Angela Janda, a Minnesotan by birth, has spent the past two and a half years doing theater and writing poetry in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work has appeared in Central Avenue and she has staged two poetry performances at Theaterwork in Santa Fe, reading with local poets Rachelle Woods and Bobby Bermea.

GRANDFATHER POEM

When I imagine my grandfather killing himself I imagine it morning. I imagine the blood on the step stool highchair on the ice rink tabletop on the cabinetry on everything but that painting of the old man with the Bible and his hands pressed against his head. I imagine his hand against his head. I imagine I am the one who found the man who was my father's father; I imagine I am his only son. And when I find him it is morning and from that time forward morning never wavers.

When I imagine my grandfather I imagine a grape arbor, an ice rink table top, the velvet lined box I would have kept the gun in, unwavering morning. I imagine sky blue morning, oboe morning, ice shack morning on a chain woven fence.

You only half believe the things you were never told. You half believe in death. When I imagine my grandfather I imagine his kitchen and the morning light on the faucet and in the shelved Czech crystal and on his hands.

SUITE OF FIVE PIECES FOR THE TAURUS MOON

I
There is a room in Potala
with thirteen stupas.
There is a house on Deurloostraat
with three rooms.

There is a sky and its moon-rising,
and a penitentiary risen
from the desert road
we're driving home on.

There is no space for the place
the fourteenth ocean would need,
conceivably, and no desert
as long as the road.

I find the end
of the Camel Light I lit
one late night in Vondelpaark,
late one April, and lean
to lay its ending
on the dash edging
your own.

No regrets, he had
said, like a
mantra.

II
I have already seen
a bird that resembles
a feeling. Felt
a bellchime
that signals an end.

I have driven north
past Sausalito
to the ocean
and I am barefoot here
making Bagua circles
in the sand.

In a small forest
in the Midwest,
wild turkeys
parade past mornings

and everything is
as everything was,

growing straight up
out of the ground.

III
The lizard,
which had been
in the cereal box,
lunged. Left.
I looked to
your lips still tipped
in a bow
collar ripped
eyelids clasped
shoulders high
forehead blue and
golden and rust
and green and
gray.

You looked on, quiet mind.
You are gone. You are you
but dots of paint and
pinpricks.

IV
So the horse ran
and the boy ran
from out the house
to the field
with a lunch
for his father.

Past the stoop
that was a school
and the pump
that was schoolwater
to the map
of alfalfa
cut & uncut.

The field's tractor
in autumn
ran rows
of harvest
and at the break
between sow and reap
the boy's father
could but be.

This boy this run
this lunch this lunge.

Hope? Hope, yes.

And certainty.

V
Red fire red sunset
red the color of blood,
the color of birth.

Red the color of rhododendron
of taillights, of things leaving,
things leaving
or leading.

Red the end
of a story
not ending
but writing raw and sore
enough to scab red and
grow red again.

Cloud-wrapped red mountains.

Red the color
before night.

WINDOW PLUS LANDSCAPE PLUS MOON

One streetlamp lit
outside stage door window casts
a garbage into
shadows.

On the corner opposite,
a man closes up his shop.

Red-orange orb scrim-projected
inside behind scenery planted
along the high hedge.

I am
one whalebone. A vase
of roses, peach.
I am pacing
the halls
of the abbey, I
am on this stomach waiting
for one last thing.

The moon begins at winter.

We are dressed
as soldiers, skirting
its reflection.

SAINT PETER TO VENICE

Twenty-one months ago birds cut flight back to spring-wet maples
at the corner of Walnut and 3rd I waited, waited
tied to want of warmth, the want of something
after what must stop. I painted battleships, bones
Venetian sailors come swaggering through lamp-lit studios half underground-
I wore red, red chalklines of figure study, your arch, arch, swivel-hip,
belly dip, broad long lines. I climbed scaffolding to sit with forgetting,
to squat in bales of hay and our own too-set to be shifted.

One skirt, one ship, one pair of stolen shoes,
the doge and the carpenter.

We can't go on like this, you said, said it again-

No one told me
how delicious defiance

A BEGINNING

Will I see you again
The sky is full of stars
Will ours collide, then
They have already
What does that mean
It is good to spend some time alone
And after?
Every night the moon changes
Do you love me
I love the moon.

MAN PLUS FISH

The miracles of sleep and trees
as old as Jesus; the man plus fish
monster Ichthyoid; you in a fecket, a farer
taken icepick to insurmountable miles:

there is something resembling grace
that I would like to pull as near
as we lashed together across Lake Emily
in the fair-skinned morning, one kayak
to six canoes.

ENOUGH SLEEP POEM

You would like to
think you are
the only spider in
the forest

that what you
have you will
always have

that white-necked
black-billed swans
will swarm you.

You would like to
think that
everything returns
to where it
came from
and there is always
enough sleep
to go around