Slick

There is a little girl across the street hanging from the loquat tree
All you can see are her shoes and socks and skirt
The upper half of her body is buried in the leaves,
The branches are shaking, as she reaches up, deep into the tree
For the yellow fruit.

There is a long, tall man riding down the street on a ten-speed.
Sitting upright on the seat,
He has his right hand centered on the handlebars,
In his left arm, cradled against his body
Is his baby, she’s about a year old,
He’s probably taking her to daycare.

There is a woman on the phone she has called at six pm and asked for
a donation to the Police Benevolent Society
She is calling from far away,
in a room of fellow telemarketers in New Jersey.
When I tell her I don’t have any money
She says she understands and they have a special contribution package
So I say No, I mean I have no money and I’m not entirely sure
what I’m going to do to get dinner tonight.
So she says, Oh, believe me I totally understand
I’ve got two kids and my husband left me last year
and sometimes I don’t know if I’ve got enough money
to put gas in the car
to get to work.

It’s seven-thirty on a Saturday night in the heart of spring.
There are two girls in prom dresses,
at a nice seafood restaurant.
They are sitting unescorted,
together, at a communal table, near the raw bar,
with assorted tourists around them.
The rest of the restaurant is full of seventeen-year-olds in tuxedoes
with dates who have their hair up and are too uneasy to eat their scallops.
As I leave the two young ladies by themselves
are each on their cell phones.

There is a young man running down a busy street,
in a polo shirt and bermuda shorts
he has a little pony tail
and is taking long quick strides, with his bare feet
slapping the sidewalk,
making an unmistakable pop and thud sound of skin and bone and concrete

Mid-summer you buy shrimp under the interstate from the Vietnamese man
in the big rubber boots,
then you go home and pop the heads off,
they are slick and hard to hold on to,
a little surreal in how, slimy, they float in your hand, they
glide easy and sharp, with the constant threat
and fulfilled promise of little briny pricks.

there is a girl picking fruit, she’s half-inside a loquat tree
a man riding a bike with a baby in the crook of his arm
a telemarketer who opens up to you
two girls with no date for the prom
barefeet on the concrete
popping heads off shrimp

a girl picking fruit
a man on a bike
a cold-caller in dire straits
two teens going stag
barefoot runner
shrimp

You know, some time I would like to go down to the marsh
and coat my face in pluff mud
I’ll bet it’s good for your skin
I thought of that one night when I was
making dinner and I accidentally got some habanero pepper juice on my lips and chin.
It stings so you smear your mouth with Hershey’s syrup
make a goatee of chocolate sauce
but it doesn’t really soothe the burn

a girl in a tree picking fruit
man on a bike with a baby
stranger on the phone
dateless
barefoot
sharp shrimp shells
loquat girl
baby bike
phone call
prom night
feet slap
hot-damn!
shrimp

they are slick and tender and hard to hold on to.

paperwhite bulbs

Paperwhites ( narcissus tazetta ), a.k.a. Soleil d'Or, a.k.a. Chinese Sacred Lily, are easy to force and have a distinctive minty, soapy blossom.

brown, leathery
like an old baseball mitt,
a little one, a middle infielder's
wrapped up tight all winter,
slathered in neatsfoot oil

until one warm day in Florida,
opened as a foot drags across the bag,
and like a green shoot, the ball
winged down the line to first
smacking the glove in a white puff

two

brown, encrusted, guarded like a
worn heart,
then dunked in a brackish baptism

In Charleston the earth is soft and the
water is hard, and rich,
a steady laborer
constructing quick shoots with the patient ease
of sweetgrass weavers
launching a tower of green
crowned with a puff of
peppermint patty l-o-v-e.

lift it high like a beacon
above the trampling hordes,
the unrelenting gardener
raising supple reeds,
shivering out gospel lyric melodies,
over a low lawnmower world.

On Ribera's 'El Martiria de San Filipe'
            

When they martyred Saint Philip, his throat was sore,
His voice hoarse, like a candidate in the last days of the campaign.

He didn't remember eating the last few months, but
His body had grown, the arms on him heavy, muscles
In his thighs and calves strapped on like armor
As they hoisted him in his failing loincloth.

In his nakedness he expected shame, but his
Right breast shone like an idyllic isle,
Calm and strong in the distance.

Anger to him was like arrows at the moon
And his words had flown from his lips like ten thousand
Swallows soaring north, and spawned as many epiphanies.

It was only when they lifted him to the cross,
Four men with all their might,
Helping him to pronounce
A sonorous capital T with his voiceless body,
That he realized how tired he was.
An exhausted passenger on a rising jet,
Ready for sleep, with nothing left to say.