Learning the Words
In my heart there is a song
that will die in a hundred places
On Summit Street in Iowa City
when I rolled down and locked
the door to my life jammed
in a mobile box
In Iowa where your eyelashes
freeze to each other and the secret
is in the pizza the song is green
along the Dubuque bluffs
in Paris in the October rain
The Place Dauphine’s sweetness
not yet part of a story of deceit
sending me into endless walks
across San Francisco the Avenue Hotel
its hungry blind inhabitants
singing their own mad songs
Dead in Spain the village barber
dressed for a fiesta hiding beneath
the floorboards the Communist father
and son still hunting deer
hunted by fascists
in the limestone mountains
Cold May Montana song turned
To humid Topeka song along a confused
Interstate where my father whispered
Come home come home
In a Mendocino loft I sang the song
of rowing the boat of love a lesbian muse
from Detroit holding the rudder
The moon bothers me into remembering
inside my New Mexican song where I sleep
between the woods and the mountains
where my song will also lose its body
You will find yours just the same
RS 2010