Bird to Bird

After Neruda

Muhammed was pensive and withdrawn as a child,
my brother’s scars elsewhere.
Cocaine use can cause purpura of the face, ears, trunk and extremities.
Why don’t they say bruising all over one’s body?

The trunk of the car contained:

1. 1. 1. Thirty-three coiled jump ropes with fleur-de-lis painted on their wooden handles.
      2. Two cases of Gatorade: Cool Blue and Rain Berry.
      3. A leather attaché case with an armless puppet inside.
      4. The claimed caul of a baby crocodile.

Sometimes mistresses are sequestered in caves,
the men in the mountains riding their polo ponies.
Some live in flats,
the way you can describe depression,
the way the world once was.

“Someone needs to bring Princess back from the vet,”
says the woman in memory care to everyone she meets.

What do they call a flower
that flies from bird to bird?

Genuflection

In lake and ocean, I seek cold sectors,
vacillate between sun-warmed and gelid spaces,
as if between two homes or horses.
Palace and mut hut; Mustang and miniature horse.
Hunting for flesh and gathering wild berries,
penitence and wild abandon.
As for you, be alert as the serpent, and simple as the dove.

Isn’t there a theatrical role for grace? Center-staged
operatic or trashy burlesque, beamed in sign language or tongues?
A poet defecates in the woods behind a raspberry bush.
Genuflection is the act of bending a knee
or touching it to the ground in reverence or worship,
be it a man, woman, child—or puppet.

My parents stopped attending church, for reasons they never revealed.
When my maternal grandmother visited,
she corralled me into attending mass with her.
She exuded fear of being alone, and home invasion.
When my parents went out at night, she’d repeatedly ask
my brothers and me every half hour if the doors were locked.
We would appease and sedate her by making the rounds
to each exit, checking the locks every time she asked.

Not one of my exits is locked,
at least not my literal doors.
I just noticed and made the correction:
I initially wrote home as “evasion”.

I am older than my grandmother was when she died.
I have escaped electric shock treatment.
I have no way of knowing if it did her any good,
or if it was as barbaric and horrific as in films.
She liked to say, Joanne is going to be a nun when she grows up.
I have no way of knowing why my grandmother had that hope.
Perhaps she wished she had been a nun, therefore never
having a son who would leave his body—
cease and desist at 21 from leukemia.

Knowing he was dying, my uncle Harold, handsome as a movie star,
smart as a whip, travelled to Mexico, alone. Was it the culture
he was drawn to or the freedom to smoke weed
which might have lessened his pain?
My guess is the culture.
I’ve experienced the Irish-Mexican bond.
We believe what we want to believe.
I have no idea if Harold thought there was a God
who gave any thought to him or the world,
if he wore a crucifix necklace around his neck,
if a rosary dangled from his hospital bed at the end.
If grace played any part in his departure—
or if he and all of us are grace.

How is a whip smart? Someone
who is exceptionally intelligent or perceptive.
I love the inclusion of perceptive.
But I can’t help but associate a whip with cruelty.
Even against a horse’s back, it’s violent,
never mind a man’s, woman’s or child’s.
Nietzsche says Man is the sick animal.

I tried returning to mass to bond with a boyfriend,
to genuflect side by side.
A theater of resuscitation—but there wasn’t enough air to sustain a blackfly.
It pains me to think of the nun doll my grandmother gifted me
lying in a heap in a landfill.

Perhaps she foresaw me living like a nun.
But nuns don’t live alone; they live communally,
often touching each other in the dark.

Notes on ‘Bird to Bird’

After Neruda

I carry a photo of Muhammed in my wallet
on a boardwalk near the sea, 1977.
The first known use of attaché case was in 1904.
Don’t get too attached to me
or the sedative flavonoids in vanilla.
I bruise easily, love shade in any landscape.

A caul is an amniotic sac covering a fetal head.
Caput galeatum in Latin: a protective helmet.
It’s rare that a child is born with the veil intact.
To be in possession of a caul ensures you’ll never drown.

Princess was likely put down years ago.
Some mistresses live in stone cottages by the sea.
Some have grown their hair long.
Most are just as happy alone as when their paramour arrives.
He is wearing hip waders.
He’s brought a bottle of gin.
They will take a walk along the shore;
the earth will absorb their pain.

And how do the roots know
they must climb toward the light?

Joanne Dominique Dwyer’s collections of poems are RASA, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize (2022) and Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). Dwyer’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2024 and 2019. Her poems have also been published in various literary journals including The American Poetry Review, The Common, Conduit, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry.  She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award before publishing her first book of poems. Joanne counts her time spent using poetry to interface and commune with folks in memory care units and with teens in rural areas of Northern New Mexico as her most important engagement with poetry. She is also a ceramic artist and mountain hiker.