Waiting

I was packing when my mother died,
on my way from Hawaii
to Amsterdam
but dropping by to see her first.
No one warned me she was nearly gone.

I know nothing about death,
its arrival, its departure, whether she met
death sleeping or awake. They said
she’d stopped eating.
What happened before that?

She tried to be Katherine Hepburn
instead of the fifth of six
girls in a poor Catholic family
far from Boston, badgered by her father
to attend mass,

mostly ignored by her mother
who tired of children
after seven
(one died) but went on
to birth seven more. What brutes

men are. I’m happy my mother defied him
though she went on to marry
a worse one.
We’re so alike in stubbornness
& valor

though we never learned
how not to squabble, how not to lie.
Many nights
she plays in my dreams
always young, vibrant, always taken for granted

because she never left.
Somewhere in some lonesome home
she’s still waiting
for me, I’m still trying
to arrive.

Esther Jones Peters in the 1980s

South American Desert Spring

From the northeast
today the wind orchestrates
the willow dance, urges
birds to choose the strongest, bendiest
twigs for nests, the shiny foil,
cigarette butts, the lengths of cotton
lost from dustcloths, clumps
of dryer lint. Chimangos dive bomb
their competition,
horneros lacquer their mud
ovens, the steady coot
roosts on the dead grass next to the lake
her mate secures from dawn
till moonrise. The buzz
of flies, the whirr of
hummingbirds, the ben-te-ve-o
of benteveos, the shrieks of parrot flocks on
chimney tops, the warning chatter
of burrowing owls
secure the richest season.

Chimango Caracara, Milvago chimango

Hornero, Furnariidae

Benteveo, Pitangus sulfuratus, Great Kiskadee

Pastel

Today at the workers’ café we order
the daily special – Pastel con papa
con ensalada – though we don’t know
the meaning of the word Pastel.

Always, we share one order, plus
un medio de vino tinto. Graciela
tells us an aunt & her two nieces &
someone’s mother cook the food

& also sell frutas y verduras
one door down. Pastel arrives –
potato, ground beef, & potato
topped with cheese, shredded & melted

to a lacy web – Argentine version
of shepherd’s pie, new to Hervé,
aka Yakeen since he lived in India,
who long ago was born French.

Yakeen’s girlfriend regards me
with undisguised suspicion
after learning my name is Carol,
the name of Yakeen’s previous girl,

though I’m ever so old & only today
met Yakeen when he parked his scooter
& crossed the street & surprised us –
Hello, Carol – we met on facebook

thanks to our friend, Jeff, another
expat, all of us far from home
though quite at home, ordering
Pastel & becoming new friends.

Flares

Homeless is who we've become
hearing the desert wind drone.

Sand in our crepey throats, is this the next hard pillow?

On worn hotel sheets beneath a quilted spread
spooning, we lean toward sleep.

Same-name streets guide us to beefy lunches,
salad without the raw onion.

My skin chills in artificial air. I lay my body
on his when afternoon dulls

our fruitless day, his fingers quicken.

Home is where we are, he tongues,
turning me slowly, my scales, my thorns

softening in his hands. We smolder, beacons
fired at early dusk,

the desert blooms.

No Frame Fits

I’m the kind of woman

who meets a man named John who

an hour later says,

“You’re not a normal woman,”

because I said,

“I don’t like talking on the phone.”

He meant it as a compliment.

When Miriam the well-endowed

begins to rant about designers

who put pockets

on woman’s blouses, I say, “Women without tits

like shirt pockets,” but she says

she’s talking about blouses,” & I say,

“I don’t own any blouses.”

When I ruin five more T-shirts

by spilling food down their fronts

I shop the Walmart boys department

for five more – size 14,

bright colors – but here in Cafayate

Walmart’s a 3-hour drive.

I’ll need a new source.

My husband Mike’s the vain one –

shaving, primping his hair, & trimming

his mustache for ten minutes

after I’ve walked past the mirror

without a glance, pulled on the clothes

from the top of the pile, & often enough forgotten

to comb my hair.

Remember Madame Curie

who failed to pamper her skin, Carolyn Chute

who writes novels in flannel shirts,

granny skirts, & shit-kicker boots,

Sinead O’Connor who plumped up &

grew hair – square or round –

no frame fits all women.

Choices

I prefer rain.
I prefer Mike.
I prefer children from walking age until puberty.
I prefer Earl Grey tea with honey.
I prefer Peet’s coffee.
I prefer yellow, orange, & purple.
I prefer raspberries.
I prefer to get the details right ahead of time.
I prefer a house that faces east & south (east & north
in the southern hemisphere).
I prefer a botanical garden to a landscaped garden.
I prefer color to black & white.
I prefer suffering from my remarkable dreams
to the alternative of not dreaming.
I prefer Keegan for his humor, Zoe for her thoughtfulness, Moshe
for his determination, Phaedra for her zaniness, Daniel
for his affection, Tova for her attitude.
I prefer solitude, quiet, nature.
I prefer the out of doors.
I prefer glass houses & metal roofs.
I prefer knowing the shape of the inside from the shape of the outside.
I prefer large birds whose flying seems improbable.
I prefer women friends.
I prefer reading to movies.
I prefer dirty over clean.
I prefer barefoot, naked, uncivilized, & I don’t like buttons.
I prefer raw food.
I prefer baby animals, whole milk, shrimp with their heads on.
I prefer single malt scotch.
I prefer J, K, Q, X, & Z.
I prefer wet grass, unopened buds, unfurled fronds, ripe fruit.
I prefer walking on land to boating on water or flying in air,
unless I’m riding in a helicopter or flying my body in a dream.
I prefer riding to driving.
I prefer riding bareback to holding a pommel.
I prefer squash to tennis, baseball to football, hats to gloves.
I prefer anything over celebrity culture, mass media,
processed food, & conspicuous consumption.
I prefer hard rain & lightning & thunder.
I prefer swimming.
I prefer the life of the mind to the life of the body.
I prefer William Carlos Williams & Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot.
I prefer Scrabble.
I prefer clearing the forest with lopping shears & chainsaw
to liberate ferns & ohi’as.
I prefer apple bananas & white pineapple.
I prefer Torrontés.

You're Not Serious?

Mike woke me from a dream where
the baby I'd forgotten in the car turns
into a kitten. Baby or kitten peed
on the car floor where I'd left a borrowed
& signed book. I have a difficult time
parking – where's the brake? – clutch
the kitten tightly as I follow the clerk into
the store, a dreamscape that lingers
through the morning, does the dream
set the tone for my day? The sunlight
pours a golden pool on the ocean
under blue & white cloud & dark
cloud, the mynah chides, our cat sleeps
in Mike's chair. The baby has short dark
hair & wears a blue- & white-striped
T-shirt, a sagging diaper. She suffers
no distress, is happy to see me. Black
kitten, silky handful, taut sinews of
cling. Pictures are everything: the
forgotten baby's head appears in my rear
view mirror, & my guilt is short lived
because Look: the baby is fine, will
likely grow up to be a drinks industry
professional, work in hostel/bar Almacén
in Cafayate where the Internet
password is sapopanza (sapo in Spanish
means toad, 5 or 6 at a time spend
the day in a pool of rainwater at the
bottom of Ginny's pool. I would need
to stay awake all night to see how
they climb the vertical walls to
escape, they must, because I've never
seen a dead one, unless a carancho
dives down to carry it off.) Why replace
a toilet? Is it cracked or merely stained?
In Tucumán I found myself locked in
a bathroom because I didn't know
to ask the proprietor for the door
handle, how the people stared when I
emerged, the woman who had been
screaming Help! ¡Ayudame! Stupid
tourist. Even Mike was confused. The
ocean is silver, with white streaks, birds
streak past the picture window. What
makes a poem is shape, surprises
that make the heart lurch, words that
make a picture, the pool of pee where
the book lay, a corn-colored paperback
book in a shallow puddle of pee, the
shape of the puddle on the car floor
mats, its fractal repeats. I didn't ask
to borrow the book. How will I explain
to Debbie or Jane whose friendship
I take for granted. The author had
signed the book, "To my dear friend
Jane," now pulp of various colors,
the poems merged into fibrous
soup with a pungent odor, the baby's
bottom sporting an angry rash. Had
she not shapeshifted to a kitten I
would have removed the diaper &
rinsed her clean, carried her bare
into the store to buy the toilet, the utility
of which escapes her. It's important
to hold tight to a cat in a public
place lest it escape & become
lost, like Flora's cat that broke loose
on the way to the vet to be micro-
chipped so that if he were lost &
found, he could be returned to his
grieving owner. He never returned
or was found, which proved that the
nameless yellow cat that shows up
& fights with our black & white cat
wasn't Flora's cat after all: Nameless
occasionally still comes around.