Meeting her, I felt drunk on crabapple wine.
I stood under a crabapple tree in bloom
Dazzled by the pink foaming branches,
Tasting tartness infused in raindrops,
Breathing the sweet air of a spring shower,
While falling petals paved
An endless road of crabapple trees in bloom
Where I went staggering and in love,
One spring day worth a thousand French wines.
Poetry
Amazon
What can I do with all this wood
Lost for a year to the Amazon River?
I squeeze a plank and feel the rainforest
Ooze through my fingers.
I look at the drowned wood
Through the red earth tones in the grain
And I am submerged in thought.
What can I do with lumber so wild
It warps at the touch of my hand.
Who can cut down a jungle rain?
Who can hammer nails into water?
Even to burn it might begin a river.
Voice of a Woman
Whenever I hear your voice, I’m a beekeeper,
My hand in the honey of the droning hive;
I can hear a cat purring inside a pyramid,
Conch waves, music box with ballerina,
Your voice pregnant with love,
Sprawling bedsheets stirring in dreams,
Spring wafting its aura into the room,
Waking us to love, to sleep, to more dreams.
Whenever I hear your voice, I’m kissed
By the shape of your mouth, warmth of your lips,
And flesh of its naked sound, the wild honey
Of hearing you from the inside.
Church Demolition
At last the church is open to the heavens,
Not since its consecration has a congregation
Been closers to a spirit maker.
Fall leaves fall through rafters
And gather at the altar stones.
Its ascension is part accession.
The night belongs to real estate.
The owner cannot attorn; and so,
It’s clear to us in one lifetime
The insufficiency of faith,
The shifting sands of substance,
The cloud over the title,
Structure amassed in rubble,
On this eighth day of creation
After the first seven have failed.
The Botany of Words
A sentence is like a vine
That produces good red wine.
Phrases grow out of roots
And words have shoots
Flowering in the mind.
Words are epiphytes
With jungle overwrites
And the earth is rich and deep
With words that creep.
My hand blackens when I dig
Through a dictionary
Looking for a blood berry.
Deep down I suspect
We are all incorrect,
When in the compost
I find something amiss.
Can we save existence
If the words go extinct?
Authentic Zen Garden
Stuck behind a combine harvester on a county road, strangely I see one of those tiered pagoda rooftops you see in pictures of Japan. Above a cedar fence I see cherry trees in bloom. My mind does a double take. It looks idyllic. The sign reads: Authentic Zen Garden.
After the day I’ve had an hour of inner peace is exactly what I need. I pull into the driveway, but walking to the office door I begin to hear a man shouting in mixed English and Japanese. I hesitate at the door. The man is enraged, quite literally screaming into his phone. I know what to do when a Catholic is angry. What do you do when a Buddhist is losing it?
I back onto the road and drive off. The farther away from the Zen garden, the more at peace I begin to feel. Glancing up I am struck by the light and stillness of the clouds, like stones in the garden of the sky.
An Equal Return
We found a young snake on the road.
We found a young snake on the road.
It was November but felt like spring.
The month had shed its skin.
What shall we do with a serpent
When stars are the tail of the sun?
What shall we do with the earth
When we are beings of a dream?
We didn’t know where to find its den.
It swam from my hand like something Zen.
It’s a gift from the earth to catch a dream.
A gift to the earth to return the seed.
The Fig Tree
for my parents
In autumn they tie the bare branches into loops,
Then build a shelter with wood and tarps–
The tree is my father’s island, the home he never left,
Every leaf is a handshake with his past.
The tree is my mother’s island, the green dress of her youth—
Ripe purple fruit warm as the first kiss on her mouth.
All winter they fill baskets with shadows of a greener time.
They’ll carry in sleep the baskets to their island.
Strip Search
for Victor Hernández Cruz
Strip search because I was full of the drug love,
Strip search because my name is an eye-rhyme with Allah,
Strip search because of Mafia stereotypes,
Strip search because I was carpooling to Mexican Village,
Strip search because I carried a book of poetry,
Strip search because I was traveling to New Orleans,
Strip search because I loved a woman with two names,
Strip search because a black woman offered me a ride,
Strip search for desiring Belle Isle after midnight,
Strip search because I am not a Savior but a Salvatore,
Strip search for bleeding from hands and feet,
Strip search for driving naked and saving time,
Strip search for visiting the graves of my ancestors,
Strip search for the orange blossoms on my bride,
Strip search for the smoke of ablution and peace,
Strip search for defiance at the borders of freedom.
Iceland
Between being awake and awake
I found a lost feather by a remote lake.
Between restlessness and rest
Neither visitor nor guest.
Between dreaming and dreams
Icelandic streams.
Between too late and too soon
Drifting bodies in a blue lagoon.
I stared into a blank bay
In a sea trance between day and day.
The sun shone without substance
Like the image of thought.
Salvatore Ala 