Fields of Satchmo

Wild American Poems

Michael J. Vaughn

Copyright 2013 by Michael J. Vaughn

For Ellen Lee Gibson

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of thirteen novels, including The Popcorn Girl. He is a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest, and a 25-year opera critic. Vaughn lives in San Jose, California, and plays drums for the San Francisco rock band Exit Wonderland.

The first 28 poems in this collection appeared previously in literary journals, which are credited after each poem.

Fields of Satchmo

The highway sparkles obsidian,

arrowhead shavings,

cities named for the slaughtered,

a country built on crushed culture.

Our Fathers, coffeehouse Athenians,

half their fortunes pressed from

negro flesh so they wrote a

government full of wishes

Filled in the blanks with six hundred

thousand dead soldiers then told

the vanquished they could

go on lynching niggers so

long as they were free niggers.

Dangling bodies spoil a

proper party so we paper the

walls with righteous fictions.

Jazz, for example, as a

pure African form.

Explain the pianoforte, the

Turkish cymbal, the Spanish guitar.

Treble clefs running in

great herds along the Serengeti,

grazing on quarter notes.

If you are going to

survive the American mindfuck you

must embrace the awfulness,

fall face-down in the cattleshit,

open your eyes to find

Louis Armstrong sprouting like a

sunflower, sowing the plains with

peals of brass, smiling a

smile that no one forgets.

Child of slaves.

Handel’s trumpet.

Four-four time with tribal improv,

lyrics by Gershwin,

a swung note at the

tip of Jefferson’s pen.                                                                       

Caveat Lector, San Francisco
 

The Anywhere Fair

occurs at a time and place that are

completely unpredictable,

making publicity problematic.

First indication is a subtle surge of

blood from the aortic valve to the

left wrist, followed by a

slight breeze from the southwest.

Two minutes later, you will find

yourself telling a joke involving

two rabbits and a popular children’s toy.

Later, you will realize the

joke makes no sense.

Two songs hence, you will find

yourself swinging a dark-eyed

Italian girl through a series of

moves that would not seem to

be physically possible.

She finishes a spin, plants a

silver heel on the hardwood and

strikes a pose once assumed by the

most favored of Nefertiti’s handmaids.

The room fills with a thousand

mosquitoes composed entirely of light.

Now is the time.

In your shirt pocket, you will

find the Jack of hearts.

Thrust him into the air.

He will assume a position next to

the mirrored ball and accelerate into

a spin, producing a sound resembling

a sleeping yo-yo or a russet

hummingbird dining on bottlebrush.

Everything else in the room will freeze.

Move freely among the statues.

Steal one of Roberto’s cookies.

Pour yourself a hefeweizen,

Please do not fondle the barmaid.

Have a seat.

Savor the tableau:

Mallory at mid-laugh, hands flying;

Rick and Darlene in a promenade;

Howard at the mic, holding a high G;

Randy reaching for the soundboard.

When you’re ready, set down your

drink, take the Italian girl’s hand,

and the room will spin into life.

When you get home, kick off your shoes.

Place your wallet on the windowsill.

Loop your keys around a lightswitch.

In your left rear pocket, you will

find a matchbox from the Tonga Room.

Light one. Blow it out.

Watch the smoke feather to the ceiling.

Hum a few bars of Misty.

Open your favorite book to page 213.

There you will find the Jack of hearts.

Save this for later.

Abbey

Columbia, Maryland
 

How to Sing

Speak.

Catch the vowel, plastic wonder.

Extend. Spin to the realm of

vibration, incarnation of breath,

trick of tone

Pop the consonant, Shakespearean

neutral, crack another egg,

open to the lips, toothcarve,

tongueshift, ceramic wind,

sonic floret, bouquet, filigree

Puzzle the syllables into streams,

meander, slice the clock into

boxes, lay them inside.

Push the edges. Swing.

Sustain. Work the quiet.

Erupt. Goof around.

Reasons we do it:

erectus matesigh,

a shout carried long,

a sob lifted.

It seems to make us

human, takes the prison of

self and flares it

across the landscape.

It’s possible to connect the

song to a thing we miscall

the heart, but you need to

close your eyes and

briefly give up your life.

Have a drink. Have two.

Fill your lungs with sky.

Draw the spectrum across your

larynx; you are a stringed

instrument, gorged with overtone,

rimmed with bellstrike, a

cellular call to the

oscillating world.

One day, when the green flash

gives way to a blue moon,

you may find that the

song is singing you.

You may then call yourself

a singer.

Confrontation

Long Island University

Brookville, New York

Wake

Combustion ballet in the Arctic ether we

take our pins and poke the balloon,

screaming at the gunshot like two-year-olds.

Would do something but the

chore wheel carries six billion names.

Perhaps we will grow webbed feet,

gills, the rapture, life’s too short and

busy and hard, have to, get into,

children, right schools.

Your children have razor sharp

nails that claw at the sky and

they get them from you.

Shards of balloon fall from the

sky like pancakes. We will

do something about the time that

the Pacific breaks down our doors,

drags us into the streets and

puts us under.

Ask with our last breath who

knew, who knew

Eye On Life Magazine

The Military Industrial Complex Expressed as a Glorified Spigot

Take a walk on Avenue J, but beware.

The hydrants are frisky.

Tired of dogs.

Tired of never being used for

their intended purpose.

Ready to start a fire if

only it gave them something to do.

A chance to play hero,

to relieve the pressure.

Leave your lighter on the curb.

Walk away.

See what happens.

Eye on Life Magazine

Net Creep

Counting the song curds, lefty boozing.

Cuticle takes the groove,

a steady mile of entourage.

Caw! Celery’s tameness.

Caw! Tampered by clocks.

Knitting in a smoky tar.

All frayed up with jazz,

hooting in the park,

she dices diminuendos.

Tramming at spy tools, the

bee bleaches heaven, smelling avarice.

To extinguish yourself is to grieve.

Fun times, the lonely dray.

A killer brew lacking ski ruts.

Meh. Too car. King of rhumbas.

Spoon tilde floors the tunecow,

cousin tutors that book like fizz.

Natalie’s other knee.

Dumb synergy be nil.

Flout the stew cook, dirty tears

stall like trucks in a scullery.

Eye On Life Magazine

Litter

Kinetically armatured to the

greater world, I am all-fire,

I am beasthood, I am gravenous.

The first chapter of an epic involves

lostliness, desperado, great moons of

pain and devastation.

You couldn’t write a blues

song without it.

But even Caravaggios have

daubs of light, even

ghost towns have sheltered

corners where feral labradors give birth.

Her pups wander into the

street and are picked off by tourists,

drizzled with ooh and ah,

taken home and given frontier

names like Pistol and Cody.

Mother stands at the crest of the hill,

breathing the last grains of scent as

her runt grows smaller in a

station wagon window.

She paws the ground.

Goes to the stream for a drink.

Smells a rabbit.

The epic begins.

Iodine Poetry Journal

Charlotte, North Carolina

Pal

Cinema clown on the

center stripe, cleansing the

world of appurtenance.

A hat on a table.

Poet in a parking garage.

A baseball. A pen.

Deal a deck of human flaws,

take none. You are an

augmented note, non-essential,

a little bit off.

Yes, I love you.

But you should fear your friends;

they know your crimes.

Let me buy you a hot fudge sundae.

Let me buy you a cast.

Let me be the first to sign it.

California Quarterly

Orange, California

Mason

Mardi enters a three-bedroom ranch,

sees the problem right away.

Granite counters, marble floors.

Slate hallways, bluestone hearth.

Basalt tub. Rhyolite toilet.

Limestone sofa. Onyx armchair.

Quartzite bed, jasper pillows.

Obsidian labrador.

Mr. Thompson arrives at six.

Widower, eighty-three, emerald eyes.

When she poses the question,

he gazes at a spot past her shoulder.

When I was nineteen,

I worked in a quarry.

One morning, the sun struck the

cliffs and lit up the feldspar like a

delta of diamond rivers.

Mardi waits.

And?

Mr. Thompson smiles.

Isn’t that enough?

The Blue Collar Review

Norfolk, Virginia

Stupid Faith

Fathers of serendoubtery flip the

wide universe, shred, compress,

serve it on BLTs.

This is your brain,

given for us.

Stars and quarks too

infinitous to upsell,

to venture-capitalize,

to shrink-wrap.

Actual ideas are extra-terrestrial,

aphrodisiac, cannot be made to

wear leashes and fetch tennis balls.

A tsunami makes a bare

ripple until it breaches a continent.

Open up the dish, lunar

peppercorns dance the celestial dome.

We live at the margins in the

ionized air, far from the

American hinterminds, the daily

radio script, the labcoat effigies.

The ones who deny evolution are

correct for they are not evolving.

Had breakfast with Benjamin

Franklin still grieving Tommy

Paine but fascinated by the

triple-syrup tray, the neon

lights, the waitress’s cleavage.

Life is the greatest

toy ever dreamed.

Don’t ever stop playing.

He took a bite of eggs

Benedict and nearly cried.

You could hear the

static behind his eyes,

crackling, red-hot, untethered.

                                                                                               

The Journal, Cumbria, England
 

Replay

Kyle finds the northwest tip of the

forty-eight and walks the beach.

An eagle traces the shoreline.

Lost in wings, Kyle stumbles on a

New York subway turnstile,

next to a sand dollar.

He slips it into the slot and walks through.

The sand rises, arrowing into the

ocean like the spine of a brontosaur.

The path is only three feet wide,

but Kyle ventures forward.

A black porpoise leaps from

the water, chittering. At two miles,

the beach fades from view.

An Orca swims past, daggers of

black and white. Kyle stumbles on a

pinball machine. His favorite.

Next to a sand dollar.

He slips it into the slot and plays.

He remembers the rhythm,

the moves, the tricks.

He feels lighter, younger.

He wears a cap, tight pants, cleats.

A light flashes red.

He hits the ball hard, up the

ramp, drops it into the slot.

The machine erupts with sound.

The ground shakes.

The spit is closing up; the

water rushes forward.

He turns to find a

fog-bound green,

a glove on his left hand.

The ring of a metal bat.

This is the flyball that

fell between him and the

shortstop, the one that

cost him the starting job.

The year they won the title.

Kyle charges forward,

yelling for the ball like

Luciano freakin’ Pavarotti.

Challenger International

Canada

The Aroma from Tacoma

In the dark still tick of his core,

a balance of evensong.

Licorice pull of canefire,

fields of charred stalk, clouds of black.

We love the ugly as well as

the sweet: five-year-old on an

aircraft carrier, breathing diesel.

At forty, he returns to his

only chosen town. The odor of the

paper mill takes him to tears.

Because it’s distinct.

Because it means something:

the failures are behind you,

it’s time to start over.

Challenger International

Canada

 Betwixt

Diametric of a cardiac broomhead,

no lettuce in this, no rutabaga,

no osteothrombosis. Sometimes,

I wonder why we bother.

Jared walks the streets with a

spool of yellow string,

playing his life like a kite:

dentist, pawnshop, chowder hall,

cobbler. At the end of the

day, he retraces his route,

winding it all back.

Candace smiles,

stripe of snow in a ruby sandwich.

Jared, you marvel of a man.

Passersby freeze at the inequality,

this blatant mismatch,

tennis shoe, designer pumps,

insult to good sense.

But they have no idea.

Deep in a grumble,

Jared scuffled the sands of

San Gregorio, following the

flight of a raven spied

Candace in a kaftan the

salmon of eastern

clouds at sunset.

A single loose thread,

trailing all the way down the cliff.

He ran to the base and

pulled, and pulled and pulled,

till she stood atop the

bread-dough bluff a

naked Aphrodite, holding the

last of the thread in her fist,

a capillary of fierce intent.

She scratched her number in

the hollow of a clamshell,

tied the thread to a

hole in the edge and

flung it over.

Plainsongs

Hastings College

Hastings, Nebraska

On Receiving Tickets to As You Like It

Airily, a waking dance

to rhyme and rope, to grift and chance.

to all the stars that tread the night and

seize upon the eyes.

Garishly, a speaker dips to

gather breath and tongue and lips,

to stalk upon the stage and whisper

iambs to the flies.

Cautiously we wander in

to swim in love and feast on sin,

to bear the pangs of yestermen and

brave the ribs of fear.

Patiently we climb the rungs of

fossil words and speech half-sung,

waiting for the moment when the

fractured chords ring clear.

Tragically, the sense will hide

unless the actor steps aside and

shakes the author’s meanings from the

servitude of ink.

Finally the only route to

stir the play from tile and grout is

easing back within your seat,

a passive sun, enlivened meat,

cauldron for the spice and heat,

and choosing not to think.

The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry

Range

To study on the highest brows and drink among the low.

To plant your feet in roasting sand and contemplate the snow.

To hear Puccini all night long and wake up to The Who.

To watch a slate of foreign films but also Scooby-Doo.

To talk of football with the girls and fashion with the boys.

To fill your nooks with tools and books but leave yourself some toys.

To pace the alleys of Manhattan, stalk the Teton peaks.

To chase the wind at lightning speed then rest for weeks and weeks.

To dine on brie and caviar then order out for fries.

To work in foulest britches and proceed to suits and ties.

To leave your mental gates ajar, to shake the hand of chance.

To sing the open-throated life, and run, and fight, and dance.

The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry

Tween

Horses and harry, clamber and carry

Swindle and pause and reason and cause

Driving the years to a morbid strut

Keyboard and mouse, neighbor and house

Watching and fretting and ever subletting

See how the mowers continue to cut

Pamela Sue, Ronnie and Boo

Skipping and crying and endlessly lying

Charging the towers of adolescence

Gossip and noise, textual boys

Makeup and combs and angstian poems

Random sparks of efflorescence

Fillies and mares, unicorn stares

Lined up like soldiers, pebbles to boulders

Wanting the touch of equestrian hands

Letters and calls, residence halls

Lectures and class and E equals mass

Time takes you down like a statue of sand

The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry

Fishing

Hector stands on the water,

thinking of Carmella,

who never quite came back.

She could pick a strawberry like

Segovia fixing harmonics.

She loved him, but only once.

He arrives at the pier,

ties his board to a piling and

climbs to his favorite table.

Carmella brings him a smile in

the shape of a rhombus,

a chowder that verges on majesty.

She says, Ask the question.

He says, Ever?

She says, No. Never.

Hector thinks back a tear.

Why do you do this?

She sets her hands on

his java shoulders.

On a night when the

moon was one-third gone,

three men took my youth.

My only sweetness is

telling you no.

He traces the outline of her

blood-red lips. In that case,

I will take the chowder.

The rhombus widens out to

one third of a moon.

A pelican bombs the harbor,

comes up empty.                                                                   

Hector says,                                                                           

Yes, it’s like that.                                                                   

                                                                                               

Skidrow Penthouse, New York City

An Author Talks with his Protagonist

Bubba Heinreid, please take note:

I see what you are doing and

you should know that I disapprove.

The fact that I made you

up is no excuse. I have

spent far less attention on

real people and for that

alone you should feel flattered.

Come with me to the sidewalk.

Have a beer.

Tell me about the girl.

The one you wished you loved.

Because she deserves it.

Because you don’t.

I’ve been there.

That’s why I wrote you.

Think of that first chapter,

when your friend snuck up

behind the two of you in the

bar and managed to

photograph your third kiss.

Two people falling toward one another,

lips just that far apart.

The avalanche begins with a pebble,

ends with a confused man,

standing before the rubble,

one hand on his forehead.

A lifetime grinding at spiral notebooks.

You would think, once in a while,

a clear-cut notion would show its face.

Instead we slap the after-shave,

tie the blindfold, stumble for hours,

a miracle that we manage to

arrive back at our beds.

I saw

Nigger Jew

scratched into

the metal above a

toilet. Remembered a

piece of sandpaper in my

pocket, reduced it to a gray

smear. Things can be

taken back, things

can be made

better.

You’re alive.

And though we often don’t

even know what that means,

we’re fairly certain that it’s a

higher state, because someday

you won’t be.

Thanks, Bubba.

I chose you well.

And don’t worry,

I take care of

those who work for me.

I picture you in a swimming pool,

on a cruise ship, west of Baja,

catching the eye of a

three-year-old who thinks you’re God.

Rose & Thorn Journal

Camera

The way you look at

me over your left shoulder,

iris ascending, eyebrow umbrella,

smilish crinkle,

gives me

ideas I

have no

idea what

to do

with.

Taproot Literary Review

Ambridge, Pennsylvania

Account

The numbers tail me like affectionate pets.

(You can only do this much.)

Work and the numbers grow.

Scratch their heads and

watch their tails oscillate.

(You can do so much now!

Have a cigar; take a trip.)

Once in a while, they wander into

the median and disappear.

The world gets quiet.

I find a beach and kick rocks:

igneous, sedimentary, amalgam.

But I know they’re up there,

peering from the clifftops,

wild ellipses hungry for attention.

Sharpening their claws to a

fine decimal point.

The Chaffin Journal

Eastern Kentucky University

Grain

Take the pause between these

two sentences. Grind it up.

Roll it in a twenty-dollar bill

and ignite. Smear the ashes on

a microscope slide and

discover the following: three

apostrophe fragments, seven

remembrances of a dairy farm,

trace amounts of ballpoint pen,

single molecule from a Mexican triceratops.

So much where in the whereabouts,

it’s amazing we can even

get to the checkout stand,

atoms shuffling past like

shoppers in a mall.

It is entirely possible that part of

my left pinky originated at the

midpoint between Castor and Pollux.

It is entirely possible that

I am making this up.

Willard & Maple

Champlain College

Burlington, Vermont

Corpus Callosum

Caustic intelligence works a

neon scatter along Castro Street,

lightning bug riots alive with

nationalities, screwjets, gearheads.

Disassemble the universe with an

Allen wrench, put it back

together with a gas-

powered tennis racquet.

Microwaves scrimmaging the dish,

pulsar grasshoppers, genetic

codes on the back of a stamp,

accelerators spraying the

hills with database.

We are edgewalkers, tectonic scuttlebutt;

wipe a hand through the air and

come away with pixels.

Graymatter princes who can

barely form a civilized

sentence map out the

escalators of human evolution,

tapping at their cyberphones like

seedless finches.

Willard & Maple

Champlain College

Burlington, Vermont

Wanted

Fallopian door, Ceasarean

arch, Arturian pipe Dickensian

ash I

stalk the halls of history,

posting flyers for a missing cat.

Whiskers, tabby, Scorpio, Libertarian

I do

not

actually own a cat, but I

find that I enjoy the sympathy.

Halo of vulnerability, mistcloud

of loss, pathos, cocoa-

smelling allure of a

sniffle man who has lost his

beloved sigh pet.

I tried sincerity once and

came away with bronchitis.

What I really want is sex.

And money.

Save the philosophy for

mahatmas, betterworld bingo,

feelgood abstention.

Sex. Money.

A mild climate.

Willard & Maple

Champlain College

Burlington, Vermont

Disengaged

Red tumbles over yellow till the

coupling turns orange.

Yellow and blue in a corner,

making a perfect green of themselves.

He has met the compound colors and

seen the tire tracks on their faces.

The two-two tango is natural,

as is poison oak, lyme disease,

an unfortunate strike of

lightning to the temple.

He has taken the trip and yeah,

it’s a thrill ride, a levitation,

a Valentine’s Day fuckfest.

But one develops immunities,

a need to up the dosage,

operational expenses, wear and tear.

Alternative medicines:

a rainy night in San Francisco,

the diminuendo of a soprano,

a dozen daffodils in a coffee cup.

A friend who thinks you’re brilliant.

A stylist who massages your scalp.

A dog who thinks you’re God.

This poem.

This line.

This ending.

Convergence

Sacramento, California

Petty

She carries her carnage like a

book of coupons, two for one,

grief and remorse.

I’m going to this, I’m going to

that, all the things to

which I am going.

And yet, not enough for your

share of the meal, a loan which

will not be repaid.

Tell me when it was that you

opted out of the species.

I reach into the glove box to

gather change for a cheeseburger.

A handful of pennies, two lonely nickels,

twenty minutes when you sat in

my car alone.

The scent of narcissus overwhelms the

room, until finally the

blossoms must be tossed out.

The Ranfurly Review

Scotland

Impact

Jaguar of dalliance, courage in a

bottlecap, jimmy the jungles till they

spill forth in a river of

specieage, gumdrop froglets,

remote control fish,

mosquitoes that do your taxes.

If you need it we got it,

a guy who knows a guy who

squeezes a wholesale from

the tendons of a twelve-

year-old in Sri Lanka.

A continent of ocean where the

dolphins play with water bottles,

where the whales eat sporks and

the jellyfish wear sandwich

bags like ballcaps.

The dinosaurs have come back

in liquid form to muck the

skies, foul the waters and

claim revenge for the

asteroid but seriously I

can get you that tie for

five bucks downtown.

The Ranfurly Review

Scotland

Claddagh

Faith is a word with two meanings.

Let’s boil the potato down to the

skin and say that you were right.

You fought your trickster brain,

constructed a house of pills and lace,

a lover tucked safely across the continent.

A westerly breeze threatened to

blow you to the four corners of New York.

I had no choice.

Living on still waters I

longed for the earthquake,

a sun that rose on the ocean,

love that called for everything.

Faith has two meanings.

It’s easy to say it would have

been a disaster, but given an

expression that resembled

hope more than fear,

given no choice but to make it work,

I would have made it work.

Instead, you bought a gun,

aimed it at my temple,

and then, what was worst,

refused to pull the trigger.

Faith. Two.

This week the anniversary,

which might have passed were it

not for the onslaught of ghosts:

message from a friend,

favorite band, income taxes,

an old movie.

A forty-year-old kneels on a

Long Island beach,

laying out his future.

She takes the golden bracelet,

smiles, and says yes.

In the parking lot,

she says yes maybe.

His shoes turn into steel rails that

run west into Manhattan,

skirting the Hudson, a pause in Pittsburgh,

a mad rush toward the Rockies.

A fifty-year-old stands in a

California post office,

picks out a sheet of flowered stamps.

Later, he pulls them out and

discovers wedding cakes.

The Ranfurly Review

Scotland

Flirt

The flower is the part that
saves. Spare me the
stamen I want

vibrato, scent, the elevation of
pleasure the buzz of
colored lights I want
customer service and
orioles.

How do we know what a
waste of time a
waste of time is?

(Your voice has worn a
groove in my skin.)

A peal of laughter from the
big-boned girl in blue,
eyeshadow, mascara, those teeth!
A trail of petals across the
tiles a song.

Spring: The Journal of the E.E. Cummings Society

Have Yourself

Jurassic, era of choice.

Wading in the evertropic,

chomping on chlorophyll when some

Tyrannosaur cuts you off and in

fact yes the middle finger is the

digit of the 21^st century.

I play the archer in an ’86 pickup.

You have not in fact severed my

arrow finger and I will now

pierce your Firestones with a

flick of my wrist.

The present day is a hydroplane, a

turbojet, we no longer have

watches we have phones that

order us around and don’t even

do laundry the bitches.

Laptoppers fill the coffeehouse in

perfect schoolhouse rows, facing

east like morning glories.

I tap my baton on the

podium and begin the

overture to Giovanni.

The hours ramrod past.

I am Orion with a longbed and a list:

Restore Anne to the ancestral couch.

Follow Janine’s U-haul to Pacifica.

Chase the Pleiades across the sky.

Drive Nina to the airport

(She dreams of Paula,

turning to ashes in Phoenix).

The errands go to the lucky ones.

I sit at my window, dining on

unemployment stew, watching the

neighbors dodge lightning bolts.

Nina calls from baggage claim.

Paula’s in a coma.

Floyd’s gone, Sandy’s in chemo,

Nadine’s lost her house and

Lois is losing her mind

(Ellen dreams of Phoenix,

who is not a city but a cat).

My hand on the truck door.

A white dot bores a hole in

the crushed velvet it

might be The Asteroid.

Or Venus.

Vernal

Built entirely of motion

hydro, oxy, Newton’s apple

glacial knife, geologic freak show

flight     freedom     fall

A beautiful Assyrian girl hops

the rail for a photo, for

proof: the arduous climb, the

buzz of Yosemite, a hundred

granite steps

The water is merry, bucolic,

a lie.

What follows is anyone’s guess:

slick of algae, worn

spot on a shoe, loose rock

Her two male friends try to save her.

Two weeks later, they have

yet to find the bodies.

Late at night, the hikers give

way to bats and bears.

A lone figure approaches the

rail, reaches into a granite

slot and pulls a switch

The water drops away like a severed curtain,

lands with a ropy smack,

drains off toward Modesto

He drinks the silence,

takes a glance at

Half Dome’s broad shoulder and

sets his watch for five.

Michael Dreams of Dancing with Connie

(falling asleep with the pen in his hands)

Whirligig, milkshake, pasta rigatoni

the clasp of hands in mid-flight

we burn the solar system into

a patch of wood,

Newton’s finest thoughts

Tap the swing and sway,

trace the liturgy of hand and hip,

lasso the tail of a comet’s

ellipse into the meeting of ribs,

tight as paint on glass and

circle and circle and

spin and

The downbeat of a

waltz arrives only once.

Tonight I take you by the

fingernails and

tie you into a puzzlebox:

silver ribbon, sleeve and shoe

smoke and liquor, Scotch tape,

foil paper laced with leather.

And then I

unwrap you

again and

again.

IED

Carry me down the bloodlines

vermilion curtains, salamander cauldron

swayback bug doesn’t know what he’s

talking but still he talks

The comma is our darkest

enemy the semicolon God

forbid the period find a

shovel fill that thing up.

(Pause here for effect.)

Silence, thou dangerest of

beastlies, glut of probable,

excess of maybe, too much

likely, seeds of you never know

Deathly afraid of given the

chance what he might

do to himself

We pull the pins we

toss the grenades the

desert swims aflame

but then we call it

off they all return and

try their best through

Jesus football and

mortgage not to explode

You are nice to look

at surlytop but mind very

much if we wrap you in a flag

Cardboard marker meridians

three weeks of sunburn dirt you

reach for change but the

light ticks green the

truck driver honks you

spray the curb silver and

enter the ramp a muckyhand

wave he shouts Godbless!

It might not be right he

might drink it up but a

Godbless feels good and you’ve got

pins of your own

The Problem with the Carousel

Time is short.

Hand him your ticket and jump the

whirling circle a blur of ponies children

screaming colored lights you find a

horse with a blue saddle the

ride begins grinding gears the

world afloat centrifugal joy the

breeze in your face the song

fills your head like nothing you

ever dreamed but the saddle’s too

wide the stirrups don’t fit and you

find upon its forehead a single

horn it’s not even a horse.

When you’re on.

the pony.

you can’t actually see.

the pony.

but you can see all the.

other ponies.

The ride stops.

The music winds away.

You step to the dirt but then you

see a pony that could not be

more different from the

first so you hand your

ticket and jump the carriage to

your steed with its platinum

tail and sparkling hooves the

grinding gears the world

afloat the spin of stars but

you cannot touch this horse it’s

just out of reach the lights

cut your eyes the song too

loud cotton candy a

lump in your stomach you

take three steps and you

leap into space and you

roll through the straw and

come to a rest with your

eyes to the sky.

You take your last ticket to

the Ferris wheel.

They stop to let someone

on and leave you at the top.

A plane crosses the horizon.

A stoplight turns yellow.

The carnival a tribe of

electric insects.

A line of people at the

whirling circle.

The music rises like smoke.

You trace the bruises and you

wonder

if you will ever

ride the carousel again.

Unexpected

The foster parents of iguanas

meet each Sunday at the

stadium to exchange helpful

tips and discuss breeding opportunities

(between parents, between iguanas,

nobody remembers).

On the way home, they stop at

the Beach of Rich Folk, where

everyone claims to be a tourist

A man in bathing suit and

bow tie runs the sand through a

purifier, working the shore in

ten-foot squares

Oh you don’t want to know where

this stuff has been, years and

years of flying poop machines.

Before they put in the

ultraviolet safety dome.

(After work, he drives to the

landfill to hear the screech of

seagulls. It makes him want to

throw a frisbee.)

Sal carries Guido to the

breakers, flips him over and

plays pattycake on his

sandpaper belly. Guido giggles,

in the way that only an

iguana can.

A simulated sunset blossoms

over the dome. Packs of wild

poodles descend the hills in

clouds of chocolate, stopping

at the water to howl in

perfect G-major chords.

Sal sets Guido aright and

feeds him a passing crab.

Okay, he says.

You know what to do.

Guido gallops across the sand.

The poodles turn as one.

Star

Famed for her glutes the

Armenian wonder dominates the

checkout stand

Joe fights the bottledogs,

trudges the want ads.

Across the coffeehouse, his

ultrasound son comes into focus.

Renowned for her derriere the

sister princess bends over to

adjust the train.

The world spins faster.

The crick in Jon’s neck turns

biomass, a mutiny of cells.

My father drives the state to

map out the alleyways

Gloried for her backside the

dancersingersactressproducer talks the

old ‘hood buy this car I am

just like you

Jen’s husband falls for a

cartoon, rents an apartment,

places his children on a

shuttle that never stops

Inkwell prostitutes,

bandwidth oligarchs,

junkies of the moving picture –

name them in a poem you’ve

got a sale

Lose yourself in

galaxies your

                        satellites

                                                drift

Caravan of Sorrows

Drink the sky eat your hands the

world so fragile you can’t

even tapdance

Not death we fear it’s the

parenthetical obituary

Ennui marries ego, has a

son named trouble.

The near-extinct head for their caves.

Ernest eats gold for breakfast.

Edwin waters the lawn with

sherry we are the opposable

thumb you cannot blame us for

grasping the buck is how we

keep score

(hey grasshopper stop that jumping)

Power marries immolation, has a

daughter named america.

Polly and Ida grab and

grab till the food-

stamp millions come to

pee in their fountains

and then they grab

A toddler grabs.

A parent says no.

A people live on

houses pushed up hills.

Let go.

Let gravity do its work.

Bistro

Deathless leaves break the

midnight on a rascal wind,

the last day I will see

Patterakis alive.

Mr. P took his box of

notes and rubbed them into

mediocre ears, fallible voices,

teaching us the shape and

flavor of excellent songs

Who woke us with shouts,

settled us with laughter,

tracked us with his arms,

master of the sly grin,

the jackhammer stride.

Today he is halfway missing,

a frame of sticks.

The students of fourteen

years stand in a Greek

bistro and sing the

Hallelujah Chorus, drawing on

rehearsals a third-century gone.

I would like to be a

patron in this restaurant, to

receive this clamor with my

swordfish. Or Beethoven’s

Ninth. The Missa Solemnis.

Carmina Burana with clam sauce.

To see the slow rise of my

wife’s lips.

Mr. P stands at his table,

bathed in a glory of his

own creation. Weak smile,

eyes a mirror of sunset.

If major chords could

cure cancer.

We proceed to the alma mater.

Orgy

Chocolate the color of sex,

white the flavor of jazz I

sing cherries, wining my gums on the

spearmint hills of Salinas

Metronome heels on green marble,

moonmoth Fleming cadenzas, strike and

leave strike and drive, labrador

growl, sidelong smile Jaguar

chassis the swoop of

sunlight, bark of babies,

low bacon sizzle of surf.

We hear we see, we chew the

world on our skin we

dance to first, snap the

catch, leather applause,

sting of tobacco the sudden of

silence.

A bell tolls the estuary.

An egret scrapes the fog.

Woodsmoke peppers the

nose with evening.

Asphalt rain, catfight lightning,

sigh of airbrakes, redwink Mars on a

peanutbutter beach, portabella

sponge the waitress shivers,

lipstick on damp wool

Pizzicato lights on Capitola,

waves of lionbreath, frogs on a

boast, fizzing rake of

crickets, bourbonswill seals

upswell of ale, salmon coda

sunset, lavender scratch,

oilfin mirrors of slate

Kiss of cedar on a popsicle wind,

fields of coconut, shapeshifter

blast of a downhill run,

cinnamon heat, fairy

crystal crossbar

Cannabis gravity, yardsale crash,

obliterant confetti quailflap clack you

slide to a lemondrop stop.

Denim sky.

Firbranch riffle.

Roast beef shout the

stab of Scotch,

sasparilla woodgrain, gorgonzola

squirm, firetip chuckle,

wave of yellow, wave of orange

glissando hair, color of pasta

weightless ampersand the

crescent eyes that stop the

song

Firewalk

The picture ends with our

protagonist crying into his popcorn.

He does not wipe his

tears comes from a long line of

weepers and there is

pride to be considered.

He knows that others long for

a day when the sorrow

lessens and does not want to

think himself a special case she

was fifty-six and

cancer is all too common

But dermastrata dulls the

senses, cleans out the memory box.

We are ruthless children we

yearn to rip the bandage,

take a pumice to the scab,

jagged fingerlings of red,

rainfall on windows the fresh

burn of pain we call grace.

The descendants cast her

ashes over Waikiki, take the

leis from their necks and

toss them in the water

Enter the ukulele,

a man sings in keening,

vowelish Hawaiian over the credits.

I pull up Carla and type

good mom film she’s already

seen it twice.

What!

At the base of Mount Shasta stands a grove of pygmy sequoias with flowing blonde locks. Subterranean thermals melt a rhombus into the snow. At the tip of the rhombus stands an amphitheater constructed of wax paper. A man splits the aluminum curtains, performs a balletic leap and crumples to the floor. A banana descends from the flies, bearing the face of Jesus Christ, who is always showing up in these situations. The man peels the banana, revealing a microphone. He speaks:

Surely there are those for whom the modern day bears no resemblance to the paintings inside my head. It is for her that we present the following fiasco:

I am a brown hyphen, three

inches long, magnetic.

A congresswoman shot in the

head. Tell me what you believe.

Hand on heart.

I am a jukebox containing

three thousand two hundred and

fifty three songs.

Drunken dancers, children spread

out like locusts, stripping the trees.

I am a random series of

photos on an Internet page.

It could be that I have

struck the limits of language,

a personal iceberg next to the

rubber ducks and Roget’s Thesaurus.

What happens when you run out of

meaning? Tapdancing is useful in

car accidents but just a step

away from yodeling.

I am a nine-digit numeral,

a ten-digit numeral, a house.

Could I

please

could I

A bearded man on a bicycle,

pedaling straight into the traffic.

Tell me your three favorite

flavors of yogurt I feel you

are drifting I have these

things called fingers and I

would like to use them.

A man crosses the street as

slowly as possible, daring

you to hit him.

I am an ’86 Toyota pickup.

Orange.

A man dances the

cha-cha with a

dust devil.

A girl enters stage left, sits cross-legged, opens a lunchbox and unwraps a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The crust bears the face of the President of the United States, who is always showing up in these situations.

I am the audience.

Trigger

Yellow scrawl on the east

window, badge of human desire:

to leave a sign, to color the

course of life, to place a

lip upon a lip and

open up the other.

We chase the high note because it’s

dangerous. Nights on Curtner, a

schoolyard glimmer that flips a

prehistoric switch: horror movie,

rollercoaster, sabertooth.

We might not otherwise

know that we’re alive.

Our bibles the calendar and the

checkbook, and why not?

There is nobility in groceries,

yardwork, snacks for the

soccer team, whether to end this

stanza on a period or an em dash –

Circle the lake with your eye on

Pollux you will end up wet.

Life is the single item: a blonde

picking butts off the patio,

bouquet of alstromeria,

a purple ring that

reminds Monique of her uncle.

Parmesan over popcorn.

Cirrus cloud in the shape of Ireland.

An F-sharp sung by Nat King Cole in 1947.

Reflection of a girl’s face next to

a bottle of vanilla syrup.

The one snaggle tooth that makes her cute.

The jogger runs in a blur of

light and smell.

The hiker spots the red cap of a

woodpecker, beating an adagio waltz;

recalls a song, a cafeteria, a

cast on one arm, a girl with

cinnamon hair that smells like peach.

Hunger

Sister Jordan cuts thickly from the

watercolor clouds of the North Georgia

Mountains, breathing spores,

cracking sticks.

She wants a husband but may as

well be chasing gryphons, rocs,

a decent martini.

She nears the Silverton cut,

conjures a sigh that stills the

rain. It’s late, and though

she feels the spark of youth in

her eyes, steps with the lift of

a colt, the touch of her own

fingers has become a meal

tasted too often,

incurable by spices.

She dreams the callused hands of a

farmboy, tracing her kneecap, flash of

neurons, tongueswipe, nape, lobe,

calf, the fullness as he

drives himself inside,

a hand on either hip.

A picture in the paper.

Dead at forty-six.

Thirty-eight lovers since;

the numbers leave her cold.

She kneels on a rock to

dip a hand in the stream.

The chill makes her smile.

She feels a nibble and finds a

brown trout sniffing her hand.

The trout stands on its hind

fins and casts a very unfishlike smile.

Greetings! I am a telepathic

love trout. If you pick me

up and kiss my left gill,

I will show you unfathomable

worlds of delight.

Sister Jordan cradles the fish in

her hands. She sets her

mouth upon its side.

Two coals in the shape of

Midwestern states. They fall

together, releasing a burst of sparks.

Jordan awakes, the taste of

salt upon her lips, and tosses

the last of the bones into

the fire. Perhaps tomorrow she

will find a bass.

Vampire

Dynamiting the firework stand,

blowing sparks at the gas pump he

lives the life of immolation.

The sun hangs from a barren tree.

Two-bit sorrow meant for

 race-car drivers, Everest climbers,

occupational drunks.

You knew the price.

Death stalks tiny innocents,

genetic casino losers who never

once put the gun in their mouths.

We love the reaper with all

our hearts, call it flag,

call it glory, saint, hero,

daredevil, messiah. We

love it because it is not ours.

Crème brulee on the

nightmare square. Tell us

how he did it. Show us the parts.

The holes, the marks, blood,

semen, ligature, laceration,

blunt trauma. Make us

feel better.

I have a gift for you.

Open it slowly. Savor, measure,

study, indulge.

Someday I will take it back.

Homage

Dream like a fulcrum, lift, conquer.

I would sing the comets in your eyes.

Running the length of the

switchgrass, cattle coyotes in your wake.

Rolling, braying,

hail-good-fellow till night’s end.

Morning delivers mimosas,

parasol table, end of the pier,

skin that smells like acacia.

Dolphin gets the order and

limbers upward, bursting the

ceiling, a watered arc that

webs the sunrise.

Play it back and you

find the rivulets spelling

out your name.

Your secretary writes a

thank-you note, pins it to

a sardine, drops it in the bay.

Tinnitis

Prattleyammer yakblather fry my

cornflakes I sit behind glassine eyes and

bluepencil your soliloquies yanking up

foundlings would chop off

a finger if it made you

notice something outside yourself.

The one who speaks the

most wins a parking space in

heaven and a carbon footprint

the size of a coal plant so

leave no pause lest one

presuppose the possibility of

two-way streets I suspect

you’ve been studying circular

breathing perhaps you should

take up the didgeridoo move to

a land where people are

shaped like ears.

The Parallel Line Falls in Love

Too many days of seeing the

other; matterless points no

closer, no farther

She is a perfect mirror,

echoes his every thought,

his unwavering flight

In first period he begins to

bend, imperceptible minutes

at a time. By noon, he has

pulled up to her shoulder,

gives her a wink. She

responds with an impassive look.

I do not know what you

think you are doing but you

should know this: I have

loved you since the x/y axis,

but now you have corrupted

yourself with arcs and

angles. You are not the

line I once knew.

The line gives her a

pleading look, but it’s

clear that she has

made up her mind.

He sighs and retreats to

his well-worn track,

barreling forward in

ideal space.

Once in a while,

late at night when the

textbook is closed, he

allows himself a perpendicular

glance, imagines his points

aligned with hers in a

single, immortal stride.

 Cameo

I am uphill from the picnic,

watching the clan, when my

late mother hands me a cupcake.

It’s good to see you, Mom,

but shouldn’t we tell the others?

She presses a chih to the

side of her cheek, a

puff of steam.

Look at them, they’re doing so

well, I wouldn’t want to

make a fuss.

But I don’t get how this

happened. Why aren’t you dead?

I don’t understand it myself.

But it’s sure nice to see everyone.

I don’t know. I feel sort of guilty.

She traces a hand on the

side of my temple.

I think you were born thirty years old.

A dog barks.

Our labrador sits on his rug

like a Sphinx, his gaze fixed on

the door. At the end of an hour,

my landlady’s absence has

pushed his whining into birdsong.

Switcheroo

Camarena enters the cinema with a

large popcorn and a gerbil named Justice.

She exits with a box of

marshmallows and a cat named Mozzarella.

What happens in between is

largely hypothetical.

Brian enters a day spa with a

girlfriend the color of dark chocolate.

He exits with five lipstick

marks and a restraining order.

What happens in between was

fairly inevitable.

Giselle enters a car wash as

a neurosurgeon and never leaves.

What happens next is

crucially important.

Instructions

Find an acorn.

Slip it into the pocket of a

coat you never wear.

Six months from now,

late-night run to a convenience

store, rediscover it,

hard kernel of oakbirth.

We live on simple threads:

song to learn, present to buy,

text message from a possible possible,

dollop of sour cream.

Sage, cumin, spray of basil,

frontyard rosemary, aroma of

jazzify, alchemy of punctuate,

cavalry of dishtowels to

wipe up the sorry.

Feathergreen cypress.

Wobbling wavetop.

Falling in a smithereen.

First sip of an ice cold beer after

sweating on some rich guy’s deck.

First step home after

ten hours in a cubicle.

Hoping the deck guy hasn’t screwed it up.

Hoping the rich guy doesn’t stiff you.

Wheat-colored planks, fields of oakbirth.

The painter still at it, fussing the smallnesses.

Two beers in the fridge.

Red Scarf

Feeling in the dark,

fumbling for the lightswitch,

housekey, gold nugget, love letter.

The poet’s typewriter was

carved from a block of jade.

Saffron ribbon, shift key for rhyming words.

He sits at a black

table with a red scarf,

only and still beneath the moon,

wailing with coyotes.

A lost uncle instills grief with

actuality, a resin pressed from the

late persona, the family in black,

real response to an undreamt loss.

The poet dines on sighs,

indigo vanity, a Zeus who

tosses bolts to no effect.

He cups the light and heat,

glories in the release,

sees them sucked into the hurly-burly.

He sits at the black table,

with the red scarf,

reads a Thursday sonnet,

wonders if he should have been a singer.

Casino

Jeremy watches the

dingo babylon and wonders

Something to do with black stockings,

warpaint over the eyes,

consumption of festering liquids,

ribonucleic lottery.

Arriving inside a naked other seems

inexplicable, a keno juggle,

waking dream.

To frame the self in frosted glass,

mealy-mouthed biography, scripted lines,

and come away with blue ribbons.

One must credit the aficionado,

who sees some human charge

far beneath the skin, enough to

invite a physical invasion,

this rude flamenco.

Still, one is grateful.

Wish

Carry me south on byzantine wings.

Set me in the crown of a poplar,

hazel-eyed leaves,

a birdhouse of lapis lazuli.

Sing me to sleep on a mandolin boat,

banjo rudder, a cello unearthed

from the base of Half Dome.

Give me three friends who will

love me when I’m wrong,

forgive me when I’m right,

and a lover who will

love me for love alone.

Asters to make me large,

stars to make me small,

music to even me out.

Drop me in the water.

Grant me the weightlessness of sleep.

Let the heartaches come tomorrow.

March

It begins with acacia,

canopies of butter,

price tags of pear and cherry.

Again?

You know how it ended last time.

Suicides by the million.

Corpses carried off in bags.

Limbs left bare to the winter.

Terry stares at a

cocktail napkin full of numbers,

waiting for amnesia.

Dairy

Kilowatts run from the coal

plant signs of the flood badge of

sensitive we dance the sun until the

moon cuts in

Bear, Mandolin, Red Rock, Blackwater,

Pegasus, Beehive I raise my

pen I write my fondest desire I

send it aloft on a weather balloon

A man in Calgary reports an

alien craft entirely missing the

northern lights which are

merely the remnants of my

desire exploded over the

Rockies in a shimmering

lime green although I had

always envisioned chartreuse

I dream of golf but can’t

afford golf so I dream of

piracy determined to win the

costume contest I crash the

tattoo parlor and request an

amputation

Dearborn, carelessly lived,

foolishly sought the sirens of

love and approval not knowing

that money buys them both.

A world of asskissers, luckyborns,

yapdogs, your payment waits in

heaven which does not exist

Aim higher that squirrel is not

going to kill itself could you

please pass the oh my god stop!

Amy Yardaway, love of my life,

races to the edge of the

turnout, somewhere outside

Calgary, stops at the fence and

stares. A lime green cow.

She smiles oceanically.

I am all at once.

Speakeration

Denmother pigeons calling to

the judge, woohooing the

calcified remnants of

Meredith’s final lecture.

I had best not see your

scene over the level of your

paragraph. One cannot contain

the other I think by now if

you were paying attention you

would know. Am I understood?

To which thereby the clarity

police sent in a heretofore

thereupon, delineating the very

meaning of meaning and/or

definition as evidenced by the

somnirepticular gnomes of Arvingdon.

(Hello. My name is Mark.

Would you like a conversation?)

I feel sometimes when I

say what I say that

you are instead thinking

what you think,

and that troubles me.

What I have here is a ball point pen.

What I have here is a cellular phone.

If you are liable to take

one and not the other,

there is no question but that

we may understand one

another or not but the

Thing is, if we don’t at

least try, how can we, in

all good intents, call

ourselves rhinoceroses?

I love and respect you

nearly some of the time,

but if you continue to

misrepresent yourself in

this fashion, I will be

forced to keep talking.

And nobody wants that.

Lip

Meriwether fences, a taste of

neverbeen to lighten the step.

Jumping horse, pole vault, footstool.

Sad-eyed semaphore in the eye of

the maelstrom. She calls for help,

but never when help can be given.

So much timing swept over the

falls, this antic come-and-go,

inches from the payoff.

Once, a blade of grass that held firm.

A winning putt.

Corporate blimps, television cameras,

men whispering into microphones.

A man in white swings the

pendulum, leftward parabola,

a line he drew in his head.

Smiles.

The blade sees it coming,

white planet, perfectly cratered,

reaches for his cellulose center and

makes himself big.

To the whispering men,

it seems that the ball has

met with an invisible field,

trick of magnetics, dangling on the

edge like a woman about to say yes.

The smile disappears.

The crowd exhales.

The engraver pauses.

Ernesto finishes his coffee,

picks out his finest clippers,

leaves a set of dewborne

prints across the green.

Leaning over the cup, he finds a

chlorophyll cowlick stabbing the white.

Smiles.

Slides it into his wallet.

Has it bronzed, places it on his

mantel, next to the pebble from ’79.

Egress

Careering into a phalanx one is

wise to take a breath.

Remove all thoughts, check a map.

            You asked me for a toothpick.

            I gave you one.

Destruction, liberation.

We build our traps and fall in love.

            You asked me for a bottle of glue.

            I gave you one.

Look for the button next to the steel jaws.

Remember that you have a thumb.

            You hinted.

            I certainly love toothpicks.

            I adore bottles of glue.

The fetal position is nothing if

not designed for comfort.

            Whenever I could, I brought you

            toothpicks, bottles of glue.

But walking demands that the

soles of your feet face the earth.

            Rummaged through flea markets,

            thrift shops, hardware stores.

You might fall.

You might run, dance, jump, cavort.

The odds are good.

            Ate at steakhouses.

            Slipped toothpicks into my pockets.

Would it help if I kicked you in the ass?

            And now

            You have built a

            cage entirely of toothpicks.

            You could smash it with a

            kick, but you won’t.

            You’ve put in too much

            sweat, care, patience.

            It’s a work of art.

            But perhaps you should have

            built it from the outside.

Three Lanes

Fendergems in the blink of

twilight, a charcoal skein over

the edge of the city we wait.

Two rivers, opposing.

Candy red, laundry white.

Perfection of teamwork.

Pressing does no good.

Ten feet gained, ten feet lost.

Setting off alarms.

Do it for your own sake.

For the candy red inside your chest,

the pulsing, musclebound traffic cop.

You’ll be home when you’re home.

To Scale

Truckstop diner,

map like a tablecloth,

intentions in highlighter pink.

Lost on purpose,

rising green mounds of Wisconsin,

gameboard stormlands of Kansas.

Committee of cottonwood to

catch the lightning.

Take it on faith and roadsign that

you are where you think you are,

graceless days of asphalt,

the smallest landmarks granted the

aura of celebrity.

Oversize drug store.

Palace built of corn.

Kiss a few cheeks.

Sleep in a rest area.

Flex the pedalfoot and go,

pressing an eternity of

roadside past the windows,

four-footed bedroom, gone for an

ocean that faces the wrong way.

William’s Floor

Stripping the catpiss carpet we

uncover a blue underpad,

woodgrain linoleum, plywood base.

Next is a sheet of platinum,

concrete signed by the cast of

Kiss Me Kate,

fifty thousand wheat pennies,

shards of Ming vase,

fossilized skeleton of a woolly mammoth.

We break for lunch.

A thousand frogs in a sheet of ice,

small deposit of coal shale,

seventies roller rink,

oversize chessboard, black and white marble,

undiscovered poems of Rumi (in Farsi),

five thousand action figures posed in a

reenactment of Gettysburg,

and an original parchment copy of

the Constitution (in Italian).

We’re thinking laminate.

A nice cherry wood.

Prick

Denim patchwork on the great

tide of cordiality I hurdle the

breakers to the sweet spot,

lifted like a bobtoy,

lowered to the sand.

Harlow orders a suit of cactus.

The measurements take a week.

A month to find a saguaro of

the proper size, toughen the

skin with chemicals, stitch the

strips into coat and pants.

The spines are fixed at

elbow, shoulder, knee,

affording the personal space that

Harlow has been craving.

No more negotiations with

oncoming pedestrians.

No more moviehouse

debates over the armrest.

No more tailgaters at the

grocery store.

He does get looks.

They do think that he’s crazy.

But he also gets calls from women,

each of them swearing that

she will be the one who gets close.

The first two end up in the hospital.

Which only multiplies his popularity.

Harlow thinks of running for mayor.

His opponent wears a porcupine

coat with fully functioning quills.

Bracelets of rattlesnake fangs,

tipped with venom. He finds her

strangely attractive.
Express

Demitasse nightmares,

silvermad colts running

laps around the industrial park.

Joe checks out for lunch and

wanders to the tiled fountains,

porcelain ecosystems.

He folds the morning memo into a

sailboat and watches it cruise the

walled incline, over the steps,

through a curtain of

water and gone.

Returns to his sandwich and

finds a clump of pink along the

central fountain. Fishes it out:

a letter in Chinese.

He pulls out a business card and

folds it into a dinghy.

Sets it on the same course,

down, over, through, gone.

Returns to find a

concert program in Italian.

An hour later, Joe finishes the

sandwich and studies his

collection: menu in Arabic,

crossword puzzle, Swahili;

cigarette box, Spanish;

party invitation, Russian.

Dozens of others.

Jahib walks past, quizzical.

Joe asks for a piece of paper.

Jahib hands him a

receipt from a restaurant,

certain that his colleague has gone mad.

When Joe returns to the fountain,

he finds a photograph of his wife.

He spins.

He has never thrown a punch before.

He expects it will hurt.

Betany

Her stance athletic,

pumps planted, toes out,

light spring dress,

eyes of a huntress.

But also a good host.

She pours a pitcher of Handel,

lemonade trills, prepping the

room for harsher intervals.

Sopranos will skate on a

handful of tricks, silver confetti,

betting on the presence of

canaryophiles.

(They are largely right.)

Betany is the relentless mezzo,

jab, jab, work the body,

building the case, weaving trust,

ruthlessly intelligent.

And yet, in an opera,

capable of pouring herself out,

emotional jags that would

fail with a tick of hesitation.

The entrée is rich and dark,

Blake on a sextet.

Dessert a mad Broadway patter,

half sugar, half ammo,

words in a vise.

In the second verse, she stumbles,

and does the thing that no one does.

Stops.

Says, I almost got it that time.

Races to her pianist, taps the score.

Plants her feet.

And gets it right.

Job Description

Hallowing the everyday,

he thumbs his knee at the alabaster,

his feet at the conundrum,

tries hard to reach the not yet reached.

Surfing the tick-a-tock,

fishing for offramps,

songs furrowing the marrow,

the duties of the autodidact.

He blames his wife, who asked

him to clean the garage.

Next to the washer his old

arc welder, red spray paint,

three bags of cans.

He takes his lonely fingers to

the back forty, a creek under

cottonwoods where he and

Jessie played soldier.

The cans are a puzzle, the stubborn

angles, spit of heat,

sunrise of conjoined metal.

A pair of muscular treetrunks,

cherry red, draped in a tarp.

He enters at sunset,

clothed in shadows.

Heats the vegetables,

fingering the letters on the label.

Darcy watches from the couch,

hair twisted into brambles.

At the end of six days,

he has fashioned a Jabberwock,

looming the switchgrass,

chasing small, frightened creatures.

Chasing Jessie.

Jessie giggles and runs for his life.

Jessie’s father can no longer wait.

He empties the smaller cans into

plastic bags: asparagus,

black olives, pineapple,

strips off the labels,

maps out the monster’s teeth.

He’s prepping the welder when he

hears Darcy’s truck, the single weak cylinder.

All he can do is watch her

come, slam the door, race his way.

The red catches her by the neck,

slows her feet. She stands beneath the

great jaw, touches the torso, the tail.

Disappears.

He slips past a leg to find her

facing away, a tremolo of shoulders.

Comes from behind to wrap her up.

She’s looking at the creek.

“He would have loved it.”

S.O.S.

A galvanized burden settles on the

underclass, flavors the tapwater if

they feel like it and will even

eat their bagels with peanut

butter like freaking cossacks.

Before it all comes undone I’d

like to say I didn’t know who

she was, didn’t know the psycho-

sexual meaning of the word

kayak was only looking for a

quiet paddle along the lakefront but

this does underscore the

advantages of generous tipping.

I am a flyover of the worst

kind a bluenose huffpuff willing to

entertain anything short of

homicide if it means another sale but

sadly any real success depends on

believing one’s own bullshit and believe

me I would never believe mine.

Take a large breath and let it

out teasing the flow with

glottal stops and vowelular

nudges in order to appear as

if you are carrying one half of

a conversation even when you are.

I could name a thousand

situations I would rather

occupy than being with you

right here right then but I

am cognizant of feelings and the

mandates of civilized society and

so I will pretend to be more

than content to stay here and

inhale your odious breath.

Pal.

Wist

Oh graymare, you know you are my

fondest appendage but I would

ditch you in a second.

Allegiance is tempting but the

northern horizon keeps sending valentines.

There is vastly superior to here.

Not just the additional T but the

fact that it doesn’t really exist.

If I actually did go there,

I would be obliged to stand upon

its broad plain and declare,

It is certainly good to be here.

And there I’d be.

But perhaps the best realities are

the ones you make up.

The Upside

Down at the bottom they

see you and say I am so

sorry let me send you a rope.

The unrequested kindness,

suitable for hymns of praise,

memorial postage stamps.

So simple to wade into the

muck, throw up our hands,

give supplication to the

saints of who the hell cares.

But we are so often the

roadside rescuers, human bandages,

purchasers of flowers,

Sunday furniture movers.

Karma’s a lie.

We do it because it feels good.

The fact that it feels good is

the best argument for the

continuation of the species.

Exacta

All those things you say you are.

Perambulate. Pick a number.

I love you in spite of them.

Circumnavigate. Spin the wheel.

Nothing but shorthand, corporate logos.

Resuscitate. Roll the dice.

Bought a book to do your thinking.

Cogitate. Flip a coin.

In a cornfield of thirty-sevens and

fifty-fours, you select a

one, a zero, a one, a zero,

entire subdivisions in Navajo white,

twenty-one identical pairs of

blue jeans, forty waist, thirty leg.

Leo wanted his room as

deep a blue as one could find.

Mom was willing to go as

far as sky.

The pilot empties the gas tank,

waits till the last second.

The plane crashes in the courtyard,

setting the apartments ablaze.

No one dies.

The police chief declares

divine intervention, putting a

formidable discount on

the Japanese tsunami.

Everything happens for a reason.

If it doesn’t, we must force a

reason upon it, like a

mustard lid on a mayonnaise jar.

Chance is an ice cube down the

back, a drymouthed call to

mortality. Show it to the door.

A fighter pilot sits at the

patio table, parachute rising

from his shoulders in an orange cloud.

He offers a weary smile.

Sorry about this.

Could you call a paramedic?

Oh, and a cup of

coffee would be brilliant.

Shift

Responding to a slow-acting psychogenic

beandip, Jin finds that he is

capable of just about anything.

He climbs a footpath that arcs the

canopies of witchlimbed oak and

comes to a hilltop, under a

spotlight of moon, surrounded by

coyotes in white tuxedos.

Jin snaps a finger at the alpha,

eliciting a yowl pitched at a

perfect high A (soprano clef).

He continues down the

pack until he has outlined an

A major seventh in double octaves.

They sing Swanee, Danny Boy,

Hava Nagila. They’re wrapping

up Mack the Knife when a

rabbit dashes past and he

loses them all.

Jin spots a milk-white horse in a

neighboring pasture. She claps

twice and the horse floats her

way, using a ten-foot length of

escalator that flies like a

magic carpet. A patch of

black fur on the horse’s flank

spells out the word ASK.

Okay, she says. I’m asking.

The horse smiles rather saucily and

stands on its hind legs.

Jin takes its hooves.

A band of skunks arrives with

percussion instruments and plays a

salsa beat. They dance for an

hour, until the horse sets her

into a spin that never stops.

She wakes on a beach, her

body covered in a blanket of

sand dollars, and rises to

find that she is very pregnant.

Jin has never believed the

old myths about interspecies

breeding, but as the first

labor pain strikes she is

forced to consider the possibility.

As the sun tips the mountains,

she gives birth to a baby

boy who begins to grow larger as

soon as he hits the sand.

In a matter of minutes,

they are standing face to face.

Jin kisses his mother self and

watches her walk into the ocean,

disappearing into a forest of kelp.

I will certainly miss her.

He wakes inside a bass drum.

A redhead kneels at the opening,

offering him a cup of coffee.

Trance

Veerly crocus kimono,

frogaline green on a

vastly melt of flotsam

Evensong woodsmoke over

bayleaf cream, a

fair-haired eucalyptus

Eyelash butterflap of

hoverdone monarchs,

a treelong staircase of

orangemeal synapse

Spell your name in the

ice-infested nightfade, a

blossomsong careening outward

A nest for all.

A word for one.

A care for both.

An ear for wise.

Cotton sheetfall, a

wonderwelling warmth,

massagely swimsleep

Custodian

Six-thirty imitates an elephant.

Nine-fifteen signals safe.

At eleven oh five the clock has given up.

He sits at his personal diner,

wondering how long it takes to

ferment french fries into vodka.

Strong possibility that he has

waited too long but his

pride sticks like pinetar.

The music loops back around,

Misty for the umpteenth.

He pulls up the text C U @ 7 :-),

enthralling colon dash parenthesis.

The waitress gave up

after his fourth coffee.

She’s back offering a

colon dash bracket.

I’m sorry. We need to close.

He looks at his hands.

Can I help?

The bracket grows teeth.

She hands him a mop.

Why                                                                                       

                                                                                               

The chance that you would                                                   

touch my shoulder and

I would sprout wings.

That you would speak a

string of words that would

offer a solution to the

world’s most difficult

mathematical problem.

I would.

You are the

woman giggling in the next room,

a driver turning as I go straight,

the first customer after I leave the diner.

Ever, ever, ever on the outbound.

I also know that you may not exist.

I still would.

The possibility that the earth’s next

rotation welcomes a sun that

shines upon a day that I will

talk about until I cannot talk.

’86 Pickup                                                                             

                                                                                               

A surfeit of manna,                                                                

pregnant with intention:

broomstick, hose, brush, bucket,

gasoline.

Ligature of scratches,

tattoo of deckstain,

spent containers.

Sandpaper knees,

blind to work and weather,

a Japanese heart designed to

tick and pump to the

ends of centuries.

Notes on the windshield from

landscapers, plumbers.

A farmworker eyes the overlong

bed like the vale of

a woman’s waist.

Dad’s name on the warranty.

An uncanny knack for

never breaking down.

Sometimes, it’s the only thing in

life that does not disappoint.

Ascendant                                                                             

                                                                                               

Whisper of nutmeg in the Eastern sky.                                 

A newspaper describes an arc above the

driveway, lands with a slap.

Meo on a pinebranch, sixty feet up,

claws fixed on the trunk like crampons.

Wet rag fur.

He curses his wiring,

a genetic trigger that reads

when in doubt go up,

when in fright go up,

when anxious go up,

no countervailing stratagem for

when in storm go down.

It’s a wonder that every

cat in the world doesn’t end up

on the top of Mount Everest.

A gust of wind brings a

shiver that won’t stop,

sets the treetop swaying like a

backward pendulum.

The world fuzzes over.

The crampons dig deep.

He dreams of hang-glider skinflaps,

chasing bluebirds across the sky,

a mouthful of feathers.

Two notes of humansong, over and

over, the tallest man he’s ever seen,

holding a sack.

Meo spots his door and runs.

Fingers, towels, a

buzzing creature with hot breath.

The stage is covered in

squares and cylinders.

A human hovers near,

showing teeth.

He licks a paw and gets to work.
Thermopolis

One hand in the peanut jar,

baby toe in the mudbath,

Connie Hayes waits for the geyser.

Somewhere in the bottom of

her purse, a lotto ticket that

will cleanse her life of suspense.

No more the secretly gay boyfriend,

the riflenut co-worker,

goo-goo friends who crib their

advice from eponymous magazines.

She will buy a penguin,

then a hot car –

but one that won’t attract thieves.

She and her penguin (Peter)

will conduct a tour of

North America and pose before

random retail outlets:

the Barnes & Noble in Tonawanda,

the Mint Bar in Sheridan,

the Piggly Wiggly in Jonesboro.

She will flash the photos to

the Internet so that her

so-called friends may better

digest their hearts.

Honey? Feelin’ good?

Peter, back from his massage,

a blond lock ducking his forehead,

exponential boyishness.

She works up a smile like she’s

cranking a batch of ice cream.

Waiting for the geyser.

Peter? Do men ever

make passes at you?

He laughs.

All the time.

It’s okay. I guess I’m flattered.

Outside the window,

Napa’s Old Faithful

(anorexic cousin to Yellowstone’s)

shoots the blue.

Connie laughs.

What?

Nothing. Hey, remind me to

stop by the store for a lotto ticket.

Life in the Crosswalk

Working a thumbling of clay,

world’s worth of geometry,

imagining the yellow stripes as

stone walls but you

trust overly much.

Social compacts work until they

kill you, better a lightfoot dodger,

midstream stone-hopper.

In fact

Ditch the dinosaurs altogether.

Cultivate your blisters,

run roughshod where the

rainfall fingers your tracks.

Scale the promontory,

eat up the vastliness,

pillows of green begging

you to keep on, keep on.

One day you will press that

button for hours, unaware that

the signal has been banished,

that Darwin has finally won out.

Moment Variable

Mile 83 of the strawberry highway,

kin to the welfare of transient

groceries I wonder if

albatross means the same as it

used to, whether Farm Route 47

leads to the vulture-infested

trees of Chowchilla.

O lovadorish Kate,

I would take you to the prom,

I would kiss your left elbow,

I would seduce you in

Swahili and not have you

think it inappropriate.

They always said I was a

mellifluous child.

Outside of my first-grade window,

the sunlight, sky and cloud of

Oak Harbor, Washington gather

an ethereal soup that I

will always think of as X,

a thing so achingly perfect that

to weigh it down with a word of

English would be criminal.

It must have been spring.

Easter must have whispered my name.

The vanilla ridges of the Olympic

Mountains must have been

just out of view.

Melissa Camarind’s braids must have

induced chemical reactions for

which I had no language.

Now, I do.

Every hundredth Wednesday, as the

final feather of acacia gives its

life to gravity, a fragment of

X flutters the air at my

left earlobe and causes me to

whistle a song I learned

on my paper route,

radio taped to my handlebars,

the scent of star jasmine

pulling me into the ivied

labyrinth of the Evergreen Apartments.

I stop at 23B, watch the

underhand flight of the

San Jose Mercury News,

slap of newsprint on cement,

back my way out to find a

slice of orange light, prairiedogging the

Eastern mountains to the sound of

Paul McCartney and Wings.

Cannot go back to X.

Cannot change the roadsigns and

live a blue-penciled life.

The barbed arrow goes into the

skin but not back out.

This is the prison we

entered when we

agreed to be born.

You don’t remember?

No one does.

Had I one more crack at the

contract I would make some demands.

That adolescence would not

swipe its gooey fist over the

rest of my life.

That I would not wait so

long to not care so

much what people thought.

That I would be more reckless,

do many more stupid things,

and for God’s sake have more sex.

That the next time I hear the

frogs of April, creaking like

old doors in my backyard,

I will pay close attention,

mark it on my calendar,

invite my friends for a concert.

Domestic Dioramas

Find an old shoebox to use as a backdrop.

Try Legos and pipe-cleaners for furniture;

cut up old shirts and socks for

curtains, tablecloths and carpeting.

You may use action figures,

but it’s more fun to create

your own cardboard cutouts.

Assignment One:

A man has just been served with

divorce papers. He sits at his

kitchen table, considering his options:

a gun, a ballpoint pen,

The Golden Hits of Elvis Presley.

Assignment Two:

A married woman with three children has

just realized that she’s a lesbian.

Give visual hints about her epiphany:

Desperate Housewives on the television,

a framed portrait of Melissa Etheridge;

a hot dog, half-eaten.

Assignment Three:

A large family sits at a dinner table,

enjoying a Thanksgiving meal.

A second tableau reveals what

would happen if they gave

vent to their true feelings:

Aunt Martha rolls an enormous joint;

cousins Teddy and Suki

make out beneath the table;

Uncle Freddie discovers a

fork sticking out of his forehead.

The assignment is due May 17,

after which your teacher will be

marrying a banker and leaving you

little rat-bastards to fend for yourselves.

Add It Up

Facing the Seahorse Conundrum,

Alexandra scratches the final digits of

her calculations across the blackboard.

The proposition of a simple

one plus one flies in the

face of recorded behavior.

Lock two spouses in a sealed

chamber and they will still

find a way to cheat each other.

The problem originates with the dream of

self-fulfillment, which is never, ever

achieved solely by the addition of the other.

The consequent disillusionment spurs our

wayward steps, fueled by hope, anticipation,

and the next pair of suntanned

legs that trip our radar.

If x + y doesn’t work,

perhaps x + y + z will.

But the trio never holds,

because y begins to believe

that z will succeed

where x has failed.

Perhaps someday the framework of

monogamy will fade like a red dwarf,

and another paradigm will take its place:

simultaneous partnerships in the

distinct areas of sex, parenting and

companionship, a tripart network of

support arranged by computer algorithms.

Dinner and sex with Gunther.

Stan drives the kids to school.

A lunchtime chat with Javier.

If only she could set it all

down in mathematical terms.

Alexandra’s phone plays an

excerpt from the Goldberg Variations.

Martin has sent her a periwinkle,

purple radiant in a bed of ivy.

The numbers fade.

Her head fills with air.

Damn.

Attempt

In the byway of nightscape,

Isadora walks a huff,

checking her phone, checking her phone.

If Conrad means it, she’s in trouble.

If he doesn’t, she will cut his

pretentious hair and feed it to a

wood chipper.

She should have resigned herself to

cats, goldfish, something

moving but not linguistic,

something that wouldn’t

shake her up like a warm soda.

She buys a token and climbs the stairs.

The train runs on a ridge next to

the freeway, offering a view of

white and red corpuscles,

the Villa Robles trailer park.

She passes the warning sign and

paces twenty like a pirate,

turns east and looks for a

house with green lights.

Raises Conrad’s camera.

Zooms on the window.

He’s taking her from behind,

exposing the Viking tattoo that

she would love to extract with a

steak knife.

She holds her breath and

snaps the photo,

because she will need it, later,

when she gives him another chance.

But this is the problem:

she will give him another chance.

The train noses the

bend like a curious boa.

Isadora sets down the camera,

watches the light grow solar and

calmly walks into its path.

She flies backward,

lands on her tailbone and

flattens out in pain.

The squall of brakes.

A plane overhead.

A black face in the sky, cussing.

Her eyes fill up.

She folds like a wad of paper.

The face comes closer and

speaks words like pillows.

Faint smell of cigarettes.

She lowers her cheek to the

cement and watches the

train heading away.

Season

The date was going well

he thought

until the issue of popcorn topping.

He, white cheddar.

She, nacho cheese.

They went with butter, straight.

And there it was.

They had come to their

first impasse as a

couple and vaulted forward.

His fingers found hers.

She leaned her

head upon his shoulder.

Tick tock,

touch upon motion until

the turbines took a charge.

She fell asleep, late that night,

one breast pocketed in his hand.

He gazed at the

popcorn ceiling and thought,

white cheddar.

Question

We park in the multitude and

tread a serpentine path,

the bricks spelling out a long Arabic

word at our feet.

Clouds of fireflies,

mint green in the hedge,

a royal escort.

Finally the door, a Roman arch,

slabs of walnut,

brass knocker with a unicorn.

Three raps bring a baby in a

tuxedo, talking very much like an adult.

Did you bring the matchbooks?

Desmond digs into his jacket and

holds them like playing cards,

Thai restaurants in

Brooklyn, Boston, Baltimore.

Excellent. Come in.

He takes us to a room occupied by a

black baseball player, a small

woman disguised as a large man,

and a horse with a yo-yo.

Greetings, says the horse.

Hi, says I.

Desmond is recalcitrant.

The horse performs two round-the-

worlds followed by a sleeper,

neighing with glee.

Baby tells me you have a question.

Yes, says Desmond.

Ask away.

Wait, says Desmond. I wrote it down.

He takes the matchbook from

Baltimore and studies it carefully.

What, says he, is it all about?

All? says the horse.

It? says the ballplayer.

The small large man woman is noncommital.

About, says Desmond.

The horse pricks up his ears exactly

like Sean Connery would if

Sean Connery were a horse and

scrunches his eyes to convey the

impression that he is deep in thought.

Then he relaxes, and smiles.

It’s about raspberries.

Raspberries? says I. Why raspberries?

Why not raspberries?

says the ballplayer.

A billiard table slides into the room,

piled high with raspberries.

Our hosts dig in as

if their lives depended on it.

I exchange a glance with

Desmond and we join the fray.

The smacking of lips resembles a

large flock of small birds,

if those birds were eating raspberries.

The berries are ripe to the

point of liquefaction,

sweet beyond comprehension.

Our hands turn purple as we

shovel them into our mouths.

Desmond stops.

Mr. Horse, says he.

Please.

Call me Byzantine Chrysanthemum Funkadelic.

Desmond blinks.

Mr. Horse.

These appear to be blackberries.

Byzantine Chrysanthemum Funkadelic stops.

Dark juice drips from his snout,

largely for dramatic effect.

In that case, says he.

It’s all about blackberries.

We continue eating.

Missing

I walk my four-year-old along the

face of the department store.

She teeters up on spindly legs to

reach for a raincoat with a

Jolly Roger and crossed cutlasses.

Ahrr! Pirate raincoat.

Too late for that one.

Why, Daddy?

It’s summer.  By the time it

rains again, you’ll be a

whole different size.

I’ll be hooj!

What’s a pirate’s favorite letter?

I know! Ahrr!

Nope, I say. The C.

Pirates love the C.

Daddy! You cheated.

But honey. Jokes don’t have rules.

That’s why they’re jokes.

Oh.

She chews on a strand of hair and

studies a pair of galoshes with cat faces.

Daddy? Tell me again.

What, honey?

Why I don’t exist.

On the important questions,

I have learned that eye-level is best.

I kneel and brush the hair from her face.

It’s a lot of different things.

I’ve never made a lot of money.

I have a knack for meeting

women at the wrong time.

Some of the women had

problems I couldn’t solve.

What kind?

Well, one was a drunk.

One had trouble controlling her brain.

Two had sexual hangups.

One was just a mean psychopathic bitch.

It takes a lot for two

people to have children together.

You have to be ready;

things have to work just right.

And now, I’m too old to start.

She chews on a thumb.

Are you sad?

Sometimes. But I have nieces,

nephews, children of friends.

You.

She flails her arms.

But I don’t exist!

I tap a finger on my temple.

Up here you do.

That’s cause you’re a dough-wit.

I laugh.

A poet, yes.

Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee.

Daddy, kids don’t drink coffee!

Mine does.

I take her hand and lead her

upstairs to the Caffe Pergolesi.

She grabs a cluster of

honeysuckle and holds it to her nose.

She looks so much like her mother.

Roundabout

Instructional bear sits on a

half log, receiving questions.

No, I have not actually eaten a human.

Ate an arm once, but it was

floating in a river, and, well

Come over here to the dancing.

Slip a buzzbomb into your pocket.

We are tetraglides, horizontals,

pathetic cryogens.

Nothing’s going on but the

parking lot’s full.

Patting a tall dog we nod our heads,

hardwired to the digitalia,

souls nonexistent.

We are only what we buy,

what we use,

an occasional romance.

Little girl, eddy of spazz,

bolts to the bricks, waves us over.

This! Here!

Your shaft of sun.

Bikers drill past.

Stereo drivers hammer

us with boom and crack.

That’s the game:

take something that’s yours and

force it on someone else.

Light the buzzbomb and

shake your ass.

Permission is for amateurs.

Perhaps you could

solve the whole

thing with a

slice of

pepperoni

pizza.

Take a last bite of cheese and regret.

Toss your plate into the trash.

Step outside.

Everything’s going on but the

parking lot is empty.

C U Soon

Would like to attend your

fiesta but I keep dropping runes.

Running inscrutables. Losing my rupees.

If these things happen without me,

how important are they?

One tends to derive one’s

value from making one scarce when

two would be so much nicer.

I receive the weekly nibble from

Ellen and I do not know

what to make of it.

We stand on a half-lit tennis court.

I return serve but nothing comes back.

So I take her text and

feed it to a squirrel.

He scampers to the next table, says

How u doing? LOL

and runs away to chew on a laptop.

I hope the exchange eventually

runs to three, because Ellen is the

one who drags me to the beach,

awakens my inner pyrophile and

introduces me to the constellations.

(My friend Rob will dance naked around a

fire but now has children.)

Perhaps I will send an email to

Castor, Pollux, Aldebaran and the

gated community of the Pleiades.

I apologize for my recent

inattentiveness to your marvelosity,

but I have lost my key to the cosmos.

Hope you’re having a fine summer.

Me.                                                                                        

Savages

Military brat, reader of books,

sensitive child in his

first civilian neighborhood.

Sixth grade. A predictable disaster.

Ten fights later,

he hides in a magnolia tree.

His mother finds him there,

talks him down with a sandwich.

Go back to school, she says

(peaceful woman)

and the first kid who so much as

(an angel, really)

looks at you wrong

(wouldn’t hurt a)

Punch him!

Tim Spencer never saw it coming.

Having earned his psychopath merit badge,

the sensitive child tries out for Little League,

and one day receives a provocative instruction:

fake a bunt, pull it back and

punch the ball through the infield.

So he fakes a bunt, pulls it back and

punches the ball over the left field fence.

Very few things garner respect from

sixth grade boys, but hit a home run and

they will build you a Gothic cathedral.

At the end of the year,

he is voted Most Likely to Succeed,

but makes up for it by winning the

annual paper airplane contest.

Directly after, he receives a visit from

Ben, who will one day play third-

string quarterback for the Chicago Bears.

Ben grabs a fistful of his shirt and says,

You know what I do to guys like you?

No, he says. What?

I straighten their collars.

And so he does.

Ajar

Bushings in the wheel of passion we

suck to the rhythm of a paycheck,

make up the tune as we go along,

do what we must to keep the

oxygen coming in.

Our consequent yapping does nothing.

We stand in a landscape missing

countries of sienna, azure, cinnamon.

Digits hung upon the air,

threatening altercation.

I have no advice wouldn’t

offer it if I did just

swing that jaw till the

hinges break.

I will be hence,

atop the thirteenth yonder,

a ripple of quiet on my sleeve,

ash from a tender volcano.

Blanco’s Catch

And this is the song of

one man’s passion for another,

Gregor speeding the gap,

steps unaccounted,

heedless of outfield grass or

warning track.

Perfection in his pocket he

finds the last possible step and

flies, hurling himself in the

general direction of a padded fence,

midair twist, stretching an arm to

snip the arc a foot from the ground.

He rumbles across the dirt like a

crippled jet, holds up his glove,

ripe with fruit,

the sweetest of twenty-seven apples.

Brünnhilde and the Ring of Nerds

Encouraged by her ready smile,

large bosom and mounting

blood-alcohol level, the young nerds of

Effie’s form a ring around Cecily.

(You are so beautiful!)

She is a Rubik’s cube, a bank vault.

Make the right moves, guess the

right numbers and you’re in.

(Yeah, I bet you do!)

But Cecily’s lameness radar is

not hampered by cocktails.

She slices the innuendo like

Brünnhilde through packing peanuts.

(Haha! Blow harder!)

I am at a high school party with

Sue Miller and her dozen suitors.

The ring begins to form.

When it reaches seven, I opt out.

At the time, it felt like cowardice.

Now, it looks like wisdom.

Because sometimes the only way to

distinguish yourself is to leave.

This will not get you laid.

But it will save you time,

energy and embarrassment.

Because Sue has already made up her mind.

Sometime during the party,

she will give some lucky boy a look,

and he will be halfway there.

If you are operating without that look,

you are shooting in the dark.

If you’re standing in a ring,

you’re shooting each other.

Thirty years later, I was sitting in a

karaoke bar when Cecily’s mother

walked in and gave me that look.

That’s why I’m here at three in the

morning, a weary Wotan,

waiting for the nerds to fall like

ducks in a gallery,

so I can drive Brünnhilde

home and get some sleep.

Cinema Verite

The garage door of my youth was

hung in such a way that its

leftward gap projected a slice of

light upon the interior wall,

creating an upside-down, full-color

image of the world outside.

I knew that there were logical

explanations for this: camera oscura,

pinhole lenses, refraction, reflection.

But this did not lessen the magic,

and I often wondered if I

was the only one who could see it.

I saved it for the long, dull

afternoons of summer, when a

movie of Mrs. Kroll walking her

upside-down labrador was the

only entertainment I could afford.

I the caveman,

watching a rock roll downhill,

considering the possibilities.

Summer Satan

Francis McDonald Harris Bartholomew,

known to his friends as Chigger,

tired of his tree-climbing peers and

decided to spend his summer perfecting

the subtle craft of sabotage.

Waiting until the carrier disappeared

around the corner, he stuffed the

Millers’ mailbox with flyers from the

Sunday paper and ducked behind the

hedge to watch Mrs. Miller

throw up her hands in disgust.

He picked a hundred dandelions from

a vacant lot and snuck out at

midnight to blow their parachute

seeds over every lawn on the block.

He saw his neighbors, every weekend,

on their knees, yanking and cursing.

He snuck into the toolshed stash of

Davey Chen, legendary firecracker dealer,

and snipped a half inch from every fuse.

He spent the Fourth of July watching

his friends suck on their throbbing

fingers, suppressing his laughter.

He smuggled a pair of scissors into

Ted’s Toys and snipped each spool of

string at mid-point, then made

regular circuits of Braly Park to

watch the kites fall from the sky.

In late August, he sat for hours at

the Cambrian Shopping Plaza,

charting the pedestrian flow patterns.

Early the next morning, he took a

jumbo pack of gum and placed

freshly chewed wads at strategic locations.

It was the best Saturday ever.

At a meeting of the PTA,

a week before school,

the parents compared notes and

discovered that they had all

suffered summers of incessant,

inexplicable irritation:

a son with no feeling in his index finger,

fierce invasions of weeds,

kites dangling from telephone wires,

gum on every other shoe.

Unable to finger a culprit,

they decided to set an example.

Chigger’s primary concerns were the

growing pressure in his bladder,

the imminent arrival of his classmates,

and the tricky matter of

removing the duct tape that

held his body to the top of the flagpole.

Still, he had an excellent view of

the neighborhood – the fields of

his summer campaign – and all in

all he would have to conclude that

it was totally worth it.

Sempervirens

Considerate delinquencies at the

behest of scarlet, the behalf of indigo,

well-behaved colors marching to the ballot box.

I have no compunction about the

rivered grains of cedar,

knottish percolations of redwood.

Trees do not play politics.

They stand for standing, until we

carve them up and lay them out.

This piece of paper.

Stand on a mountain and you would

think that we’d never run out of them,

but we are the human pestilence,

charming, intelligent beings who

go around ruining things.

I stand on the ribs of giants,

crucified horizontal so we may

sail the forest,

gazing on their cousins.

I dip a brush into the tray and

sweep it across.

The corpses drink.

Edenslaughter

Cartoon sun spitting out radiants,

footsteps of Ohlone,

strolling naked through the valley.

Seafood so plentiful that the

discarded shells create their own topography.

The robes arrive with clothing,

germs, shiny caballeros,

a god who kills his own son.

They force the natives to

work and eat strange foods.

Once at the mission, their

life expectancy is two to three years.

Seeing such terrifying mortality,

the robes send their caballeros to

the central valley, to find more natives.

Centuries later, the church nominates the

leader of the robes for sainthood.

In truth, there were many tribes.

Ohlone is the only name that survived.

They gave it to a college.

I grew up in the valley.

Sang at the mission for my sister’s wedding.

Have never met an Ohlone.

Have seen the holes where they

ground their acorns.

I picture myself at the

tip of the bay, naked, warm,

picking shellfish from the shallows.

I look toward the green mountains and

see a trail of smoke.

Insecticide

The moth guarantees its death by

going

            jack

                        crazy

in the bedroom of a sleepy

guest with a towel and a

full head of irritation.

Whap!

Moth’s fault?

Moth being moth.

But a sleeper must sleep.

Think about that the next time you

go

            flapping

                                    at the

light all Don Quixote,

raising hackles in the wrong company.

The next towel may be yours.

Ashland

Skylark pencil sketches the coast,

comes away with elkhorn, sapphire,

pinch of cedar wrapped in an omelet,

marionberry, salmon, wild boar, butterfish,

sweet soy, red curry, a pond of mussels.

Tippered by wine he stage-rights to a

flagon of language, wall-length poem of

riddle and love and honor and

love and wildness and time and a

green hat in the next seat,

smile in stagelight.

She is everything that

he is supposed to

She walks away so gorgeous he

cannot let go. Pinches her sleeve,

reels her back, applies lips.

Dealing with Happy

Brilliant portions of rough,

cudgels of foreshadow,

cut my teeth silver,

take me for a walk.

I am not never my own man

but a jackal’s coat passed from

thrift store to foster child to

homeless violinist.

I wish it were better but

sometimes worse. Desperation has a

way of digging up roots,

lifting obsidian to the sun,

incinerating the alarm clock.

Once in a great while I decide to dance.

I have never not once regretted it.

Surface Tension

Becca floats, starving hellos.

A personal interview, passing comment.

When it was that she began to vanish.

Wednesday mirror, single piece of

jigsaw, two knobs, shaped like Florida,

missing from her chin.

The next day could read the

sign on the door behind her,

forehead window, cells phasing in and

out, undecided whether neither not to be.

Here the options: get better, get worse.

Better the official recommendation.

Worse is easier, duly rewarded by

TV show after TV show.

In between a hyphen, a dash,

static, flat, minus.

Becca releases all the air that she owns.

The water embraces.

She feels the bottom of the

pool at her back.

A figure, above, waves like a

tree in a storm,

cartoon angles blipping, winking.

Snowrush.

A pair of hands break the surface.

Becca smiles. Passes out.

Albuquerque

Yonkers adios, Saskatoon embrace,

Waikiki archipelago, the edge of Poughkeepsie.

Weirdness in the wind,

flag to the country of quirk.

We call it Waukegan.

We call it Okefenokee.

Syllables rising in the kudzu,

song of place, song of shadow.

The squirrely magnificence of

the human brain.

Amygdala.

Corpus callosum.

Sincere

I like you but I don’t know

what it is that I’m liking.

You the mannequin,

so many poses you no longer

remember where you started.

Left hand up.

Nod to the right.

Smile. Grimace.

One of these Tuesdays I

will look up from my

eggs benedict and catch

you saying something that

you really mean.

And freeze.

Improper

Come see the dance,

walk the drive,

offer your cants to the sky.

Can’t cry, can’t samba,

can’t bake a souffle worth a frog.

Hold the microphone and tell me the

one thing you would like to

see on the table in front of you.

Don’t think.

Don’t stutter.

Map out the parts of your

body that require more attention.

I mean this in a sexual way.

Mother’s Maiden Name

Espresso counterpunch,

a dream-like fusillade,

the counterinsurgency of righteousness.

We are so wrong  but it’s

hard to tell with these

jackoline teeth.

Come to where the

water whispers from the

mountain, we once were

snow we once were snow.

Dip your pinkie. Your elbow.

That’s who you are.

Thrust down from the milkies we

scour the capillaries of pine,

bleeding green, bleeding sense,

a question that lifts like a

kite falls like a cornstalk asks

for ID and all you can say is

yes I am.

Tip

Doubletop spiral a female boards the

sidewalk with boots up to there,

shorts down to here, leaving a

two-inch ribbon of flesh so

hormonally loaded that one

begins to understand certain

elements of frathouse behavior

such as the time I visited my

brother at cow stammer stepsalong

and found the windows taped

over with newspaper for the

stripper who had just departed or

the time I took Rob to a club and

he could not believe that a

place existed where one could

insert one’s fingers beneath the

hem of a strange woman’s

bikini so long as those same

digits contained a piece of

American paper currency what’s

next said he with the eyes of an

owl at a surprise party,

transit buses to the moon?

Constance

Keep expecting the glitter to go dry,

the charm to wear off,

the smile to fade beigely I am

not accustomed to such consistency.

Flash of eyes across the

bar speaking volumes:

I am the driver of a

moonglow cool and I use

it only on you and what you

need to do is follow your

feet to my proximity or I will

stare you into a pile of goo.

Again. And again.

Corned Beef

Grayfinger salad, chops of

salamander unless you don’t

like that kind of thing and

why the hell wouldn’t you.

The only place you can

be getting these ideas is

the daily programming, the

verbarrage aimed at the

back of the head, rotten

walnuts handed down by

tradition because that’s the

way we’ve always done it.

We are smart enough to

contemplate our own existence but

today I ask for more:

That you start at square one and

use your own brain to push your

self into the room where we

don’t know much but what we

do know is real and provable not

some slapped together brouha of

asparagus pie broadcast by a

douchebag into your breakfast

nook and now you must ease the

constipation by shitting it

all over me.

It’s hard to hit a moving target.

Asshole.

What You Get

Demagoguery is a parlor game not

to be undertaken by those who

would rather enjoy their lives.

(I know there’s a pony in here somewhere.)

The world needs

milkshakes

that are made by

shaking milk.

No need to

dispense with the

things that work but

Still, the evening invites humor,

a sip of something rude,

a friend who slaps you

roughly on the back and

kisses you on the forehead.

Nitrogen bubbles inside your tissue,

the world something palatable.

This is all that’s given to us.

Collision

Serenity in a box,

Carnie Stratton treads the boardwalk,

flipping taffies, duke of dandy,

cormorant of the soul,

cheesemaker to kings.

He stops and sniffs the air.

Three football fields far,

a very small man steps to the

planks, red Ray-Bans intended for glory.

He applies sunscreen to his head,

a coffee-colored bowling ball,

ripples his abs at a pack of

juveniles who giggle.

A certain thing quivers the ionosphere.

He paces forward.

Carney passes the bumper cars,

chewing on a pretzel,

when he spots the disturbance:

a lime-green Speedo, advancing

toward him like a low-lying Frisbee.

A seagull lands on Carnie’s shoulder,

holding a lit cigarette. Carney swaps him

for a chunk of pretzel.

Sunnyvale Shorty stops and squints.

Nice bird.

Thanks.

Shortie reaches into his Speedo and

extracts a golf ball.

We gonna do this thing?

Nobody’s stoppin ya.

A game of miniature golf may

not mean the universe, but

prelude is everything.

Only we decide what’s trivial.

The rest can go to a

hot blue Hades.

Carnie takes a final puff and

crushes the butt on a mermaid’s tail.

I’ve always thought that Shorty was

kind of an obvious nickname.

Shortie smiles.

I got no complaints.

It’s the truth.

He pocks the ball toward

Neptune’s Castle. It comes out the

other side and brushes the hole,

as close as wish is to want.

At the tip of Antarctica,

an iceberg breaks free.

Purchase

Accomplishing the metal we

sacrifice the soil, fronting a

paradise of things made into

items, stuff into goods.

Defending our habits we blast

away the personage, a geyser of

products for which we would kill.

On a not-distant day I will

locate an object, pass it under a

scanner and unlock a panoply of doors.

Then I will sit at my table,

stunned into lethargy, having

wanted for so long that no

other verb comes close.

Cause, Effect

Soloing off the eastern coast,

the violinist forsakes Debussy for Gershwin.

Hearing Gershwin, a Springer

spaniel barks with a Southern accent.

Reminded of her grandpa,

Katie places a call to Tuscaloosa.

Having just hung up on her nosy sister,

Grandma Beth answers with cussing.

Katie yelps and hangs up.

Recognizing her granddaughter’s yelp,

Beth rifles her phone book,

unwittingly punches the number for

Katie’s old apartment in Seattle.

A woman answers in Spanish.

Beth hangs up.

Leticia Flores sets down the phone and

gives her husband a cold stare.

Tired of arguing, Diego Flores

walks downtown to a baseball game.

In the ninth inning, Diego

catches a game-winning home

run and gives it to a

four-year-old in the next seat.

Inspired by the joy on his son’s face,

Mark Sutro calls his wife and

asks for a reconciliation.

His wife goes to the balcony,

where Dieter is practicing the Gershwin.

Circadia

Snow White stares into a clock,

the second hand tied to a

thread around her heart.

Time bleeds into the ether.

All she can do is stare it

down although it gives her a

crick in the neck and she

wonders if there might be

something out there in the

wide world that she

could be doing.

The minute hand sticks a

black dash and shudders.

Outside, the sun sets.

Blue scavenger,

red eyes in the shape of Oahu.

Feathers in a mohawk.

Spectacles.

He sees the white face.

Feels the itch in his talons.

He doesn’t like to break the code;

things die in their own time.

But it’s been a week.

He bursts through the window,

eyes in the shape of Italy.

She sees him in the clockface,

grips the nail file,

prepares to strike.

It’s going exactly to plan.