June Gloom

Gabriela Anaya Valdepeña

for Doug

In That Past

They tell me I should praise
heaven, earth, and sea
for all I have been raised
above, and keep my peace
in this quiet kingdom
of coffee, books, and sun,
of salt air, of dreams
keen as the blood that runs
in a rebel giving up,
who knows deep within
that she will never stop
singing her old sin.
To err is only human
and charming when you're young.
Why can't an older woman
be so prettily undone?
And why should I regret
the days you wasted thin
waiting for my fat heart,
which couldn't imagine, then,
this marriage? In that past
I was alive and ripe
with ruses to resist
this ring around my life.

Cada Vez

Cada vez que regresas no se si volverás.
Cada vez que encuentro la poesía,
se desaparece el camino.
¿Cuantas veces te interpusiste entre las cobijas y el destino?
Soñaste con rosas fluorescentes;
yo, con el suntuoso oscurecer de tus ojos.
Quizás, las manos ambiciosas de primavera
no se equivocan. Pero mis dedos
adelgazan. Ya no me queda tu anillo.

Whenever

Whenever you return, I don't know if you'll be back.
Whenever I find poetry,
the road disappears.
How many times did you come between destiny and the covers?
You dreamt of phosphorescent roses;
and I, the darkness growing rich in your eyes.
Perhaps the ambitious hands of spring
make no mistakes. But my fingers
thin. Your ring no longer fits.

translated by Douglas James Martin

Blue Girl

I miss you,
blue girl—catatonic,
histrionic, blue girl.

You snatched your collage
of stone faces.
You pinched my plastic heart
and made it beat.

Your crooked clock says
you ain't comin' back,
but I've known time to lie.

Weren't we
gloriously lazy
on the silver sand
sipping Texas tea?

We slipped past guard,
past shoreline,
into slanted caves.

But the waves
called us back
before we could
carve our pictures.

The sea wall
bellows:
blue girl.

Surfacing

There are words
logged in my knowing,
a bird's tune, yet unsung.

Thoughts like pink shells—
blushing beneath
a veil of sand—
waiting to be
collected in your palms.

Surgir

Hay palabras
grabadas en mí saber,
canción de pajarito,ún no cantada.

Pensamientos-
como conchitas rosas
ruborizadas debajo
de un velo de arena—
esperando ser
recogidas en tus manos.

translated by Lita Anaya

June 25, 2005

A shadow
glazes this sill.
A chrysalis
thickens across the pain.
Tomorrow, surely—
a color-filled stage.

Deep Bay

My fingers couldn't reach the bark
so I used your book, shoving off the old oak
to get more swing in my hammock. And now
Deep Bay has a bend in it. But its spine
is still strong, and my heart is stronger
and you give me goose bumps, like only one man
is supposed to. And he hates duplicity.
So I write, shaded by dead branches.

I Said

We were bored. I said
we can photograph ants, if you want to,
carrying their bones on their backs
as they crawl on the red asphalt
in search of crumbs.
Some days
your crumbs have been
my only feast.
How quickly
the heart expands, needs still more
to fill it. I said
we can photograph ants. We can
walk with our bare feet over
hot stones. We can sit
on the curb, like honey,
all day.

City Lights Bungalows

At City Lights Bungalows
it is always twilight.
One can live for plumes, one
can bathe in the conjugal
showers, with bars
of homemade glycerin.
The old man who hands out
warm towels whistles
a tune he learned
boating on the Styx.
I dry myself from
right to left, and soon
read that way too.
When one gets hungry,
and the belly sings off-key,
one can order the bitchofahurry
breakfast, at the diner
two doors left at the corner,
where I discard my memory, and somehow
it winds up at my
contingent table, beside
my cup of midnight blue.
And I know,
though you are not in this dream,
you have put it there.

Make Me Rich

Lover, believe in my fiction,
in my patchwork truth.
Love me when words falter,
when thoughts melt.
Sift with me through the numbing darkness
to find gold,
make me rich with things to say

These Are the days

These are the days
that dye the murex moon.
Your androgynous eyes
go loopy-loop.
These are the days
you sway hipless into eclipse.
Say, "So long."
I fall, senseless,
into the wind's mouth.

So Many Hearts

Your silent steps climb the sleepy ladder.
Though you grope for distant suns, oranges
yield to your tug.
Scurvy sailors ached with dreams, once,
of fine fruit on a long stretch of sea.
Do not hold them against my winter face;
I wear the shade of poisoned berries best.
Your flexed forearm squeezes and turns
so many hearts.

It's Just Nothing

We have shared everything,
we have shared nothing.
The birds are indifferent to me,
they sing as they've always sung,
their tunes diminishing as
the sun gathers strength.
You're sleeping, turned away.
It would be pointless to say
just let me hide.

By the Time You Get to San Diego

By the time you get to San Diego
I'll be tripping on my hair. And I'll be sure
to choke that parrot, before he squawks
number, seat, and itinerary, while the sea's
pale promises roll over Logan Field.
You are my phantom; I will be
your ghost. Together we dreamt
of anemones in a blustery field, of fish
stuck in a mallard's craw, of ant bites
blossoming on my well-kissed arms.
But the last nickel cadmium flares
are fading in this cool light,
and I just might finally get somewhere—
between gaiety and the ghetto,
between Cannery Row and the Left Bank,
between confessions and the dawn.

What Now?

Silence, sterile and damp.
Ants in antipathy steal my bread.
Another wet towel in the hamper—
your mildewed jeans,
and that reckless gene
I forgot to test you for
sky dives through my heart

Red Berries Blue

The dogwood is dour, its red berries blue,
and I haven't bought a hat in months.
What I would give for a fedora and a contrite song,
for a bowler and a rose.
I was hell's beauty; I was the church bell.
I glued shells and a red ribbon to a floppy straw.
I poured a swelling life into the wide brim,
But I couldn't drink it straight.
A bee has stung me silly, diving drunk
into the pale lily's heart.
And my arm is a small mountain,
and my breath is gone.

What Happens

What happens when you're spit from an afternoon nap,
and you awake, disheveled, on a pier in Ventura,
rich in your nakedness, rich in your isolation,
until you meet a man who shits diamonds,
with eyes like two black turds?

And after it all,
would you sue the Santa Ana Winds,
would you spend your last fifty on a loop of red yarn,
or take up heroin for a sleepy decade,
then quit suddenly, after you spy,
plastered on a wobbly billboard,
Tom Cruise's medicinal grin?

Would you shake so much
LA comes tumbling down?

Immortal

I spend my all my time
implanting microchips
into the genes of a cockroach.

One day the world will be judged
by what I have written—

and I will remain,
misunderstood.

Suicide Note

From your ballsack to my Balzac—
I've seen it all.

Eulogy for Myself

She died
leaving seventy-three letters unopened,
one full bag of kibble, and her earless sage
panting at the Pantheon of her gutless gods.
She died unworn
by that turquoise bra, unpinned
by the serpent brooch with the soft red eyes.
She never seduced
Beefeater, or croupier,
with her ylang ylang, with her reticence, until
they left her broke as a one prong plug, or a poet.
Who will dance
for this vapid village? Who will taunt
the sleepy tide? The bluff
thought she was bluffing. The clouds tonight,
sigh little books of air.