Yes, I bought the dress.

The Green Dress


Hangs sexy & taut
Poised, yet ready to launch
When I imagine you inside

Excited to see you there
My fingers liberate across
Your silken waist, fall
To the dimples of your back
Halt in the rough organza

I struggle to evoke
The color of your eyes
Until resolving they are right
Before me in muted green
Exactly as this dress

Peek around. Sales ladies
Ring up and smile and fold
Untouched by my caresses
By the window and mannequin
At Francesca’s in the mall

Tilt over to breathe you in
On the humid heat from where
A woman cut and joined and eight
Girls leaned hot over engines
Just for me to touch you here

Or trace your simple dints of
Neckline, or wander in the
Flower garden of your pleats

Breathing out

Breathing Out


I don’t know if I’m 46 or 45
For the first time, I forgot
     Finally, half way through my life
All there is is breathing out

Not like writing last year’s date
In the opening days of year
     Appearing on an empty plate
All there is is breathing out

Breathing in is not the same when
Bones are speaking in a tongue
     Neuroscientists defining sin
All there is is breathing out

Wise but ugly, with gaping sighs
Mountain gorillas carried on their backs
     Surrounded by le mort and time
All there is is breathing out

Measuring worth with gushing speed
Volcanic lurid late night chat
     Exactly when, how long, how deep
All there is is breathing out

The comedian bows into laughs
Her favorite jokes are winding down
     All mountains strewn with trash
All there is is breathing out

Shifts go late and hard at work
Since boyhood scared of touching fire
     Wrecking daytime with a fork
All there is is breathing out

Our bones fuse in a dimming light
Exhale what I have not touched
    Squeeze your ass into the night 
All there is is breathing out

Is it forty-six or forty-five?
For the first time, a lost count
     But I’m not arguing this time
All there is is breathing out

Doesn't get any better than this

Meditating at iHop  


Stomp off your snow at iHop
Follow her this way past booths
By the black ladies with eyes

Order decaf, a plate of fries
Note the heating ducts, syrups
Uniformity, rhythm and orange

Plug in at iHop to meditate
Regard the breakfast photos
Everything lucky and consequential

She brings the copper kettle
You are feeling calm and relaxed
Outside scrape the snowplows

Ketchup, Equal, iHop
Squeeze those muscles, good job
It is as if—you are there

Each fry slick and hot and cut
And now I’d like you to bring your
Attention back to the body

Everyone just fine at iHop
That’s it, breath deeply, pour
As much as you wish

Make two tight fists, that’s it              
When you meditate at iHop
It is as if--you are there


Multiple meanings, many questions

1409 Constance Street


Tablets in our laps creak in the Age
Of Information, from our sofa’d tours
Hallelujah, dreams, blinds, doors
We might have breathed behind

Type 1409 Constance Street, New Orleans
To Street View where you could have been
Hallelujah, hunched on that parched stool
With your fingers dripping from the sun

How she holds them calm in time
On the stoop, where you aren’t held
Hallelujah, her purse full of gold, secrets
Out of cat’s purr on Constance Street

Does the child at 1406 wonder
As she rides her bumpy trike
Hallelujah, I am saved from this
Or what lives behind door 1417?

Why would we switch places with
Walls whose stuffing is awry?
Hallelujah, our bricks lie tucked
Beneath, our stuffing tight inside

What stoop we do not dwell upon!
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

The following poem has been crafted from copied lines from the article, “Out of Eden,” by Paul Salopek, in the December, 2013 issue of National Geographic. Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist whose first book based on his seven year journey around the world, A Walk Through Time, will be published by Random House in 2016. Salopek’s superb account deserves a close reading for its anthropological and internationalist perspective, which is ethereal, shocking and beautifully written. Again, these fragments are from Salopek’s article, minimally adapted. They stand alone, but are insufficient evidence of Salopek’s entire work of art. It is my wish that the integrity of his language I’ve borrowed attracts readers to his work. This poem, therefore, is testament to Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden” journey and what he can convey.

Walking


Walking is falling forward 
An act of faith, retracing pathways
Of the ancestors who straddled the strait
Called Bab el Mandeb, the “gate of grief” that cleaves
Africa from Arabia

Millennia behind,
We follow, out from Africa, Eden
Across the gravel plains of Asia into mint
Blue shadows of Siberia to wind-smeared
Tierra del Fuego

To relearn contours
Of our planet.  To slow down
Think.  As a pilgrimage to remember
After 600 centuries, we still seek guidance, even rescue
From those who have walked

To walk for 7 years
Across three continents
The absurdity of it.  The dust.  Are you crazy?
Sick?  Plodding in acacia plains darkened to the color
Of chocolate by warm rains
                                                                      
Over Homo sapiens idaltu
Gone for 160,000 years—a dawn version of us
Ardipithecus ramidus, 4.4 million years old, upright
Walking, an old cousin, amongst the Bouri-Modaitu
Of the Afar

In the direction of Warenso
The world changes when you are thirsty
It shrinks.  Loses depth.  Earth butts against sky
Hard and smooth as the surface of a skull, desert tightening
Like a noose

Little else matters
The sun’s rays corkscrew into our heads
To be tempted into shade, to drop under one of
10,000 thornbushes means death: No one will find you
So we stagger

When our ancestors wandered
Out of Africa 60,000 or more years ago
The world was crowded with strange cousins
Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis, Denisovans
Did we make love?

Or rape? 
We alone survived to claim the earth
We won the planet.  But at a cost: We are without
Close family, a species racked by survivor’s guilt. We are
A lonely ape 

Who are the millions
Who surrender their livelihoods today?
Irish farmers in the European Union, Mexican ranchers
Shunted aside by highways.  Humanity strips away our stories
And the topsoil

The struggle of man against power
Is the struggle of memory against forgetting
Writes Milan Kundera.  Opening your eyes to nothing
But seamless sky for day after day; a numinous void, clarity
Of hunger

Blown through by the wind
The way a hollow pipe is blown to make it whistle
Over the dead, faceup, facedown, in the mineral silences
Sprawled on the black lava as if dropped from the sky, bleached
Walking

More than 100 billion of us have lived
93% have vanished.  The bulk of our heartaches
And triumphs lie behind us.  We abandon them daily
In the wasteland of the past.  We must embark on journeys
Of forgetting

The sea is walking
It falls endlessly forward, then rolls forever back
Pulling toward the Tihamah Coast, toward the lupine valleys
Of the Himalaya, toward ice, toward sunrise, toward the hearts
Of unknown people.