March/April 1999

Two Poems

"Victory Victoria, my beautiful whisper."

You are the daughter who sleeps beauty. You are the women who birth my face. You are a cloud creeping across the shadows, drenched in sorrows, and to heart sees terrain. Victory Victoria, my beautiful whisper. How as a baby you laughed into my neck. When I cried at you leaving, after your mother and I broke up. How at age 3, you woke me up from stupor, so I would stop peeing into your toy-box, in a stupor of resentment and beer. And how later, at age 5, when I moved in with another women, who had a daughter about your age; you asked, "How come she gets to live with daddy?" Muneca, these words cannot traverse the stone path of our distance. They cannot take back the thorns of fallen roses that greet your awakenings. These words are from places too wild for hearts to gallop, too cruel for illusions, too dead for your eternal gathering of flowers. But here they are, really offerings from your appointed father, your anointed man-guide. Make of them your heart's bed.

Poems Too Short to Braid: Believe Me When I Say.

Believe me when I say water is the skin of the earth; trains are arteries with corpuscles of people. A sight is an ancestor praying. A women's body is suspended over the land. Tears come from clouds in your head. Writing a poem is like fathering a river. Waiting is the art of desire. Something about a city makes you want to kill. Fetuses scribble on the walls of wombs.