birth day

she slapped
the baby
to welcome him
to the world

The Farrier

She was fifteen; you, thirty-two.
I wonder, did she blossom
in your hands?

Some men don't understand flowers
bloom best unforced.
You wouldn't. You never

let your colts run barefoot,
preferred to shape red-hot iron
to your own specifications.

You knew how to use a twitch
to make a filly stand quiet,
quiver with anticipation

at an opening gate, or prance
under light fingers
plucking reins.

It wasn't her time
to flower. Spring came
early that year.

Hidden Cost
for the mill rats at Smurfit

Thick concrete floors conceal a dozen men
with muscle memory fine as rats
dragging conduit through knee-deep chemical waste
in the semi-darkness. Clumps of putrid pulp
lie submerged along an encrusted creek.
The E.P.A.
OSHA
Erin Brockovich—

nobody sees this
except the men who skitter four tens
each week, so your correspondence
can be printed on pristine paper
92-bright.

Anniversary

Last year at precisely three p.m.
on this date my father expired
like a parking meter
without a gasp or wheeze
just tick, tick...
stop.

I can't believe a man who could fell
trees big as mountains, fly airplanes,
shoot bear, beat his own son
without a second thought
just whip, whip...
died.

ending

Remember me like this, always
lured by the glimmer of minutiae.

Crashing waves batter
gold bits into worn pebbles

tossed by the tide, silver
stones shimmer in Aphrodite’s

darkening foam. Wind-battered gulls
stand in crowded klatches, beaks

clamped tight as empty purses. I lean
into the wind, concoct entire futures

in the moment it takes to scoop
a clutch of sand, a feather. Undeterred

by their mocking gaze, I dip
a quill in the sea, write my own

Missed Connection

What diety designs a track so stark
that soul escapes before the engine makes
its stop? What lot permits such heartless lark
to rake the poise of one whose faith now shakes
her stunned and pulsing heart? Through acrid smoke,
be-dulled and sooty black, entrails of hope
betray her trembling lips. Lost tongue invokes
his name before the pregnant cornucopia
of dreams upon the tracks reproach
in futile sparks each dimmer than the last.
He slipped away so softly from the coach
she did not see him go, but now bemoans,
no god exists. She disembarks alone.

Atonement

the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each
separate individual…it is the ensemble. -Karl Marx

i.
From a distance one does not exist
except as part of the gray
meld where sea, sucking and spitting
claims shore. Woman wanders
the edge—its relentless pressing
and receding
transfixed by the power
of at-onement.
Awed
cowered
she posits proof of
her own essential
Oneness
lifting a single stone
from the sand.


Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching,
thinking, feeling, desiring, acting, loving…
are…the appropriations of human reality. -Karl Marx

ii.
Stone is never as simple as it feels
in the hand. Each historical epoch
captured existence in it’s own finite form
without consideration for outcome.
Some rocks dazzle.
Some cut.
Some lie
dull and brittle against the living
created when nature knew only itself—
and other existed purely
as predator or prey.
No man watched the first rocks form
neither heard the shrieks
nor smelled the flesh
condemned to steaming wells
of black tar.

Mankind.
Womankind.

They came.
They sensed.
They named It
and each other.
They arrived malleable
in the hand.
But whose?

They will tell you
Eden exists not in the bold face
of one who dares to stir your soul
ablaze against the licking flames
of complacency
but in the congratulatory gold watch
and the security of knowing
checks continue
even after you stop
caring about what you do
who you are
what you dreamt
you’d be.
If hell is the deep black abyss
promised to those who plummet from the grace
of conformity, purgatory must be the slippery slope
of mind wrestling heart’s despair
for those who fail to be transformed.


Alienation is…the equivalent of sin. -Karl Marx

iii.
Illegitimi Non Carborundum.
They will devour everything—
a parade of tired and desperate people
who give minute after consuming minute
to garner mantels of existence
that demand desecration of their own
spirit in the interest of community,
subjugate soul until introspection and thought
have been suppressed long enough to placate
everyone.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.
Walk and talk and breed essence
the way one bright bit of broken glass
churns in the surf to be cast upon shore
then draws the eye in defiance
of where one and all coalesce.

The dark sea batters.
It is hard to brave depth
for the glimmer of such tiny light
in lost and broken bits.
You may choose to batten down the hatches,
weather the storm, but there is no safe harbor
in alienation—
home
work
church
state
all eager to yoke you.

In time, the weight of their need
will force you to lean so close to the ground
they need only clear the debris
in that very spot—
and clergy to offer forgiveness
for your sin—
before tucking you back
into earth’s sodden fold.


We become aware of the void as we fill it. -Antonio Porchia

iv.
Open your hands. Pluck this pebble
from my eye. Tears flow
with its departure; they cannot
erode the gift now proffered.

I challenge you with phantoms
charaded as action; ideas expressed
in electronic blips and ink scrawl
because I am afraid to do
something that might become what we are not.
I fear this fraud has been complicit
in your alienation.


I have lost my way of being
who I am if we are not
sometimes together
where eyes are portal to soul.
I refuse to be the thread
that binds you, even loosely
to an existence that fails to transcend.
So I wander the uncertain edge
of my own seeking, wondering
if the only atonement is solitude,
if ensembles exist at all.

The Poem She Found in He Who Searches Is a Bitter Pill

Sometimes one lives
with a woman a thousand years
and yet—
that woman never
understands you.

At times one allows
an unknown woman
to absorb the best of oneself
and this unknown woman
suddenly intuits everything

guesses everything—
and one is naked in her eyes
even though one has only
unbuttoned one’s pants
a little

as if, absent
-mindedly. It’s not easy
to know who one is, and if
he is—
and it’s still less easy

to complete others by trying
to incorporate them.
There is a time for everyone
to tremble—
a time of changing skin.

I am tired
of making myself plural.
In other words
here I am
with little courage

to be here—
to forget one’s own desires,
to take refuge in the life
traumas of another person.
Rebirth?

No.
No rebirth.

All men are alike—
they don’t hold up.

And women?
They’re all equal-
ly hermetic
and outrageous.




The novel "He Who Searches" was written by Luisa Valenzuela.

bearing time

slogging through mud in hip boots
baby takes time, the crush of flesh
against flesh, nurse clucking at his resistance
to the pulsing insistence of vaginal walls
and the cold bright world he will meet
when his face breeches her hips
and tired flesh ejects him

it grows at night when no one watches,
slips from your head, micro by micro
revealing shades of red and blond,
each new shaft in morning light
displays a millimeter of shine
so incremental no one comments
oh my, your hair is longer

at the dmv, latitudes and longitudes,
arrows on signs, doors and desks
point and lead and direct and insist
this way and that way and over yonder
till you have passed the same redhead worker
three times in one afternoon and
still not renewed your license

thick like family secrets or ketchup
dried on the dashboard, your words
slow-poured, and me savoring
a fresh sense of heart
check my email one two three
times daily, but words come
in their own time, when you press send

Lake Maiden

Water ripples along mud shoulders
where ice binds two small islands into glistening
nipples. Her marshy bottom fills with cast-off shells
shaped in an unseen mosaic. Rain melodies
dance in divots—winter’s frenzy
whips dirty lace along her saw-grass hem
where toads sink deep in her fertile belly
for a long sleep. The mystery is always
whether this is the last season or whether,
when winter passes, she will press her toes
against the far shore, arch her back,
deliver tadpoles, ducklings, spring.

Unsent Letter To the Man Who Raped and Killed Her
for Jessica

Had I lain panting while you bloodied your way
into the world, I would easily forget your trespass
as you latched to nipple and nursed at swollen breasts.
Impossible to fathom what wrenched your baby fingers
into these callous hands; which wretched moment
fused your heart and head into conspirators of horror.
Easily forgotten, the violence wrought upon vagina
when you come as babies do. Incomprehensible,
your replication of that destruction as a grown man.
How could you bestow such rage on any child?

Easy to Miss the Symbiotic Dance

His bark is tough
enough to withstand wind,
though it may succumb
to boring insects
and water creeping in.

Her reputation is invasive
as she creeps
up the stalwart trunk,
expanding her green reach
toward his welcoming limbs.

Ivy penetrates fir in ragged
notches,each protecting other
in what some perceive a strangle-
hold. Others call it love.

Years Blow By

Monday, poolside, pre-dawn,
2003. Broken straps of the pool chair
slap the deck beneath me. Engines rumble,
lugging Mercury across rough sea.
Wind shears the surface of the pool
spraying the fiery-eyed Cyclops
curled in the palm of each early riser.
I scan for evidence of the sun
rising, find only miles of dark sea.
Wind lashes my hair in strands of
torn sails. Smoke wafts toward

Saturday morning, early,
a Chevy pick-up, 1969. Jimmy and I
curled in sleeping bags and old coats,
slam against the steel bed of the truck
as dad rumbles along Weyerhauser roads
spotting for buck to feed us through winter.
I scan for signs we are headed home,
find only a sea of evergreens
cut in wide swaths by perilous gravel roads.
Dad sucks Benson-Hedges, flicks his ash
out the window. Jimmy and I
hunker down for the long haul.

April is National Poety Month

so i am taking part in a challenge to post a poem every day. To see how I live up to that challenge, stay tuned.

To read more about Saenz' work:
Benjamin Alire Saenz

Grave Stone

A bowl of rocks, a bird of stone.
Gray granite heavy and flightless
like the flies whose wings my brother pulled
before singeing them black with sun-
light shone through glass.
When you look close, things burn.

Rock forms to fingers for digging
or killing: stones won't tell.
A half-rock the size of a chicken
heart heavy in the hand.
I picked it up in Dachau: a token
dark as blood.

M & M Poem

Pot Watchers
for Nils

women watch
pots mirror
vessels yield
lush light

How to Do Friendship

Build a fire and let it heat
the room. Invite one you must know
inside. Walk loose, limbs dangling
like limp piccolos with nothing to do
but whistle the tune that you, wise child,
once knew by heart. Sing
flames that singe and wither.
Be unafraid of intensity—glow
little ember, flicker and grow.
Give yourself space to be fierce
and thunderous. Be dark as you must.

Stomp.

Storm.

Splash in murky puddles.
Listen to the hiss of water
tossed on lost dreams, blackened
edges where others fail to consume your offering.

Stand tall, shake the ash from your wings.
Fold shoulders back until blades clash
like swords slicing at armor you wore
to protect heart: its seeds, its hulls.
The charred remains help separate destiny
from twirling whimsy. Breathe soft
and slow. The embers of every blaze
you have endured and every torch
you will ever light smolders within.

Strike your eyes in hers.

Burn.

Two Girls 4 and 6 Twirling in the Park

I stood under the hundred year oak
watching little girl bodies intersect
at the belly where one lay across the other
at right angles on the doughnut-shaped swing
and a young man—clearly not their father—
spun them round and round.

I got dizzy watching
in the warm afternoon wind,
worried what to say, not knowing
any of them-- just gaping
like some voyeur, sordid and obsessed
with the relentless need

to stare and the nudge of something
in my gut. Maybe it was
how his hands moved so quickly
to spin them; the little one's cries
rising in near delirium, clamoring
for him to stop while he kept on

twirling them round
and round and round
on the city park's Big O
tire swing until they melted
into tender, mewing kittens
willing to be held.


"Two Girls 4 and 6 Twirling in the Park" first appeared in Green Monsters on Red Moons.

You Do Not (de-doo-dop)
Need Her

Go ahead, resist her
de-doo-dop
incandescent lines and taunting
sensibilities. Each awkward angle
relinquishes proportion, tempts
distortion where she dangles
in your periphery. Cage your
dismissal. Pretend
she is invisible when the breeze
ripples and your tie loosens
chokehold, it is not
de-doo-dop
her
and when the wind messes
your silver tresses capped closed
you can bet she’s not-got wicked fingers
tangled there and her tongue isn’t
slipping lobe to lobe, circumnavigating
the northern hemisphere
of the globe you so-tried
to fence from view.

You can lock it up
chalk it up or blame
it on the arrogant wild-eyed
minx who refused to cop a trade for someday
antics and cheap trinkets. She wants
it, flaunts it; the thrilling filling haunting
every single solitary pulsing
molecule— each cell
swirling, twirling
reflections multiplied and divided
in dazzling
de-doo—dop
dance of your prancing
duality. Take her
face in cupped palms,
succumb to breasts pressed
close against the child-shamed chest
float
sink
swim
in the essence you struggle
to repress. Go ahead,
resist—

You don’t really want her
to be your
de-doo-dop
mirror anyway.

Do you?