We don’t have to hate
all people
at all times.

Maureen is a funny woman.
She takes my taxi just to
have an audience.
She tends to talk on and on.

She has no friends,
just a cat
who drools.
She has no physical coordination
at all
and is the butt of
everybody’s jokes
even her
own.
It has been that way
since she was a child.
Now she’s a 41-year-old nurse
who can make fun of
herself,

which is something even most
saints can’t do.

Passion Contents

She walks across a desert on fire
head held high in the flames
like homicidal poppies

advancing over the mesa, over the milkweed
and the cacti boiling sap.
Smoke cancers the sky

like a hell-cloud inhaling: smell
the burning hair of the cholla                         
and the down of the owl’s clover, see that death

is indigenous, feel the heat  
of the melting anemone, the snapdragon’s hope,
the broomrape’s pride and the wind

whipping in the scorpion weed…
The desert burns like the fields of Heidagger
melting the sands to mirror

but she crosses it, my brave Mexican girl,
collecting larkspur
and blazing stars.

Wild Transitions Contents