Poetry

-written in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf”

There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart...

Sometimes—like right now—when you
need to see yourself from
outside, so you can say, objectively, how it
really feels in there,

your mind is a translucent sheet of plastic
taped on to the hotel room window in a
ragged part of town
that looks over a parking lot, a late night

Nineteen-thirty-six: I hurried as always
but was late. Eight centuries
or ten thousand years,
my small story fixed to my back.
Food came weighed and wrapped,
shelter engorged, surplus.
My own, my own, my own
was a mantra I could sing
in any season.
I could be who I was
and also anyone else...

The heat of Las Cruces begins
somewhere
deep in the bones underground,
out near Mt. Robledo and ends
south of the border in the desierto looking
for a
better life.