Selected Poems
This page is under construction. In the meantime, a rotating poem:
Qué Será, SeráShe doesn’t mind the time he spends
in the domino hall downtown, silent
staccato of light and shadow radiating
from fanblades overhead. She listens
to the whir of her Singer, watches
the shimmering needle stitch up yards
of satin the color of ripe plums, muted
voices from “Our Gal Sunday,” its serial quest
for happiness reaching her against
the open-window backdrop of sparrows
in the hackberries, a cow nuzzling
chainlink at the gatepost, honeymoon memory
of blackberry wine on her lips, cool sea breezes
on the balcony of the Casa Ricardo, though beer
is the beverage she shares with Elwood late
afternoons beneath the chinaberry trees out back,
good solid German beer, foam cascading
icy bottles like surf flung up an English cliff
in a poem she memorized in high school, struck
by an emptiness she knew but could not name,
sunless-February counterpoint to a feathered hat,
a pair of patent leather ankle-strap heels
in the window at Lichtenstein’s. She walked
right in and tried them on, risked Elwood’s gloom
and brought them home. This afternoon, while he
plays dominoes in town, she sews a dress for herself,
hums fragments of a Doris Day song from the movie
they saw last week at the Rialto, a voice to match
the open landscape outside her windows: cottonfields
ripening all the way to the creek, thunderheads dark
in the distance, and the sheen of late-afternoon light
against satin rippling toward her Singer’s needle.
Caliche Road Poems (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024)