Notes in my Shirt Pocket

Two examples of his poems: "Have you always been so fragile?" (She asked) "Yes" (I said) "always." Since the day I squinted across the sights of my shiny new BB gun and watched a Mourning Dove stiffen and tumble from the peak of our parsonage roof to spread its broken wings at my feet. Since the day I watched a thin trickle of blood seep between its feathers like red ink leaking from a ball point pen and staining a clean white shirt. Since the summer morning when I was eight or nine and focused all my curiosity and passion on the silhouette or a bird delicately balanced on its stick legs and sent a sleeping pellet across an impossible distance to consume a bird and a boy in a shock of sudden self-knowledge. Massed at the extreme of our lives we cannot hear a distant moaning, cannot feel the heavy breathing of those feasting on our common abundance. "Have you always been so fragile?" (she asked) "Yes" (I said) "always," since the day I shot a hole in the world and met myself coming in from the other side carrying a shiny new weapon. Madonna and Child Her name is Consuelo (or María) her skin the color of coffee beans drying in the midday sun of her beloved Oaxaca standing in the long line at the main post office, she misses her tías and her abuelitas she misses colored skirts at fiesta time, the guitars and trumpets and the way the earth moves under dancing feet, she misses calamitous roosters announcing dawn and flaunting their riotous feathers from the fence post and tree branch she misses las madres chismeando over buttered corn on the cob sizzling on greasy iron grates atop wood fires she misses the intoxicating perfumes misting from lush vegetation i interrupt her reverie to comment on her sleeping child as she struggles to contain his shifting body "bien metido en sueños,verdad"? and receive a full account of his erratic sleep behaviors from behind the wistful voice of a middle-aged black woman "I wish I could speak a foreign language" Ah! but she does, fluent in the only language that matters, the articulate language of "Hi"! so artlessly hidden in all of us.