life
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Liminal Joys
The bookstore lights were off. Its window glass reflected red neon from the theater marquee across the street. If you peered inside, if you shaded your eyes with your hands you could see thousands of books stacked and racked their spines titillating to a man of words as what’s under a skirt is to a…
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The Newest Year
At some point across the Date Line (cutting out the small archipelagos where seabirds don’t care) the New Year somehow begins. Other than on paper, it doesn’t exist its not an admonition in the flesh or a pure astronomical event its just a reinforced reminder of how we measure the flow of time. The New Year…
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Magpie Death Rituals
“They’re just birds” is the casual cast-off what can a bird feel? Their brains are so much smaller than ours yet they can recognize themselves in silvered mirrors and groom themselves with their reflective assistance like teenagers readying for prom puffed up feather headdresses high as kites. That’s something. When a magpie dies, other magpies…
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The Ancient Past
The ancient past – 1984 where rolls of copper wire unwound coil in the walls of white gypsum board electric surges and negative potentials sanctify the silicon motherboard a computer beeps and numbers crunch the sun is in the sky the clouds stay far away. Orbiting the Earth Soviets and Americans point lasers at satellites…
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National Poetry Month 11 – Clipper
The clipper cuts through the sea verdigris under water flashes when the hull rises copper and oak and teak black pitch and gold leaf topped by white billows straining in the wind. She moves fast, flags stream and the bowsprit sometimes splashes against the waves. The figurehead’s white breasts try to calm the world-sea where…
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Twenty Years
I A few weeks after the attacks I realized that there would be anniversaries. Moments in years to come when people would stop and try to remember the event; and try and remember the nature of the world before the explosive propulsion of our wrath halted the inertia of peace. II I…
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Amelia Earhart Sees (Elegiac visions of the next world in the depths of the Pacific)
The silver skin of her Electra reflects the setting sun. The twin engines hum, steadfast lift is provided by the wings. The strange invisible waves of the radio beacon fly out across the ocean, far faster than the plane itself. Here among the tiny green islands and endless blue waters are beasts that wait in dark places.…
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Precursors
In a dark cave, in the shadow of Rome piled up beneath stalactites are remains of ancient proto-humans. You could hold their skulls up to the light and see through the bite holes down through to the brainpan, and run your fingers across their over-sized brows which hang over the eyes like little hills bordering…
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The Whales
Barnum brought some beluga whales to his Museum across from City Hall hauled them behind a belching steam engine from up near Canada 700 miles across the land of America he was told they were a male and a female perfect white oblong shapes bathed in a bucket of salt water. Oh dear God, when…
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Nixon Works Himself into a Frenzy, April 18, 1994
I’ve played these cards close to my chest anchored my feelings to a one ton weight and left them sitting at the bottom of the sea. Chairman Mao once told me “you need your own cult of personality.” Picture that, rallying students hoisting my face printed on huge banners chanting quotes from my Little Green…
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Howard Hughes
It hurts in ways I cannot explain a broken body imprisoning a healthy mind I have my papers confirming American citizenship but I am late for the ceremony out there on that last island off of Florida I can fly away there at 400 miles per hour in a steel cage like an autoclave killing…
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Napoleon’s Last Words
There is a panorama somehow unfolding before me like a landscape painting on an infinite canvas all of you look as little dots crowding and clustering in armies of barely distinguishable colors smoke is rising from cannonades, and here and there blasts of dirt tinged with red blossom and fall back to the earth. How…
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Theme Song
Every day I think about writing a song being played on a piano with some interesting lyrics about Southern California in a rainstorm and a little boy waving goodbye to his red bicycle. It will have several verses to help accentuate the loss, maybe it stands for the loss of his innocence I don’t know.…
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National Poetry Month: “Walk”
Around the corner past the mailbox and the severed palms I would walk to school. Past the Mexican market and the panaderia the old Bank of America with its Art Deco marble panels riddled with bullet holes. Past the yellow brick Masonic Lodge and the three long blocks of Dooley’s Hardware – the “Largest Hardware…
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Evening Walk
Under that stifling proto-summer heat the evergreens sag and the past-dusk sky holds burning red Mars air clear and turbulence low he’s reflecting the missing sun. Two men stand under a street lamp smoking a joint they pass back and forth conversing in Spanglish and I am hearing in memory Beethoven’s Romance for Violin and…
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Age as Gift
“Ever you desire to appear lordly and gracious as a king of old.” – Denethor to his son Faramir (great line for men who like to look nice) There is something fascinating about aging, about the long, slow decay of your flesh. The less rejuvenated, the more interesting we become. Gray hair, saggy skin,…
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Aldrin Waits
The sheets were purity white, blameless. Two hands lying atop the crisp linen folds; gnarled, purple veins, arthritic, with brown spots as numberless as a Dalmatians riding a Fourth of July firetruck. Under eyelids jittering, sunken eyes move in REM motions; emotions, vibrations, oxygen levels, fuel warning indicators, alarms. It’s a tight fit with…
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Old Editions Live
While walking through a bookstore, new or used, I always stop and look for my favorite authors. I idle by their alphabetical presence and run my eyes hungrily over the spines of their books. I am always looking for first editions, or copies of works I do not possess. But sometimes I find a unique…
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Watched
Watches don’t tell the time, they manifest it. The various little voices that tick out speculative moments: the second, the minute, the hour, all accordion noise to waltz through the seasons of our lives. Where the passing of time is measured by the heat of the summer sun, its mercurial reflection on winter…
The Numinous Cosmos 