"Poet's Progress"               for Sandra Cisneros I haven't been much of anywhere, books my only voyage, crossed no bodies of water, seen anything other than trees change, birds take shape -- like the rare Bee Hummingbird that once hovered over the promise of salsa in my garden: a fur feathered vision from Cuba in Boulder, a wetback, stowaway, refugee, farther from home than me. Now, snow spatters its foreign starch across the lawn gone crisp with freeze. I know nothing tropical survives long in this season. I pull the last leeks from the frozen earth, smell their slender tubercular lives, stand in the sleet whiteout of December: roots draw in, threads of relatives expand while solitude, the core, that slick-headed fist of self, is cool as my dog's nose and pungent with resistance. Now when the red-bellied woodpecker calls his response to a California owl, now, when the wound transformer in the womb slackens, and I wait for potential: all the lives I have yet to name, all my life I have willed into being alive and brittle with the icy past. And it's enough now, listening, counting the unknown arachnids and hormigas who share my love of less sweeping. For this is what I wanted, come to, left alone with anything but the girlhood horrors, the touching, the hungry leaden meltdown of the hours. Or the future -- a round negation, black suction of the heart's conception. Save me from a stupid life! I prayed. Leave me anything but a stupid life. And that's poetry.