SoniaPereira

                   Cruz

Sometimes the most crystalline voices
approach you at night
while the mice forage cat fur
for their dens of stillness.

Listening to Moving in Your Sleep,
researching a poet, Cynthia Cruz,
for her bony words like tiny aces.

Come across another Cruz.
Tougher-looking than the former,
  than anyone I know with her freezing,
blond hair like a nimbus.

She holds up a now dated denim collar
with the daring pizzazz of a Pink Lady.
Cruisin' for a bruisin' and all those kids,
auburn and warmly plump,
shining under her dress, closing black eyes.

Stars crying into the tower.

The headline says one more casualty
of domestic abuse
and I wonder if she too had poems
crumpled and smoking in her brain.

Or if when he took one last shot
did her velvet satchel of promises unfurl,
scent of wisteria untie,
finally, all those broken words sail
into the great ice-robed air?

Her legs were hunger, she said.

Her legs were fever.

            Painter at Auvers

  Perhaps because you cried
  like a church swan
  on the fringe of some crag,

  my heart recollects the snarl
  of your faith,
  but not the essence
  of your skin.

  Now you're sprinkled
  over France and Tahiti
  like a window, wide open,
  all curtained in fur.

  And madness flows
  as only something established
  can trickle slowly
  into the fat eyes of forever.

  While I linger like a child
  imagining the world,
  but cupping for a soiled coin
  in the November wind
  when no one's watching.

Frames

My walls stretch as a dancer,
hungry in her shingles
of muted browns and copper,
frail crusts changed,
as I crumble down
from the purple bed-sheets,
with a man, long as a ship's plank,
caught in those essentials.

I take a walk outside,
thinking I'll leave them to suffer
as they seem agitated to do,
as they seem only destined to do.

But the tide, whirling frozen marbles,
crosses my path again and again.

So I return to see him renting
wide holes like volcanic upsurges
into those scrawny edges, a sight
like baby's first stool,
dark and solid as loyalty,
meshing light onto a canvas
for the first time

before I light the furnace of surrender

and leave you all to burn.

          A November Morning

The neighbors cut down the one slim tree
veiling us from their court yard.
Now when I sit at the round old desk
and its white Portuguese cloth,
I can look out onto their yard.

The child lies asleep upstairs,
alone like a last leaf
on the great empty bed.
Gray cat fur floats to my fingers
in this silverweed light.

And I take a moment to witness
some carefully placed flagstones
like railroad tracks that end suddenly
in an old forgotten cartoon.
Flanked with late fall's browning grass.

Last night, later than usual,
the three of us climbed into bed
with Snow,a new book
picked as her one special gift.
After you'd left for the lilac shine
of your weeknight bedroom
our daughter and I lay in the dark,
breathing at the ceiling like soldiers
wondering how long we had.

While two remaining brother trees
framed a stone bench and a skunk,
sodden nose to loam,
wound itself drunkenly by.

The small plaster angel gazed
at the neighbor's house
in the tensest of graces.
I wonder if he perked his ears
when she murmured into air before sleep,
Mama, Dada.

So few to hold dear, but she treats them
like charms on a brand new gold bracelet.

I hope they not only give her luxury.
I hope they give her ease.

Some Season

This holy theater of fall air breeds ghosts
from memories we can't define but bend
for like fat goldfish
diving beneath scum on a moonlit pond.
Maybe it's the steam of rapture,
but we can hear
those visions rage

they keep us awake for hours.
They are the coiled hooks
of a Sequoia's concealed archipelagos.
The effluvia of stained teeth yielding
to one last breath

beneath my kisses like cummings,

my new white pillow like release.