| James Cervantes USA
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How Dreams Resolve I am holding the hand of a hideously androgynous man and woman who will not make up his or her mind and return to being the brown-haired woman on the escalator who turned and touched my shoulder one second longer than a stranger should, transmitting to me on the gliding upward moving stairs the push, resistance, warmth and acceptance of her naked body, though she was stylishly dressed in a brown tweed suit the living color of her hair, a dark tone against which her paleness flashed at the very moment her braids untwined, floating us off the escalator mid-floor onto the dirt of our nest with a pleasant thump, her buttocks and thighs picking up the grit but with no objection from me. - The Laurel Review, V. 37, No.1, Winter, 2003 from Mr. Bondo's Unshared Life * How special it is to live in a special place, one which is photographed by tourists and included in packaged tours. Mr. Bondo wishes he lived in such a place. Sitting on his somewhat run-down porch, he'd be the envy of those shaking their heads from a distance - that shake which means "How lucky! I wish that was me," and their list of bad choices as their eyes pan above Mr. Bondo to staggering heights of granite rising from his heavily wooded yard. Mr. Bondo would leave his almost-antique chair and calmly disappear into the forest to surprise himself with some newly-found den, hardly hearing the motors anymore and taking unto himself the tang of pine and juniper, the soft and musky forest floor, the afternoon of woods and pleasant footfall. Mr. Bondo's photos of his special place would be like those the tourists take, and in which he provides a human scale. * The Law of Remarkable Resemblance was born this good day, when Mr. Bondo decided the world does not run on wires, or waves, or particles. It runs, instead, on chains of tiny mirrors that face each other like half-opened wings. Excited resemblance finds itself over and over in the face of each mirror and spreads the word to its reflections. They might, Bondo mused, be influenced by an observer, so he looks over the shoulder of a resemblance and is instantly included. - The Boston Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, April/May, 2001 from Poems For Friends at Midwinter 1 . You tell me your walls are bare because landscapes intrude, that they stay flat and will not open up like the view from your kitchen window: a touch of garden, an elm, a rise in the land, a yellow horizon, the awning of night. You say portraits are like strangers in the house, yet you wrote from St. Petersburg that Katya wore a dress of orange chiffon with thin spaghetti straps, that her clothes would have looked provocative on other women but she just seemed merely more fragile in them. You felt that if you blew on an old woman's curtains they would dissolve into fragments. And you noticed how barren the flats were of any possessions, then cast your sight on unwaxed, wooden floors. Tell me again how you respect empty space you will never own. Look again, and tell me why it moves with you. 2. I have heard, in great detail, of your father gunned down before you. Suburban yards tend to look the same, so I see his blood spilling on your front lawn, then remember it is gravel mindful of borders and tree-wells. And so I see a gardender dutifully raking graceful swirls, turning blood-stained pebbles inward, desert dew like varnish on signatures of rust. The driveway and the path to your door look as if drawn, and maybe it is stick-figures you see after so many years, with Pow! Ka-pow! contained in a jagged balloon next to a muzzle. All I know is a thin, brief recital of a father's death, three or four sentences in years of talk during our breaks, and I hear them when your voice goes flat telling of a neighbor's fight or a student's outburst in class. It is all behind you when we smoke and talk, behind you like strong wind that sways us in the middle of some laugh. - Gargoyle, #45, 2002
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