On the Anniversary of My Father's Death

I scoop up fine sand with the plastic shovel
of a small boy, funnelling it over you
in pinions. Grasp her tail feathers, father,
rise with the heat. Surge through dark veins
to their last branchings. Forget Helbros watches.

Roll the desk top down, leave Pittsburgh,
its gritty window sills. Let your silver body
rise up so I can feel the withered muscles
of your back. Make love to the show girl
from Las Vegas you have dreamed of.

Dailiness sucked your large brightness to a dry
socket. Stretch yourself out on the flatness
of the world-let this tribute draw the terror
from you. Seventeen years too late, I am arriving
indecently with the covered dish I owe you.

How can I find you, not below a proper Jewish
headstone in the high Reform cemetery, but where
you pitch and yawl, longing to trim your body
out of turbulence, unless I release myself
from the stubble to a dry dispersing wind?

La Mora

It is not the mix that jars - the Bauhaus ceiling,
tile Corinthian columns, the scratchy Vivaldi.
Beneath white table cloths men are touching the knees
of women, and, Alma Mahler Gropius, I am touching yours.
Beneath the sign of the blackberry, I am touching yours.
Beneath this fruited rose of small flower, the rasp
of young thorns and deep wounding, I am touching yours.

Werfel might have brought you here. Did he, Alma?
He might have courted you right over there, you,
drinking Frascati, and he, holding a book of his poems,
paraphrasing them in English, running his fingers
down your backbone, following the line of your body,
and pausing at the cross formed by your spine and bra -
as if this were a holy place, a sign that desire itself
is sacred. Was it love, Alma, or your muse he saw?

Perhaps you glowed inside as Siena might in the fading
light. Or felt only the distant pull of the Apennines
at night. From under tile gnarled pines I view this sight
and feel the fire of grappa gone down too quickly. I want
to take you to the steps of the Duomo in Firenze, buy
you a leather vest from the old women in the stalls
and carve La Mora and my initials across the back,
Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel.

Morning in San Miguel

Some moons are too luminous to praise,
and so, up early, I boil water for my wife's tea.

The gong of the church is stiff with night
as it strikes six, sure and certain - then pinging

from another far below - of an average day
in irrigated fields. The sun floods the land

with radiance - too pate for farmers cinching
burros, or brailleless beggars on the stoops.

Lucky

Every heart conceals a few small secrets
or, if full of amplitude and plenty, large ones.

I begin with a green bough, forsythia -
supple and yellow with flower.

I end there - not because I am impoverished,
but because I have it all.

KING ME

Goldin opened the drawstring,
spilled the checkers on the table.
"Wha'd you say your name was?
Calahan, right? Calahan,
would you like to play some checkers?
Stay right there, I'll get the board.
Red, I've got to be red, if that's okay."
Goldin placed a single disk
on a square. His index finger
zigzagged it toward Calahan.
"For me each checker is a rising sun.
You see, ah, Calahan, that's it, isn't it?
Once I knew a Chinese woman
living in Japan, a woman named Da-ling.
King me, Calahan, king me.
Okay, I'll do it myself," and he placed
a black checker on the red.
"Calahan, I should have chosen
black for my first move. It fits my moods.
Know what I mean, Calahan?"
Goldin moved the maverick king
back across the board and frowned.
"Black, dungeon black. People forget
the East is also where the dark
begins. Of course, she's just a part
of the story. You know how it is.
It's never simple. Sometimes,
my mind rushes like a storm sewer,
and when the torrent finally breaks
into an open bay, I see Da-ling
sitting on a raft. King me,"
and Goldin added a red checker
to the stack. "Da-ling, on a raft, Calahan.
You're quiet as a dog whistle.
You have a problem with any of this?"