Meditation on the Iris.

Through jade, the sun becomes
a prism of greens, some vivid
like absinthe, some blotched
like leaves awaiting autumn.

Lao Tzu says that words can never
convey the beauty of a tree;
to understand it, you must see it
with your own eyes.

- He makes me lie down
in green pastures
leads me beside still waters -
…and what about green tea?

the way it sparkles in my cup
as its warmth comes up to
touch my lips. My soul
is restored.

And this blade of grass I hold
between my fingers, so
delicate to touch, a phantom
limb of the whole earth.

Every thought is monochrome
or covered in mint,
endless and everywhere,
is the color of your eyes.

DQ 08/31/08

June 9th

I watched the narrow hallway
come to an end where the desk stood.
I was prepared: lessons were fresh,
I had learned from failures, felt sorrow,
and faced sickness. I had even loved.

I heard a woman struggle with pain.

I sat on the black chair across the desk.
This was my moment for honesty.
Time to be assertive, answer quickly,
impress, succeed, and move on.
…and why not? I earned it.

I heard a woman shout with pain.

He walked to the desk, sat on the big chair
across from me, and asked a question
I had never heard before.
I froze, forgot everything I knew.
No answer…couldn’t even recall my name.

A woman released a cry of pain, then grunted
three times as if to gather strength.

Someone hit me.
I cry. I cry. I cry.
I am being handed to her.
She smiles and for the first time,
holds me to her breast.

DQ 08/19/08

Cygnus

She woke me in a different room. Walls
painted red, small circles of pearlized light
reflected by strands of shells.
We said nothing. I saw her face for a moment, before

all seams of the universe neatly
converged between her thighs. Sweet succubus
pheromones crossing the silence in
kaleidoscopes of jasmine and lavender.

Zeus once turned into a swan to love a woman
and changed the fate of Troy.
Are there forces that use dreams
to satisfy their thirst for love, their need for company…

or is it maybe our needs that
wills them through the darkened conduit?
Perhaps my mother knew.
For now, back in my room, there is only the early morning scent
of jasmine and lavender still stirring inside me.


DQ 08/18/08

Coins

The Cadillac driver
looks away and cringes.

Her body hung with icicles
like a slant roof
dripping freezing water
in the north pole.

Even so, she fights the solid flesh
turns to the radio, and thinks:
Let’s not make eye contact.
A few more steps he’ll go away.
Maybe the next guy
can help the homeless drunk.

The same look
again and again
behind every windshield.

They turn aside, check the dashboard gauges,
re-check the radio the station
and go on driving stiff,
without making eye contact.
Maybe the next guy…
each one is thinking.

They treat me as a disease.

What have I done, except
make a bet with my son
that I can give away a jar
of coins in half an hour.

All they have to do is take a handful.
Maybe the next guy…

Tomorrow my son will have twice as much
of the left-overs.

DQ
8/17/08

DQs Book

ALCHETRY

The Other Wish

Not the one shaped
like a dust covered footprint.

Not the one folded back,
hem of the garment I call body.

Not the one
that repeats itself with breath.

This is the other wish.

One kiss.

DQ 02/28/08

Statue of a Lion at the New York Library

There are pigeon droppings
on my mane, but it doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters when you are
encased in stone. A day
or a thousand years are the same.

I cannot hear the city,
only the everlasting sound
of the ocean trapped in a hollow conch.

Before my fur was rock
it was the orange of chaos.
My gold eye, the fate
of wilder beasts, and my tongue
a sponge for lapping blood.

It is over, our time together.
Photographs dismembered,
plates broken like gazelles.

Another pigeon lands on my head.
I prefer this.
I prefer this to the steel bars
of your jealousy, and your fear
of being struck by fate.

DQ 11/16/07

The Crucifixion

Had I known where it led
I would have chosen a different
path. Not that I had a choice

to have my arms secured
to opposite sides of my chest
by nails, or feet immobilized

to a wooden plank by another,
while my head was free to turn
to either side. My wife on one.

You on the other. My mother
kneeling in front, taking pictures
of all us singing happily around

the birthday cake. Someone said:
“There is your mother”
I suppose the spear is next.

DQ 11/9/07

Time Travel

The past is all around us.
It travels from earth, outwards
to space in a ripple.

Do you remember yesterday
when you laughed at my joke?
Look at your laughter, making

its way past the moon now.
And the summer when your
mother died? Look there…

-those are your sobs-
They are almost out
of the sun’s reach by now.

And there, by that star.
Those are your
first cries as a newborn.

I looked beyond that thinking
I’d find God, but all I saw
was your mother’s laughter.

DQ 10/29/07

The Lazarus Journey

“And he came forth, feet and hands bound
with bands, and face covered in cloth.”

1. In hospice rooms, they weep
before they cross the threshold.

2. At the pound, all dogs on death
row have streaks under their eyes.

3. In my garden, flower buds
sprout with little droplets of dew.

4. In birthing rooms,
newborns cry at birth.

What are tears
if not proof that

this circle of life thing is
really lonely on the other side.

DQ 10/21/07

Equestrian Women

I am not exactly sure when
they traded places.
The supplanter, the displaced,
the daughters of Isaac.
It happened sometime before
the alarm clock rang. Sometime
between the tap on the shoulder
and the straddle of the hip.

There is usually a cautionary word
between one runner and the next
to warn about the exchange of the baton.

But not this time. There was no warning,
no approaching footsteps by one,
no reaching back by the other.
No halt of the race to exchange jockeys.

It was you that bounced
on my hips in the darkness
but someone else’s name that I called out.

DQ 10/19/07

When Knees Touch

Before making contact,
the invisible lightning arc sizzles
across inches.

And Jesus said, "Who touched me?"

When have you felt ether
fall from you like reflex?

Out of your skin
and into the flesh and space of another
like gravity

bound at each end by a string
with fish hooks politely forcing
a minimum distance

crackling and white
the baited touch of a woman’s skin

and after that, the stare of Eve
and after that, the sweet smell of apple
and after that, the fate of all my fathers.

DQ 10/11/07

Untitled

That afternoon the wind
turned trees to bone,
cut my face with leaves.
Every butterfly became a sail

and I became a prophet,
predicting it would topple
a dream house built from clouds.
Butterflies have returned since.

My face has healed.
The wind replaced the space
my body filled, and pushed
my half the sky along with yours.

DQ 10/07/07

Revisiting Ravens

“Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering fearing.
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before”
- Edgar Allan Poe -

No longer silent, ravens
chase a piece of bread
on the sand, black on white
like octaves on the keyboard.

In my yard, ants scatter
at the mist of bug spray,
mimicking ravens fleeing
from a thrown rock.

An ink blot splattered
on a letter tossed aside.
A raven lying on the road
victim of a passing car.

At the coffee shop, a woman
points at the menu flaunting
a diamond surrounded by onyx stones,
a small raven’s nest on her finger.

I remember the first time
we made love on January 29th
a raven, colored like dreams,
landed on the hotel’s window.

I have never seen a better metaphor.

The Last time I Cross-Dressed

My mother sewed three makeshift
worm shaped duffle bags out of a sail’s
canvas the day after three men in
uniform walked away from the front door
of the old Spanish house in Havana
my family owned for over a century.
They came on the very night my father
dreamt they would. They carried our permit
to leave the country. They said we were scum,
said we betrayed “Fidel” and the revolution.

A week later my parents scrambled
to buy coats in the black market because
there are no department stores or winter in Cuba,
and Madrid (or any exile for that matter)
is always cold during winter.
All they could find that would fit
a six year old boy was the coat
of a ten year old Russian girl
who died in Havana as a result
of mosquito induced meningitis.

A month later, I walked through the airport
wearing an oversized dead girl’s coat
with big square buttons, and carried
my belongings in a worm shaped canvas bag
branded with a blue partial race number on one side.
They confiscated my mother’s
wedding ring, and said that a six year old
boy dressed as a dead ten year old Russian
girl from the Moscow sailing team,
should not be traveling wearing
his grandfather’s gold crucifix.

That was the last time I cross-dressed
and also the last time I filled a sail
with something else other than wind.

DQ 7/20/07

Rarely used (or failed) poetry forms

1. Falsonneta
The Falsonneta consists of anything else other than three quatrains and a couplet. The usual rhyme scheme is a-a-a-a, a-a-a-a, a-a-a-a, a-a and recited in an artificially high voice such as a shriek. In addition, Falsonnetas are written in amoebic pentameter, meaning that there are mostly 10 small single cell syllables per line, and that every other single cell syllable naturally divides.

2. Pantouhmmm…
The pantouhmmm… is composed of a series of quatrains whose lines are forgotten once spoken; the second and fourth lines of each stanza cannot be repeated as the first and third lines have been forgotten by this point.
Since there is no real structure to this form, this pattern continues for any number of stanzas, similar to a political address.

3. Balladiarrhetic
A balladiarrhetic is told or written in the form of a story, usually composed in a hurry in a public restroom. Any story form may be told as a balladiarrhetic, such as historical accounts of how pants were stained or rhetoric for ineffective pheromones. It usually has foreshortened, alternating four stress lines and simple repeating colic accents, often with a refrain.

4. Prosethetic
Prosethetic writing is usually adopted for the description of non-facts or the discussion of fake events incorporated in free flowing speech. Thus, it may be used for corporate newsletters, political speeches, tele-evangelists, love letters, debtor's notes, or famous quotes. This form is often erroneously credited to the signing of casts, or to the unusual fetish of writing free-flowing poetry on fake limbs or strap-ons.


DQ 7/28/7

Three Rings

For five years I filled a light green
three ring binder with poems about you.
Each sheet chronologically archived
and dressed in clear plastic covers
to avoid the paper from being stained,
or damaged, or wounded by the bite
of the three hole punching machine.
Poems describing stares, kisses,
and the taste of sweat. An anthology
of lovemaking told in color and scents.
Poems about your hair and your breasts
and your thighs and how each of them
felt on my skin. Poems about fire and
dark nights filled with moon and stars.
It took five minutes on a night like that
to set the light green binder on fire.
Only the metal rings remained,
all three equally black and welded shut
small symbols of dead lovers moving on.

DQ 7/18/07

The Sky is Dark Orange

The sky is dark orange,
the grass is red violet.
I walk my bicycle
with square wheels.

Blood is blue green,
my skin is light blue.
I stand awake
on my bed all day.

Oranges are dark blue.
Blueberries are yellow orange.
I have forgotten you
and I no longer love you.

DQ 7/12/7

Prayers

The waters of Biscayne Bay turn darker blue
with every inch of sea displaced by shoulder
with every stroke of paddle dug deep into the wave,
each breath breathing the pride of ancient sailors
who charged to sea by mere wonder of what
lies beyond the threshold where the water falls to the abyss.
A quest of man and 14 feet of durable plastic that will end
right back where it started, on the roof rack of the old jeep
five blocks away from home right before dinner.
But for now there are hours between dinner and horizon,
there is distance between horizon and dream, and there is me
between the dream and the reality of the jeep’s roof rack.
For now there is no asphalt, no work, no money
or street lights, no red x pin-pointing my location.
For now there is only motion of arm and wave
only the traveler’s pleasure of an unknown destination
only effort and sweat, only one breath with every stroke,
chest rising and falling like the tide and the rain
and the woman giving birth, and the meditation of the Buddha.
For now, there is a man canonized without a rosary or nails
a visionary saint without papal decree or Vatican council,
a threshold seeker displacing water and salt by shoulder,
sitting in a 14 foot cathedral made of durable plastic.
For now there is me in awe before the teal vastness of god
a small moon on the liquid ring of a distant planet.

Red Giant

They say in future eons the sun
will enter its red giant phase as
hydrogen fuel in its core is depleted.

They say the sun will swell
large enough to overcome
the orbits of all the inner planets.

Earth's water will boil and
everyone will call god’s name
before being consumed by fire.

I remember you came like that
one night in September,
and it seems to me that

dying while screaming engulfed
in the luminous swell of the fire’s
combustion won’t be so bad.

DQ 7/10/07