Sample Poems by Candice Favilla
Silence
We learn nothing from silence, but from an absence of words we might
know
freedom or error. In night fields, a second skin, a star in each pore.
Brown pelican keening north, water’s turbulence her only sound.
Current pushing over shoal and up to climb the shock.
Sound is a pocket opened into space. What happens next
without the verb? The second silence owns us.
On a hill, one reads silently, the watchman and the ox blink
at one another, the gong unsounded, the ships far gone.
He goes to boys for it, their stark cries as gulls tumbling over water.
Their fourteen-year-old backs shiny, wetted agates he secrets away.
In Chemo her bald head nodding.
Pumps shushing white sledge into veins.
Any body for comfort here on the beach, a scow riding the prow of the
ocean.
Forward throttling, imagine the word “hope” as wind tightens the
scowl.
Had I not been a coward, I would have admitted love, even though he
went to boys. And might have been a better woman, as she, a better woman than
I.
Allergies
Suddenly I believe
I am serious-
ly depressed. Soon
as I write it the rueful words
caroom skywise as birds, make
a crappy mess all over the page.
See?—Onto a photo of a virtual king
in a magazine entitled Radical Uncertainty
and spread as a vizard
for the homeless asleep in City Plaza.
My skin flakes; golden pods
of autumn waft up my nose,
dissents elbowing
their paths to voting booths.
Who sneezes knows the truth
in that only moment. Myths and ideologies float
that image of your finer self
to the surface of some snot. Think
of a woman cultivating winter squash
beneath three puny rows of corn. That’s hope. Dented
trailer house, a couple of fists
about to be borne
in the tire-tracked yard. Two
spotted hogs snorkeling red
mud. And anxiety-ridden flies
zooming their relevant dives
around a flap of ripped screen.
My liver nudges my spleen
for comfort. Even the sparrows enjoy
their grievances in season. Here’s a soul
up your nose: I’m named
What-You-Got-For-Me-Now?
The Woman on the Airplane to Los Angeles
—for Mike Osbourne
1
Up this high, there’s no turning back.
What caught my eye, the color of her dress.
Her hands. Her charm bracelets.
Then her photographs in a wallet unfolded
in her lap. We are let into life
the way I began to care, as she spoke
about her children in Florida,
another coastline behind us.
She said, To be unheard
is to be dead. I tried
to tell my husband this.
2
A man lost his house to a flood.
So he took a job on an oil rig
off the Baja coast. Now,
daily, he bends over the Pacific,
his house slipping farther west.
Three times a year we meet
at Long Beach, make an island
of our bodies. The sadness
in western people I explain
by recalling that they can only repeat
their journey. Standing on a beach
they long for the water as a bird
caught on an inland current
of air must long for the gulf.
3
At Long Beach runners lean
into wind, eyes on breakers
and collecting within
the force of waves
as though the body
were a receptacle the contents
of which the ocean continually restores.
It is early evening. Twelve strangers
rest in a bar near the beach and look out
toward the pelicanry on Catalina. Earth
pitches, the sun rolls down. For a moment
we are intent in the same way
all things are changed
when waiting for the rhythm of day
to break into night. We collectively turn
away from the even features of our neighbor’s
face and watch a sailboat pulling
its wake across the harbor. Pelicans
in tight formation glide over
the palm trees and the patio, pulling
their own arrow drawn in counterpoise
to that of the boat. All memory and hope
are directional and opposite.
Palm trees brush the forming night.
Hundreds of pelicans take direction
and shape in the violet air while I recall
this symbol for the flight of Christ in counterpane
to the secular as growing from the myth
that the bird so loves its offspring
it tears its breast to feed them. A waitress
pauses by the window. There is no turning back.
She points to a first star low over the bay, or
maybe it’s an airplane. From here we cannot
be certain. Two people turn to each other, suddenly
familiar. The kids they’ve raised.
The people they have married. Now everything
an arrow at night. And I like them for it;
for discovering each other; for the chance
each takes when the face opens on that island.
Who can say what form election takes?
Bathing, End of Summer
Earth slips around this hour,
Trout takes mayfly, and then at dusk
The larger dragonflies come out, reaching
Over the creek. Just this dawn, I was young,
Lying on this rock and looking up. Soloing in my skin,
I thought, my song to the sky thin, just beginning.
Light falls across rising dust. Spider among blackberries.
Consequence and the beauty of gravity. Already my voice
Thickens. Now a web of folds, lines furrow
My cheeks. But vines, too, I ‘m reminded,
Thicken upon themselves
While thriving. So I
Am not alone, each new thorn a kiss. Axil of brevity,
Axil of eternity, the body playing up to the stars.