watches planes, which might be his,
arc the desert—the selva of paired birds,
painted rainforests, terrorists—the mountains—away—
Soon after, she breaches the cloister-wall; arcs the desert-and-selva-
and-mountains herself; returns to her father, November, fireworks like
gunshots, brief birds climbing the night, and the original wall
made of muscle and will.
I remember a time when the desert wasn’t metaphor,
when I was inserted there, for dry-throated reasons,
for years. A tree outside my cell leaved itself after rain
with lime parakeets and open-handed moths cloaking
the trunk with heavy wings of serge.
A decent desert, worth its salt. A sister-lined system.
The desert isn’t the desert unless it is too big for you.
This spiritual wilding lacks waymarkers and bounds.
And we were desert mothers and accomplices,
engendering puddle-babies and preening date palms;
aspersing them with quarter-buckets of day-old
well water, when it could be spared:
until they poked out flaring devils’ tongues—
which seemed to give a focus.
Leonardo and the Birds of Clay
You drew a perfect circle in the sand.
Your talent was upfront, a nonpareil.
Your hands pearled plumage for the birds
you’d turned in clay. Or so they’d say—to me
it seemed you’d plucked each, sleeping, from the shore,
a shout of black and white, fresh-dipped in pitch
then lime. Or robbed a singing bird or two
from forest stores and with your fingers calmed
and stroked their tiny flanks and shivering coverts
till their dun forms became like putty in your palm,
and drawing out their song you daubed it,
in sticky glaze, along stilled feather-vanes.
Then looped a cape of scarlet, provocative,
around the throat of the brilliant male.
At a rough-backed hour, wound round with olive
light, the pink-cheeked would-be anchorite
slides past date palms and scarlet
trumpet lilies in the colonial garden, intent
on the far spinney, where wiry trees like acolytes
surround a simple hut her heart always skips to reach.
Holy time, before the porcelain-jowled suitors
(damn them!) begin to queue,
their arms and brows pale-as-the-dough
which Madre leaves in the sideways sun
to rise. Their insect-voices urgent and ‘mi-querida’-ing
as they bend low to moan her name.
Always always she is called back just when
hermano Sun peeks up to play, called back
along the manicured paths, the geometric beds.
Called back from the bosky place, cloaked in verde
and all alone with the Belovedexpected. Called in
by a maid, because Señor So-and-So is waiting (‘and his
father is so importante, pretty Rosita’).
She makes lace, and takes stupendous blooms
to market, to support the house, ‘though many in the city
are much worse-off, Mami’. Some of these she brings
to her room, to rinse and bind till nightfall. Then,
though drooping, keeps vigil, to cultivate that sweet edge
of encounter, and grow—oleander-like—glossy with blessing.
This siesta-time, she flits again—lizards skid
on scalding sand—down to the cool grotto, for an hour
in eucalyptus and blueberry, till, again, some
Rafael or Gregorio in the lobby, and oh, the slippery grasping
insistence when you are so spent and your legs and arms so limp
and the cushions in the parlour so soft and grateful.
Ah, but she’ll show them. She plucks two pods as she passes in
at the kitchen door, scores their seams, then draws tart flesh
and virgin seeds across her eyelids, and cheeks,
like a society lady’s brightener, and they begin
to smart and swell. ‘Ah, my Rosa at last!’ her mother turns,
then gasps, at Rosa’s eyes dancing and red, the perfect skin
puckering into pustules, fresh chilli juice dripping
at her fingertips. The suitors look, and look away. But then (covertly)
look again.
