In a blue painted pool sponsored by Corona and Sol, it's hard to see
the larger ocean.
Picture a lonely dolphin waiting to get paid, his forced smile,
his blow-hole opening
for coins.
(They call him Chuy, a Mexican nickname for Jesus.)
He takes his fish lazily from the trainer; and you know
if he could walk backwards from here to the sea, he would.
We are his 2:30.

Standing in life vests,
all grouped in the shallow end like Baptists, we're told to stroke him,
but carefully:
we're warned to avoid his pin-hole ears that hear what we cannot;
also his blow-hole,
a second mouth that speaks an ocean tongue of shrieks and clicks.
I can see by the trainer's caution our innocence is dangerous:

he says if Chuy takes a hand in his mouth,
sometimes he's curious, we should not pull, but let him release us.
Also, it's a myth dolphins push drowning swimmers
to shore, to a dolphin all humans look to be drowning,
besides, their instinct
would be to push us out to sea, to safety.

He's not as slippery as I thought, and his skin
just like the moon shining back, that still silver, is cool to the touch,
the exact temperature of the water.
We take turns in a strange communion touching his forehead, laying
small bloodless fish
on a big blue tongue. We are educated people,
but I sense among us a competition for who Chuy likes best.
We command cheap tricks,
and he jumps —

first circling gaining inhuman momentum —
he fears for his job, he works — his back bent as to a desk,
holding his breath —
and I see there's nothing you can do to make him love you —
suddenly he leaps, hangs a perpetual curve. . . .

Before I leave, I pay extra for a kiss, for the picture of a dolphin's
grin on my lips.
I kneel, he pecks my cheek . . .
I'm told to wave,
and away playfully he leaps, pure muscle (no bones)
the way we wish him to be —
nosing a blue-green ball, his fins not quite fingers or feet.

Nursing Home Love Poem

I've never told anyone this,
but before I can say, Grandma, it's me, Chris,
she slips me her tongue,

and I sit back and think about who I am.

I want you, she says, I want you to kiss me.
I miss your lips, she sighs, hot and dry with death.

Often I am her dead children,
her long gone mother, once even her last best dog.
Today I am her mindless memory of his mouth,
Mexican skin, the young man before he became the hard husband he did.

Pedro? she asks, as if I've forgotten:

Remember, we met at the harvest dance. You tipped your poor hat and we waltzed circles
in the dust, and later, behind a full strawberry truck,
I kissed you. It was the truth,
before we lived in that chicken coop, before we moved to that mining town, before I died, and I loved you.

Ode to an Insect in Wet Paint

Small winged life, you stick to what you think you know,
You're caught in late spring thinking meadow.

You struggle with your tiny might,
You fight the very physics of existence, the minuscule gravity of your life.

Reading for reasons, your frantic feelers tell you everything but why.
I too question the rightness of Sage Green. I wait. You dry.

The house needs a new roof, a more solid foundation. I wait.
I wait. You breathe paint.

You, smallest of abstract artists
Splashed yourself against a canvas.