A Reminder (2nd draft)

You haven’t known humility
until you’ve had your foot run over
by a woman in a wheelchair
smoking an off-brand cigarette
She rolled off as I stood in the middle
of the crosswalk and she flicked her butt
to the pavement without a single glance

To know this humility, like knotted seaweed,
those emotions that stumble over grace,
you must sit in Veggie Heaven
on the drag in the off-peak shadows
for hours and watch the window
as the pane is passed over by hand-holding lovers
(flicking butts without a single glance)
and study your reflection as a palimpsest

In this position, you’ll notice
someone’s aging mother with arthritis
ambling on cloudy sandals
with a lone tray of leftovers
tossing rice to pigeons (in Tok Pisin
muttering a prayer for the many starving people
on the islands of Melanesia you’ll never know)
which crumbles on the parched pavement
in the shape of Indonesia

Why do you care to notice?
Because at the far table
beyond the edge of your known world
the Spanish-speaking busgirls
sit down after the lunch shift,
enjoying an energetic picnic
in the empty restaurant,
their three voiceless whispers
echoing the cadence of confidence

Sunburnt men in their seventies
with tired rage encasing their faces
creep along the sidewalk,
mumbling to pigeons as someone’s mother
hands them meals in styrofoam
(which didn’t exist in their youth)
to extend time with a smile

I am the silver man from the Dobie
(the one who sweeps the floors in a stained uniform)
charging across the street
between the #1 bus and the bicycles
shielded by a black plastic bag
with all I own – a blanket, two shirts,
and the last picture of my mother before she passed
(to bury it behind a dumpster)
Though you can’t help but wonder about my childhood,
how I always wanted to be in the movies,
know that my last job was Fear
and that you too will one day be ensnared as a metaphor
by some scared poet searching desperately for an image

So go back to your uneaten
curry bun on the table,
savor it now,
and save the humble prayer
of words
for yourself.
One day they’ll be all you have.

Monday Morning

The tiles in the kitchen
have warped and cracked,
attacked by too much expansion,
too many contractions,
too many breakfasts in flames.

Last night we laughed like jackals on wine
but in the morning you screamed
sirens and slammed the door,
the dogs baying under the table.
They weren’t waiting for scraps.

Your words were sleeping dragons
startled from a century’s slumber,
the volcanic breath expressing
this week's frustration with
me and my stone schedule.

Why couldn’t I make the time to take you to dinner?

There were too many starts of fights
and ends of loaves of bread,
compliments cut
short
by loathsome crusts
burnt
by your anger
crumbled to dust and crumbs,
falling







apart like weekends
that rush by like menus
said all in one breath.

Waypoints

In those autumn evenings when the sun dripped dry
we slept in the harbor, swam in our clothes.
We picked up the drunk at the liquor store,
and from the bed of your truck, he asked us
for a ride home from AA,
and then for some beer.
We left him on the corner of Wilkens and Fulton
and he popped some pills, ducked into a stoop
and out of our lives.
We never went back.

Left on Rolling Road, we pulled into U.M.B.C.
(You Made a Bad Choice we’d joke),
threw such lofty fits in the the dorms,
pushing each other into and out of new -isms
and your finger slammed like an apple
in the basement door, its skin
dangling from the bloody core,
and we rushed you to St. Agnes in our pajamas,
sat out front with the addicts for hours
throwing bottle caps in the birdbath.
Those ambulance sirens were little lobotomies.

Why were we so lost then?
Past the rowhomes we ran downtown,
Charm City rising in Bromoseltzer hues
And were we falling to the sidewalks like beetles
drawn in by neon letters, places with names like “BAR?”
Did we want a death like Poe,
worthy of the gutter?
Or to pass through the Blues like those other
assholes bitching about their mothers?

We rode through the streets and out to the diners,
the Double TT on Rt. 40, smoked cigarettes,
drank coffee until dawn, our books left in their bags,
wrote poems one line at a time, sharing the rhyme,
the accordion paper stained with doubt.
It’s odd how in these habits,
you blink and you miss it.
We paid the bill and out in the street,
the sun etched its impression onto the bay.

In those days we were looking for so much more.
but memory has no direction or logic,
like the Chesapeake, only buoys light the way.

Soufrière, St. Lucia, December 2005 (2nd draft)

Under déz Pitons, the cinders sing with charcoal springs,
rocks ruddied with sulfur cascading down Diamond Falls –
the bearded men with carved baubles and beads,
You on vacation mahn, no pressure, no problem –
mahogany straddles the stilted houses in the hills,
River Doree cool and deadly as a lady
snakes through narrow streets, pastel faded façades,
past the Church of the Assumption and central square,
childhood home of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine de Beauharnais.
The ever-windward waves,
catamarans anchor tourists just-offshore as the wake exerts its will
on rows of canoes and buoys, beckons like beacons to divers,
muscled men blowing conches over cruise ship horns,
parade their tuna-colored shells,
and soté boys from the jump-up in Gros Islet dive from docks,
dreadlocks as golden as the crests of hummingbirds,
mister, madam, coin, coin! plead tourists
to throw cent, five cent, ten cent, dollar
into the deep water, shoving each other,
nosediving after the coins,
bodies dancing upside-down, the feet flit
like minnows, racing for the specie,
specks of silver sinking under the sea,
flipping end-over-end like the island’s history –
which side you on? no pressure, no problem,
then surface and shout for more, raison d'état,
their voices a soca chantey, a chorus of gulls.