The Rebuke

                                      The breasts of Hecuba, 
      When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier 
      Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood. 

My mother was an avid gardener.
But when cocktail hour arrived, delivering
the first of the four martinis she’d imbibe
before dinner, she didn’t sit
out in the sunset admiring her bleeding hearts,
her rhubarb, endive, asparagus, but reclined
on a shabby divan in the dim rec room
in the east end of the house.

After my father died, it often happened
that dinnertime never came, and she would drink
til she couldn’t walk to the kitchen anymore. She once set fire
to the divan with a Lucky Strike. She never bothered
to replace the divan mattress but simply covered
the big burned spot with a raggy quilt she had.

So it continued until cancer stopped her. I came
to dispose of her affairs, to settle her in hospice
care, and to hear her final words to me:
You have never in your life
shown your dear mother any courtesy,
when she, poor hen, caring for you alone,
has clucked you to the wars and home again,
loaded with honor. Then she turned
her face to the wall.

June 2014

Someone, Jorge Luis Borges

A man worked by time,
a man who does not even wait for death
(the proofs of death are statistics
and there is no one who does not run the risk
of being the first immortal),
a man who has learned to thank
the modest alms of the days:
the dream, the routine, the taste of water,
an unsuspected etymology,
a Latin or Saxon verse,
the memory of a woman who abandoned him
so many years ago
that today he can remember her without bitterness,
a man who does not forget that the present
is already the future and forgotten,
a man who has been untrue
and to whom others have been untrue,
can suddenly feel, when crossing the street,
a mysterious happiness
that does not come from the side of hope
but from an old innocence,
from its own root, or from a scattered god.

He knows that he should not look at it closely,
because there are reasons more terrible than tigers
that will demonstrate his duty
to be destitute,
but humbly receives
this happiness, this remnant.

Maybe in death we will be forever, 

when dust is dust,
that indecipherable root
that will grow forever,
kind or cruel,
our lonely heaven or hell.

Alguien, Jorge Luis Borges

Un hombre trabajado por el tiempo,
un hombe que ni siquiera espera la muerte
(las pruebas de la muerte son estadísticas
y nadie hay que no corra el albur
de ser el primer inmortal),
un hombre que ha aprendido a agradecer
las modestas limosnas de los días:
el sueño, la rutina, el sabor del agua,
una no sospechada etimología,
un verso latino o sajón,
la memoria de una mujer que lo ha abandonado
hace ya tantos años
que hoy puede recordarla sin amargura,
un hombre que no ignora que el presente
ya es el porvenir y el olvido,
un hombre que ha sido desleal
y con el que fueron desleales,
puede sentir de pronto, al cruzar la calle,
una misteriosa felicidad
que no viene del lado del la esperanza
sino de una antigua inocencia,
de su propia raíz o de un dios disperso.

Sabe que no debe mirarla de cerca,
porque hay razones mas terribles que tigres
que le demonstarán su obligacion
de ser un desdichado,
pero humildemente recibe
esa felicidad, esa ráfaga.

Quizá en la muerte para siempre seremos,
cuando el polvo sea polvo,
esa indescrifrable raíz,
de la cual para siempre crecerá,
ecuánime o atroz,
nuestro solitario cielo o infierno.

Myself

I’ve heard that there are African bush people
who carry their souls with
in little bags.

Waiting for the tub to fill,
working on internet business
in my bathrobe,

shall I say
that what I preeminently am
is a pretty animal,

myself
my one 

best fetish?

Performance Yoga

It’s hard to write about others
without crossing discretion boundaries.
Can I even write about myself without apology?

If I want to seduce
you, reader, with my pen,
I’ll at least have to be fun to watch!

Went up to my attic
and did my yoga just now,
first laying out my amulets—

ceramic female meditating figure;
rose-quartz sharp-nosed ID (I mean Latin for Thing);
amethyst Satva not really a superego, more

like all those fallen knights at the end
of Childe Roland;
orange feldspar Dhamma fronting the deeps;

green topaz Buddha resting
sometimes on their back with their feet in the air,
sometimes on their side or forehead.

Start Child pose, usually—asshole
and feet aligned, touching the mat
with the bone between my nose and brow that

a punch would break.
Up to Downward Dog, then walking
my hands to my right foot,

left foot high behind. And now I lift
with my whole hip till my hands are above my head
and I’m balanced,

left foot pressed to my right knee. And now I bend
slightly and bring my left foot back
so that I can hold it in my hand like

a tender bird, a turtle dove,
chuckling and cooing and trembling against my fingers.
Two arms full of fluffy chicken!

And now I let go and do the same drill
on the other foot. Next, I press my 10-lb barbells
from below waist to above head twenty times—

surprisingly difficult, even after all this time!
I usually finish with Sun Salutations,
each ending with putting my anus on one heel

and stretching both hands to the opposite foot.
Happy Baby, on my back, grasping feet, rocking.
Bridge, groin high, letting my butt down slowly.

last ten breaths in Corpse—
each breath lasting
forever

Villanelle: Just Write It!

When you write, don’t worry about saving face.
All your embarrassing experiences are grist for your hopper.
There are worse things than being a literary disgrace.

You can struggle every morning at a frenzied pace
scribbling confessions that may be deemed improper,
when you don’t worry about saving face.

You can write about the time you kept your ace
when the queen was on the board, and you let another take her.
There are worse things than being a literary disgrace.

So you want a part in Arsenic and Old Lace?
So you put bird seed in the popcorn popper?
So don’t you worry about saving face!

And you’ll never disappear without a trace
if you get to be known as the world’s biggest moper.
That's the advantage of being a literary disgrace.

And maybe you will win the poet race

and be considered really super-duper,
if you don’t worry about saving face.
There are worse things than being a literary disgrace.

More Skeleton Platonism

                   *
Most of the skeletons you see
are just ghosts pretending
to be skeletons.

                   *
You worry about being attacked by an army of skeletons,
but there can really be only one Skeleton,
just as there can be only one Rose in Borges’s shadow world.

Meating the Beatles

You have to get right to the meat
when you talk about the Beatles.
My friend Tony

had Meet the Beatles
and Introducing the Beatles
in his basement.

We had sessions after school
we called “rehearsals,” singing along to them
with ukulele and tennis racket props.

Tony was a tall, blond, diabetic kid,
the center on the 6^th-grade basketball team
I was on sort of by his sufferance.

The Beatles' sound was so fresh!—
miraculous fusion of English country music
(which many even in England had probably never heard before)

and American blues mixolydian.
“We’re done,” said Ian Tyson when he heard the screams
in When I Saw Her Standing There.

Their long hair broke the arctic ice plate—
not just disrespectable, but disgraceful—
but we embarked on that perilous road.

Tony would invite me to sleep over,
and we’d sing and drink a kind of strawberry kool aid
he made made with fizzy pellets in a glass pitcher.

Like me, Tony had a foot phobia.
I remember the hatred in his older sister’s eyes
when he ordered her to get her feet off his bed.

The night I remember, we didn't
sleep in Tony’s bed,
but in a larger bed, in another basement room.

We played Boy & Girl, of course.
Tony was the boy, mostly. I remember the hard feel
of his groin against my hip.

It was easier to be the girl. Tony
generously offered me my turn to be the boy,
but I liked just lying there better.

One night there was an unpleasantness—
I had eaten a few peanuts I saw in a jar on the coffee table,
and he remarked on it when he smelled them on my breath.

I didn’t feel like admitting I had eaten them.

I was being an asshole, and Tony wouldn’t let it go.
Later, Tony was the bass player in my band, The Trojanz.