Between Two Lines of a Stevens Poem
                   for Tsi-ge-yu/Beloved Sharp

A man and a woman
Are one.

A man and a woman,
you are one
of the two-spirit people.

You were kicked many times
by a cowboy boot
of rattlesnake dreams,
swift to recoil,
swift to strike.

You were capable, too,
of paranoia,
of feeling they might
tear you limb from limb,
your future becoming
the disembodied voices I hear
late one night
on a Tahlequah road.

You belong to a race, a history,
I should not be allowed to define.

The child you carried,
bled into loss,
your people's past
a prison sentence
where victims become
the accused.

One night we argue in Traci's kitchen.
Hate is part of the bargain, you say,
and you offer it as a gift.

A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

After Fifty Years

the flowers seem gifts
from a tourist's world,
the meadows so perfect
our minds risk marriage
to the world outside.

Grandpa asks for a map.
He tells us he's looking
for a place he remembers.
"Mauthausen," he says
when he finds it.

We arrive too late
for the last English tour,
so our guide speaks German
as she shows us the showers.

He watches her lips
like one who needs
to lose himself
in another's arms,

in a word here and there
he can't quite grasp
from a story he knows
he should never tell.

from War Stories, Pudding House Publications.
First published in REAL, Vol. 30.2 (Fall/Winter 2005)

Great Sports Moments

The '85
          Super Bowl

when Jim McMahan
          was quarterback

he's back to pass
          now two are out

I'm back to throw
          a big surprise

slow curve slips
          over the corner

three, what are we
          fighting for, don't

ask me I don't
          cheers from the stands

when I struck out
          young Jim McMahon

when I was twelve
          and he was ten

who gave a damn
          'bout Vietnam.

from War Stories, Pudding House Publications.
First published in The Melic Review.

A jellyfish takes
the water's pulse,
its slightest flicker
of some device.

As if to remember
the world's alive,
an octopus writes
its poems on glass.

No one forgets
the rarely seen sea horses,
Paolo and Francesca
in a girl's braided hair.

Trombones slide their tears
down long white sleeves to the sea.

Cider Press Review, Vol. 6 (2005)

Childhood

We ate cotton candy,
the koi fish rising
towards fragrant shadows.

Their colors blend,
scales of tessarae
at the end of sight.

I hold out my hands,
ask our father
for the plain white bread.

Our aging dog
at the end of his leash,
a car coming near.

We close our eyes.

David Linebarger, Borderlands, No. 25  (Fall/Winter 2005)

Birth

You're here one month early,
the scalpel visible
from where I sit
with my notebook of fears,
palimpsests of ghosts
on fingers of air.

The nurse blurs by
in a moment of white,
cuts through the air
of cool anesthesia.

I watch the first spank
with no response,
then another, and another,
please breathe, please breathe . . .

Outside the window
a precarious branch
that holds the world.

Tomorrow's bird comes.
Small mouths open
to swallow the sky.

From War Stories, Pudding House Publications.
First published in Potpourri
 

Across the Street

A peasant woman eats pesticides.
Mountains climb toward the clouds.

Anubis barks what birth desires:
starfish on a child's beach,
today's webbed fingers
in the mouth of night.

Helpless, we watch
birds open the sky.

This does not mean
all travelers look up
when the wind blows hard
always remember your eyes
your eyes they sometimes see.

Gravity bows the head toward earth.

An old man walking
bends his back into the cold.

David Linebarger, The Bitter Oleander 9.2 (2003)