Poemunity — your poem community

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep is an image because it moves when her body does, even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail, until you hear that the row of numbers underneath are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact. I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it’s about death. At my uncle’s funeral, the coffin was so beautiful it was like the chandelier lighting the room where treaties are signed. It made me think of how loved he was. It made me think of Shoshone funerals, where everything the dead person owned was put into a bonfire, even the horse. In that last sentence, is the horse a detail or an image? I don’t really know. In my mind, a horse is never anywhere near a fire, and a detail is as luminous as an image. The trumpet vine on the sagging fence. The clothes in the fire. And each tattoo that I touch on your back: the three-part illustration of how to use chopsticks, the four-leaf clover, the clock face stopped at 12:05.

The woodpecker keeps returning to drill the house wall. Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another. There is nothing good to eat there: he has found in the house a resonant billboard to post his intentions, his voluble strength as provider. But where is the female he drums for? Where? I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding, the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

I took the dog and went to walk in the auditorium of the woods, but not to get away from things. It was our habit, that was all, a thing we did on summer days, and much there was to listen to. A slight wind came and went in three birches by the pond. A crow uphill was going on about the black life it led, and a brown creeper went creeping up a brown trunk methodically with no record of ever having been understood by anyone. A woodpecker was working out a deep hole from the sound of it in a stand of dead trees up there. And then a jay, much put upon, complained about some treachery it may or may not have endured, though most are liars anyway. The farther in, the quieter, till only the snapping of a stick broke the silence we were in. The dog stood still and looked at me, the woods by then already dark. Much later, on the porch at night, I heard the owl, an eldritch thing. The dog, still with me, heard it too, a call that came from where we'd been, and where we would not be again.

The wind flapp'd loose, the wind was still, Shaken out dead from tree and hill: I had walk'd on at the wind's will,— I sat now, for the wind was still. Between my knees my forehead was,— My lips, drawn in, said not Alas! My hair was over in the grass, My naked ears heard the day pass. My eyes, wide open, had the run Of some ten weeds to fix upon; Among those few, out of the sun, The woodspurge flower'd, three cups in one. From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory: One thing then learnt remains to me,— The woodspurge has a cup of three.

In the mud of a tire rut, we were the filaments. We said if Mrs. Agnew could make music on Spiro’s flute we said the clubs in the hands of the Chicago cops would liquefy. The trees shook with the throb of steel. What did we do to be so red, white, and blue? We were inexorable like the dialectic unraveling from Hanoi to the Jacksonian grass. We were the inebriates of vitamin C and cocaine, the daughters of the gray flannel suit. And when the shaman spread his yellow robe like the sun he was all teeth and amp and what were we?

woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y Vietnam woodstove corner that kept vigil over drunken nodding remembrance woodstove corner where uncles primos compadres gathered on visits from Califas woodstove corner with a warm ear for nostalgia where Mama Ane stirred the atole and wrung her hands thumb over thumb praying for her children's children's children woodstove that witnessed six decades washing its face at the vandeja that saw western swing dancing in dim lantern flame that watched Elvis come in from across the llano strumming a mail-order Stella and singing in Spanish woodstove of the feast lamb tied up under the crabapple tree of early sour cherries ripening above the cornstalk horizon of neighbors bartering a cup of sugar in exchange for mitote and conversation woodstove of rain tenderly pouring into the afternoon and salt sprinkling onto the patio from the mouth of the porch woodstove of the nighttime crackling softly of harmonious harmonica medleys blowing before bedtime prayer woodstove facing John F. Kennedy's picture on the wall woodstove of Protestant Sundays ringing without bells woodstove of dark earth fat worms and acequias woodstove of 1960s propaganda and all the rich hippies knocking poorly at the screen door woodstove of private crazy laughter of woodpeckers pecking through rough-hewn barn timbers only to meet the sky of rabbits nervously nibbling evening away in the arroyo of the water bucket banging and splashing all the way home woodstove of the water drop sizzle of buñuelos and biscochitos and flour on the chin of chokecherry jam dropping out from the end of a tortilla woodstove that heard Mentorcito's violin bringing in the new year that saw Tío Eliseo bring in an armload of wood that heard Tío Antonio coming down the road whistling a corrido and swinging his cane woodstove of the blessed noontime and Grandma Juanita heating up the caldito woodstove of the sanctified and untamed holy spirit of the dream awake dreamers prophesizing in the beginning how the end would come of creaking trochil gates left open forever of twisted caved-in gallineros rocking in weeping April wind of abandoned orchards waist deep in desánimo of teardrops that held back the laughter of the penitente procession moving through the hills for the soul of the village woodstove of the wounded faithful proudly concealing their scars woodstove of armpit farts and bedtime giggles of pitchforks and axes under the bed in case of intruders of coffee cans filled with everything but coffee of ten cents for a cream soda at Corrina's of strawberry Nehis and a bag of chili chips at Medina's of a handful of bubble gum acá Santos's woodstove of genius wisdom dressed up as the village idiot of hand-me-down stories locked away in the dispensa of bien loco local heroes cracking homeruns Saturday afternoons en la cañada woodstove of all that and more of all that disappearing as children played hide 'n' seek in that abandoned goodtime feeling while stumbling on the footsteps of tradition woodstove that heard the fall of a people rising in silence that died of a loneliness without cure that cured itself in the company of the so many more lonely woodstove of my childhood

There's a word you've met but once and now forgotten for the spoon-shaped concave under your Adam's apple: a small pouch that must be kissed and kissed again by lovers learning the ins and outs of one another and where last night in the sleeping dark a lone mosquito inserted itself and drew fresh blood and left venom and a couple of love-bites then left without waking you although this morning you'll blaze with the minute but unassuageable pain of them—which only that word that's vanished into the mud of memory might be the right cooling balm for.

For A.B. She said God. He seems to be there when I call on Him but calling has been difficult too. Painful.

After a Nick Cave “Soundsuit” made from buttons and found vintage abacus When George Washington became president in 1789 he had only one tooth in his head, a single premolar poking up from his gums. His dent- ures were fashioned from lead, gold wire springs, brass screws, the teeth of humans and cows, ele- phant ivory, and hippopotamus bone. It is a myth that he had false teeth made of wood. A mis- perception put forth by those misled by the hair- line fractures that ivory and bone possess. Just as cherry wine will stain cloth with a rust-hued vein, Washington’s fondness for dark wine blemished his teeth. The fractures eventually darkening, un- til resembling the grain in a piece of wood. The darkening of fractures is rather curious. The makeup of the flesh, the constitution of origin, the trackers of bloodlines thrown off the trail. It is difficult to determine what discolor- ations have tunneled their way through the body. Spider veins climbing the back of my legs like a winding river mapping the trauma. An unspoken collective of ephemeral bits and bytes, suffering most eloquently preserved in the mouth. The skin of one’s teeth decides many a fate. A black woman’s incisor settling down inside a white man’s maw. Overall, a quizzical look, an off-color joke about progress, the very blood a trick of the eye, an ocean blue on the outside of the skin, a blushing red if viewed just beneath the sheath. • A tooth is made up of the crown and the root, all the King’s Men destined to revolt. There are many ways to worm your way inside, many open- ings in the body of an animal. Some orifices gated with white entryways. A wooden portcullis, a pick- et fence, a laced corset secured tightly by a maid, a pointed geode just waiting to be pulled, the cavern wall glittering in the dark. Sharp crystals ornament the cave’s jawbone.Cave canem, quite naturally speak- ing. A hooded hole a place for some to hide or go seek. A toothless whistle the signal for the slave hunting bloodhounds, with canines fanged like water moccasins. The swamp mud gushing like the suppertime mush sloshing between the gums of a Confederate soldier. The terror of limbs at odds with the self. In World War I, trench foot meant frequent amputations, the blade sliding like floss between each toe. Some diseases attack the foot or mouth, gums left inflamed in the cross fire. A grieving mother wears dog tags around her neck. Her son’s baby shoes and teeth cast in bronze. The pulp at the center is how the tooth receives nourishment, how it transmits signals to the brain. The forgetting makes the present tense possible. Memory is the gravity of the mind. All the icebergs have started to melt, milky objects left hanging by a string, the doorknobs means to an end. • The keyboard’s toothy smile splayed wide, the flatlined cursor blinks impatiently on the screen, my fingers struggle to tap into word processing. I monitor all of the track changes. Even the computer is a slave to death. Its in- nards already bygone, its body obsolete upon year of purchase. I am a librarian, swimming the digital divide, my predecessor’s paddles — a mass of floppy disks in an office closet. They pile up like the teeth of slaves waiting for sale. An affluent businessman at the door, his hands panning the saliva for white gold. His fingers parting the cavity, pursed lips cooing, I need something of yours to call my own. The desire to chew and smile at will. My grandmother lost her mind before her teeth, lost the memories be- fore the enamel gave way to rot. My face has my mother’s abacus features. We are, in fact, diphyo- dont. In one lifetime we develop two sets of teeth. The missing space filled with air, a hollow exile before the native tongue. I pray my unborn child will have a gap. What the French call “dents du bonheur” or lucky teeth. The womb’s peephole is rather impressionable. I will fasten the buttons of time. I will take the baby’s body in my own, whisper a plea in its discriminating ear: Try to keep your wits about you, my love. Memory is about the future, not the past.

It's often those who talk a streak on world affairs and love and peace who seem to love and peace the least.