Status Updates From The Tijuana Book of the Dead

It's
the sunlight
so rich you could lift it
in a tin cup--fill it with sky--take a swallow
of glowing and sing.

6.
Winter wheat
stalks bent: red
bows fiddle sky.

7.
Crows
on that telephone line: restless necklace black laughing
pearls.

8.
Magpie
pecking a snowbank:
poemless page &
spilled inkwell.

Their moon peeled a panicked eye, goggled
blind as they ran. Headlights froze them, twin moonbeams
ran them down, tufts of their dreams tangled in thickets
of border tumbleweeds.

'The first poem I read
was the ragged V scrawled
in a brown sky by gulls
escaping the garbage dump at sunset
cutting under clouds
over the apartment blocks
going to a sea I knew
was there across the city
but never saw.

'Soy un hombre sincero
De donde mueren las palmas
Mi infancia fue
Un jardin de fuego.
Y ¿Tú? ¿Qué
Supiste de mi?
Antes de tocarte la cara
La perdi.'

'15.
Pickup trucks in snowstorms
amass gradual loads of white
haul winter 99 miles.

16.
Beau Jocque
and the Zydeco High Rollers
Caifanes
Wall of Voodoo
Concrete Blonde
Café Tacuba
Catherine Wheel
Love and Rockets
Maldita Vecindad
Lila Downs Tonantzin'

'Ya fue escrito
Que moriré

Mi vida pasará
como venadito

Por estas montañas
Tan ajenas

Pero antes
De dejarte

Quiero escribirte
verso pequenos

Poemas
En la nieve

Que te dirán adios
Cuando salga el sol'

'Tù
ahora
tan delgada en mi memoria
como estas telarañas
de tinta.

...listen
carnales listen
to the hymn of it, the lie of it, the
prayer of it, the voices
singing our names: listen
it's our story, it's our song,
you've got to hear it—
listen.