Spearmint twist

There was a time upon which

we once trusted God’s grace

and Abraham Lincoln’s face.

Stamped on the front side

of pennies hundreds of billions

of times, in bright copper

alloyed with zinc until

three grams of copper

was worth more than a cent.

Now they are a thin copper

plating over 97.5 percent zinc.

Like the gilded toilets and sinks

that adorn the president’s

residence in Florida and

Manhattan. He loves the glitter

believes that it hides

the dank sewage pumped

from the sump to the gutter

of his diseased mind.

One can find gold-plated

commemorative coins

with a raised clenched fist

and the slogan fight fight fight

on the reverse side of the coin.

Available on Etsy for $21.99

plus shipping. Discounted soon

to six dollars and sixty-six cents.

I’ve still got a jar full of pennies

on my desk, some are real copper

the brightest but lightest ones

are ersatz. Perhaps some day

they could be melted and reformed

into something useful.

Like the swords into plowshares

and spears into pruning hooks

as the prophet Isaiah foretold.

On the path

The sleepy mountain

awakes, sheds her veil

as the sun shreds

her midnight chemise

and the verdant chaparral

cloaking her shoulders

fills with the morning

twitters and trills

of courting birdsongs.

There are rivals to send

on the wing to other perches,

other sheltering bushes.

Foxes, bobcats, and hawks

to avoid, nests to construct,

the season’s urgency to begin.

My toe catches the root

of a madrone pitching me

towards the naked rocks

of the trail, but I grab

the skin-smooth red branch

of its sister and thank her.

The birds ignore me. Yes!

Great-tailed grackles

 Do great-tailed grackles

have a Spanish accent?

The hundreds perched

in the ficus trees along

the Alameda de Santa Lucia

Near the bus station

In Antigua, Guatemala

Shout, Si, si, ¿Nos oyes?

But when we fly up

to Marfa, Texas in April,

we sing like Willie Nelson, with

a cowboy twang and crackle.

All moments are lost, all moments are found

First there was the Word

and the word was Bang!

And what was dark

and absent became light.

An infinite nothingness

Instantly becoming an

Infinite everythingness.

As it ever was and ever

shall be. As far as we know.

Every particle is simultaneously

a wave. An ephemeral instant

that switches from one to the other

as soon as you look at it.

Or when God rolls over when

the cat jumps up on the bed.

It is said that the human brain

is the most complex structure

in the known universe,

eighty-six billion neurons

with more than a hundred trillion

points of connection.

But before all that, before poetry,

music, or rocket science. Before

Genghis Khan or Shakespeare

or I love Lucy stuffing bon bons

into her mouth when she can’t

keep up with the conveyor belt,

was the first mass extinction,

the Great Oxygenation Event,

when too much oxygen killed off

most of the life on this planet.

An ice encased globe with no

surface water. Snowball Earth.

Then came the Cambrian Explosion,

when complex multi-cellular life evolved

and then the advent of the so-called

Big Five Mass Extinctions:

Late Ordovician, Late Devonian,

Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic

and the one we talk about most,

the Cretaceous-Paleocene,

when the Chixulub impactor

smacked into the Yucatan

and killed off the dinosaurs.

(Except for the ones

ancestral to birds).

Moments captured in stone

and chromosomes. We still have

the same basic anatomical plan

for bones as fish and salamanders.

Now, in what some call the Anthropocene,

the Age of Humans, we've made moments

that will live forever in the electromagnetic

energy flowing out into the cosmos.

All the curses and prayers,

Rocky and Bullwinkle. Howdy Doody,

Ghandi and Elvis. Rush Limbaugh,

Obama, Kennedy, Cronkite.

Commercials for toilet paper

and lizards selling auto insurance.

Beatles and Beethoven. Ricky telling

Lucy, you got some ’splaing to do.

Epiphany

Tuesday,
the 6th of January

was the first day

of Epiphany, also known

as Three Kings Day;

the day when the Magi,

the three kings from afar,

following the star from the East,

arrived in Bethlehem.

The citizens of Antigua

celebrated with big

booming bombas

and strings of firecrackers.

No laser-guided bombs,

No wannabe king lusting

for oil and dominion.

Some believe that the

explosions get God’s

attention. Does he hear

the bombs of war as well?

I trust that he does,

It is some of us

who seem to be deaf.

A giant 3D star of glass

and metal that glows

blue through the night

rests in the plaza

in front of this posada

that belongs to a convent.

Smoky air from some

distant fire veils the volcanos

that tower above the city.

The bangs that echo

in the stone paved streets

rhyme in my mind with

the sound of the guns

when death squads trained

by the United States

killed tens of thousands

of people in the thirty

years of civil war.

On Thursday, the eighth

of January, the smoke

was gone and the plaza

was warm and sunny.

I saw a woman walking

a cat on a leash.

He sniffed at trees

and the straggly grass.

I asked the woman

if Icould take a photo

of her and her cat.

Yes, of course she replied

and she introduced herself,

Maria, and her cat, Nala.

I said Mucho gusto,

pleased to meet you.

Then we talked about cats

and the English tutoring

program at the posada

that I was participating in.

Food, politics, both local

and global, family.

The sun was not the sole

source of the warmth.

Her eleven year old son, Tony,

took the cat to his favorite

trees, avoiding the ones with

strings of festive lights.

Tony, who was wearing

a Mexican soccer uniform

and a red cape grew restless.

Maria said he has ADHD,

but has finally found a school

that treats him kindly.

Her cousin entered the park

leading her blind grandmother.

They live nearby as well.

Introductions were made

then we said we would

watch for each other

on another day and if I return

next December, she would

cook chile rellenos for me.

Hasta la vista, Maria, Tony

and Nala the cat on a leash.