Revised, from 2018.

It has taken me
nearly sixty two years
four thousand glasses of whisky
uncounted pounds of herb
pills upon pills
a taste for killer’s thrills
dozens of bodies held close
whose souls I kept at arm’s length
and countable but daunting numbers
of lost hours spent
chasing words into caverns
and trash heaps 

to realize I might have a hearing problem

I might have misheard 
my mother 
when she said 
don’t have kids
they will ruin your life

What she might have said was
don’t have kids
you will ruin
their lives

but thank God I followed her advice

for surely
surely
surely
either way
she was right

From 1998. Revised.

One, two,
three, five–seven-nine,
eleven
dark brothers
at sunset:
wetsuited surfers
off the beach at Del Mar.

The bell for vespers tolls
from the seacliff mission.

Two parallel acolytes
in this year’s hot fighter jets
arc south toward
San Diego.

What is it about
the brotherhoods
that men form
that makes me want to watch them
for hours and hours?

I pose that question
to Angela, crazy plaintalker
from the Encinitas streets,
while we sit in a booth
and mull over her fabulous life
in this bar called
“The Saloon”.

Two hours pass.
I’m buzzed and no closer to my answer
though I have heard
all of her own thoughts
about men
and their missions:

she’s told me how
once she was a clerk typist
and then she was an engineer
but the boys at the Atlas-Titan plant
made it so hard for her
to hold a job there
that she walked away
(and it’s been a while
so she doubts it’s still there — )

so now
instead of gliding toward the stars
with the boys
she lives with a man
who’s a hundred years old
and tonight she’ll be damned
if she’s going home again
because he is so
damned
angry all the
time.

In the booth across the aisle
two women are
kissing
and Angela
flashes a smile full of surprisingly
white
wild woman teeth
at them
and then at the
bartender, who is watching them and
squirming.

“It’s right,” she says to him. “It’s right. 
Leave them alone.
Couples in love ought to kiss.
Everyone here is just fine.
Everyone ought to do just
what they like.”

I get up to leave and ask her if I
can take her somewhere.
She thanks me but says she never
gets into a car with a strange man.

Back in Rancho Santa Fe,
in my expense account
movie star hotel room,
I open the window to let
the night breeze bring me
the scent of camellias.

Downstairs, other
businessmen are
drinking Scotch
and pounding veranda tables
for emphasis,

while somewhere in Encinitas
an angry old man waits for dinner
as pilots’ cheeks flatten in the force of the turn
and monks fall off to profane dreams
while engineers stew
before their monitor’s blue fire —

and somewhere
ecstatic Angela
builds a new world right around our ears
by challenging nervous bartenders
and refusing to be with anyone.
In the starry dark she walks the beaches
to do just what she likes,
free of strange men.

A poem from, roughly, 2002. Slightly revised.

1.
Monday night bar in Union Square,
loud enough to allow for intimacy.
You have been here for hours when a co-worker
who is also the woman you’ve been seeing,
who has also been sitting across from you all this time,
rises from the table and turns toward the door.

You catch a glimpse
of a tattoo on her back, 
visible between the shirt and the belt;
it stretches from hipcrest to hipcrest
as if she has sprouted 
low-slung wings.

She leaves the bar,
moving away from the sound of your voice
out into the night.
You suspect she’s thinking that 
though your words, like stones,
were clearly born in fire, 

you have tumbled them too long between
your water heart and your earth tongue;
made them cool and gleaming and edgeless; 
you took and tossed
the once-burning words at her
and it felt like hail in July.

How will she ever rise
when you keep burying her 
under such a tumble
of dead things?
Inside her a stone is growing
where you once were.

She is gone,
but you drink for another hour. 
On your own cab ride home,
you begin to plot a new path 
toward her heart.
Your dreams burn and spin all night.

2.
Next day,
you wake at 6 AM.

There have been many things 
in your life that were 
seen once or many times 
and unremembered 
until they were needed —
ripple on a lakebed, 
patch of wrinkled layers in old stone,
some tree gnarled into a twist waiting
until they could give meaning 
to something else. 

Her face last night.

You hear secret voices,
voices heard solely in the body, 
saying that
revelation exists 
in a simple trace of 
transcendence – even inside 
the skin and eyes 
of someone you think you know.

Before now, you certainly
would not have called out to God
when thinking of her. 
Now your brain slides into that way of being — 
now you say, alone in your bedroom,
what you have learned: 

it exists, 
it certainly exists,
a way of living, 
a holy space
that only another body
can make real —

because you will not call it 
‘being in God’,
you will call it 
‘being in love’. 

You have never felt like this 
before work before –
ready to pray all the way up to the 
forty-fifth floor.

3.
By Tuesday noon 
you have run back down 
forty-five floors,
you’ve learned thousands 
of new names for God, 
crying them all 
as you run from thunder, 
fleeing stone 
and powder 
and shock.

The running itself is a kind of prayer
that she is running too
or watching this happen from elsewhere, 
one hand on her mouth, tears 
leaving trails in the white, 
awful dust on her cheeks.

Your running is a prayer
that she can fly.

4.
You kick over the television at 9:30 PM.

You have not spoken for hours,
staring at the phone,
waiting for it to ring, waiting.

You close all the blinds
while waiting,
waiting for the phone to ring, waiting.

You wish you could drink but everything tastes like suicide. 
A pill forms in your hand while you wait,
wait for the phone, waiting.

A pill washes down
past the scratch and raw breath of your coughing. 
A pill makes you lucid in the face of delusion
long enough to realize
that someone really is at the door, it’s your landlord, just arrived, 
all the roads closed, been waiting for hours in the lines,
waiting,

checking up on all of his tenants, tells you
the towers are gone,
the towers for the cell phones are gone, 
no calls coming in or out, no calls, 
all those hours waiting, 

air filled with voices in tears, 
in arrest, in thrombosis, in embolism, 
waiting, waiting,

with crush injuries, 
burns, inhalations, rages, fevers,
blames and names and hatreds,
silences and understandings,

moments gone with
all the bodies newly torn, flung, 
sundered, crushed, and cindered;
all the memories

and the bearers of the memories 
waiting to get through, 
hoping to reinflate, 
to reanimate, to be reborn:

you’re still 
waiting.

5.
Wednesday, driving north from the city
before dawn toward New England
to stay with friends. It’s mid September,
nearly time for the leaves to come off the trees
in one last burst of flame. 
The day looks like it is going to be perfect.

You are trying to remember yesterday morning’s dream of her,
how it felt to rest in the moment of knowing she could leave you.

You linger on one small moment of it:
the moment of not caring where she was, 
as long as she was out there somewhere, 
as long as she was happy. 

You called it love then, 
but now you know it was God. 
that moment of being
without attachment to the result 
was something you could call God; 

a name you could hang 
on the moment,
a name you’ll cling to 
though it has become hard to say because
it does not include enough syllables 
to describe the fact

that you didn’t bother
to bring your cell phone with you this morning,
that you did not leave
a message on hers before you left.

At a rest stop outside Waterbury
you pull over.
Maybe you fall asleep. 
It isn’t important ?
what matters is that 
suddenly all around you
the earth is pushing up geodes
by the thousands.
You pick one up and it cracks in your hands,
spilling oceans of ancient, limed water,
soaking your hands with salt and 
the flakes of 
long concealed
crystals. 

She is suddenly there,
watching you weep, 
and as she rises from the ground 
she tells you:

keep moving

there are more names 
for God 
than any of us ever 
could have 
imagined

A very old poem, a popular Duende Project piece, and one for Bastille Day and all of us who suspect we might need to protect ourselves against predators very, very soon.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 years of watching

 nature shows

 and I still can’t answer this question:

 given the opportunity

 will a predator

 kill two at once?

 imagine: somewhere

 in central america

 a jaguar is striving for a personal best

 and prays (in whatever way

 that big cats pray) that the kinkajous

 fooling about on the forest floor

 will stay still long enough

 for him to take both with one

 velvet razor swipe

 but he is thwarted when

 one sees him waiting and lets out

 a quavering cry

 (this is why they call the kinkajou

 la llorona

 the weeping woman)

 and when the two

 scratch their way up a tree

 leaving the jaguar behind to curse

 (in whatever way jaguars curse)

 they weep with joy and perhaps

 snicker at the loser below

 imagine at night that las lloronas

 the weeping women

 honey bears of the canopy

 tell stories to each other

 of all the death they’ve avoided

 at the jaws and paws of would-be overachievers

 pausing now and then to whisper

 of the ones who fell alone

 and unwarned

 there is strength in numbers

 they tell each other

 the jaguars can only kill us when we forget that

 so can a predator

 kill more than one at one time?

 las lloronas say si

 but only

 when we
 let it happen 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Link to a Duende Project recording of the piece with Steven Lanning-Cafaro on guitar: Las Lloronas