Ten dollar Chevy

I lost my tape to a shuttle driver in Nashville and never got it back. Then there was that journal full of grandfather poems abandoned in a London taxi. But none of this comes close to the time Martha left her boyfriend waiting in a phone booth on the freeway outside Eureka as she sped away or should I say lurched in that ten dollar Chevy with no windshield and only second and third gears. She never knew how vital it could be to have reverse in the palm of your hand. No reverse gear. So she kept going all the way to the Okanagan Valley and blended in with the seasonal tribe of apple pickers. Left that Chevy in a ditch outside Spokane and hitched into the next stage of life wondering if George had ever figured out she wasn't going to make it back. Maybe he was still there smelling the salt sea air talking lobster pots and 19th century engravings with the local booksellers. Or maybe someone else turned up, someone with a windshield and reverse, to give George a warm bed and a BLT at midnight. Maybe George metamorphosed right there in that northern Californian phone booth like Superman flowering into an indestructible arrangement of blues and reds with flashes of yellow. Maybe a lightning bolt took George out. That sort of thing happens, thought Martha, as she kept moving forward, reaching for another apple and another, not caring when or how things get ripe, only filling the boxes, filling her pockets, filling her heart without remorse, filling her life with the Okanagan autumn before all the leaves would most certainly fall after the first frost.

Avocado

When I first heard avocado trees take eight

years to bear I reckoned I’d be sixty-plus if

I planted one right now a daunting notion

meantime a volunteer tree between our place

and the barn kept growing we puzzled

over its identity the first few years then knew

it to be an avocado maybe a seed started

by a child using a glass with toothpicks holding

aloft the fruit’s center thrown aside the long

root tailing into tap water while two dark

green leaves reached out of the crack long

before we arrived then say four years ago

flowers showed on what had become a shade

tree we’d pruned and shaped agreed to leave

in that corner thus when the first fruit arrived

delighted we opened it up but its watery

bitterness put us off too bad we said not

the good kind and now I’m sixty two lived

here nine full years resigned to another

decade before we’ll find the right variety

though this one bears so much our children

now grown bringing their children two born

this year and a third two years ago

walking between here and the barn over

numbers of fallen avocadoes opening them

up they tell us you have delicious avocadoes

you know and so we do we’re told they’re “goldens”

so many we have to give them away like

everything that comes like a gift without

waiting just as our life here started green

and promising while we planted not knowing

how time would keep us guessing before flowering

before setting the fruit down before us

The sober Capricorn moon

The sober Capricorn moon needs a little magic
in her life bent as she is like the bow of the
huntress at rest there in the small room her
arrows spent the night long pierced with
bright places where she pointed and aimed
now heaven itself strained across our minds
by her careful weighing and selecting all
however but her own fate perhaps surrendered
to a gin and tonic half way between five and
six at each day's end though never after
having dined. She served fruit cocktail
I remember, from an ornate Chinese bowl,
green, I recall, with intricate stories
suggesting themselves in the glaze
but then everything she reached into
seemed to have a pattern one never
noticed until she began and she usually
began far beyond the beginning as we
mortals know it. You know, I suppose,
of what I speak. I hope you do, because
the night is cold and she is far away
in her small room, and close enough
to the television screen to touch the captions
orchestrated by a deft touch of her remote.
I hope you do know what I mean. How the word
was in the beginning a sound so close
so intimate so akin and simultaneous its utterance
brought us and everything else into existence.
You know. That word. And the huntress
sober tonight, needing a little magic in her life.

Her soul came all this way

A baby is a baby is a baby till she
turns toward you as the two of you
lie there on Sarah's beautiful quilt
spread out on the floor of the big room
looks at you, she does, with a look
you don't understand, so close she
takes the back of her hand delicately
across your face, the corner of an eye,
the place where the nose rises up
and down until finally her fingers
turn touching your lips searching
inside that space that moved apart,
closed up, opened again, that time
you said something, that time your words
spoke a sound an articulation of
slow music she seems to remember as if
her soul came all this way from
somewhere deep inside and yet out there
somewhere all at the same time
just to touch you