Everything Forbidden Falls Away

If I put my finger gently

On your lips,

Letting it slip slowly along

The moist arc of your mouth,

Back and forth,

What would you do?

If my foot found

Your bare ankle,

My skin on your skin,

Searching your smooth calf

For that moment

Behind your knee,

Breathless and imminent,

With one last question,

How would you answer?

Would you collapse this thin field

Wrapping round us

With childlike arms,

Leaving me desolate

And stripped of cosmology?

Or would you sigh,

And turn,

Bringing yourself

To where I wait in the dark wood,

Everything forbidden

Falling away like leaves

With fall’s first breath.

On Seeing An Old Friend

I saw an old friend yesterday,

A farmer,

Still wrapped

In his family’s stubborn land,

Cleaving to the founding generation,

Solid stock,

Who chewed at timber,

Tore at rock,

And greened their lands

With defiant arteries of water.

As before,

The rains had failed him,

The snows slid too quickly

Down the dry throat 

Of the hills,

And the land itself

Shrugged,

And dozed.

His children had come of age,

Loosed their grip –

The eldest fleeing to Baltimore,

And the baby

Disappearing over time

Into a heroin overdose –

Leaving him and his weathered wife

Alone,

Tangled up in the 

Tired machinery of farming

And at war with everything, 

From their own exhausted chemistry,

To the government’s grey wolves.

The timekeeper is fickle.

One moment she exalts us

And we look out upon

An ocean of ourselves.

The next,

We are islands

In a shallow sea of other,

Buoyed only by nostalgia,

And betrayed at last even by water,

The dearest of our children,

As she turns away from our fields,

Towards the lawns and gardens

Of those who would 

Too easily forget 

We were even here.

Song To The Southern Latitudes

 Every indigenous lung in Cuzco

Is filling up with carbon –

One more gift

From the New World

To the people of Peru.

But there are still streets

Not yet suffocating under the heavy breath

Of the diesel bestiary,

Streets with walls of great stone,

Imaginings

Quarried from the mind

Of the crimson Inca,

Where your lungs leap

Like thoroughbreds from the gate,

In pursuit of every molecule of oxygen

In the high, light air of the Andes.

And when I slip away

To catch my breath

Between the close walls of such a place,

I see a round Aymara woman

In a red, woven wool wrap

And worn fedora

Foraging in a pile of food waste

And the other serendipity of poverty.

Her brown skin stretches over

Her high cheekbones

As if over the frame of a drum.

Two children stand just aside,

Sucking their fingers

To some secret rhythm,

Their wide eyes,

And round, brown faces tethered

To their mother’s every move.

Across from them,

Another mother mines the mound.

In spite of the brown collar round her neck,

She is wasted and feral,

No longer carrying the loyalties

Of that more benevolent time.

Her pups, too,

Have learned to wait and watch,

Wagging their tails

In rhythm to their own anticipation

Of their mother’s return,

Her teats full,                                                                                                                  

Her snout damp with sweet mysteries.

It is a scene torn loose from a magazine

By the careless coriolis

Of the southern hemisphere.

That their trajectories

Should have collided in this place

Was unremarkable to them.

In the hand hewn, cobbled lottery of Old Cuzco,

Families suck the  marrow 

From the bones of a civilization

Long since flayed and gutted

By the long knives of history.

Only now,

We have decided

To embalm them in diesel fuel.