Collaboration #15 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #15, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 12'' x 9"

Learning to Pray


I was never good at it, even as a kid,

kneeling on the tile floor, elbows

on the pieced quilt, hands

folded, a collapsible steeple.


When I shut my eyes, I didn’t see

God, but silver bullets and horses

cresting the horizon of hills.

What I was told to say to God


about my soul, my blessings

felt muzzled by an inside voice,

one that wanted a fast new sled,

more of my grandmother’s dimes.


I knew my mother prayed daily

that my grandmother’s brain tumor

would shrivel to a raisin.  The grape

enlarged to cluster and she died.


I never got the inside voice

to hush, stop interrupting, making,

grocery lists, quit asking how to miracles

and seeking explanations.


It kept up such a racket:  argue,

measure, translate, deny.

Compose, regret. Then my mother

died.  Voices lost their sound.


Now I know silence as a kind

of prayer, a voice asking nothing,

tired of words, tired of lifting up

and tying down, tired


of grammar, syntax, left brain.

Prayer finds its own release,

the hand and breath of God

calling forth a chord.


It’s no struggle

tuning this instrument

I’ve never held, playing

a score I’ve never seen,


the song untethered from its notes:

acorn, feather, moon.

Collaboration #14 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

You Never Know

The wolves rise with the moonrise.

As your breathing grows heavier,

more rhythmic, the wolves emerge

from their underbed lairs.  They watch

you sleep.  They watch you dream

the things which make you howl

in the forest of nonsense. They hear

that howling. The fine hairs in their

ears waft like anemone in the sea’s

undulations.  The wolves leap onto

the quilt, patchwork of plowed fabric,

no woods for dens or caves.  They lie

down around you like dogs, not friend,

not foe.  The wolves wait for your next

move. You watch a raven circle, needle

of black stitching a wound in memory’s

sky.  There is something familiar about

the bird, something in its cry that cuts

open your heart like the surgeon’s blade.

Still, you float unharmed on the white

river of sheets.  But, the wolves smell

blood.  They glide toward you, fluid

and feral.  The raven departs, flies

through a hole you hadn’t seen.  It

widens, opens like a porthole, the iris

of a blue eye, cold as Arctic air. You

step in:  left paw first, then the right.

                                  7/20/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #14, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 12'' x 9"

Collaboration #13 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #13, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 15.5''x11.5

After Reading the Note from my Cousin

It’s a card from Moab, sandstone

arch stretched, as if a rock

could be elastic, could extend

like an arm reaching across the table

for dinner rolls, that reaches Michigan

with her words from Utah.

She’s been to Palm Springs, she’s packed

the place in Phoenix, she’s got a room

rented, a ski pass, and a job

in Vail.  Now it’s just getting there,

she says.  Yes, just getting there, I think,

looking at the curly blue words

on white cardstock, the small i

and ampersands, the dashes and ellipses.

Here’s someone already taking flight.

But among the fragments bumping into

one another, an exclamation point or two,

a hot tub under a full moon, clouds

and cold and snow, and a final phrase,

time to move on & live in joy.

This is the cousin who once arrived

with a sack of granola, two pans,

and a vegetarian dog at my door in Kansas.

After fifteen years, I recognized her

only when she said my mother’s name.

She left her job five years ago

to travel with her mother

on that night train to the country

of lost names and landscapes,

conversation dropping like snipped threads.

And then my mother, just a year later,

surprising us all by departing on the same train

before we even knew she had a ticket,

the two of us left in a thicket

of brothers and my father tending

the bleeding heart that bloomed

the morning she did not see.

Just getting there, I hear.

This is the week of Thanksgiving,

tables calling us from our dark corners

to handshakes and ham, potatoes

the way Aunt Phyllis mashed them,

my mother’s molded jello salad,

our grandmother’s pumpkin pies.

Just getting there, she writes:

under the cold November moon,

snow obliterates the swirls of tire tracks

in the driveway, no one coming,

no one going.

Collaboration #12 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

 Flowers, Then

 In a plot beneath the dining room window
 my grandmother grew carnations, pink and white
 layers of lace smelling like the handkerchiefs she tucked
 discreetly up her cuff.  On Sunday morning my father
 might clip one for the buttonhole in his gray lapel.
 To the east side of the house, beneath my bedroom
 window, my mother grew roses, her favorites
 the peach of a Florida sunset, pink curl
 of a conch shell.  My grandmother fancied reds,
 bold and certain who they were, unlike her.
 I loved the yellows:  summer sun, no school,
 and my special Davy Crockett shorts.  On the bank
 outside the kitchen window, to the west, grew
 morning glories, blue of New Mexico sky, trumpets
 voluntary.  When they opened, a hillside symphony.
 When they closed, no one could pry their secret
 music from them.  To the north, where I roamed,
 blackberries, pokeberries, milkweed, ironweed.
 Gulley, full of poison ivy.  Rocks in the creek bed,
 grapevines to swing across.  Blossoms we trod on,
 some purple, some white, on our way wherever.

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #12, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10'' x 10.25''

Collaboration #11 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #11, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10'' x 10.25''

 What Can Happen

 Every poet writes a poem
 about writing a poem:  the first

 poem, weak in the knees
 and suffering acne; the last poem,

 confident in voice but unprepared
 to acknowledge it will have no successors.

 There’s the poem about why
 it is not a poem (which is usually

 the case) and the poem of longing
 for a poem, the one of looking

 for a poem, the one of discovering
 the poem in some unexpected

 lair:  on a flowchart,
 in a possum’s tail spoken by

 someone named Ashley.
 The poet might claim the poem

 has written itself, or sprung
 full-worded onto the page like Athena

 from the head of Zeus (never mind
 the woman he must have swallowed).

 A young poet writes of his honeymoon
 with the poem, how together 

 they will sail to the lost continent
 of love.  A survivor poet 

 knows that boat’s going down,
 listens, marvels at how

 words can take wing
 from a concocted thing,

 circle free, imagine their way
 to another fiction.

                                                     6/13/09

Collaboration #10 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

 Those Summer Mornings

 after the report card came home
 and bus 228 no longer stopped twice a day,
 the world woke canopied in translucent
 green, light dappling wet, spider-webbed
 grass, fog drowsing in the river valley

 like me, still hovering in half-awake
 beneath my grandmother’s double
 wedding ring quilt, loops of blue
 and yellow calico for my cars, roads
 that always circled back, stories plotted

 as wheels turned.  All was still, my parents
 gone to jobs, NanNan in the kitchen
 ironing to gospel hymns.  In my day a bike,
 a dog, a friend, the woods.  How could
 I know what loss already lodged among us?

                             5/21/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #10, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10'' x 10.25''

Collaboration #9 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #9, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10'' x 10.25''

The Mapmaker

lifts her pen from paper
and sees the shape
she has drawn
is the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan.  
Not wanting it
to be alone, she touches
down her pen again
outlining a mitten, open-faced
and ready for cold.
There will be a city somewhere
mid-mitten, so she drops
a yellow ball into the palm
calling it the state capital.
Now a highway would be nice,
though she’d rather have a river.
She dips a brush in blue
and a line flows south
below the border, curving
to miss the lake
she has not painted,
bending north a short distance
where she drops another yellow dot.
It’s windy there, she can tell.
She wonders what a voyager
on this river-road might see,
what is the season of this map.
Because, like the UP,
she is lonely, she decides
it is autumn, leaves swirling
on the cerulean roadway,
a hunter’s moon rising
over water.  This, she is sure,
must be cadmium red.  
She does not paint the man
in the moon but the stag
she hears crashing
through undergrowth,
caught in the sight
of the marksman’s
rifle, the bullet hole
blossoming onto parchment,  
alizarin crimson rippling the lake
she cannot paint,
her map collapsing
under the stag’s weight.

                          5/18/09

Collaboration #8 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

Swimmer

When I heard my mother’s voice
for the last time on the phone
I said I’d be there soon.
That’ll be nice, honey.  Bye.
Then she stopped smiling, stopped
eating, stopped talking about the rain.
Before I arrived she was already swimming
the channel of dreams toward that beautiful shore,
awash in the waves of a soft blue blanket,
the deep breaths of her last laps
audible in the room.

As a kid, I remember watching her
at Daytona Beach, out beyond
the breakers where my father and I rode
the canvas raft, swimming up, then back,
white bathing cap bobbing like a gull
on the blue.  I never feared for myself,
dumped under by the churn, rising
with a mouthful of crushed shell,
sputtering to breathe, but I was anxious
that my mother swam too far out, too far away,
that the current was too strong,
that she could not swim back.
Her stroke was sure, steady, unfaltering.
Even though her father drowned,
she loved her buoyancy in the ocean.
She did not believe in evolution.
I believe she retained fins.

When I saw the surf swelling,
thunderclouds rumbling in, I called
to her as she stroked back and forth,
back and forth.  She never heard my voice.
She heard the hymn of the waves, rejoiced
as they rose beneath her like a final
heartbeat, lifting her on their feathery curl.
Mother, I called, as she dipped
out of sight, Mother, swim back.

 4/24/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #8, 2009, mixed media on wc paper, 15.5''x11.5'' 

Collaboration #7 Guillermo Delgado’s image, Anita Skeen responded

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #7, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10 x 10.25 inches

                    After

                    Everything waits
                    and is still.
                    Slowly
                    things begin to shift:
                    blue lengthens,
                    green leans into the frame.
                    Vapors cool.
                    You sense a word
                    arriving. 

                    Lines unwind,
                    go vernacular, colors
                    you never noticed
                    petition the vocabulary.
                    In and out, over
                    and back your eye
                    passes.  Nothing
                    is crowded.
                    There is space
                    for it all.

                    And then,
                    rain.

                                    4/16/09

Collaboration #6 Anita Skeen wrote, Guillermo Delgado responded

            New Balance

            These are the shoes I bought
            my mother for comfort and support
            when she and my father hiked
            the sidewalks at Water's Edge,
            their morning ritual.

            I wished her to go
            willingly.

            These are the shoes I tied
            for her, perched on
            the Lone Star quilt of her bed,
            her eyesight too poor,
            her back too stiff.

            These are the shoes
            I could not give away,
            our feet the same size (7N),
            our paths different:
            hers to the Baptist Church,
            mine toward the studio.

            This morning I tuck my foot
            into the cradle of leather
            rocked by her step, my foot
            a square peg in a round hole,
            my toes bound.  I jerk the laces
            for a tight fit, bring strings
            to a knot.

            I do not fit
            her impression.

            The day strides on.
            I step into it
            in my mother's shoes:

            along the gravel road,
            over flagstone, up the grassy
            bank, kicking through dust,
            squealing on tile,
            lingering beneath stars.

            By nightfall, we're cozy,
            my feet and my mother's shoes.
            We keep walking, walking.

                            3/27/09

Guillermo Delgado's Untitled #6, 2009, mixed media on wood, 10 x 10.25 inches