PALM SUNDAY

Here we all are in the beautiful lily-white church
filled to the brim with wonderful lily-white children
and gray grandparents all in lovely straight rows...
Nothing distastefully irregular or out of place here.

What my memory searches for is a rooster crowing,
smoky charcoal mornings on a Malaysian hillside,
the log house by a dirt road in backcountry Arkansas,
a Mexican farmhouse down the road from San Miguel...
to recreate old pictures in the region of my heart,
something I cannot must not will not name or lose,
like that distant feeling in the back of the neck
when the wind whistles--white curtains billowing
across screens on open doors and windows in summer...
organic loneliness that once shrouded primordial earth...
warm air rustling the dry underfronds of Chamaerops humilis,
precursor to the trembling sorrow of man.