On the streets of Mérida, beggars and vendors
of shirts and hammocks and panama hats.
We perfect our no. But there's always something
we can't help saying yes to: I want to join
...
All seeing is joy
when it is simply seeing.
It is from the mind
that the trouble comes.
...
If I, as I drive the Caravan
with its nagging blister of rust
on the driver's side door
home from the office on the day
...
It made me feel small, like a husband,
and I never married, never owned
a table worth turning over, china
worth shattering, linen worth blood
...
In one of the open-air restaurants
along the beach at Progreso
three shy pretty Indian girls
danced for us with trays bottles
glasses balanced on their heads
...
Hang him from a tree he hasn't hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one's been flung from yet.
Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet's nest he's not gone running, stung, from yet.
...
we find it
and photograph it
bury it out of sight
and try to sleep with it
...
A crackpot gringo in Guatemala told me:
when the pilots of the suicide planes began
their dives down at the ships they were already dead.
Coming from him, a smug didactic metaphor.
...
There's never been a poet where I live,
but I grew up in the shade of Whitman's name:
born in West Hills—our hills—he would have walked
our paths along the crest. I walked Whitman Road,
...