Inner Space

a guide aims her flashlight
at the borehole drilled
half a century before

the build of I-35, below
ground it’s twenty degrees cooler
than the blazing temps out there

the cavern where my Texan mate
takes me to find relief from heat, beneath
a canopy of soda straw stalactites

the Permian floodwater
maze that claimed the lives
of Ice Age species, mammoth

armadillo and sabre-toothed cat,
swamped in quicksand,
a pyramid of bat guano piled high

on the grotto floor, past the talus
cone of bone sink I spot
a crumbling tusk

wall murals of camel and horse
depict a different history
than the one I knew

growing up, Cabazon dinos
the novelty architectures of my youth
that call me home,

rising over desert hills,
the concrete Apatosaurus
reclaimed by Creationists

selling toy replicas their labels
warn, “The fossil record does
not support evolution."

Blotter

San Marcos PD send someone
out to follow up after I file the report,
the police dick visits Hillside Ranch

having already talked to the neighbors
across the breezeway about the email
I got at work – Say another word

about our flag and we’ll take you down.

Detective Duwayne Poorboy deduces
simple country boys getting their degrees from
Texas State couldn’t make up such a thing,

No matter how many white guys you fuck,
you’ll never be anything but a worthless gook.

a gut check tells him their mamas
taught ‘em right from wrong and for
the record, the confederate flag stands

for something else to people from these parts –
a source of regional pride he beams –
not unlike the hanging

of a soccer pennant for a favorite team,
or displaying a banner from China he says
scanning the living space for clues

to my background, but I was born here

Go back to where you came from!

when I tell my closest friend who
shuddered that time she climbed
the stairs to my walk-up,

she doesn’t hesitate to send
her cousins around – Black
law enforcement officers

from the Austin PD appear
to intimidate the antagonizers

MANASA SAROVAR / (MIND LAKE)

one hour into a 10-mile hike around
White Rock Lake, Lama Dorje turns
around to his slowest disciples and says,
Do not feel bad to go at your own speed.
The master picks up his stride so that
all we see retreating into the distance
is a red speck flanked by his closest
associates – a gaggle of golden-haired
female patrons – we must choose what
to cultivate; I steel myself to rise
to the challenge when you suggest
we slow down instead to keep step
alongside Lama’s older pupil
with the foot injury; we are
none of us social thinking
about circumambulation,
the pilgrimage past Winfrey Point,
Flagpole Hill, the Pump Station,
to each his own
relationship to the sacred
Manasa Sarovar,
Mapam Yumco
Lake Manas
this inland sea
where buffalo once
drifted encircled now by
million-dollar homes which wink
at us at dusk upon completion
of our death march, we go off
to separate vehicles, no sign of the lama

vernal pool

scattered across the pink batholith monadnock,
weather pits sprout Texas bluestem, live oak,
miniature soil islands independent ecologies
all of their own – 425 feet above ground
opening out over the Llano Uplift,
we scale Enchanted Rock on New Year’s Day
to get to highest ground,
six months since our last move
and still strangers to Texas Hill Country,
I inspect a water-filled depression
remembering the tide pools of Mora Beach,
when you point out the one-inch invertebrates
swimming upside down just under the surface,
the fabled fairy shrimp
whose eggs survive even in drought,
to be revived in salt water or when rain returns
to the granite shelter, evidence of animal
existence on a barren rock,
adapting to a new habitat over millenia,
we descend the dome to feast w/ friends
a supper of black-eyed peas

a horse is a horse (of course of course)

my father fills my ear with Confucian
proverbs all throughout my girlhood
each blade of grass has its drop of dew
a tree without roots is rootless, strange
koans I applied myself to understanding
even when the message was not quite
right: the first Noble Truth is where
I parked myself - suffering more profound
then joy - I saw him run that horse
until it broke down beneath him,
not grasping the exchange,
ride a horse to find your horse
the actual adage offering a mule
for a horse, a donkey for a mare,
the trade in and trading up
for a higher vehicle