2 Poems:

Mitla

Cortes’ nightmare and the Moorish dome 

stained cochineal: drunken duende-like 

fallen fruit, underworld gatekeepers

a church alongside a site named Mitla;

I came to see what Spain brought the New World

when it brought the pomegranate and the horse.

I came to explore its primacy

its flourish and fragrant past. Looking

upon a pomegranate beneath its tree

I saw a drunken man passed out at my feet

who muttered hola! as if I were a portent

I made my way around him, as if he were  

a portent, and walked past him onto that 

not too busy street on that July day

which was warmth mingled with dry breeze.

I’d crossed along a cactus fence

and cinder huts and loom filled halls

and a pomegranate tree, my

rucksack and lonely planet guide,

to ticket taker and temple ruins

to a site Zapotecs call place of death

where walls spread lines in geometric 

intricacy a variegate frieze

interlocking patterns of hewn stone

underworld duende-like.

Passed on empty streets a drunken man.

Town on blocks of tapestry wove 

Arabesque.  Sunlight willing it to speak.  

Abalone

It sits like an elephant’s ear

eavesdrops on everything my roll-top says

feels like the backside of a Grey Whale

embossed inside a batter of magic

its inner-sheen like oil-slicked 

bay-water that laps seawall stone.

It sits on my desk to remind me

an emblem of life.  

Crazy  saltwater sea-shell holding sweet grass– 

grey Mono sage– a planetary ridge 

the mottled care of rock-strewn ages.

Abalone button, abalone earring, 

trinket coin that travelled 

from Puget Sound to Eire Lake, 

down the Huron trail, up that Great Divide, 

carried by Aboriginal-Americans 

on Missouri River trade routes 

connecting culture: Crow, Shoshone, 

Assiniboine, Plains Apache, Lakota Sioux, 

Arapaho and Pawnee.

Abalone.  The ear shell, sea ear, muttonfish,

mutton-shell, ormen, sea snail.  

All of the mollusk family

an image of androgyny.

It’s iridescent inside surface 

bears a mantle cleft

impresses a groove, as in the red abalone, 

where a row of respiratory apertures for venting water 

also release egg and sperm.