there is a Siamese cat crossing the alley. he used to be my cat but he lives with some other woman now.
the moon is also a cat— round-faced, old-fashioned, talkative.
this moon-cat follows me from room to room as I wander in the mid-night. heat soaks into my body; curls under my diaphragm; tries to suffocate me.
she finds me in my chair nestles in, will not leave. as I read, I listen to the moon-cat’s chatter, and pray for relief in this brutal, new-world August.
At the Palacio Municipal, you can pay outstanding parking tickets with counterfeit 20 dollar bills and frayed-edged loteria cards.
I keep La Sirena for myself and go out into the rain with only a paper umbrella to keep the ghosts out of my ears. They get in anyway.
In the square the Independence Youth Orchestra plays waltzes for your wristwatch that keeps time backwards and Ginger Rogers dances the lead for a change.
Epitome of everything you mistake for female, she is actually an avatar of Venus whose sea foam birth was foreseen by the side-street organ grinder.
Born Virginia Katherine McMath, this fecund goddess is the queen of a girl-crazy, blue-eyed god, who creates and destroys the matter of the universe.
As I walk toward the cathedral, your watch, the waltzes, and my paper umbrella turn to pink pulp and shower around my shoulders like the bougainvillea dropping petals. I look longingly at a little girl's roller skates, as Ginger Rogers drives by, a blue dress flapping from the bumper of her Lincoln.
All narrative poems are conflations of the things that happened to the poet and stories told by her mother when the January nights got to be too much.
Do not be misled by the line, the poet was drunk when she laid it down.
Dogs find the classically rigorous poetry of the early 19th century stifling.
Cats, however, relish the constraints of the Japanese forms. A haibun will often soothe their fears of thunder and wild parsley.
Read poetry on an empty stomach, to feed your hungry misapprehensions.
If a poem moves you on a Tuesday, revisit it on a Friday as the moon rises behind the Nabisco factory; read it again on Sunday when you should be in church. You will not be able to substitute one reading for the other.
