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.