On Love and Hunger
People tell me I sing the words
‘love’ and ‘hunger’ like no one else.
Well, everything I know is wrapped
up in those two words. You’ve got
to have something to eat and a little
love in your life before you can hold
still for anybody’s damned sermon.
A woman’s scent is nothing
like bread, although sometimes I steam
when the moon slivers my heart
into poverty’s portions. This one’s
for you, though you lie, though you deserve
none of this butter. On the table between
us: a slab of meat that once tasted
cud the size of my breast, a cunning
wire to slip off some cheese, a plum
brandy that dissolves into nothing, silver
on the tongue as that talk we devour.
Who would hunger at the brink of this
feast? Who would go, uninvited,
but you and your ghost of a dog?
Raisins are my currency
to date—slightly seedy,
prickled as my nipples,
black as pubis, colored
as my opened eyelids.
I tongue you
fricatives into vowels.
I suck you
to the scabs
you were, forbidden
fruit. Reminders.
Never mind
the way I found you
deserted in the depot
stall. No matter
how this small red box
was once a child’s.
Lost wonder, you’re
the gift of grace
swept up off
the bathroom floor.
You’re my only food
today, the day I left
you, paper husband,
widowed name.
Our final meal
was sweet, you
hovered over me,
an empty package,
beating blades
to froth, teething
me the way I like it,
both lips bit and shriveled
as our last fuck you.
You are black with rust
and will restore my blood.
You’re my prize of faith,
stave against starve.
I eat it. Grateful
Twenty eight tips
of fate. Three good sweats
they soaked in sun
as you now soak
my spit, sweet as acid, damp as rot.
This hunger, as your
memory, feeds
by chance.
‘Onions, lettuce, leeks, broccoli,
garlic, cantaloupe, peaches, plums ... ’
The man whose work is hard
slides onto me glistening
as a bass wielding the sheen
I’m mirrored with when I
step out of the bath.
He wears the patch the sun
has x-rayed to his chest.
He’s the color of work.
I’m the color of reading.
I hold my sembrador
under the august calabasas
of his arms. As first
light drifts through gauze
I have eyes the half wild
know with: half bitch,
half wolf; here I am
extraterritorial
in the divisions,
extinctual as a missing
lynx. Its a foreign well
I drag my sullen bucket to—
in a western bar on a frontage
road where we recognize the past
and find we have escaped the thing
which in the night would eat us.
We are gouged by the machinery,
we fill the holes with fire.
We pull the pails another sloshing
day up through the cracks in our
overdue finality. He is wearing
hundred dollar shoes, wool slacks,
linen. He’s making better money
now filling holes and digging.
A better life for less is lost.
But if the dirt where I was born
still tamped beneath my feet, if
the concrete avalanche of progress
hadn’t filled my love and the
rivers of my youth hadn’t iced me
into middle age, I might have
stayed. But no
one stays.
His touch is like a man’s
despite his age. His Moorish
fur, his Saturn eyes, his sadness
says: although he may not know
beyond the suicide of soul
the poor possess, the threshing race
machines, the names of Goerring,
Himmler, Buchenwald, Farben ...
and all that written fables
spell for us—this he knows—
Esta gente no entiende nada.
And I—am the way I had intended.
I’ve come to what I wanted.
And here, writing, wearing things
the discarded dead have
bought and sold: we know.
You can want to do nothing then decide
instead to do this: make leek soup, I
mean. Between the will to do something
and the will to do nothing is a thin, un-
changing line: suicide.
—Marguerite Duras, “Leek Soup”
I feed you
as you hunger.
I hunger
as you feed
and refuse
the food I give.
Hunger is the first sense.
Imagination is the last.
You are my sixth sense,
imaginary lover,
missed meal.
Food is first choice,
first flaw, fatal
in its accessibility,
fearless on the tongue
of mean denial.
First word.
First sight.
Food is love
in trust.
Did you love them enough?
Did you see the limned quartz
of their eyes? Are they in
their heavy beds? Is the sleeping
beast you call your heart
alive? They will eat
the night. They will burrow
out with spittle and tell tales
in twitching sockets. It will last
as long as paper or the cum
cry of our living. Guilt.
It’s like this: an oratory
of ants begins on the crested
graves. The dutiful
survive with grace, holding
granite in their weighty
mandibles. Lined like ants,
the red and black surmise,
orderly, filed, and eat
the heart that ails them.
for the Ute and Arapaho
The mountains are there like ghosts
of slaughtered mules, the whites of my
ancestors rest on the glaciers, veiled
and haloed with the desire of electrical
storms. Marginal feasts corral the young
to the cave walls, purple smoke wafts up
a chimney of shedding sundown. Statuesque
and exquisitely barren, my seed shines
in the dying rays. The rich earth of the wealthy
splays the legs of heaven in my view. Monstrous
and sullen, the slabs of death let loose their
hikers, let fall with an old snow. My harmony
of blood and ash, fire on the mound, I feel
them shuffling in the aspen, their vague ahems
marry the sucking fish in a derelict river. The
winter of their genocide still Ghost Dances
with a dream where the bison and mammoth unite,
where the story of their streams is as long
as the sabers of northern ice. The mountains
are the conquest of the sea, the belly of gems,
her fossil stays, her solicitudes. The glass
before the angel fish, she stands royal in
her invisible captivity, the impassability of her
element, elemental and efficient. She is there
in the silent baying, in the memory of a native
and the dripping pursuance of thawing babies—
specters in a sunset on The Heights—after massacre.
The closer I come to death
the more the stuff of sex
rubs off, the harder stiff
sticks scrub cicada songs
of fury. Like scrawny
white cells breaking loose,
the dandruff of my days,
my doggone days,
works dry. My avalanche,
unfold me, work me free,
untooth me from the mountain
of this meadow: white sheets,
wrecked love, demure demeaning
slush. You save. And
the body bears its choice.
Who is that keeps
knocking on the body?
She doesn’t use the telephone
of dreams. He doesn’t drive
into town on the freeway
writ of passage. This mail
leaves no forwarding address,
kicks around in the dust
like a fish who insists
on swimming into no one.
Who is this heavy hitcher
who keeps riding the bed
of my flat-handed hunger?
Doesn’t she know, there’s no one
at home? Doesn’t he believe
this exit’s not the last?
She asks the man who is absent
if he might send her a photo
she can light before the candle
that keeps holding its breath
and won’t stay lit for a prayer.
She sets a glass of water
on the shelf beside the bed
dirty with sweat. She lights
the match once more and once
again what is used up stays dark,
a virulent wick set in the mouth
of the jar. The water governs air
in the crusts of its sides, proof
of the existence of brujas, the owl
outside midnight and the feather
that flares when lit by ritual
desire vague as dreaming. She
empties the glass each morning
but can’t get rid of the hex of hair
falling across his face when she turns
to the door, to the dead red clay.
for John
I couldn’t see in this light
even if I wished. The black
grillwork over black, cool upon coal,
kisses me back in an icy press.
Not wanting—anything—but to fall
as the empty trash cans mingle
below with the smell of feral cats.
Flailing moon the color of suds
over this factory of artifice,
moored in the poverty of my untouched
element, downed like a dog
struck by a diesel—one headlamp
flaring before my shadow’s dust
buries its past in a crescent of mirth.
Lost now in this anonymity of barely
knowing you, my body would go
unsearched for in the rubble. Who could
remember my odor, my perfect strangeness
at a glance? Life leaves through the gate
of an ache, where you are, a vanishing
landscape. Do I dare it back?
I don’t know where you go
anymore when you escape
into that vast wilderness
of our legal separation. Your
memory rises from the knocking
pipes, a sudden heat, a blast
of blood. Where does it go?
The galloping horses I hear are not
hooves but my heart kicking in its swollen
stall. But you, you take things as
a letting go, like a beacon that opens
a lens cap to our past. You take off
the dark like this snow-strewn alley,
a radiance, but no light of mine.
Jealous as an abandoned child, I
had no word for father. It floated
in heaven like friend or famine.
It rose like a muscle and punctuated
my dreams, the ones of ruined houses,
of countries like this one where the faces
of whores and the working poor are my own.
You had Irish eyes the color of old
ice. What you lost was first love
and a word for forever, like evergreen,
oceanic, fossil. My bones could grind
themselves to salt and I would still be
this aging woman, this battered lifeline.
History never has been kind to a loser.
What do I see when morning
chops ice into jade? What ring
could I trade now for the freedom
to bleed? What would I remember
of a hearth where the flags
of my silks beat at half mast, where
I studied a sure vocabulary of snow?
I had to leave before I could
hear it: the sound of dishwater
in a steamed house, the singing
of water on white porcelain, cooling
like clots seeping through a wound,
our collision of tensions, a viscous
rendered fat, divorced, releasing.
I wanted to die so I walked
the streets. Dead night,
black as iris, cold as the toes
on a barefoot drunk. Not a sound
but my shoes asking themselves over:
What season is this? Why is the wind
stuttering in its stall of nightmares?
Why courage or the bravery
of dripping steel? Given branches
rooted to their cunning, a kind
of snow lay fallow upon the hearth
of dried up trunks, wan and musing
like an absent guitarist strumming
wildly what she’s forgotten most.
Bats fell about me like fire
or dead bark from my brow beaten
autumn. A kind of passing through
and when it called, the startled bird
of my birth, I left it, singing,
or fallen from its nest, it was silent
as the caves of my footfalls left
ridden in their absent burials.
What good was this? My cold
hearing, nothing, more desire
than protection. When would it come?
In that clove of cottonwood, perhaps
that shape in the mist, secret
as teeming lions? Is it my own
will that stalks me? Is it in
the slowed heart of my beatings
or the face that mists when
I least expect it? Frost covered
the windshields of the left
behind autos. In his parking
lot, my savior rests, lighting
his crack pipe, semi-automatic
poised at my nipple or the ear
I expose to witches and thieves:
Here it is. Will you kill for it?
I’m going away to where I’m from.
I’m fleeing from visions, fences
grinning from the post. Give me
a hole with a past to it. Fill up
this mess with your wicked engines.
Give me the gun of holidays, calendar
shards, disarray on the avenues
unending as the streets of my vast
memory. There are marigolds six feet
under. They eat the names of the dead.
There are hovels under these caverns
where liquids marry and paint themselves
a mauve display. There’s a place
in the mists of this city where a silence,
lean as ghosts, beckons, is archaic
in the workclothes of my otherness.
There is cedar, ash sage, an owl
on the grave of this town the width
of sin. And crying’s like hating,
it won’t ever pay. I’m going away
to where I’m from. I’m leaving,
last condor, last chance.
Education lifts man’s sorrows to a higher plane of regard.
A man’s whole life can be a metaphor.
—Robert Frost
Nothing has to be ugly. Luck of the dumb
is a casual thing. It gathers its beauty in plain
regard. Animus, not inspiration, lets us go
among the flocks and crows crowded around
the railroad ties. Interchanges of far away
places, tokens of our deep faux pas, our interface
of neither/nor, when we mutter moist goodbye and ice
among the silent stars, it frosts our hearts on
the skids and corners, piles the dust upon our grids
as grimaces pardon us, our indecision, our monuments
to presidents, dead, or drafted boys who might have
married us, Mexican poor, or worse. Our lives could be
a casual thing, a reed among the charlatan drones,
a rooted blade, a compass that wields a clubfoot
round and round, drawing fairy circles in clumps
of sand. Irritate a simple sky and stars fill up
the hemispheres. One by one, the procession
of their birth is a surer song than change
jingling in a rich man’s pocket. So knit, you
lint-faced mothers, tat your black holes
into paradise. Gag the grin that forms
along the nap. Pull hard, row slow, a white
boat to your destiny. A man’s whole life
may be a metaphor—but a woman’s lot
is symbol.
for my grandmother and against the budgets of ’89
Tonight I view seven sisters
As I’ve never seen them before, brilliant
In their dumb beauty, pockmarked
In the vacant lot of no end winter
Blight. Seven sisters, as they were before,
Naked in a shroud of white linen, scented angels
Of the barrio, hanging around for another smoke,
A breath of what comes next, the aborted nest.
I’ll drink to that, says my mother within. Her mother
Scattered tales of legendary ways when earth
Was a child and satellites were a thing of the
Heart. Maybe I could tell her this. I saw them
Tonight, seven Hail Marys, unstringing;
viewed Saturn
Through a singular telescope. Oh wonder
Of pillaged swans! oh breathless geometry
Of setting! You are radiant in your black light
Height, humming as you are in my memory.
Nights as inked as these, breathless
From something that comes from nothing.
Cold hearts, warm hands in your scuffed
Up pockets. I know the shoes those ladies wear,
Only one pair, and pointedly out of fashion
And flared-ass breaking at the toes, at the point
Of despair. Those dog gone shoes. No repair
For those hearts and angles, minus of meals, that
Flap through the seasons, best in summer, smelling
Of sneakers and coconuts, armpits steaming
With the load of the lording boys who garnish
Their quarters: the gun on every corner,
A chamber of laughter as the skag
Appears—glossed, sky white and sunset
Blush, an incandescence giving out, giving up
On their tests, on their grades, on their sky
Blue books, on the good of what’s right. A star,
A lucky number that fails all, fails math, fails
Street smarts, dumb gym class, fails to jump
Through the broken hoop, and the ring
Of their lives wounds the neck not their
Arterial finger. Seven sisters, I knew them
Well. I remember the only constellation
My grandmother could point out with the punch
Of a heart. My grandma’s amber stone
Of a face uplifts to the clarity of an eaglet’s
Eye—or the vision of an águila
Whose mate has succumbed, and she uplifts
Into heaven, into their stolen hemispheres.
It is true.
When she surrenders he will linger by her leaving,
Bringing bits of food in switchblade talons, mice
For the Constitution, fresh squirrel for her wings
The length of a mortal. He will die there, beside
Her, belonging, nudging the body into the snowed
Eternal tide of his hunger. Hunters will find them
Thus, huddled under their blankets of aspen
Leaves. Extinct. And if she lives who knows what
Eye can see her paused between ages and forgotten
Stories of old ways and the new way
Of ripping apart. They are huddled, ever squaring
With the division of destiny. You can find them
In the stars, with a match, a flaring of failure,
That spark in the heart that goes out with impression,
That thumb at the swallow’s restless beating.
And you will look up, really to give up, ready
To sail through your own departure. I know.
My grandmother told me, countless times, it was all
She knew to recite to her daughter of daughters,
Her Persephone of the pen.
The Seven Sisters
Would smoke in the sky in their silly shoes
And endless waiting around doing nothing,
Nothing to do but scuff up the Big Bang with salt
And recite strange stories of epiphanies of light,
Claim canons, cannons and horses, and the strange
Men in their boots in patterns of Nazis and Negroes.
I count them now in the sky on my abacus of spun duck
Lineage, a poison gas. There, I remind me, is the nation
Of peace: seven exiles with their deed of trust
Signed over through gunfire of attorney.
She rides
Now through the Reagan Ranch her mothers owned.
I know this—we go back to what we have loved
And lost. She lingers, riding in her pied pinto gauchos,
In her hat of many colors and her spurs, her silver
Spurs. She does not kick the horse. She goes
Wherever it wants. It guides her to places where
The angry never eat, where birds are spirits
Of dead returned for another plot or the crumb
Of knowledge, that haven of the never to get.
And she is forever looking to the bare innocence
Of sky, remembering, dead now, hammered as she is
Into her grave of stolen home. She is singing
The stories of Calafia ways and means, of the nacre
Of extinct oysters and the abalone I engrave
With her leftover files. She knows the words
To the song now, what her grandmother sang
Of how they lit to this earth from the fire
Of fusion, on the touchstones of love tribes. Mira,
She said, This is where you come from. The power
peace
Of worthless sky that unfolds me—now—in its greedy
Reading: Weeder of Wreckage, Historian of the Native
Who says: It happened. That’s all. It just happened.
And runs on.
The Chumash who inhabited the Santa Barbara coast may have believed that they descended to earth from the Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters.
The Seven Sisters also refers to the seven big oil companies.