Courtly, and: Kemo Sabe, and: For Ruth Stone

Courtly

Forget the high-flown improbable phrases, the tinned fish and flowers, lipstick and wine—no matter Venice’s gimcrack cornices holding their thighs apart in the night or the red dahlias swaying on long stems walloping each other in the summer wind.

It isn’t the blue rocks at low tide or the pale sea grass by the wall, lady of time and dried white flowers, lady of distant rain

who wanders off looking for a book of matches along the road near the coffee shop built to look like a chateau and spattered with bird shit where gulls and ravens like the Hollywood movies have feasted for almost a century on the corpses of Lancelot and Keats.

Nobody knows what it’s cost you to keep facing up to the world like this with its airport exhaust and chalk dust, both of us tired, both of us cold, trying to talk with the professors and lonely for California.

I bring these today to the door of your dream, as close as I can approach: saltwater to heal your sinuses, coffee with soy milk and coconut, blanket to warm your shoulders, bag of blue ice for your spine.

Kemo Sabe

My brother looks down at his fingers sorting the herb and mineral caps, bloodroot and barberry, burdock, zinc, prescribed by his holistic doctor. The tumor at the base of his tongue has shrunk a bit in the last months though he must still take a painkiller to swallow his chicken dinner.

We’re in a quiet booth in Max’s Deli in Redwood City having just been to see The Lone Ranger, masked Texas cowboy of our childhood riding his alabaster horse across the landscapes of the Southwest, protector of the weak and scourge of all evil, with his Indian partner Tonto, once played in Hollywood by Jay Silverheels an all-star Mohawk lacrosse player and today by the white man Johnny Depp, heartthrob of women and master of disguise, with the taxidermic corpse of a raven covering his head and slashes of white paint below each eye and we’re joking about the movie remembering our childhood diving like bats through the summer dusk, firing tin pistols into the air or else sneaking up on the twilit house to free all its hopeless prisoners. Sometimes we wanted to be the Lone Ranger, masked face of justice and valor, and sometimes we wanted to be Tonto with his buckskin clothes and his pinto horse who could track a man over solid rock, organic, native, and whole—

my power-brother in his blue rain-jacket gambling on his Hanoi doctor who feeds his patients cobra blood running herbal ivs into their veins, and though he still looks way too thin my brother’s eyes are bright in his face and I think he embraces his unknown fate watching him hunch down over his plate working his way steadily forward through Max’s Lemon Roast Chicken Special.

For Ruth Stone

Sometimes you say bad things about people claiming it can’t be helped

you crawl farther into the darkness just to see what it feels like

but today you count the late frozen stars and Jupiter drifting into the dawn

because Ruth the poet has passed away who listened to the muse alone:

the mailman and the trash truck driver, the women who work in Lost and Found,

their faded hair wispy as cotton gauze in the discount store downtown.

They are folding a dark wool sweater that smells of camphor and lighter fluid,

in one pocket a train ticket from Roanoke to Syracuse.

The creaky hinge on the Ladies Room door is silent now in the vacant station,

only a traveling woman asleep, her suitcase tied with ribbons and twine

and snowflakes dusting the platform, their stellar dendrites and crystal rosettes

flickering like signals from outer space planetary and blind.