Tucumcari, New Mexico

(Ghazals, sort of . . . )

FREEWHEELING MIGRATORY BIRD

1.

Maybe the only ones not ruined by hominal

butchery are migratory birds.  Then again maybe not. 

Are birds the same over there just with different names? 

Unbearable the life without mockingbird, meadowlark, crow.   

Looking up I saw a giant holding the patio umbrella a hundred feet in

the sky.  Letting go, a red kite over Kabul before we ruined the place.

I pretend to have abundant courage, not a big deal.  But bleeding Afghanistan

for twelve months?  With no wine to temper the madness beneath kite-less skies?

O Bordeaux, nectar’d bees and butterflies!  These agricultural thoughts will get

me arrested over there.  Stocking the cupboard in advance of the ensuing draught.   

Galisteo, New Mexico

2.

Weeks of laboring must have seemed preposterous to the
rattlesnakes and wallowing buffalo.  The flooding monsoon rain. 

A man and a movie star fell from the sky in a gold-plated helicopter

to inspect their toy buffalo herd and Mexican Gray Wolves.   

I discovered Bob sleeping in his chair the other day, still gripping an

empty mug of coffee.  He said it was time to get an artery drilled. 

A world divided between the new and the old.  Why must everything I love

have some age to it?  All those dead heroes, worn out boots, aboriginal loves.

A life carved into big chunks of time like do I wear a coat or not?  As measured

by music of the mockingbird on the traffic light as I walk to work every morning.

She said something about running out of toilet paper two weeks ago, improvising

with _______.  I didn’t hear that part but the mind runs wild with possibilities.

Millions are wasted predicting an impossible future.  Everything we are is the past of memory 
and the tenuous present.  Except for dreams, which if we’re lucky will lay claim on the future.

“The rainbow flags were like suspended confetti above Christopher Street [Greenwich Village, NYC].  I remember her and her extended family, stepchildren in tow, wrestling a stroller and diaper bag on and off the subways in the city humidity.  I remember catching my reflection in subway windows, oblivious to my youth, focusing on every imperfection.  Somewhere we’re still children catching fireflies.  We belong wherever that is.”

            -Heather Arrington

3.

The bartender didn’t have a single drinker in his first three
hours.  Only on Sunday I guess.  Only in Oklahoma.

Robert’s Western World: you know it’s going to be good when

before noon you must two-step from the front door to the bar.

An old man hobbled in with a cane and ordered a tall double whiskey,

the only obvious way to build courage for the barfly next to him.

A billboard on the highway says LUST IS SINFUL.  Nearby there

is a tavern where the women go topless to George Jones on the jukebox.

Fuck the two-hundred-dollar seat on the forty-yard line.  The view is better

from the Stonewall Tavern, sitting next to the sweet profanity that is John.

CD is a ninety-four-year-old black man who’s been coming to this redneck

bar since 1953.  There’s nothing else to say except he’s one tough hombre.   

She had raven hair.  And she got a raven tattoo on her forearm the day her grandfather

died, because he’d recite Poe’s poem from memory every time they’d meet.

Will never forget the time we tried to hike from Mexicali to the Sea of Cortez.  Turned back

by a hive of pickpockets and youthful lust, getting no further than a dingy whorehouse bar.    

Linda rescued them from an oilfield whorehouse in Seminole.  They worked at her tavern on the edge of town, where one night Conway Twitty stopped by, leaving with the words to a hit song.

Cuervo, New Mexico

4.  

A life mystery is my inability to appreciate classical music.  Like
rum and golf I’ve tried.  Oh, but not the blues or country music.

Seeking:  anyone young or old willing to read thousand-word letters every

day (including weekends) with the desire and ability to respond in kind

The trucker was on the road for three years.  Where am I he asked.  It’s pretty

simple I said.  You’re in the middle of it all, but you’ve still got a long way to go.  

The future of human love and loss is incomprehensible.  No one knows each other

anymore except as they are linked by green and yellow wires, invisible waves in the void.

I wish I remembered the face of that fleeting woman, surely ten years my senior, if it is possible to fall in love in a single embrace, dancing to “You’re So Vain” in a sailor bar in Memphis.

Blue Swallow Inn

Tucumcari, New Mexico

5.

I went a whole month without looking at the stars
and moon and thought I’d die from the experience.

These boots were an ugly tan before I added some

brown.  Now they are the color of Tupelo honey.  

I walked all over D.C. in uncomfortable boots, the cherry

blossoms piling on my Stetson like perfumed snow. 

Mowing murderer of tallgrass and countless frogs!  A few jumped out of the way,

and I could see myself in their eyes, upside down.  Also fear but not hatred. 

We missed the last train to Yokosuka and slept on a train station sidewalk.  Waking to

the buzz of a Tokyo morning, into the irritated eyes of an old woman selling magazines.    

Butterflies and honeybees are dusty ghosts expelled from the dry lungs of greedy humanity.  Before long they’ll be gone as will the miracle of nature to feed our bloated faces.

Santa Fe, New Mexico 

6.

There is a song about the sweet sound of car wheels on a gravel road.  Add to

that the sound of meadowlarks in mid-summer for the ultimate ear orgasm.

Red: “Okla” is Choctaw for red, the red of a red-tailed hawk on sortie from cedar

to Sycamore, the red of cinnamon sandstone beneath silver ice and green moss.

White: I hear the white noise of red earth slipping lubricated, of cedar waxwings

tittering under cottonwood’s skirt, of white people whispering to their own kind.

Blue: under the blue bird sky a heron stands one-legged on blue ice in Soldier

Creek, where the water ran red during the Indian Wars, but not anymore.

Great-great-grandfather was captured during Sherman’s March to the Sea, shot by a

guard at Rock Island, an easy target at a fetid privy near the perimeter fence kill line. 

Shawnee, Oklahoma

7.

Sleep?  Cigarette seep.  Rough etched “Motel 7” on fridge, even though the
Frontier Inn.  A Tufted Titmouse paid a visit, clutching the window screen. 

Cheap army blanket mental layer five-thousand fuck mattress forty-dollar

motel clutching boot knife – dreaming!  Turn the door key, nothing.  Just push.     

Quanah’s house sighs at night, sucking summer through broken windows, blowing

through holes in the roof between giant white stars fading and falling into the earth. 

Small town near Rainy Mountain.  As close as I’ll ever get to her reds and blues and

raven curls.  But her ancestors are here as ghosts walking the prairie visiting friends.     

No friendly faces in the Lonesome Dove Saloon.  A sign on the door should say “no vacancy”.  Just down the road another sign reads “danger – artillery may be fired over roads in this area”.      

She is common mallow.  I am hollyhock.  Tall and brittle in mid-summer, a head above the weeds near the bus stop.  Our secret purple garden nourished by the blowing trash of humanity.

Lorraine Motel

Memphis, Tennessee

8.

Riding eastward with an aching back, refusing to
give up two bottles of French wine in my backpack.

I’ve always wanted to be a migratory bird, north to

south, searching for nuts and berries along the way. 

“Take this off?”  “No darlin’.  You couldn’t hide anything in

there.  Fits you like a glove.  But those boots?  Full of nails.”   

The weatherman said it wasn’t a storm but a great cloud of Monarchs
over Denver.  Unfortunate for them.  All those windshields.

Let your spirit flow into the moving water of your life and into the

occasional acequia, allowing things to grow green where they shouldn’t. 

Crossroads up ahead.  She asked the boy, “Which way do we go?”  “That way” he said,

which was the right way to Houston.  He always had a wonderful sense of direction.

We will always belong to the missed because we live well.  This has nothing to do with economics but rather a way of moving in the world.  Our bird feet, feathered wings.

Pontiac

Tucumcari, New Mexico

9.

Bees love wine but even at the risk
of getting stung I refuse to give.

“Art of the possible” has its place except in the

corporate world where anything but art is possible. 

Such contradictions!  A dove and not a hawk.  I hate

guns but can shoot the tits off a boar at thirty yards. 

Said the jazz saxophonist doing life in Angola, “Every

time I play music I feel like a kitten, not the murder I am.”

Sandstone boulder, mud ripples fossilized in stone.  Touching them I

realize my problems are inconsequential in the big scheme of things. 

In the quiet boats are tied to bridge pilings a quarter mile away. 

Spotlights aimed at the murky depths.  A fisherman yells “I’ve got one!”

I stared at the red moon long enough to SEE it lifting above the

cottonwoods, dragging its tail on the water below, a bright red lick of light.

Don’t want to be troubled by the familiarity of the pleasure.  Instead it will be

sparse, building over time, into something beyond pleasure.  Something sacred.   

The weight of water turned your powder bones to the milk of catfish.  Cursed to

the watery depths you dance in the moon’s silhouette as strings of pale light forever.  

Lucille Lortel Theater

NYC

10.

Sewing new soles on the bottom of my boots,
John said, “It’s like sewing upside down blind.”

In Stillwater they cram for finals at the bar while drinking

beer for breakfast with plenty of cigarettes and country music.

We heard a pop then watched it roll down the road into a bar ditch.  She said,

“what was that?”  I said, “it was my hubcap.”  She said, “what’s a hubcap?”

Mama’s Diner.  Roasted lamb shank with a bowl of green peas.  Blue bird blue vinyl

booth and a big blue window through which I saw a deal go down in the parking lot.

They once migrated like birds but now rue for home and even hard winters.  They came

here to die in this false paradise, bequeathing a sea of Hawaiian shirts to the Goodwill.

In a perfect world there are no questions.  Nobody cares.  Birds and dogs and a few old

Indians know this.  Sleep when sleepy.  Eat when the belly trembles.  Cry out when it hurts. 

“This will sound creepy but when I saw you standing there in the airport, reading Sam Shepard,

I thought, I hope he sits next to me.”  To which I replied, “nothing sounds creepy to a poet.”

Quanah Parker House

Cache, Oklahoma

11. 

I’ve never been to another planet until now.  If this is not another planet then
it’s the far side of the moon.  Lunar cold and dark, without an atmosphere. 

A flight attendant bumped my elbow causing my pen to fly, landing on the giant

Breasts of the woman next to me.  “That better be a good novel you are writing!” 

Who can say they’ve walked four miles in frozen darkness to buy toothpaste?  Who can

say they don’t remember except for the cyclopean red moon hanging above the pines? 

In Santa Fe he saw an old windblown cowboy who could be him twenty years.  When 
the cowboy’s cell phone rang he answered “bonjour mon amour” in perfect French. 

With trickery and guns they pinned us into a house at the end of a street.  They found me

staring out the back window at a bald eagle high in a pine tree above a frozen stubble field.   

Reading alone.  The others small talking about the day, when we were killed with rubber bullets in the hostile cold.  One of them asking, “What’s wrong?”  I looked down saying, “Poetry.”    

T-Bird

12.

She’s a friend to everyone who matters
and to one mongrel who does not. 

All those wandering spirits.  Their faces

the burning sun when they’d see her coming. 

He was rarely certain about anything in life

except the scent on the collar of her fur coat.  Lilac. 

He saw her dance across the plaza in heels and fur, raven hair

bucking the blue gravity.  He followed until her scent kissed his nose. 

She got a tattoo of his name on her thigh.  He didn’t know what to think

about this other than he’s closer than he thought to the man he dreamed of being. 

He learned from her that a homeless Navajo boy with the saddest happy face is as

relevant as the sun and moon and all the celebrities huddled around the bar at La Fonda.

She said time means nothing to people around here, so he was surprised at the speed she walked in high heels.  He asked her to slow down to remember her every step on the cobblestones. 

Imperial Eagle

Mosul, Iraq

13.

Meadowlark.  Bird of the West.  I think I

hear your call.  But no, this is the East. 

Beautiful sleep cheek propped up on apricot

wrist pistol at her hip machine gun sling. 

Reading Anais Nin’s diary in a café full of women

wearing full burkas.  What would Henry Miller think? 

Cinderblock rests on liquid heart.  Eyes full of rain.  Doing things slowly. 

Taking what I can get.  Permitir más recuerdos.  Missing, having someone to miss. 

Bedouins wander in white light desert, flowing robes, beneath hives of power lines

and refinery spew.  White tents, camels in the courtyard.  Parked out front, Cadillacs. 

In Kuwait a man with a long beard walked up to me.  He wore a flowing white robe,

sandals and a trucker’s cap.  “Bedouin hipster?” “How can you tell?” he asked.

Her scent loiters in this desert, sans competition, vivid as violet on a white palette, red mingling with true blue.  No mere evocation but a double barrel bouquet.  A lingering, chromatic sillage.   

just north of the Texas line . . . 

14.

My wings are broken I can’t move.  Waiting for the
Moon if there is a moon in this world of disappearing. 

My essential melancholy is equal to my great energies,

obviously rare in these overly extroverted times. 

Tsvetaeva: how strange that like her the most intense and

Valued relationships have taken place at a distance.   

Amazing how much of myself I have to hide just to earn a living

in America where the very perception of reality is economic.

She once wandered Siberia during the Cold War as a young teacher and

a Jew.  Growing up I was afraid to have my picture taken and still am.

Rain left three months ago.  Desert lips deprived.  Vague tummy rumblings. 

A sign over the sink reads sanitized unpotable water.  Which is it? 

Gray gravelly everything except a stand of Russian thistle flashing purple eyelashes

next to tumbleweeds that don’t tumble across the highway like they do in west Texas. 

The word constipated describes America not just for obvious reasons but the

Pervasive numbness and sense of dread that we feel without knowing the exact source.       

Some birds have magnetic devices inside their eyes to determine direction from Earth’s

magnetic field.  Some believe in the miraculous, but I don’t have to believe.  I know.     

Former lobby of the Chelsea Hotel stripped to steel and rivets.  Security guard saying, “Does

this place look closed to you?”  “Not necessarily” I replied.  “I’m from Oklahoma.”  

She lost a daughter to famine, a husband to the gulag, her last breath a self-inflicted whimper crushed by rope in Yelabuga, even though she loved life more than anyone in the world.

Ybor City, Florida

15.

Everything lawless here Including
sleep.  His afterburner dreams.

An explosion.  Then the unholy sound of air expelled from the depths of his

lungs, burning upwards into embarrassment.  The sound of death before dying.

To glance into her eyes held such consequence, but it couldn’t be helped.  The beauty of

the world painted on a tiny canvas of green eyes, black mascara, behind a veil coal black.   

Azimi said the crude painting was of his father and grandfather, before the Taliban

captured their village, killing them both.  Obviously the most beautiful painting in the world.

O Afghanistan.  How much is left of your broken heart, a heart that once knew the ways of what was to be done before the madness of the world?  Interminable bleed without a tourniquet.   

Ybor City, Florida