THE NEW MODELS

We're parked in the hills overlooking the town.

There should be a hurricane around here
for so many rainbows.

Everyone ought to compress kittens
before attaching them.

As well as breathing exercises
to be at one with the world.

Neither son nor brother nor friend
just a link in a chain of jokes.

The Mother of All Bombs
is not that naked obese woman
straddling a ballistic missile
my father e-mailed over the Atlantic.

Roll her in flour and go for the wet spot.

The Happy Hours
a wall of TVs
working stomach muscles
and deserving it.

Let's forget all of this.

We're still parked in the hills overlooking the town.

Most people these days are able
to flip right past it with the new models;
a movie, the shower scene,
a threat to national security,
armed teenagers you'd better duck for,
a hot one you'd gladly bend over for,
the herd you have to stop the car for,
a busload of dreams and car-less Mexicans,
the mantras that hypnotize them,
the accident that nearly ruins them,
billions of tax dollars spent on something
or just the commercials getting in the way,
but the snow will always be there.
Not the white kind, not the cold kind,
just that loud nothing
between channels.

There's been this guy dismembering people
so our friend keeps the couch next to her door.

I just wanted to show you where Barbara Streisand lives.

She's "overweight"—our friend that is—
quit her switchboard job but
kept the keys to the gates
and knows all the rangers by numbers,
all like totally cute.

The beer having drained into the oceans,
the dirty ions of the night now crash
down in tinkling waves of amber,
our backs to the observatory.

__

RAINBOW TROUT

A line,
faint gray and numberless,
leads from this hospital room.
A side-effect of fluorescent lights,
these long cold city nights
and animal documentaries.
Anesthesia has come between us.
You in a blue paper gown and me
the top of a snow-laden pine tree.

Once the dogs have chewed
off the opponent's ear,
it snows.
                   Snow white egrets
in pockets of sulfur springs;
tiny cannonball eyes caught ditching
a million miles of calisthenics
in another indifferent winter to
canine warfare, just barking
distance away. Unable to sway,
evergreen giants watch
all the trying keep far from dying
amidst a frozen winter's weight.

It's summer now and I'm
tickling your good knee and
Yellowstone National Park is bigger than
the Province of Zamora.

How long will you be spending here?
On Earth? a Grateful Dead van may joke. Or,
How much for just driving through?
The Chemical Brothers' foot on the choke.

Just before the continent broke off
legs were being added to buffaloes.
Bumper-to-bumper recreational vehicles
stare into the opposite not-nearly-as-pathetic extreme
of our evolution.
                                  A growing population
ever-more inclined to meditation
dares not be responsible
for beheading
the best rainbow trout in the world,
and thus more peacefully opts for
a salad bar and shrimp scampi
sitting beneath a family
of dead roaring grizzlies.

Where are we going?

This is our landscape now. It will not kill you
but it's our third time here this fall
and it's hard to keep track
of all these nurses.

We're driving into the sunset of life.
To your left, clear drops catch
fluorescent light and cascade
into an arm that has lost its tan

and someone's dog
is barking outside the window.

____

THE NEW MODELS and RAINBOW TROUT are from a series of poems entitled "On Holidays in America," a sort of road movie of moments I have shared with my partner on various visits over from Spain, showing him around where I come from. The process of writing this particular series of poems has helped me to get through a time that our life together has been interrupted by a frustratingly-long sick leave of his, due to a knee operation. This is dedicated to him, to José.