Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Terror

• 147 terror A river is flowing around and through my heart, sometimes down one breast, then up the other now above my navel washing through the ribs, now waterfall back over the heart. I know this river, all those times love hurt me I keep waking to the flood, O River Adrenalin she said was the headwaters of her disease I keep waking on a side street behind Mendosa’s in Mendocino, now here behind mi hija y nieto. River named Fear my Seminole great grandfather was born on, then fled, his life on the run, in hiding, mine too, that this family be here now, O Cape Fear coursing through my solar plexus, this back street in Berkeley. Is not the heart in the solar plexus the will to live? I wake in the body of my killer, his egg splat against my side, our marker in the road of the other and self, in forgiveness. O, Invisible River I wake in each night, then talk myself to the banks, this is how you swim back to the world that rivers you —October 2001 (Mendocino-Berkeley) ...