Poems from the Cabrillo College teacher and Porter Gulch Review editor.
Vogue—Strike a Pose
Sculpt us—reads the sign
near aluminum-foiled kids,
faces sprayed silver—
for a donation.
They’re frozen in position
until a woman—
haloed by white hair,
shawl-wrapped, arthritis-hunched—
drops in a twenty,
claps hands together
and sets to work. She folds in
the youngest child,
head between thin knees.
Selects the next oldest, puts
her in front, head up
and arms following.
And so on for all seven
until the oldest
sheds the funnel
of bodies she’s made, leaps up,
fingering the sky.
Then the old woman
turns away from them towards us,
takes up position
by the beaming boy
as if she were the product
of all his striving,
lifts hands, bows head down
and freezes—face beaming light
our claps shine brighter.
Same Time Next Year
(for Marin Alsop, and the Cabrillo Music Festival Orchestra)
When the orchestra
blows into town each summer
they converge, day one,
to find out which homes
they will live in for these weeks—
summer rental gifts
from vacationers
or widows. Soon music lifts
through opened windows,
cellos and oboes,
timpani and tom-toms sail
down every alley.
Actual concerts
are the least of it, what’s changed
is how common scales
and runs have become—
beaches awash with their songs.
People hum along,
dream to the same tunes.
All anxieties lessen,
medication rates drop,
gang violence falls off
in the month-long musical
lull. Only the deaf
are out of the loop,
but even they detect thrummed
tunes they’ve never heard
coming through floorboards.
Birds change their tunes, melodies
turn with ignitions,
and the whole damn town
is turned upside down—Chagal
floats by, hums along.
Honey From
(for Alissa Goldring)
The veins of her hands
are rivers—where they run words
and photos follow.
She shuffles through piles
teetering on her table,
muttering, in search.
The stacks are heaped up
at wayward angles like cairns
from forgotten trips.
Gotcha! she cries out,
unearths a spiral-bound book
of photos she made
in Mexico for
her two children—husband long
gone from the picture.
I see the bulky
Brownie camera. It rests on
the breakfast table
where a bee samples
jam made from a yucca plant.
The camera’s weight makes
the teaspoon wobble.
The children are out of the frame
when the shutter’s sprung.
From that camera
to chemical bath—young face
flushed by the red light—
then bound in this book
to travel in steamer trunks
through many movings,
to find its way here,
to this ramshackle kitchen
where the bee is still
balancing on a spoon,.
She tells me her friend was going
blind and took her life.
Isn’t that strange? She still
had four senses left.
Leaving, I see Cold
Mountain, 100
Poems. She blows off the dust.
Here, take it with you.
Then produces, from
under a sheaf of papers,
a booklet wherein
I’m to write my name
and what I’ve borrowed before
tearing a bookmark
to remind me to
return it. I pray I get
a chance to return,
pray that she’ll still be
feeding me memories off
a wobbly spoon.
No one has to tell
me I’m lucky. Bend to her
shrinking form to kiss
her goodbye. I turn
and see a woodcutter passing
who tips his wool hat—
a dead-ringer for
Pete Seeger. I nod and tip
the hat I don’t have.
Alissa barks out
laughter that rides in the car
all the way back home.
My first book, Strong-Armed Angels, was published by Hummingbird Press, and two of its poems were selected by Garrison Keillor for The Writer’s Almanac. My second, Devils Messengers, about the war in Iraq, awaits publication. I teach literature and film at Cabrillo College, where I edit the Porter Gulch Literary Review. I live with my love, the historian Cherie Barkey, and our two children, Jules and Amina Barivan, in Santa Cruz.
