Lethe
Soak City, Palm Springs

It’s always
the same story—
long flights of stairs,
vertiginous laughter,
bathers moving up
and down . . . I’m

at one of those
water parks
with my kid, screaming,
among stark turns,
startling switches,
this way and that way
down the dark, inner
tube of a twisty
slide, when
in a slow section
I suddenly think
double helix
and praise lust.

There are so few
completely good-looking
people in the whole world.
The race couldn’t make it
on beauty.

No wonder we pay them
big bucks
and pose them
just so
in thongs, bikinis,
touching brief dreams,
mascara harder than time—
so many eyes, lips,
navels, silken
messages.

You know
if not for the life-threatening part,
none of these rides
would be worth a damn.

Then it’s over. Strange,
how beautiful
everyone is
in the ice-cold
sunshine.

So Much More is Happening in Palm Springs These Days, But This is L.A.

Night is a sack stuffed with bones and glass.  Smell of tar
and coconut oil, like Channel 5 all over Paris.  Taste of
the bottled water dissolving vitamin pills—sky the color of
blue weight.   Drone of freeway and planes.

Scent of being lost—a woman, too small in her saggy skin,
color of a football, whites of her eyes browned
under her fried hair, under her neon pink
baseball cap, over the halter top and yoga pants.
Rollerblades to work,
a smoothie bar.  Aren’t all women aged
against their wills?

Except Carla, who also has brown skin, but
just feels old at La Paz taqueria on Wiltshire Blvd.
If the surf’s up, the mountains will bite down
to steady themselves against the traffic to the shore.
But, the mountains have not bitten down
and the surf has never really been up.  If a big wave
came in, it would wipe out everything.  Gaudy, La Brea
Saber-toothed Tigers who once prowled Rodeo
Drive gone missing to excerpts on CA standardized tests,
along with the Spanish missions.

A surfboard is a raft against this current.

Carla wraps her last foiled burrito and takes
a sledgehammer to the family restaurant.  A small
earthquake the rest of the valley misses.  Glass will land, once
the night is ripped far enough open.  Mud consumes PCH
winterly, but it should swallow the urgent care center
across from Peperdine U., which mostly does Botox treatments.

The basin taken into the faults—”Ay dios mio—hay no esta paz.”

Flowers will stretch and yawn, the glass glittering
on their cheekbones as they start their yoga in the desert sage.
A star will slide through the night and the sun
will step back off the land.  The city will finally be cool.

Palm Springs, California

Joy stamped into a landscape propelling wind and shelter–
a roof, a Walmart bag, a time to forget.

Take in the waters to sighs of far-off snow. A sliver of a room where oil
evaporates into forgiveness.

Nerves trail into a flower then drift through scorched air once exhaled by dreamless
children: a whistling of karaoke and a car that costs too much.

Driving past bones of dead fish and dead birds. Where the sound of water
begins. Hand-placed stones are a call from a stranger.

Lemon opens aloe, pricks the burn. Rubbing the soft cotton of his chest I feel
the sinking submarine in the sand, walk as if to a microphone and green the lining

of my mind. Walk in a little further, clasp my hands
shake loose the bones that once dragged me under.

It is the long view in a mirror I thought was rippled, but now scatters silence
over a kidney-shaped pool at night.

I am caught in the light of waves reflected on the wall.

Palm Springs

Imploding casket of leisure and skin cancer,
Bobsled of vanity, autopsy table
Of the dead marriage and midlife crisis–
Could the sun-gods tracked by shadow and angle
Across temple courtyards,

Could they have imagined the tanning bed,
Or how, here, in the endless operatic
Hospice piano lounge of our world,
We worship selves we want, but cannot be–
Intravenous drips of bile and self-pity–

Until the transplant ice chest opens
And the bartender scoops out the viscera,
Offering it once more, in the name of love,
To the body. Can someone explain to me why,
Once we have lain down in our self-made beds,

We choose to get up?
Why, having been divorced and jettisoned,
We insist on being useful again–
Each flagellant helping his neighbor,
Bringing, as it were, his expertise to bear–

Until each visitor is escorted, sedated,
From the asylum ward, committed again
To line dances and speed dating?
Fountains of perpetual joy and anguish,
We are but skin poured forth,

Caressed, and poured again.
The magician, whose wife has sawed
All he owned in half;
The physician whose husband has his ear
To the heart of the babysitter;

The field commander calling in the coordinates
Of his own suburban home;
The hanged suicide denied the kiss
Of his bludgeoned wife;
The voyeur cabbie, nibbling lettuce in his shell,

For whom dawn is a Dollar Store place setting
Minus a beloved to breakfast with.
Though, there are (or were), for all
The spa’s pleasures: crystal healing, mud masks,
The vaguely urinous hot mineral springs,

And, of course, the tanning bed:
That flaming stretcher
On which we are borne narrowly along
Each wanton trench
To glory.