On the Train to Madrid Haibun

We face forward, watch where we're headed: highways, wind farms, dark mountain tunnels. Our daughters across from us see where we've been: wide valleys, sleepy farms, snow-patched peaks. Bare, pollen-painted trees flank the tracks. Stones, like the ones Jews place on graves to prove our presence, mark our attendance, dot richly green fields, cold water creeks and rivers. For my younger daughter, her chin on the ledge, the view races past the train window glass like a film. She wants to take it all in, to not miss a thing, the way in the Miro museum in Barcelona, firmly holding onto my hand, she sought the bird, star, sun, moon in painting after painting. Her sister is tethered to metal screens, ifunny jokes out of context, friends she'll abandon in the next grade. She slipped as we climbed Montjuic to the museum, wore the wrong shoes, got blisters. On the train, I want to say to her, See how your sister fights sleep the train's gentle rocking

induces, eyelids
close halfway, open and close
new butterfly wings

Milk

Today it's the hot, microwave–boiled milk
of my morning café con leche, more often
it's two cups of cold, keep–my–increasingly–
porous–bones–from–breaking milk on cereal
at breakfast or with a peanut butter on Akmak
crackers snack or before bed because I missed
my calcium quota from cheese or yogurt,
and it's best absorbed naturally, not as a pill.
Let's face it, real drink milkers, milk drinkers
are thin and possibly taller: My brother at
thirteen, he of the daily vanilla ice cream
and milk milkshake, grew a foot in one year.
When we were kids, my mother swore, I'm
going to buy a cow and keep it in the backyard.
Mother's milk I didn't get, not hip to breastfeed
in the early sixties, even in Cuba—we were
deprived, fellow late boomers, of colostrum
and a lifelong defense against certain allergies,
disease, but also, having nursed my children,
of an intimacy and warmth so fine... Sorry,
Lover, but that's milk under the bridge now,
spilt milk we can't cry over, best drunk straight
from the beast, but most often, inside the frig
door, cold air spilling, cold milk flowing,
glass optional, quenching thirst, chilling
throat, chest pipes, belly, comforting hunger,
nourishing cells, the milk–fed soul.

Meat

Standing before the formal dining room table,
barbeque smoke and heat on the patio ebbing,
my husband slices a perfectly charred filet mignon
on the bias, fans back each pink–centered piece,
dips a blond brush into a glass bowl of olive oil,
snipped rosemary, minced garlic, and syrupy
balsamic vinegar, aged twelve years. He cracks
salt and peppercorns, stirs and drips the thick
black dressing across warm centers, and serves us,
his wife and daughters—the hunting (if only
to the butcher), grilling, and feeding of meat
to family like a primitive ritual, a desire to duty
we devour, honor, dipping each slice into luscious
sauce, tearing flesh with teeth and molar, with each
bite and swallow, knowing, loving each other more