Three Poems

Yesterday’s News

It seems the same old universe,but little things keep going wrong.For instance, when the streets are gray,you don’t know if it’s dusk or dawn,

Or when you go to reach for things—a rhyme, let’s say, to end the poem,a nail to drive the coffin lid in place—your fingers grasp and find it gone.

As if, having once put down a book,no matter how you looked,you couldn’t find your place,or, looking in the mirror,couldn’t see your face.

You tell yourself it’s just bad luck,like playing cards with a crooked deck,you know there’s something missingbut you don’t know what

And never once suspect,“Maybe it’s my eyesight,Maybe it’s my mind,”until one day you wake up,

Crazy, old, and blind.

Heads for a Ritual

Our faces do not change as we grow old.Instead, the features are more deeply carved,The lines around the mouth more firmly drawn,The cheek more sunken and the bone more bold,

Until each day I watch us growing lessThe public people we once seemed, and moreEmphatically ourselves—you, a wizened witch,With hands like turkey claws and quivering flesh,

Muttering dark spells above the pileOf bedclothes where I lie, my blind white eyeRevolving toward you like a moon, my gold toothGleaming in the cavern of my smile.

Ah love, some demon self within cannotAwait the great adventure of our death,But shakes in eagerness your palsied limbs,And rattles in my sleeping breath.

Out of Breath

Her hands are tremulous.Blue freckle-spattered knuckles won’t allow herto remove a ring purchased in Seattlein the year of a World’s Fair,yet such tenderness could lifta cobweb’s shatter-shape,intact almost, and carry itinto the garden whereit would become a beetle’s jungle gymwith rungs more wispy than her hair,for lately she’s been growingout of breath herself—a house of air,through whose open doorsand down whose banisters, she calls“te quiero” and “take care.”