Songs of Waiting for Winter

I. These Are Sparse and Windy Times

These are sparse and windy times
Troubles lurch asphalt, gutter, curb
Wounded weary horsemen bending
Sucking water I used to withdraw
From a well no longer recognized
As mine

I’ve patched these jeans, sang wispy
Wintery themes, loved her wrongly
And she died on a windowsill, her skin
Like dust swept away, delicate bones, hands finger
Diaphanous and shining strings of blue afternoon,
Flushing the pheasants curled in grasses blackening
The sky, their rise heralding an evensong
My piano used to know

These are amber and gracious times
Won’t the metal in the crankshaft
Slurp the oil and run hot wire round
Soul machinery, hum and sparkle, roar
And rattling up the railroad leaping
Bloodstream fire spitting across
The face of withering criticism, sailing
O’er your fields of flowers anymore?

Burlap bag in a searing wind
Indigo-dusted butterflies, voices
Of autumnal repose soften
Curl and dry and lose their scent
Like rosemary left burning in a pan.

II. Emblems

Remember
The grieving leather, the edge of sorrow
Unsheathed and slicing thin gray cinders,
A whirl of dust curling,
Blown with abandon, wheezing ambition
Embodying in breathless moments airy emblems
Signs to shuffle a soul on through, and on you go
Enduring windless valleys and sterile, crumbling
Peaks moonlighting as tender dreams long unfinished

And unyielding to sinking limestone scrapings
Abandoned—by you? Ignored—
This remember is your passion played
The heating blood of letters and emails turning
Like milk sour in the fridge
Cool balm of remorse and yet
Flung to ether and lodged in files and waiting
Humming for resurrection in soft glare

You the audience, you the player, you
The drinking dogged fawning critic fingering
Ointment dip and puff and smear
Along the mirror’s fault lines, desire
Pray, whisper, remember
And still growing established
Once
You were inside, you saw and spoke
And the reflection, suspended, held.

Tethered

Tethered, indiscrete, fawning, a soft sigh
Moored, undulating, the sea’s abandon quelled…
A hand gloved in a spray of salt
Sullies not your flesh
I brush the pallid cheek
So frail
A trembling face many thousands
Of years old and still
We touch
To brush away longing
Wiped away
Threads of desire like unkempt servants, paler slaves born
Of illusion nourishing cries from the master
Of illusion and shadowy silken songs draped
To smolder funeral pyres—
Soften the landing of a child
Whose name, finger burning black
Traces thick smeared ash, guards,
Whispering, speaks to the passing fire…

Isn’t the gray smoke burning the sky from idiot fires
Down far below cupped in this pitched and pocked hand
More breathless than any weary sigh
Poor and naked of aim, belittling trust in fellow man,
Eyes soft of wonder, thrusting an easy welcome
Enough?
I have nothing to offer any of this
Anyone, even you—
I imagine the idiots dancing, spellbound,
A spectacle of hot love in the jungle night
Denuded, burned…
Embers rising bloom as stars
Guiding me overland night into night
Dawn receding like the fire below
I smell burning and crackling, ashes and ink.

The Terrible Distance

Slept fitfully last night, so after school came home to rest. Two large parrots in cages in the mansion across the street squawked and screeched, a warm wind blew through the guest bedroom, Tigger the cat finally settled in, and I proceeded to nap. A knock on our neighbor's gate rattled me awake. More knocking. Then the rattling was on our gate. Rising, glancing out the window, I noticed over our garage door wall a pickup, engine running, a long bar strapped from the bed over the cap--what turned out to be metal slats used for automatic garage door openers. I had made no work requests with our landlord. The knocking continued. A bit annoyed, I went downstairs, peered through the hole. No one. More knocking, lighter this time. Brushing aside annoyance was trepidation: is this a ploy to rob the house, do violence to us? We're always overly cautious, as enough violent crime and robberies have rolled into our lives as stories and email warnings and worried gossip at school. Hesitantly I unlatch the door. A worker in plain clothes greets me, and I return the greeting shyly, wary. He begins in quick Spanish something, and pointing to our neighbor's house. I don't even attempt to comprehend (terrible distance number 1), and say--in English no less--that I don't speak Spanish, which isn't exactly true, but I felt impatient and untrusting. He then turns to halting but easily comprehensible English, explaining that Raquel, the neighbor--did I know her? (no, I reply, which also isn't quite true)--she'd evidently called him over the weekend to fix her garage door. I guess she wasn't home. Still wary, I shrugged. I couldn't help him. Quick thoughts shot through me: he wants inside to see if he can go over the wall to fix the door! Right. Or: does he want me to let him in Raquel's gate? Right. When I first had opened the door, I looked into his eyes--they were tinged with red, and I was immediately suspicious. I looked into his face again as he was trying to explain his dilemma, and I saw that he seemed sincere; he had a job to do and wanted to do it. I continued being unhelpful, not even thinking to suggest I could tell Raquel when she returned that he'd stopped by. No, I kept my distance and ducked behind suspicion. As no alternative presented itself, he finally declared "Bueno" as in, well, okay. Then he said goodbye, and added "I'm sorry!" to which I responded in kind and quickly as I closed the gate managed to offer "That's okay!" to his apology. He was a good-natured, friendly man, someone doing his job, and he was brown and probably Honduran, and I kept my distance. And now, with shame, I'm feeling the gulf. At what point and under what conditions do I lay my bets the other way, offering a few pieces of scrap lumber for a bridge of trust?

Third Worlding

I don't know whether I like the Third World. That immediate experienced notion at once demands commentary. How can one "experience" the Third World as one can, I suppose with a little imagination and enough time spent, a city like Paris, or Walnut Creek, or Ben Lomond? This amorphous concept of regional measured economic development one can no more experience than one can freedom. There is a general milieu of time and space I can call my experience so far, but of course living here in Honduras and previously in Syria are two very different cultures in significant ways. What I find similar I guess clings to me like burrs through a wild field. But what is this "experience", or this continual experiencing? It is the durable residue left from the clash of expectations and reality. One could, I imagine, expect reality, which is another way of "living in the moment" or Buddhist "mindfulness" or even the Christian "doing the will of God" to lasso all these ways of being loosely into one rodeo. Easier said than done. For if we are in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua for Semana Santa, or Holy Week Easter, on holiday, and have already bought bus tickets round trip from and back to Tegucigalpa but have yet to reserve specific seats back across the border, and with righteous foresight decide to call Trans Nica bus company in Managua five count em five full days before day of departure...and on the first day ring after ring no one answers...and on the second day no one answers...and so on...and nowhere on the Trans Nica website can one reserve seats...and even, desperate, emailing and texting a good friend Spanish-speaking in Tegucigalpa asking, pleading, she please visit the office where initial tickets were purchased, and when no one answers the phone there and the office is closed, and is still closed subsequent days, your expectation of a bus company who caters to travelers who actually travel on holidays actually being responsible to be OPEN stumbles, slips and crashes into the reality of that bus company not being responsible at all. The kind and helpful hotel manager, Andy, suggests we go through a travel agent in town. Office, you guessed it, closed, and no office hours listed. So how do our First World expectations meet Third World reality? Slap a credit card down for a flight out of Managua that afternoon. Done. What about when reality outstrips expectation? Playa Majagual, 12 kilometers north of San Juan del Sur on a dirt road through poor farming villages, an uncluttered gently swaying beach winding from a rocky cove sweeping south into tidepools, roaring tumult of Pacific ocean waves, the swirl and pump of clear saltwater currents, that briny wash and foamy spray of pure sea, and only rickety surf shacks, a few poor houses of Nicaraguan peasants, shady overhanging trees to soften the burning sun, sea-moist air and the sky throwing a spray of clouds across its pale canvas, and it's all ours, mi amor y yo, and we swim and splash and bounce in the waves hugging and tossing us, and we read, Carrie, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and me, Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, and we rest and sun and swim all afternoon, and it's free, and so are we.