Dark in the City

Under a broad sky
with both feet falling,
head swayed, ears open,
that young heart broken,
crazed and unable
to sleep with so much
left to do before
turning twenty-two:
learn to let words go
through my ten fingers
and find those that move
and then go beyond
what they said, I knew
nothing immortal,
how I knew I was
human, like all those
on elevators.
I remembered birth
imagining death,
kept it to myself
(old voices echoed)
so it would be where
I could find it when
the time came to talk
but keep the secret.
I was in search of
the first metaphor
memory would yield
and so my mother
loved my father’s hair,
his hair was so black
it turned white before
his death when hers, red,
tinged with auburn, died
. . . chalaqui and eire
those ancestors
were. In the city
the first time I turned
a corner and found
where rain all winter,
spring and autumn fell,
where summers were gone
over the mountains
before my mind fell
into my body,
my two hands reached down
to bring to surface
all I first knew
to take to the fall
when the door opened.

(7 January 2011)

Archaeology

The way you think,

The way you speak,

The way you walk,

The way you love,

The way you pray,

The way you sleep,

The way you wake.

Why stop walking

The seven hills,

The streets below

To hear the talk

That will decay.

So much ground

To cover, so much

To excavate,

Identify.

Be glad now

You started young,

You did not waste

Time waiting

For permission,

Learning rules

Quick to vanish.

What was the tool

Of choice,

Why trouble

To rouse the dead

Only to know

What happened

Was devoured

By mountains.

Dreams do keep

A body sleeping.

Is that you still

Digging, brushing,

Going back over

To uncover

What’s never lost


(6 January 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Emily and Jim

Who knows secrets except in retrospect
consigns their knowledge to oblivion,
even when secrets are no longer secret.
Everyone knew after it happened
why it happened.

She told him she was carrying his child.
In the letter her hand made words perfect
in the cursive the nuns taught.
Her English left out
words unnecessary in Spanish.

He left immediately, drove all night,
gassed up, kept going, bent
upon being with her.
No matter he was AWOL, he loved her
with his whole soul.

She heard the news a day later.
She sobbed in the house, on the street,
in the doctor’s office, and the long hours
grew longer.
One priest, then another, warned her, Keep it!

Irene stayed by her, night and day.
She said Emily would harm herself
if left alone.
After the burial she miscarried.
There would be no consolation.

These words are bones once blessed with flesh.
Two lives lost to the beloved,
who, God knows, would love again, if God
was the God priests asked
us to bow our heads to ask His blessing.

In mass Irene and I prayed our bodies be one.
We made love to make it so.
And where did love go
when I went to the city to learn a trade
to which I proved unsuited . . .

(5 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Movies

O I have no desire to go back home
now that it’s gone, the rooms upstairs empty
where I watched so many horses crop grass
below the window, where no one made love
until years later I brought Cathleen there
all the way from San Francisco. Irene
came to the house to sit in the kitchen
where she helped my father practice Spanish
his friend from the farm labor camp taught him.
My father loved Irene, my mother too,
Jess Maltos may have had a crush on her
but he never said more than he could smile
saying. She talked Spanish and he talked back,
the mole on her cheek moving with the smile
she smiled when he turned to me and asked how
to say in Latin what they were saying,
and I begged off. After dinner Jess said
he had a date. Irene and I drove off
to the drive-in movie in Sunnyside.
The Thing from Another World was playing
with a western called Hellfire that moved slow
but turbulently to its redemptive
conclusion, Wild Bill Elliott praying
over the dance hall girl Marie Windsor
dying before the screen was filled with flames
and one word, Amen, replaced two, The End.
I’d seen it first with Mary Lou Larson
in the theater next to the bowling
alley downtown. When the movie ended
I drove her home to Cherry Hill. She said,
Take me to the Horse Heavens, I’ll show you
something. She was very pretty, her skin
a nut brown, creamy. She knew more than I,
she was waiting to quit school when she'd put
in her time. In her last year, I learned why
she had the desk in front of mine, turning
to see the latest horse I was drawing.
She described to me how horses mated.
She used risque words for stallions and mares
making future colts. People are like that,
she said, I like to do it when I'm home,
when I’m not here chasing after mustangs.
She recommended God’s Little Acre,
she showed me the book hidden in her desk.
I recall the smell of smoke on her breath.
She looked like Tina Louise in the film.
Her cousins said Mary Lou loves us all,
her brother too. I don’t know what was true.
Jim dated her when he worked construction.
He drove heavy equipment. Overtime
was what he wanted. Mary Lou waited
for Jim in the Granger no-name pool hall,
smoking cigarettes. But that was later.
The Thing was tame. Irene wanted to go.
Neither one of us was watching the screen
by now. Back then Mary Lou said Hellfire
was the worst western she’d seen: Take me up
to the Hills and out where the mustangs are.
She did show me something. After Irene
started taking me to Sunnyside mass,
Jim rode to Toppenish with Mary Lou
in her pickup. They drove on to Brownstown,
where Rita mixed her drinks while he drank Cokes
watching the drunks beat each other bloody.
He never rode horses. I drew horses
because I loved horses before women.
Until Irene. Don’t get me wrong, I loved
Mary Lou before Jim, but not the way
he loved her. Schoolboys learning to love girls:
no one cared. Adults came to see Jim play
on frosty autumn nights, under the lights.
My father was there the night we both starred.
My mother feared I would get hurt. I played
one year after Mary Lou disappeared
into marriage. Jim was seeing Elaine
naked in the pool at her father’s house.
Then Irene brought Emily Esquivel
into his life. When I think about what
happened later, I can’t talk about it
without breaking down, so God damned mortal.

(4 January 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

You Don't Know

How could you know us without the other
saying what it was like from over there?
Out of two hundred too few ever loved.
They held their rallies with the brass present
to keep things calm when voices erupted
in a blood lust some said resembled war.
We rose and spoke one at a time, the crowd
stomping the boards, banging their useless desks.
The cheerleaders cheered . . . but nobody knew
Nijinsky could leap higher than Preston,
who loved boys and Patsy, the sex goddess
of Granger High–even their folks were tight.
Patsy called herself Pat. She was quiet.
She rarely smiled, then only with Preston,
who specialized in forbidden stories.
When they were children they read Tijuana
Bibles and she practiced her moves on him.
If Pat could mesh with Preston’s libido,
who among boys who wanted to be men
could resist her coal-black hair, kohl-dark eyes,
and the way she not only looked but fucked,
crazy for Jim but in love with Marvin,
the basketball star, whose daddy was one
of Granger’s wild men wanting to be boys
again, playing music Saturday nights
at the Circle Inn, Jim and Priscilla
dancing like young lovers while their son slept.
Or so they thought. He was a virgin when
Pat took him with her rouged skin, lacquered nails,
staying under, over, by him as long
as he stayed awake. She taught him to please
Mary Lou, Elaine, Emily . . . who knows
the names of women he loved in football
colleges wooing him with scholarships,
lovelies who could not resist this body
all muscle over bone. So Irene said
Emily told her. Emily loved Jim.
Irene swore Mexican women could love
gringo men who were soft under hard shells.

(3 January 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander

Where I Was

It’s a treachery, such progress.
Footfalls and all.
When did my fathers and mothers
rise off their four-footed haunches;
when did yours,
or did they . . .

The way sorghum is sold
you take it to town.
The boys’ job.
You rock in your chair,
Mama, smoke your pipe, dip snuff,
boil dinner on the wood stove,

dress the girls in case the preacher
takes a notion to show his face.
Why would I try dreaming up
the way I took my walks
through the mountains with blue haze
older than I will get to be,

she asks. Her rheumatism
keeps her down and cross.
If she takes her time,
if she can get past the pain,
she motions to the window, says,
I want to show you where I was.

(2 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Axe

A book, a poem, a scribble . . .
hack away with this axe you wield
with no mercy until death’s door
opens. In dark snow with silence
swirling. Your three sisters went in
and never came out. You survive
for nothing but this endless work
sledging, ripping, tearing apart
such grip. Measure and spoon, serve cold
without skin that taints raw power:

in memoriam, Franz Kafka

(1 January 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander