Renée Gregorio

 

Returning to Center

I heard a pueblo woman say
in the Southwest,
when you go outside,
skies so broad and deep,
a huge circle surrounds you.
You are the exact center,
and community is more
than just what's human.

***

But can I take that center
with me, say in Manhattan or London,
in a swirl of faces and buildings,
where so often it is impossible
to see out?

***

Driving Route 50,
the "loneliest highway in America",
the Lazy B and Salt Wells whorehouses shut tight,
petroglyphs on volcanic rock
under skies rich with black clouds and air force testing planes,
a lone woman with a flag stops traffic.
Suddenly there is a line of cars
because she's done so,
and the center narrows.

***

We receive a note from a friend:
dear fellow capitalists, he writes—
these are days when Morningstar
is a company whose advice we seek,
not a light we look up to as we wake.

***

twenty years ago a palm reader
in Burma said he'd get prostrate cancer
in his fifty-third year
so, all that year
he cancels each appointment
he's made with a doctor

***

we lay in the rain
on a lawn in Glorieta,
our clothes strewn on the edges
of blanket, skin tasting each slow
drop of water. Later, we wrote quick poems
on the white refrigerator out of
magnetized letters:
you wrote: eat hot petal whisper/skin chant moan.
I wrote: I did always what I would with you,
blue frantic blood.

***

No, I don't want to be fooled
by anything more. Starting now,
my eyes will be as open as the doors
at Indian gaming halls.

***

Some men understand
that when a woman opens
her legs to them
she opens her soul.
Most don't.

***

I take a hot bath,
watch shadows form on the stucco
of the house next door, listen to
my dark neighbor's rake
grating the hard earth,
sounds of Saturday night cruising,
Spanish songs blaring briefly and loudly,
reminding me oddly of Paris's left bank,
all that life in the streets.

***

Homeboys don't look you in the eyes
when you run by them. They stand still,
hands in pants' pockets, stare straight
in front of themselves. I know they see me.
After I pass, I hear the inevitable whistle
a sharp sound, brittle as a train whistle.
It makes me laugh as I run in my black baggy sweats,
red socks inside purple ochre Nikes,
obviously not caring how I look.
Yet how invincible I feel. I carry my keys
like mace gripped in my hands, hidden,
down Eighth to Silver and west all the way
to the catalpa trees on Thirteenth,
odd and twisted like knuckles. I
smile when I'm under their hands,
like being under wings.

***

Goddess, help me be strong
and tender and forthright and supple,
will you?

***

I lived in that house
redone by Mario's hands,
a house nearly abandoned,
inhabited by junkies and mad dogs
chained to the toilet,
a house where weeds
covered the doorways. Yes,
I lived there, in a house
whose foundation
is volcanic rock,
near a woman who lay seized up
in her front yard while the paramedics came,
asking all the wrong questions,
her shirtsleeves hugging her wrists,
and while they worked on her,
a man with his clothes in a bag
left out the back door, glancing sideways—
all this on a Sunday walk
to the river in summer.

***

Coor's Road, Albuquerque,
a sign reads:
coldest ice in town.

***

Days no matter where I go,
the Southwest, foreign cities,
the enclosing bay of San Francisco,
inside or out, I carry the circle
within, and the center simply holds.

***

On the rabbit hunt,
following close behind the hunter
with his bows and arrows,
I wondered what I'd do
if he actually killed one,
fresh death in our hands.
I thought of the daughter
who died in a car wreck
whose father received a transplant
of her heart into his body.
He lives on, heart-broken,
preferring the heart to be
beating in her body.

***

That afternoon he smeared blood
across the face of my belly,
pulled it out of me with outstretched fingers.
My blood surrounded him then,
dried on his hands, shifting color
as leaves do at the change of the season.
A precious hunt.

***

Mother Teresa said
none of us can do great things,
but we can do small things
with love.

***

Explaining his past, he said:
You have to look at this
altar boy stuff as my first
introduction into magic,
the repetition of sacred words—
a language I didn't know
the meaning of. I totally
enjoyed the sound.

***

The air hot
with oil and spinning food,
he tosses the mushrooms
over a high blue flame.
They roll over one another
like waves. He says: come here,
smell this. His face
is a hot blue flame.
The kitchen smells of Italy and Japan.
Everything's on high.
He refuses a spatula,
tests meat with the tips of his fingers.

***

Good Friday.
No longer the good Catholic girl.
No longer church on Sundays,
moral and venial sins, or
the priest's disembodied voice
in the confessional.

***

Cry me a river,
he used to say
when I complained
about love.

***

Yesterday's ultrasound,
wand of camera running
back and forth over belly
to view what seemed
the darkest sea on earth.
Entire belly became sea
and the dark, dense spots
rising in that sea, the unknown.
Photographs of cervix, ovaries,
walls of uterus and the long canal
to that place made of sex, which, after all,
is a kind of birthing.

***

Listen to the wood and how it sings,
he writes,
the moment of its splitting.

***

I've been listening so long
to the sound of splitting;
now I want to know
the sound wood makes when it's whole.

© by Renée Gregorio