POEM A DAY 2019

Poem Not Set in Chihuahuita Park

There's a little road called "Garcia Way"
along one side of Chihuahuita Park in El Paso
The other side is the border fence
and children play on the swings and slides.
The birds pass high over that fence like any other.

But this poem is set in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania
far from the Rio Grande, far from Iraq
and Afghanistan, far from Charlottesville, and so
the threat is real, but I want to believe it is small.

Nothing forces us to look
so we look away
nothing can make you know
what you know
you can play dumb, wait for it
to pass. The night
will find you, pick you up
by your earlobes
drag you out of your bed
and down the stairs
to the glow of the kitchen
and make you work at forgetting
for another six hours
until the sun slowly leaks
into the morning sky
setting trees ablaze
along the horizon.

All I know, Jaime, is that you loved that cat,
and put it down when it was time.

We Remember an Old Table

What is time? I ask Andrew. Doctors have
opened his skull to see minuscule gears,
boulders, sperm whales. The hour hand, glaciers.
The minute hand, to take out a piece of
the brain, where time is forged by measurement,
the intense craving for calibration.

Leaves do twirl
to music when
seasons change.

Andrew says if someone's slow they're just slow.
The second hand, preoccupied with the next
next, the thinnest thin, the newest new.
Earth's archaic rotation. "Our family
never called it anything." Slow means
being built out of a little more time.

A Boy Who Went by his Middle Name

I don't see the shy guy in the shiny vest
Or the pancake maker in pajamas
The pie-in-the-face smasher
Grinning mischievously or the poker
Picking out Charlie Brown on the piano
The ringleader of mud hut builders
Failing gloriously in the cloud forest
Or the madman gunning the Trooper
Up the slope from the waterfall

I envision the man whose only vow
The weekend of the wedding that didn't happen
Was: "Allow"
A casual magician with his grandparents' hands
Hands that pop my daughter's shoulder back in place
When it dislocates jumping on the bed on Christmas day

A boy who went by his middle name.

For Rio, Leaning

In the sunglasses you bought
at Venice Beach
against a mural of Chaplin
in indigo and turquoise
jeans rolled up above the ankle

Did you know I rolled
and smoked
one cigarette a night
after you fell asleep
during our cross-country drive?

Sometimes the silence in the car
reminded me of the silence in
the car I shared with my father
when I was sixteen, only
this time I was holding the wheel

Now, we share a pitcher
walk the Pacific coast
colors deepen after the ocean
swallows the sun. Orange,
purple, pink just being pink

The Groom's Father

Things the groom's father
ought to keep to himself -
his view on politics and race
his hits and mistresses

the world is blurry now
such sharp edges no longer exist
all the features washed out
identities borne by voices

he stands to clink a glass to this
as if boy and man were simply
sets of sweats you could exchange, a crown
of fabric pulled up over ears and hair

a set of coordinates on a map or plane
a corner you turn, and then you're there --
a son's voice cracking
the father's jokes, ice cubes popping

in bourbon's hot bath. Daniel, you've taken
all these vows layer upon layer
with the same mouth, yet you've never
promised to improve what you replace.

King of Bedtime

I stayed in Monteverde for three days
pulling weeds from a vegetable garden

and sleeping on a hard floor. On the fourth
day I walked down the sun baked rock

toward a pasture where cattle grazed
far from the barn. I lingered and listened

for the call of their farmer, dreaming
that I might follow, fade, and find

a new home off the map. The line
pulled at my chest, back up the steep

path through jungles with vines that
strangled giant trees, tugged by

unborn children who dreamed of
growing up in a row home off of

Locust Street, the 100-year-old brick
growing moss while the rain slinks down

into the cranky Philadelphia sewer.
And isn't it strange, Ariel, how you search

for horizons that aren't there? How the future
is a vacuum that the past rushes to fill

with anything that isn't secured to bedrock?
The night fills with the voices of souls

waiting to be reborn, the child's chubby hand
smears the watercolor world as you create it.