old songs, the Fifth Dimension
my favorite group—the dawning
of the Age of Aquarius. Lights out.

The black eye trained against the water pump, the white magnolia—
what could I bring to the dooryard?
He wanted nothing of torn bread.
Nothing to drink.

One night the mink climbed my throat
and out of bone and grasping
a demon was born
to haunt the city of steeples.

It blessed the pedestals worn
by thumbprints. Leather Bibles. Rivers bruising
in their beds. Its jaw hung like a petal
darkening by the hour.

Dear reader. What I started to tell you
had something to do with hunger
but the mink was demon
turned bodiless terror.

It lead me closer to the firs
where the dead wait for an answer.
All night the mink appeared
and disappeared.
The demon wept.

Bodies lined up like blonde guitars
without their necks. Faces I loved thorned
in the trees. A tanager shone
like a pitcher of blood.

The Vulcans

Star Trek good-and-evil policy making

Bush’s pig-in-shit smirk

“Middle East politics are like those of the ancient world—Greek or Roman could understand them better than an American”

The ancient dryness of cedar-and-bone Arabic furniture, as if with glaucous in the traceries

Medieval Islam versus Oil Patch Christian Texas

“If the twentieth century has shown us anything, it’s that history, carelessly handled or consciously distorted, can be one of the most efficient weapons of mass destruction known to man”

War structured as conscious human sacrifice

Only the good die young, etc.

Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, has bet $1,000 that bioterror or bioerror will kill a million people by 2020

Listeria, salmonella, campylobacter, E. coli O157

As many people have been killed during the last decade in the Great Lakes region of Africa as have been killed in all of Africa since independence

African wild dogs, Lycaon pictus, can bolt down a third of their body weight in minutes

Dozens of Catahoula hog dog pups being kennel-raised on a farm north of Philadelphia “for herding cows,” according to the fatso-gangsta guy who comes out to block the lane

Years of the pit bull and plausible denial

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” Graham Greene

Hoja de servicios: platoon guide in basic, sharpshooter qualification, tank training, nearly a special court martial for slamming a canteen at a sergeant, private first class a few weeks before rotation from a line infantry outfit in Korea, special services (an entertainment unit) in Japan and Okinawa

When Max Brod sought advice about burning Kafka’s work after Kafka’s death as Kafka had instructed him to do, a friend said, “I tell you what, Max, burn your own stuff instead!”

North south disorientation as a northerner in the Southern Hemisphere

In the Western Cape it took a month at least to feel at ease with where the sun should be when glancing upward coming outside

The same in Swaziland although instead of a Southern Ocean horizon, the view of the Ezulwini Valley, looking east-by-northeast, had a precise logic to it from its sharp ridges

Nearer the equator in Tanzania, the orientation was so tropical that the south-became-north problem didn’t matter

In the South Pacific, knowing south from north never quite becomes automatic

A constant problem for Northerners while in New Zealand and Australia

There’s a lateral disorientation problem in the Arctic with the meridians crowding close

Also with the Date Line in the Bering Strait forcing the eastern hemisphere to western hemisphere designation, the 180°E to 180°W, in an instant

In that locale, the short passage from Russia to Alaska, absorbs three time zones, to further complicate sense of exact place

In the fog through rough seas

At first in life one quiet place is enough, a set of roads and streets, one watershed, one identity, one complex of localisms

That become our standard against which all things unlocal are measured

“Childhood is the credit balance of the writer”

We treat it circumspectly like bad poetry

Bad poetry written with savvy, sensitivity and commitment

César Franck’s Sonata in A Major for Piano and Violin with its sublime third movement, Recitativo—Fantasia moderato, was written late, when he was 64

“With age art and life grow together,” Georges Braque

Near his end, in 1949 Orwell lingered in a Cotswold sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucester

Arshile Gorky arrived in Watertown, Massachusetts in the early 1920s escaping the Armenian genocide

Gorky means bitter in Russian

Why an Armenian chose a Russian name is part of the mystery of the man

Bartok as romantic, his dramatic Second String Quartet, Op. 17, 1915–17

Bartok began his first American tour in late 1927. He gave twenty-six concerts playing his freshly composed Piano Concerto No. 1 and his Rhapsody, Op. 1

Where we live offers the salient coordinates

The irrigation ditch coming off the Sierra de Mijas passed the house

Just below was the era, the thrashing floor, with an ancient olive tree beside it

The era on it’s little flat, the lower vineyard on the next terrace up, then the garden terrace, then the house

And above the house, at the top of the retaining wall behind a solar water heater was the big terrace in front of the garage and studio inside the gate

Behind and above that, more terraces, all the way up the Sierra to Mijas and the last path before the bare rocks

With the ancient Moorish irrigation channel running along beside

Through all time people have lived alongside running water

Just as squatters do now under freeways and bridges

glide
with ease
The men, though,
they do not glide
but stomp and push

force and grunt
old windows
out
push new ones
in

surround them with pristine
frames,
white and glistening
Someone recently told me
women use 10,000 words a day
Men use only half

These men use
no words
take their noise,
and leave
a sparkling clarity of view
echo of the unsaid

I am the daughter who left
Lonely father and quiet mother
Raised me like flowers in a neighbour’s garden
Plucked by the hands of a child
Handing them a
Bouquet
Of sadness

I am the daughter who left
Pacing father and busied mother
Staring out the window on the front door of yesterday
Watching as leaves fall
They look for my footprints in the grass
Parched
They sit in their tubewell

I am the daughter who left
Echoes of my laughter
Like a house haunted by my absence
Father sighs in the sun
All he sees is
Shade
My smile like dewdrops vanished
In the afternoon sun