Las Mañanitas
They patrol the sidewalk
in front of Balboa Lumber.
Jose, Raul, Arturo.
Stained jeans and overalls reflected
in the window of Surf Cities Glass.
Carlos, Luis, Alejandro.
Plaid shirts, limp T-shirts, scuffed shoes.
Willingness to shovel, pour concrete.
Ruben, Joaquin, Miguel.
Hoe, pick, trim, rake, hammer,
mow, harvest, move, carry, lift.
Eduardo, Jesus, Angel.
They rouse themselves in the chill
of dawn. Contractors start early.
Enrique, Juan, Antonio.
Wages go to El Castaňo,
Chacala, San Luis Ixcan.
Horacio, Pedro, Manuel,
to unmapped dusty towns, to homes
they remember behind their eyelids.
Diego, Javier, Andreas.
By 11 o’clock no more trucks slow down.
No men lean out, no more jobs are offered.
Rodrigo, Gabriel, Ricardo, Esteban.
Gravity
Gravity is not a friend of cut and fill,
soil will slide and sand will slip. The wall
in the mossy corner of the back yard
slumps more each passing year.
A rat shinnies the pole to the bird feeder.
Last summer, we found a rattlesnake
while trimming the honeysuckle
that flings orange fire over the garden wall.
Deep in the pantry, a moth flutters
near the flour, settles into a box of saltines,
leaving larvae that carve their way into flour,
polenta, oatmeal, and four kinds of rice.
Yesterday evening, as the sky dwindled
from tangerine to violet,
a bobcat jumped the wall into the garden,
pausing to sharpen his claws.
From the West Coast
I slept beneath thin summer blankets,
concentric mornings gone,
heard the sound of waves
leapfrog beach and embankment
to squeeze through the lattice
of my sleeping porch,
curl circuitously into my sleep,
a reveille soft, liquid, ascending.
Morning waves swim translucent.
Emerald and aquamarine,
they sometimes hold a glimpse
of fishy shadow crystallized inside.
Ocean afternoon glistens bright,
impenetrable. It crashes rocks
on Cheney’s Point. Relentless
foamy fingers seize soda cans,
yank down sandcastles,
obliterate prints of passers-by.
I sit alone on sandgrit steps
and watch the waterbrooms
sweep distant the day that was,
one after another after another.
Out of the Scanner and into the Fire
One thing leads to the CAT scan,
to which we can give credence
or keep silent, while science rushes in
and submits us to the MRI.
A body harbors a journey
of a thousand miles, and bad news
travels like a red sky at morning.
The road to hell is paved
not with ignorance, but with blood,
and we are cowards, all.
Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. Her published books are Fugitive Pigments, What’s Left Over, Embers on the Stairs, Selected Poems, and Flour, Water, Salt. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, sentimentalism, and sauerkraut.
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