Dilate, blink

The story always begins with an image.

Hold it, the late-afternoon window:

the jug’s rivet of water

pouring through a man’s black hair

as he leans, shirtless, over the sink.

The open square contains him, both hemmed in

by a barbed-wire-rimmed wall

overgrown with orange flowers.

As the dilated eye opens to knife-like light,

clouds burn too white, metal turns molten.

Streets vibrate with more urgent energy,

you all eye and waiting.

San Lucas mausoleums are more garish

than any gushing blossom. Sun infuses stone,

colors pulse too vibrant for mourning.

One hand on the rough wall, look close,

and deeper, past flowers shriveled brown and brittle,

to where mounds of earth rise soft to stick-crosses. Look up,

the volcano’s shadow spreads like languishing silence,

over shacks leaning together, limp and tin-patched.

A girl runs. Between the houses of the dead

and of the dying, she is small,

as all the children here are small, stumbling

in a woven skirt wrapped loose around her legs.

Her head tilts up. Her arms are out.

When the image has no meaning

is the story broken? Even as the seen takes form

within a form, a freeze-frame, an eye,

the I telling the story in a room, in a stanza, it has all begun

crumbling, inevitably, a pale dust blown

through understanding’s margins.

The man flows through his window like the air did,

smoky with woodfires; the girl runs on, a door

slams, distance expands.

You were there and saw, and you know nothing,

possess nothing but your own dumb stare.

You blink into the light. There is no story.

Newness and the nameless

A thumbtack marked each city he’d seen

on the map on his wall in that room

already blanketed in photos and books, a layer to muffle

or absorb whatever roared in his head.

In one picture he took himself, his naked torso glowed whitely,

white hipbone jutting below a smooth stomach,

frame cupping his form. “I want to go out of this world the way I came in,

naked,” he said. To be devoured,

body lain limp on a high mountain

for the birds to wrench apart.

His hands traced the map west, north, talking of

Manifest Destiny, the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail.

Brown and bright-skinned after hiking the glacier, he had a mouthful

of Thoreau and wide binoculared eyes later in tall grasses

humming with mosquito clouds. A flash of red,

the bright bird, and no guidebook to name her.

In my fifth grade class,

each dogsled rider had a thumbtack

as we charted their movements over Alaska’s ragged shape.

But no one could fear, listening to him,

that everything that could be mapped, had been

or was divided in portions of the already-discovered. All energy pushed

toward newness and the nameless.

The air almost sharpens with ice crystals and pine

when I think of him now, a string of thought leading me

to blood flowing from chapped nostrils, dry cold altitude, as the trail

drops, wiped out in a white-out. Paws fly fleet and strong

pounding an unyielding earth. All blaze like a bullet

through the blankness, half-frostbit and gasping

but pure as a burned-down forest, all ash washed away.

I haven’t cried for you in weeks,

not since the night when I knew you were gone.

The last time, you hardly spoke,

in the art museum, cold marble and blasted air conditioning.

Your face was like the statues, maybe like it was

in the casket, but I didn’t go to the wake with those people

who had talked of you in past tense for a year.

Once I wanted you, now I just want a piece of your brain

to pulse in my open palm, let it whisper

all those words I half-understood, and forgot.

In my head, when I pressed it to the bathroom tile,

you flew through a white frontier –

grim as iron, you shone

into a space

no one’s yet discovered.

In grasp - from this spring in Cape Town

Vines spread and branched like veins

woven through the dead tree’s black wood.

They snapped with pulling. Tough remains

still snaked in the wood and worms

and California soil. Wet coolness, closer to the root

the vines glowed vivid purple.

Evening comes to this city in a gush of blue fog,

thick enough to forget yourself, if eight hours at a computer

don’t wipe memory away. Bending toward home,

I am unlearning eye contact

because looking up can mean opening yourself

or your legs and slithering voices have followed me home

more than once. Harsh voices come from bloody-eyed children

in a dull cicada buzz: “Hey, hey sister.”

When stroking eyes and hands are enough

to wrench a body apart,

I look for myself the palm of my hand,

or what it can hold. Pinecones still woods-smelling,

a three-legged plastic giraffe, a shell

rainbow-streaked like an oil slick.

My mother’s meditation stones are hard and smooth,

like the solid layer my heart is trying to grow.

Call me back, graspable things.

When the night is a riot of throbbing bass and anger,

my eyes close to a stone silence,

stone in hand. All heavy limbs long to grow

thick at the root,

burn a color more brilliant.