The Love Song of Don Rigoberto

All cosmic activity
that does not contribute,
even indirectly,
to testicular and ovarian arousal,
to the meeting of sperm and egg,
is contemptible.

Take a falling star. I mean,
imagine a meteor plunging earthward,
a flaming rock
slamming the shell of the planet.

The spawn of this
galactic lust,
my love,
is us.

We are space-dust golems,
silt-sifted mannequins
posing for a brief
season behind dark glass. 

I could beg you to sing,
my darling.  I could 
plead until you dance.

So what if a fox
prances on your midnight lawn
beneath the winter magnolia.

So what if I do.

As If Anything In Language Could Make Language Tremble

Two things interested God about poetry, 
at least the stuff 
God cared to read -- 
                                     music and voices. 

The way sounds rub against sounds
and words brush words
thrilled God, 
as if language had a mind of its own, 
beyond the maker's intent
or the speaker's desires.

God was distracted 
by the rhythms of human speech, 
the singular sounds that defined 
singular identities. 

These two qualities of language, 
the music of words and the spoken voice, 
created any magic there was to find in poetry,
God said.

The thirst that compels poetic practice,
God said,
is quenched by a vast river
flowing from these two trickles.

God said, 
You don't have to play
jazz trumpet or have a tune
stuffed in your back pocket
to be a poet, 
but you must embrace
the long apprenticeship in the language. 

God said,
You must
humble yourself on the shore of the Word. 

You must dive naked in that milky river 
and swim against the current of language. 

Tugboats will push long barges upstream, 
and the waves will kick 
you always toward the muddy shore.

                                               Ha! Hallelujah!

Three-Penny Desire

That morning, he woke and said:

Like the long shadow of a spike
sunk in a waterlogged coffin,
my heart points always to the west,

beyond the Mississippi River,
beyond the desert
and the Continental Divide.

I've never heard your voice,
he said, but your words
wake my heart--

mixing memory and desire,
stirring dull roots with spring rain,
etcetera, etcetera,

in the midst of life
we are in death,
etcetera and so on.

She said:
Stay home,
hometown homespun.

Stay home,
provincial provocateur.

Remembering the Aria of November

The morning your parents conceived you,
clouds lay across the sky
like bodies all asleep in beautiful disarray.

Your father said:
The gray centuries of dawn
blow secret kisses to our bones,
and shadows coil along our spines.

Your mother said:
The harlequin moon
sinks behind the trees,
and leaf-lean branches
lift the palanquin of day.

When your parents embraced,
a mockingbird sang
like an ancient, exiled desire.

Your Mother's Roses

Your mother's roses
bowed in that heavy light.

I was thinking who
will save the bright culture
of this digital world
after we're all gone.

This light falls
the way a torn kimono falls
from the back of an old arm chair.

This light hurts
my right shoulder
like a day-old flu shot.

Someone Somewhere Will Always Whisper Narratives

This frosted morning along the Natchez Trace,
pines lay long shadows across a low field.

Six Brahman steers lounge in dawn sunlight,
pulling up damp grass that sighs
thin steam along the shadow's edge.

There Will Be Smoke in the Cookhouse Tonight

She said: My lover, I give you all
the wasted timber and abandoned cord-wood
you can harvest from the stump farm of my heart.

He said: Hand me down my double-bitted axe,
my darling.
Hand me down my mattock and my cant hook.