Postcard from Mexico
          For Ameen Alwan  

Grant me asylum-a cove within the mind
that sent the postcard-and I'll pile rocks and shells
to mark the place so we don't lose it. Your handwriting,
broken sticks across the paper, gives me
awkward choices: Look at this zoomorphic buzzard-jar
from the National Museum-is its leer a furtive Pilgrim's turkey
or that damned drunk writing teacher's soul?
                                                                          After I read it
I tossed it on the Honda's dashboard; as I was driving home
it rose and filled the window with an eerie, green insistence.
I had to hit the brakes, grit my teeth and watch headlights swerve
around and past me, then remove it. What wizardry is this?

When we're together we talk about money
and the kids in your poetry class and the articles I've been writing
and you and your wife argue-crisp retorts that sound like crackers snapping.
Money infiltrates every new connection. Yesterday I replaced a bald
front tire with an odd-sized spare and today reversed them
-the front end shimmied so bad my wife couldn't drive to work.
"And I don't know when I can afford a new set
or pay the house insurance, or Penney's--and what about Christmas?"
At night she escapes into novels (my own abandoned in mid-sentence
years ago)....
                      The pre-historic buzzard winks
and a voice I attribute to you veers through the years
between us and our years together there in Mexico.
I push our Anglo wives aside, swirl past their outstretched fingers
into a carnival of groping voices, clamoring hands; the Chapultepec trolley
hurtled us past Aztec ruins and women warming their hands
over little lumps of glistening charcoal. Mámacita! the jar-faced
postcard winks. I pull myself back to the table and fireplace
-firm ground from which to watch. It is not the drunken teacher's soul,
but his id--our id. Dreams take us back.