Poet's Progress : Poem In Your Post

Poet's Progress

           for Sandra Cisneros

I haven't been

much of anywhere,

books my only voyage,

crossed no bodies

of water, seen anything

other than trees change,

birds take shape - like the rare

Bee Hummingbird that once hovered

over the promise of salsa

in my garden: a fur feathered

vision from Cuba in Boulder,

a wetback, stowaway, refugee,

farther from home than me.

Now, snow spatters its foreign

starch across the lawn gone

crisp with freeze.  I know

nothing tropical survives 

long in this season.  I pull

the last leeks from the frozen

earth, smell their slender

tubercular lives, stand

in the sleet whiteout 

of December:  roots

drawn in, threads of relatives

expand while solitude, the core,

that slick-headed fist of self, is 

cool as my dog's nose and pungent

with resistance.  Now when

the red-bellied woodpecker

calls his response to a California

owl, now, when the wound

transformer in the womb

slackens, and I wait

for potential: all

the lives I have

yet to name,

all my life

I have willed into being

alive and brittle with the icy

past.  And it's enough now,

listening, counting the unknown

arachnids and hormigas

who share my love of less

sweeping.  For this is what

I wanted, come to, left

alone with anything

but the girlhood horrors,

the touching, the hungry

leaden meltdown of the hours.

Or the future - a round negation,

black suction of the heart's 

conception.  Save me

from a stupid life!  I prayed.

Leave me anything but

a stupid life.

And that's poetry.  

                       - Lorna Dee Cervantes

Sometimes, rather than leading me into a reflection of my life, a poet lifts me out of my own time, place, and experience and sets me down intimately into another.  

I haven't lived what Cervantes is alluding to here, but I am transported into her (or her speaker's) consciousness long enough to experience these moments from within her awareness.  

For a short space of time, it's December in Boulder, and I haven't traveled, and I've seen a Bee Hummingbird, shared spaces with spiders, and prayed for a future that is, at least, not stupid. 

And now I'm returned to the present moment, sitting on my sofa in grey mid-March, looking out at my one black hen under her lichen-riddled plum tree as it reaches through the back fence, just about to burst into bloom.

MFB,

L