National Poetry Month: Two Poems

By the Wall of Tumbling Dryers in Winchester Virginia

In the laundromat on Braddock Street in my new life, 
the churn of water and chimes of loose nickels join 
the talk of mother and daughter in a low hum of Spanish

and something is coming to me. As if I am remembering 
suddenly the lines of a play or something from another 
life which I had forgotten or banished to some pit in me:

that azure in snow where fields just roll underneath 
the moon, that loneliness that satisfies and fills you 
like a god walking into the room. Radiant gold fire 

in a woodstove. Some warmth returns to my life, some 
looking-after feeling, some protective force for what is 
tender, vulnerable and lost in me until now. What a joy 

to be here in the laundromat just unhooking Sorrow from 
Being, and language from meaning for a little while as
the clothes wash. What will become of us in ten thousand 

years? I can’t even see tomorrow clearly. Work. Sleep. 
Dream. Despair and be born again. Carry what little sense 
I have closely and love what I love. Who I love. Breathe. 

Be content enough to lean in and to hear the girl say 
“estoy embarazada.” I am pregnant, mami. Her voice 
low down and holy. Lord, whoever you are at last I think 

what you have made for us is very fine. Help this girl 
carry her life into the deep wine-dark loveliness of Time 
                                    that never ends.

***

Some Things I Don’t Want to Do

Include walking on a tightrope over a waterfall,
waking in the morning some days, or, living at all
occasionally. The snapping turtle under ground

in winter slows down its heart rate to nothing almost, 
a sound like snow falling in a pond when the Desire 
to Be grows so faint it is the setting down of a teacup 

by a mouse in the pantry, a lady mouse between chores, 
her laundry spread between chairs in the small kitchen 
of her life. The black snake blinks and she hears

it coming her way through the walls. In the cancer ward
my friend waited for his energies to return, his words
like eglantine and diaphanous to have a purpose

other than to speak of little pink funeral roses or 
the see-through gown of ghosts the dead wear so crisp
and then he died asking for his mother twelve times as if 

from a list of his twelve favorite people. I don’t want to
not be here if my children ever need me like this. Oh, 
let the fear of life thaw away enough I can dig out from 

the mud like the turtle in spring starved and clawing, 
the sun wild in my blood. Let the fear of death come
apart in my hands like bread for the table enough for us all.