after monsoons, frogs croak,
seven minutes at a time.

Silence echoes through air so thick
bugs can’t fly; they float.

Bicycles, mud, and untamed children of goddesses
wander roads along the worming river.

A pilgrim bus emerges ochre from the steam,
wheels mud-stained a jealous red.

The face pressed to the rattling window
reflects wrinkled mountains lapping at the sky:

the Himalayas, bumping Nepal and China
with all the force of a subtle subcontinent…

and India in books beckons, Someone Never-Met
more than Someplace Never-Been.

A street man offers fruit, calling Sweets, Grandmother!
She clutches her flowers and steps down to the mud,

wrinkled arms wrapped in a blue sari,
heels hard like river pebbles.

Where her neat hem ripples at the water’s
edge she drops petals and prays: one petal

for the goddesses, one for the slum, one for children, one
husband, the dead, new sari, good weather, blessings,

and one for all things forgotten.
(They smelled like bananas,

whatever they were. Forgotten.) Tear-shaped
petals and prayers curl with the river around her feet.

She makes a pilgrimage every year.
Monsoon. River. Petals. Forgetting.

Silence follows.
Then, croaking frogs.


—None of this may actually be true. The maps on the last page reveal nothing.

We stand together
Each alone
A lifetime between us.
We turn to an edge
Of The Everglades,
And to small song birds
So absolutely blue and gold
That I believe in the Everlasting,
Momentarily.
The unhallowed, hollow-boned
birds
Never still, never sure
Ever quickening, ever flickering,
Call "Vive? Qui vive, qui
vive?"
And beyond the lily pads
The treaded head and high eyes
Of the alligator,
Watch and wait
Like Fate.

He watches the way the children's eyes light
when he talks about the teeth--
the glinting points, rows and rows
of yellowed knives. They have seen
alligators in the zoo but never like this;
watching from the waters, eyes blinking
above the suface of a still swamp.
The kids don't understand their speed
clambering up the bank, of the way they snap
their enormous jaws and take in
whole animals. Alligators
are not creatures to be messed with,
he tells them, breaking from the story.
Tommy and Fred nod with glazed eyes;
he knows they are thinking about
their bb guns upstairs and camouflage gear.
It is Vida he worries about,
her hands clenching her knees,
a vague grin on her faraway face.
He can't touch her, he knows,
and she is the most vulnerable;
it is Vida, the small girl caught in the story
at his feet, who can't tell dream
from real teeth, the danger of imagination
from the danger of men.
Vida is the one who would edge up to the swamp
with nothing but wonder to protect her.

They haven't visited the Fosters in a year;
Jack has turned into the perfect boy.
Vida didn't remember her was so beautiful.
He runs down to teh swamp to feed alligators---
they like leftover chicken, pork chop fat, fish heads,
he tells her. Vida watches from behind some trees,
not daring to come closer, but willing
an alligator to pull its great fleshy head out of the water,
snap toward them, let her count its teeth.
Jack creeps up on the murky sludge--
quick footsteps bouncing through
the spongy bog. He pushes his dark hair
about of his eyes as he runs
back to her; they watch from behind the tree
a piece of meat, floating on the green bubbly scum
yanked under, as if suctioned in the water
about to pull the whole swamp after it.
Vida's father has always warned the boys
not to fool with alligators; they carried off
his little friend by the leg, ate him,
and dogs are always disappearing near the swamp.
Vida listened, but this can't apply to Jack,
because he's so fast, so bright, he shines
wherever he goes. And suddenly he is laughing,
and she has to smile back at him: this is no alligator,
only a snapping turtle; he feeds them sometimes,
tossing scraps in, because he likes
the way they snap the surface, always hungry.
Vida wonders what would happen if he
threw her in, whether turtles would bite holes
in her body, or she would get pulled under and under,
into that new, plentiful, green world, suffocating
in the thickness of it.

They were going too fast to notice anything
but Illinois fields, this abandoned un-Eden where the lonely
occasional house or tree were as out of place
as mirages. Space flattened and spread, green and green
without difference, like blindness.
She closed her eyes, though back
home, the Gulf flatness an unending blue
horizon she could submerge into.
Her husband of two weeks beside her,
one hand on the wheel, woke her; the map she held
would wind them the wrong way along the Mississippi:
North, a path too perfectly navigable
on wide, gray highways.

If they were on the river, things would be easier:
A simple call could gauge their safe clearance
into another existence, a city she could call
Civilization. In the motel, while he watched the news,
she stood by the window, open, with a view
of the river, its writhing body
a reflection of artificial light.

That night, turned on her side,
she could compare her space and his--
how he spread out, horizontal, open
while she curled, a hip and shoulder
supported by the other,
and how they could sleep this way,
side-by-side, while she waited for him to
turn to her, bend and shape his body
into the contours of her own.

I fell asleep somewhere past halfway to Esmeraldas but before the roadside pina-stand. When I woke up it was dark outside. My uncle had stopped the car so we could get out and look at the stars. We were very close to the night-sky. A trillion stars twinkled in strange constellations in the velvety blackness. I scrambled out and peered up into the heavens. The journey had been long and grueling. But somehow, among my family and the mountains, I did not feel so alone, nor so small. The darkness pressed in on me, and I pressed back.

On the Steps of the Uffizi
for Eleanor Mulholland

Standing on the steps of the Duomo,
I asked her what she was thinking;
she said, 'Baby Yogurt.'
Later, strolling through the Uffizi,
gazing at magnificent works of art,
she said, 'Look at that lady's boob,'
to which I responded,
'You mean the Madonna's?'

And so, "On the Steps of the Uffizi" was born. We had spent the day touring museums and were taking a rest outside of the Uffizi (on the steps), when something compelled me to turn to a blank page of our guidebook and scrawl down these lines.

A true work of the muse, "On the Steps of the Uffizi" has needed no revision (the truth is better than enything we could come up with anyway). It has, however, evolved into a favorite performance piece.

There grows, in an emerald square,
the only patch of grass
in town, on a small knoll
in front of McDonald's.

A highway, a dried river,
a set of train tracks all border the town
whose high points are the sloped shoulder
of a trestle and the spiked crowns of

billboards' bird guards. The building-
supply store advertises, Everything you need
to build this house while the church advises,
with an aging, alternating sign,

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERRIF
FOR HE IS A MAN OF GOD or
Jesus, I come Quickly.
Which brings a wry smile

from the fry-cook resting apronless,
taking a smoke break on the fake lawn.
In his lap a comic book, a Big Mac
waiting to be unwrapped.

At the wheel, I pass under his sneer
or maybe he's squinting, as I am,
in the dusty haze of exhaust. What is clear
is that I could never live here, though

I spent the night once, at the lowest-rate motel
where the owner's thrift had taken away
even the fake headboards bolted
above the bed. It was a dreadful night,

of course, as expected. Or was it really?
Sleep came quickly to me, the same
sleep from nights before and after.
And the people were not so different,

from the laughter of the Pakistani maids
to the silence on the end of the wake-up call.
I could never live a year in this town,
I thought, pulling away.

Now I only pass straight through,
stopping for maybe a milkshake or to wait
for a freight train to pass across Route 2
as waves of heat shake the pavement.

Mohave is filled with the same intent
as fast food trash: spend less,
throw out the rest to the dust
in twin circles behind the dragging trains.

Mohave is spent - a dried-out,
scentless X-mas wreath in the smoke
of July's burning tire. I see myself here,
and see myself gone, to keep my senses.