Maria Cristina 

At Low Tide

Words are but pebbles in mouths of these men.
Perfunctory, perhaps--groping common gestures of virility.
At the stoop, they gurgle evening greetings like salt water
with their countrymen.
The women watched encroached,
silently, breath withheld, winkless-forever astonished
by the language the men possess.
They live with them, grew up in the same huts--
yet side by side apologies never roll off the tongue,
discontentment never rolls off the back:
evident by whiskey and cigarettes stains
and blood from late night brawls washed off by morning.
Even young boys speak it like broken English.
In the back room baritone voices bond with the shadows
of a flickering candle flame by its perpetual discord
and only while lovemaking do the tides fall--
this brief moment when one can walk so far off shore
into the ocean, all the way to the nape of a woman's dream
with nets that still come up empty.

Letter to a Military Man

To my fathers:

Like fatherless conversations
many lives were unsaid.
No equal interchanges.
Existing outside,
not far from my repulsion
and my obscurities, I found you
when you found my mother.
An exotic porcelain? Not
without fracture, not without foolish dreams
of being swept away to a distant land.
Angeles City streets riddled
with men like you.
Bar girls swinging on your totem poles,
their strength of mind to get out--strong as bamboo.
Their hair thick with your smoke
and your booze and your sex.
They had your babies.
One of you left me. The trail of letters
to and from Vietnam ceased.
Then the other picked me up onto his knee
and called me Chris. An American name.
You adopted me when I was two
and I still call you Dad.
Yes, an American name.

To my lovers:

I unloaded residues, past dwellings,
and you crassly
offer me a sparse existence.
Many lives are made
of this abiding--
cessation of sound,
where penchant for
crashing endings became.
I saw babes died
open-mouthed. I saw pubescent girls
dancing for their daddies.

You are not far from this:
Circumnavigator of truth.
Attune to a compass,
charting sunrise and sunset,
by military standards. With curious,
infinite duty, I study--
I study the depths of fallacies
and my teeth
on the most copious part:
the thigh of love's vivacity.

Despite it all, I dance. Daddy,
I dance.

To a Sightless World

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
~William Wadsworth

a distracted raconteur
an empty vase
a hearty laugh
with no witness
more blood
always
more blood