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Ode to the Box that Held My Boots
Empty receptacle, once you were a womb
for possibility. Your children were perfect:
neither one had scrambled past sea urchins,
or fallen through the rusty iron of a shipwreck.
Now many possibilities have been explored,
many exhausted, many more abandoned.
And the children you once held safe
within your belly have gained scars
with their independence.
There is a warp in the leather from hot springs
in the Sawtooth Mountains, from drying in the sun at solstice,
from walking the lonely boulevards of Las Vegas,
where photos of naked women cover the streets
like a fine blanket of snow.
Boot box, I once thought that death
came in the moment of choosing one possibility
over the others. But now I think that a step to the left
is life, and the right boot punctured with cactus spines is life,
and the glory of existence is elephant dung
plastered to shoelaces.
The only thing that still reminds me of death
is an empty volume bounded by cardboard
which stares at me with blank purity, like a casket,
unable to comprehend dirt
damage
or deer running in the desert.
Tomorrow, boot box, I will have to carry you
to the recycling center (this poem tattooed
onto your back), to be pulped and re-shaped,
so that soon you may carry within your belly
five pounds of ripe peaches, a six-pack of ale,
or a trombone that sits in mute anticipation,
waiting for a child to find her first tune.
Windscorpion
One afternoon in the Mojave Desert,
a windscorpion emerged from my girlfriend’s leather pants.
Luckily, she wasn’t wearing her pants at the time.
A casualty of sex, they were splayed like a bananapeel
on the concrete floor. This windscorpion was
one pissed-off arachnid, with huge pedipalps and scissors for jaws,
and when he bit my foot I screamed. There was no blood.
But for the next week, I vomited.
I puked until there was very little inside me but a fever
that sizzled like July fireworks.
Now, if I were a comic book writer
I might claim from this experience
the lifelong ability to control all windscorpions in the vicinity.
Likewise, if I felt a little more Poetic Grandeur
in my soul, I’d probably call what happened
a rite of passage. But I am just a man who is surviving poverty
on afternoons of love, so it remains a windscorpion bite.
So too will the sun rise with the same fire
and set today with its familiar grace,
and when the winter wind swoops down
from the mountains in a few weeks,
I will continue to work outside
until my fingers are numb and my lungs are on fire
with the miracle of oxygen and ice.
Excerpts from An Abridged Dictionary of Experience
Desire: Forest fire.
Begun when one bolt of lightning jumps into the juniper.
Deer, chipmunks, ground squirrels, rabbits,
and prairie dogs flee their homes.
Only Coyote stays behind, skirting
the edge of the flames. Panting.
The infinity of heat reflected in his eyes.
Love: Honey in the comb.
Chewed gluttonously when young.
Now those remaining pockets of sweetness
are thickening with age. Acquiring texture.
And the flavor, so rich
as it slides down the dry throat
that we nearly forget the occasions we were stung.
Friendship: A condor scavenges alone
for many hours. The day is long,
the air hot and carrion absent.
Suddenly, he spies another member of his species
flying over the valley, seeking
dead meat. Wings open.
Feathers give the wind shape.
Faith: A single grain of sand
trapped inside the aging oyster.
Annoying him.
Pestering the flesh.
One day, long after the oyster is dead,
someone holds a pearl in her palm and wonders,
where did this come from?
The Eyes of the Buddha
Rangichangi (multi-colored, drunk): it’s the only word that makes sense
on Holi, when the city of Katmandu drenches itself in water and dye.
Red, yellow, green, blue, orange, silver, gold, then red again, the color of blood, the color offered to the gods.
Brandon and I were motorcycling to Patan, soaked in paint, celebrating Holi by cutting through dense waves of Katmandu traffic, when a taxicab swerved into our lane. I remember slapping the taxi’s front quarter panel to alert the driver. When I stood up,
my hand was dripping blood, and Brandon was yelling in Nepali.
I showed my red fingers to everyone. Calmly smeared blood across
the taxi’s windshield. It was an offering. Holi. Pure and fluid madness.
The taxi driver cursed at me and shifted into first gear. Neon light
from a beer advertisement caught the face of a young girl in his cab,
and the way she looked at me as that blood-anointed taxi sped away, disappearing into traffic, I swear I will never forget such compassion.
Francophilia
When I lived in Katmandu, I fell in love
with a French girl named Nathalie who was very nationalistic.
She lectured me on politics,
recited Baudelaire in the original French
between kisses,
and every time we had sex,
she insisted that the lights be turned off.
I wondered…
is sex-in-darkness the custom in France,
or is this girl hiding some terrible secret?
What if, worse, she doesn’t want to look at me?
One morning, I bathed Nathalie
using a bucket of water heated on the stove
and she was beautiful, oui,
there were fine hairs all over her body
and her stomach muscles were marble.
I was naked too, and the way she spoke to
me, loudly and tenderly in that French accent,
(telling inappropriate jokes and laughing)
just as she had done the night before, in darkness…
well, I realized we had fallen into one of those
perfect moments in a human life
that are generally only recognized in retrospect.
Of course it couldn’t last.
I wonder if Nathalie insisted on making love
with the lights out because it turned her on,
or because she understood
we only had a short time
and she wanted me to be haunted
by darkness, by the memory
of a voice laughing and calling out poetry,
making itself understood in the darkness.
Connection
What is your connection to this world
besides the things you touch, besides
what touches you?
It is 3 in the a.m.
when you pull your stuttering Ford
to the side of a highway and get out
to walk among the pines.
You feel hope,
smelling the freshness of these trees
that surround you
like the promise of something greater
than loneliness,
something more than yourself.
A few minutes later, after ordering eggs
and toast at a 24-hour diner,
you listen to the waitress
as she cracks an unaccountable joke
about elephants and their trunks, and
you laugh and laugh until suddenly you’re crying
into the cup of coffee she has brought.
People are staring.
Tomorrow you could run your car
into a telephone pole.
Or, you could drive down to Second Mesa at Hopi,
where stalks of corn sprout from the ground
like words in an ancient prayer.
Maybe an eagle will fly
between you and the sun, and the sense of its
shadow will enter your heart like this:
you are permitted to lose everything
before losing your life, the girl, the job,
the transmission, the lot in the trailer park,
the clip on a clip-on tie, all parts of a bargain
you never agreed to anyway. Look outside.
Stare at the morning star. You get another day
to feel heat building in your chest.
Michael Cipra lives in Twentynine Palms and is the regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association in Joshua Tree.
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