Lorna Dee Cervantes

Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the decks of the cliffs. They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. Rare bird, extinct color, you stay in my dreams in x-ray. In rerun, the bone of you stripping sweethearts folds and layers the shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art.

I was looking for your hair, black as old lava on an island of white coral. I dreamed it deserted you and came for me, wrapped me in its funeral ribbons and tied me a bow of salt. Here’s where I put my demise: desiring fire in a web of tide, marrying the smell of wet ashes to the sweet desert of your slate. My intelligent mammal, male of my species, twin sun to a world not of my making, you reduce me to the syrup of the moon, you boil my bones in the absence of hands. Where is your skin, parting me? Where is the cowlick under your kiss teasing into purple valleys? Where are your wings, the imaginary tail and its exercise? Where would I breed you? In the neck of my secret heart where you’ll go to the warmth of me biting into that bread where crumbs crack and scatter and feed us our souls; if only you were a stone I could throw, if only I could have you.

for Gra'ma There was always fabric in your lap and a whistle in your heart. A sweet sap to be sucked waited in the garden. Nymphs of newts nestled under rock, your role as She Who Brings the Waters intact. Between the trilling of the crickets educating into the night and the sad sack of cans in the mornings something grew, flourished in the dark — vines as sturdy as telephone wire writhed in the breezes. You patched together a blanket of us, sewed together the mismatched and lopped off edges. And anger grew a twin, ripped through the bermuda grass, something stubborn and determined: Me, in a leather patchwork skirt, the bitter lemon song returning to its beginning over and over on the Howdie Doody phonograph, a handful of bandages, a faceful of ghosts delivered from the mirrors. How did you stand it? All of it. Us crunching through your set life, kids scuffling through the mounds of leave. Always making do. Your sunshine eyes, those stenciled memories where we still live.

Night Magic (Blue Jester), 1988, by Carlos Almaraz After Federico García Lorca Blue that I love you Blue that I hate you Fat blue in the face Disgraced blue that I erase You lone blue Blue of an alien race Strong blue eternally graced Blue that I know you Blue that I choose you Crust blue Chunky blue Moon blue glows that despise You — idolize you Blue and the band disappears Blue of the single left dog Blue of the eminent red fog Blue that I glue you to me You again and again blue Blue blue of the helium Bubble of  loveloss Blue of  the whirlwind The blue being again Blue of the endless rain Blue that I paint you Blue that I knew you Blue of  the blinking lights Blue of  the landing at full tilt Blue of  the wilt Flower of  nightfall Blue of  the shadow In yellowed windows Blue of the blown And broken glass Blue of the Blue Line Underlines in blue Blue of the ascending nude Blue before the blackness Of  new blue of our winsome Bedlam Blue of the blue Bed alone: blue of the one Who looks on blue of what Remains of cement fall Blue of the vague crescent Ship sailing blue of the rainbow Of  wait blue that I whore You — blue that I adore you Blue of the bluest door Blue my painted city In blue (it blew.)

after García Lorca Once I wasn’t always so plain. I was strewn feathers on a cross of dune, an expanse of ocean at my feet, garlands of gulls. Sirens and gulls. They couldn’t tame you. You know as well as they: to be a dove is to bear the falcon at your breast, your nights, your seas. My fear is simple, heart-faced above a flare of etchings, a lineage in letters, my sudden stare. It’s you. It’s you! sang the heart upon its mantel pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch of my see—beautiful bird—It’s you.

1 I find a strange knowledge of wind, an open door in the mountain pass where everything intersects. Believe me. This will not pass. This is a world where flags contain themselves, and are still, marked by their unfurled edges. Lean stuff sways on the boughs of pitch pine: silver, almost tinsel, all light gone blue and sprouting orange oils in a last bouquet. 2 These were the nest builders; I caught one last morning, I sang so it fell down, stupid, from the trees. They’re so incorrect in their dead skin. Witness their twig feet, the mistake of their hands. They will follow you. They yearn pebbles for their gullets to grind their own seed. They swallow so selflessly and die like patriots. 3 Last Christmas, a family of five woke from their dreaming and dreamed themselves over: the baby in its pink pajamas, the boy in the red flannel bathrobe he grabbed from the door, a mother, a father, and a sister in curlers; all died. A wood frame house, a cannister of oil, a match—watch as it unsettles. They were so cold; umber. 4 I am away from the knowledge of animal mystics, brujas and sorcerers or the nudging chants of a Tlingit Kachina. I am frightened by regions with wills of their own, but when my people die in the snow I wonder did the depths billow up to reach them?

best thought, you had taught me — a river runs through it, the foot of the soul standing stubbornly in the freeze, all the shards of ice crumpling up the banks, what survives in the ignorance. Play it away. Be ceremony. Be a lit candle to what blows you. Outside, the sun gives a favorite present, mountain nests in ironic meadows, otter takes off her shoes, the small hands of her feet reaching, reaching; still, far away people are dying. Crisp one dollar bills fold another life. You taught me to care in the moment, carve day into light, or something, moving in the west that doesn't destroy us. Look again, in the coming summer, the cruelest month alive still eats up the hours. Regret is an uneven hand, a rough palm at the cheek — tender and calloused. I drink another glass of water, turn on the tap for what grows, for you, for what lasts, for the last and the first found thought of you.

When summer ended the leaves of snapdragons withered taking their shrill-colored mouths with them. They were still, so quiet. They were violet where umber now is. She hated and she hated to see them go. Flowers born when the weather was good - this she thinks of, watching the branch of peaches daring their ways above the fence, and further, two hummingbirds, hovering, stuck to each other, arcing their bodies in grim determination to find what is good, what is given them to find. These are warriors distancing themselves from history. They find peace in the way they contain the wind and are gone.

“The writer. It’s a cul-de-sac,” you wrote that winter of our nation’s discontent. That first time I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great named cats you gassed in the move.I couldn’t keep them. You explained so I understood. And what cat never loved your shell-like ways, the claw of your steady fingers,firme from the rasping of banjos and steady as it goes from the nose to the hair to the shaking tip. My favorite tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from Goodwill. What ever becomes of the heart our common child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black felt pen? Who gets what? Who knows what becomes of the rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning I sat waiting for the surgeon’s suction. What ever becomes of waiting and wanting, when the princess isn’t ready and the queen has missed the boat, again? Do you still write those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinsky’s ace letting go? Like:Lorna meets Oliver North and she kicks his butt