ODE TO THE POSSIBILITIES

It is as if you've just called from the airport,
are on the way in, and it is the right action
taking place in the wrong year.
What we are having for dinner is questionable;
we know that, in part, it will be each other
but what about all of those other wonderful and
XXXXterrible delicacies?
The banquet is spread as are the sheets
of the bed, and I suppose I could say
something about your legs here. Your hair
is curling around the corners of the world.

I can't help but wonder how it could have happened.
Whatever became of junk and yellow taxicabs?
We both like Italian food but it didn't start or
XXXXstop there.
It lingered in the doorways of the world
and you have woven and won a garland of my love,
XXXXdon't ask
how we have come to this, it is you
who are arriving. I look out the window
and the streets are bright with circumstantial lights.

I've walked along the edge of the river
wondering about the the small boats' catch
as they tack their way from shore to shore
zig-zagging against the wind. Have they made it
a good time in the clean waters of upriver?
And now the sun as well as wind catches their sails.

What we make of the night
is all so different from what we make of the day.
Dogs in the street are barking as the sun goes down,
the sky is an absence of purple
having lost all desire to be described.
Stars are gathering force at the filling-stations
XXXXof eternity
and night brings you returning to me
on feet neither winged nor sandalled
but in simple leather shoes.

It's been a thin line you've walked between
things done in the name of romance
and those in the cause of depravity.
I've heard you question the logic of these systems
maybe once. It appeals to you, the automatic service
of this or that always ringing your doorbell.
You rarely test the temperature of water,
the texture or fluidity of anything.
Your body a painter's palette, dabs of pigment
adorn you. Cavalcades of bells
and mysterious late night calls compose a litany
that somehow sings your praises.

ODE TO THE ARTICHOKE

Erect in battle dress,
the tender hearted
artichoke
constructed
a small cupola,
remained
impermeable
under
its petals;
in its direction
the mad vegetables
curled,
sprouted
tendrils, cattails,
grew stirring bulbs;
in the subsoil
slept the carrot
with red whiskers,
where the vines climbed
the vineyard
rescinded its shoots,
the cabbage
concerned itself
with its skirts,
oregano
perfumed the world,
and there in the garden
the sweet
artichoke,
dressed like a warrior,
burnished
like a pomegranate,
stood proud.
Until one day
with the others
it travels to market
in a large basket
to realize its dream:
warfare.
Into rows
never so martial
as in the market,
men
in white shirts
order the vegetables.
Field marshalls
of the artichoke,
with commanding voices
they tighten the rows
as suddenly a falling crate
explodes.

But
then
comes
Maria
with her basket
and picks up
the artichoke,
doesn't fear it,
examines it, observes it
under the light as if it were an egg.
She buys it,
loses it
in her bag
with a pair of shoes,
with a cabbage and a
bottle
of vinegar
until,
entering her kitchen,
she finds it
and throws it in a pot.
Thus ends
peacefully
the career
of this armed vegetable
called artichoke;
soon,
petal by petal,
we undress
its delight
and eat
the pacific pulp
of its green heart.

XXXXXXXXafter Neruda

ODE TO THE DAY

These hours of light,
we awaken to them, cling to them;
working our ways through timed routines
we so often wonder where they go,
they are the visible life.
Journeying through the hours
we glimpse the world, the cities,
we almost face the light unflinchingly
and call what we face 'day'.

But 'the day' is a fullness,
the endless wedding of light and dark,
a perfecting act of balance.
The world turns our eyes to the sun
then turns them to the stars,
we see a blazing fire
encircled by airy blue, we see smaller fires
encased in dark, and with them in the night sky
a moon, telling of another nature.

All this is the day,
the waking and the working and the sleeping,
the loving, the despairs,
our lives travelling a circling course,
our bodies encountering the air,
the earth, the beautiful machinery,
our minds filling up with tidal pools of reality
and the half-lit bounty of dreams,
our hearts beating strongly for the eternity
XXXXof a day
as the world turns once and we manage it,
only rarely getting dizzy.

ODE TO THE ONION

Onion,
luminous vial,
your beauty formed
layer by layer,
scales of crystal blossomed
as in the dark secretive earth
your belly of dew rounded.
Under the earth
a miracle happened,
and when your
awkward green shoots appeared,
and your leaves
blossomed like swords in the garden,
the earth gathered up her power,
revealing your transparent nakedness;
and, as that foreign sea,
swelling the breasts of Aphrodite,
duplicated the magnolia,
so the earth
made you,
onion,
illustrious as a planet
and destined
to shine,
a constant constellation,
a round watery rose
upon
the table
of the poor.

Nobly
you undo
your globe of freshness
in the fervent
consummation of the pot,
and your crystalline shreds
flushed with hot oil
transform into curly plumes of gold.
Also, I sing how fertilely
you influence the loving salad,
and it seems that even heaven,
by giving you the delicate form of hail,
celebrates your biting clarity
that complements hemispheres of a tomato.
But within reach
of the people's hands,
sprinkled with oil,
dusted
with a little salt,
you kill the hunger
of the laborer out on the hard road.

Star of the poor,
fairy godmother
wrapped
in delicate paper,
you leave the soil
eternal, intact, pure
as the seed of a star,
and when you are cut
by the kitchen knife
we cry the only tears
that are free of sorrow,
we weep without affliction.

Onion, I celebrate all that exists,
but to me you are
more beautiful than a bird
with blinding plumage;
to my eyes you are
a celestial sphere, a platinum goblet,
the motionless dance
of snow-white anemones

and in your crystalline nature
dwells the fragrance of the earth.

ODE TO MY MOTHER

Woman worn down by the years
and the oppressive trials of living,
emotional hardships
too painful to talk about,
my mother has kept a young heart,
a heart more open than mine.
In this I am older than her,
she still with a certain girlishness
and a joy that, thought it
may not have come easy,
is a joy she lives inside.
My mother, lover of music and dancing,
voracious listener to radio
and records playing on jukeboxes,
living in a world of song,
walking through a world
that, somehow, still sings to her.

She is not pretty as she once was;
lines of age and knives have scarred her.
But oh how she endures, is like
a desert plant that flowers, flowers
in a land of little rain, needing only
a threadbare moisture to blossom beautifully.
Her taste in life
is so often like a gift shop
in a Mexican border town, but
how she loves bright colors,
my mother, like a rainbow,
dispensing color into the world.

Though circumstance has crushed her
she survives,
though her life has been a series
of misplaced loves and wrong choices
she continues to love and to choose.
Woman I know so little of,
who writes letters in the hand of a child,
who invokes the telling power of dreams,
who always acts like the sun is out,
who believes absolutely in God, his son
and a heavenly host of angels and saints,
who is almost content with the little
those around her give,
who brought me into life
and persists in being my distant guide through it;
my mother, growing old,
not seeming to care about that.