Staying Alive

Staying Alive

Last year I slept at hostels in Spain,

befriended seacoast villages

with little boats. At home in Chicago,

I waved signs and chanted slogans

in the park. Now, at my desk,

laboring in the yellow pre-dawn hours,

I rush to write what I have watched

in my head all night.

Yesterday at the museum,

I saw again the Picasso

with the blue guitar-man

and Renoir’s woman wearing

the reddest hat ever painted,

then stared at the Japanese kimono

exhibit, transfixed by a heron

stitched white on a red silk sleeve.

A kidney-shaped garden

bursting with lilies appears

bright orange in a neighbor’s yard

near a rogue patch of turf that remembers

life before the hunger of rabbits.

To live is to lift suitcases and signs,

move soil with an old trowel

and words with a pen, to enter

a painting, to photograph the sea.

Cities and faces run through my veins

like the blue of blood that turns the color

of a rose when it hits the air.