Contraband

In smoke and snow
I wander a world away
where spring blossoms
and dried fruit
spell contraband
I stand guilty
before a judge
in Santiago de Chile
where thousands
are gathered for execution
in a stadium
I am only a yanqui
a gringa, a contrabandista
an imperialista
in this thread
of a nation
strifed by machine guns
I am left free
to wander the streets
where Victor Jara's clear voice
still rings
Correle, correle
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar
his mutilated hands
dance before me
caminando, caminando
walking, walking
Monjitas and Merced
San Antonio and MacIver
in the Plaza de Armas
mimes drum the beat
of rogues and pickpockets
as a gold medallion
from Lourdes
takes flight
into an expressway
of diesel fumes
that choke out
the Andes.

El Zonda
whips my paper identity
into the desert
and leaves me illegal
in a country
filled with gendarmes
and a bureaucracy
built upon stamps
Victor Jara still sings
correle, correle,
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar
run this way
run that way
run run
por aqui, por alla
they are going to kill you
por aqui, por alla
correle, correle
que te van a matar.

I kneel
before a widow
stuffed into a plastic water bottle
I carry a blood red ribbon
as I pay a peso
for a piece of toilet paper
while a dust devil swirls
and a saint rises from nowhere
whispering always,
te amo, te amo
por aqui, por alla
te amo, te amo
so many voices
speak in so many tongues
each one etched
in a layer of stone
the days disappear
into stars
the stars into galaxies
I sail into the unknown
a paper
on a spirit wind
a name
lost to the desert light
singing
always
singing
correle
correle
por aqui
por alla
correle
correle
que te
voy a amar.


( Notes: translation of Victor Jara's words: Run, run, here and there,
run, run, that they are going to kill you.
and te amo-I love you
que te voy a amar-that I am going to love you.
Victor Jara was a Chilean poet, playwright, singer who was arrested and taken to the stadium where his hands were cut off and he was executed after the coup of September 11, 1973.)

La Querencia

In English there are no words for La Querencia, an act of love, or the return to one's roots. It could be the last vibration of a sound that travels on the Andean spirit wind, el Zonda, and ripples the red cintas of the Difunta Correa, unofficial patron saint of travel, who died in the Argentine desert on her journey to recover the bones of her martyred husband. In route to La Querencia, our Kia sputters and shakes over the hours of ripio from Upsallata to Barreal in search of the Southern Cross. This is the place where the Nazca Plate converges with the South American Plate and the deepest layers of the Pacific Ocean sink beneath the continent and push the purple, red, orange, green, and yellow sedimentary layers twenty two thousand feet into the sky and then the winds sculpt the pre-cordillera of the east into monuments that leave us all with one voice exclaiming, "Holy Shit!" as we turn the corner and our gaze meets the Cerro del Alcazar. This is La Querencia where the tumbleweeds are carried by dust devils across hard packed sand flats and an astronomer sits with his five telescopes and tracks the expansion of the universe and the paths of asteroids. We follow a cantoring horse through the dark night in this place where a post card stamp costs two dollars and there are no telephones. Our hostess whispers to me as she hugs me on our departure, "I will not say good-bye to you, Amiga. I will only say, 'Welcome Home.'"

For All You Gardeners

This is a piece I picked up in Mongoose Junction on St. John. It's signed by someone named Gingras and it's copyrighted and made available through How To Live. Long Beach Island, NJ.
609- 492-6454. Enjoy.

How To Be A Gardener

Lean toward sunshine
dig down deep
make peace with chaos
Grow Amazing zucchinis and too many tomatoes
raindance
rake leave and jump in
hum along with bees
Ache, Sweat and Yearn
wear crazy hats
and baggy pants
have wise hands
cultivate patience
moonglow
stay rooted
blossom wildly
have shady and mysterious corners
mend fences
wonder
get earthy
make magic
share the harvest
be thankful

ST. JOHN, USVI

Hillsides burn in the eyes
of the baggage handler at Cruz Bay
as slaves swim to freedom
in the dark channels where a Black man
is running for President
while the ferry from the Westin
fills with the faces of his African ancestors
and heads away from this island
where I am the invasive species
perching on the hard red rocks
thrust from the depths of earths's magma
in the collision of two tectonic plates
fifty million years ago.

Blue tangs, parrot fish, octopus, eagle ray
barracuda, shark and sea turtles
all swim among the many corals
brain, fire, flower, elkhorn, pillar and deadman's fingers
Lizard fish, damselfish, grunts, grouper, trumpet fish, eels
and bar jacks,
I could make a longer list
doctor bird, bananaquit, frigate bird, kite, trembler
whistler, egret, black heron
on and on the names lure me
with their sounds and colors
century plant, sensitive fern, soursop, calabash, lion's tail
flamboyant, allamanda, Izora,
how many songs
in the words my tongue trips on?

This is not my habitat
I tell my wife
I was not made to live
and breathe here
The rocks are too sharp
the air too humid and too hot
my white skin crawls
out of itself
as I seek shelter
from the sun,
darting from the shade
to the water
like an iguana
under the watchful eyes
of the mongoose
goats eat the hillsides
cows stroll the roads
and a sign reads
Donkeys Keep Out.

Whose island is this?
Whose habitat?

Gas costs $4.68 in Coral Bay.

Anonymous

We are all outsiders at the water hole. I purchased this poem for five dollars from a hooded man at a BART station in Oakland, California. He told me his mother made him promise that he would never beg so he wrote poems and sold them in the subway, and he helped people figure the system out. He showed me how to use the automatic machines to purchase my ticket. He told me which train to take and then when I went to give him some money, he acted really surprised when I insisted he give me the poem. " I'm payin' you for the poem, Man, not for the other stuff." I said. " Give me the poem."

Here it is.

WHAT MOTHER

Mother's are the one who birth

many children one God who sent his

Son, no matter, what day Mother's

birth boys and girls.

No phone necessary to

say I love you Mother,

That call will never be missed, Love

stays with you mother forever and al-

ways

Reaching for the Stars and Heaven

I Love You Mother

United States of America

My five year old fairy princess grandson leaves a message for me on my bed, "Welcome to the United States of America!" There is a drawing of me with my long gray pony tail and a witches hat. Welcome to the United States of America.

On the way into Denny's among the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California, I am stopped by the headlines of the Los Angeles Times, "Gay Marriage Ban Overturned."
"Wow!" I tell my wife. "We're married in California!"
My niece says, "Congratulations!"
We drink blue margaritas by the pitcher
and ask the mariachis to play "Besame Mucho!"
This is the United States of America.

I am alone in Oakland, walking the trails of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Shoreline. The Canada geese are parading their goslings. A blue heron is preening. There is a cormorant perched on the concrete and steel remains of a lost civilization and a white egret gives me hope that this wetland in the shadows of Oakland International Airport will survive the assault of the two-leggeds.

A man on a bicycle stops. "I'm not going to rob you," he says. "I'm not going to hurt you. Just tell me one thing. One thing that Jesus said to let a man like me go hungry. I won't lie to you. I just got out of Folsom State Prison. I did six years and ten months. Six years and ten months of hard time, and now I'm a free man. I can't make it here in this world with all this noise and all this traffic. I don't know anything about this world. I don't know how I'm going to survive. Plain truth is, I've never begged in my life, but I'm hungry. All I've got are these clothes and this bicycle, and I'm hungry."
All I have is a twenty, a ten, a five, and a full stomach.
This is the United States of America.

I sit on the plane with a man named Steve Star. He is eighty-three years old and has bad breath. The son of a Croation coal miner from the mountains of Utah, he ended up on the Los Angeles City Council and retired to an island in San Francisco Bay. He calls me Rose and asks if I have a family. "No," I lie. This is the United States of America and I am married in only two states.

I come home to the green. St. Francis said, "Speak to me of Love," and the almond tree blossomed. This is the United States of America and the almond is blossoming.

Postcard from Smarr

In Smarr, Georgia, chickens ride Interstate 75 on their way to slaughter as humans complain about the smell of their food and a man is shot dead watching TV in a gambling house full of undesirables. This is SMARR. Safety and Mission Assurance Readiness Review that can leave no room for error in a world ruled by billboards and the hot oils of massage parlors where the gals give head like volcanoes and the chickens gasp at the trucks funneled between six hundred and nine protesting churches all building a bridge between Jesus and the northern aggressors with their powder horns full of judgments that loom in the Sprawl Malls Accelerating Religious Revolt . If it is true that the behavior of an organism is a direct reflection of the environment it interacts with we are doomed to a foreclosure of spirit in this universe of Hooters and Fudpuckers.

Rumble Road

Four thousand soldiers dead in Iraq
Four thousand mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters
lost protecting my freedom to ride
Rumble Road I 75 in Smarr, Georgia
where I can get Smart Lipo
and call 1-800-DIVORCE

"JESUS LOVES US AMERICA
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
LET'S TURN THE NATION
BACK TO HIM"

I drive past trees
strangled by Kudzu
while every twenty minutes
a child is diagnosed with autism

He who throws dirt
loses ground
to the red clays
of South Carolina
that are parched by drought
and the vampires of sprawl
tell me to Buy a Gun
for America
and Come worship
just as you are!

Just as I am?
Does God love me?
Does the Savior know my name?

Guns don't kill people
Drivers with cell phones do!

Buy a gun for Freedom
Stop in at the Cafe Risque
for a massage
by an Asian, a Latin, or an Indian

In God We Trust
and United We Stand
with the 4000 soldiers
who died for our sins.

4000 dead protecting
our freedom
to love.

What?

From the Flatlands

In the flatlands of Georgia the wind chimes yielded to air raid sirens as my wife and I sought refuge in the bathroom. I played guitar in the darkness while tornadoes knocked out a power station north of us on the great savannah where last week sixteen workers were burned to death as a sugar refinery spontaneously combusted on the edge of the intercoastal waterway where we counted seventeen alligators in the dying salt marshes.

I played classical guitar for two drunk truck drivers in a garage off Mapmaker Lane. "Why don't you just wail on that thing?"
"It's a classical guitar."
"Pick the hell out of it."
"I can't pick a classical guitar. The strings are nylon."
"You can't pick that thing?"
"Nope."
"What good is a guitar you can't pick?"

It cost 61 cents a mile to drive a flatbed last week. One of my trucker buddies paid $681 to fill up his truck that morning. He took a load of pine boards north, passing a load of pine boards headed south. "How crazy is that?" he asks. "Everything you eat comes on a truck." Everything.

Diesel costs $4.16 a gallon in Ravine, Pennsylvania, where a magnet in the Truck Stop reads, "Virginia is for Lovers, but Pennsylvania has Intercourse."

I had the best damned Po' Boy Hoagie I have ever tasted at a pink stucco roadside stop named Steffens Restaurant in the middle of nowhere Georgia. It was crammed with local boys with their camo and beer bellies. We ordered Sweet Tea and tried to hide our northern accents. We sent our compliments to the cook and the waitress looked surprised and said, "Well, if you liked it so much you'll just have to come back!" I wish we could.

It's the Economy, Stupid. The Economy. Everywhere, Everybody is talking about the Economy. A store owner in St. Augustine is wondering whether she should sell her business now before it gets worse. "It's gonna get worse," she says. It's hard to get a room because people are living week to week in the cheap hotels. One paycheck ahead of homelessness. The big building projects in Flagler County, Florida, are on hold until the economy improves. Where do the workers go? Where are the jobs? Trust in Jesus. The Lord will provide. That's how we get through. My wife and I look for a statue of St. Anthony at the Mission of Our Lady of La Leche. Our dollars go to support anti-abortion groups. It's the Economy, Stupid. The Economy.

It has been days since I have tasted silence. My wife watches an Australian play with a rattlesnake as I sit with my laptop and read about how St. Augustine of Hippo, an Algerian pagan, conceived the ideas of original sin and just war. We are on a beach of shells at the edge of the continent where the Spanish conquistadors searched for the fountain of immortality and founded the oldest white city in the western hemisphere. Today as the oyster catchers play tag with the waters, the turtles are dying, and the traffic drowns out the sound of the waves.

It has been days since I've tasted silence.

Road Trip

I go outside to check out the new moon. We still have a good two feet of snow. The air is cold and the woods are quiet. I revel in the silence. It is so hard to pull myself out of here and enter the world of cars and sprawl and people. I know that I will not feel this kind of quiet again for at least two weeks, and maybe much longer because winter is fading and there is no season as deep and still as winter and it's been a good winter, a real winter filled with all the work and satisfaction of snow after snow after snow. Who knows where the season will be when we return from this road trip. Who knows where my head will be after encountering a good slice of America in these pre-election, economically crashing, global climate changing days. It will be an adventure. A vacation in the Key of E-major.
Tomorrow at six am, my wife and I will hit the road with our music and our laptops and head south with thousands of spring breakers.
Tonight, I stand in the woods and drink in the silence...
There are compromises one must make to maintain conjugal bliss, and leaving these woods is one of those moments! Dixie here we come!