For the days when beauty was elsewhere.
Someone beats off
in the trailer, it’s the stellar white dream:
cocaine and long stemmed brides.
Always, you must focus on the sky. Bougainvillea
mutely moving like a stain, a young girl
peeing in the pool.
Is that what you wanted? Subtle? The lukewarm
politics of someone else’s marriage?
It is cool. And I am tired.
Too tired to
start a fire, so I boil water.
If you were actually my
son, I would
not tell you such things—
but you are in the care of
another, so I tell
you everything. I met you
when I fist saw your father.
Odd. Yes. But how
else to explain—I broke his
ribs with the ease of cracking
open an egg. Best
night of sex I ever had. And
then you were in me. Now
it all seems
so practical, but at the time
I had mistaken vulnerability
for love. Sometime
your Dad would say he loved
me. I mistook his words for
a house, garden,
and the sound of your feet
down a hallway, frightened
by a storm,
your little self made quiet by
the heat under our family
quilt. I live all
of this, in my head. How
to tell you, No one can know
the extent of another’s loss. I
stir my tea and hear your feet.
Went out to the edge of my life. Tumbled soft,
by wind and by sun, by ocean, by elsewhere, Anza
Borrego—
Less of a schism
between man and sky; less democracy really.
Remembered the terrible theatre
of the rental car, that summer, my father
turning slowly into lava. This is the country
they say, where no one can live. Shed it
like shale. Where stars will refuse
to fasten themselves to the sky,
will stream down in contrails
& stammer.
For convenience, they had me birth you
in a common house—thin white walls
blocking sight, but not the sound of mouths
coming up from wombs. I heard your first
cry, as though it were waves on a shore at
night—pitch black, but present. They took
you and left me with a rag full of ice—told
me to rest until I needn’t rest. I refused to lie
down. Looking for you, I woke in a gutter
holding a goat. A joke. Blood on my thighs,
I walked home with the animal. With a knife
to the billy, I tried to bleed out the past—to
empty the memory of your elbow rolling
beneath me—I tried to forget how it felt
to be two doors hinged atop each other—
to be pulse upon pulse.
The body is two doors hinged atop each other, designed
to swing in opposite directions. To change someone, you
must enter from their back—keyhole below left ribcage—
tickles a bit—unlocking. Inside, use a bird for a needle—
embroider the face of starvation over the peephole, then
exit from the front. Surface to a world where fish sprout
wings and appetites for harm; let them suck marrow from
a man’s center—drown them in fat. If they beg for mercy—
try to be patient—most can’t see you have already given
the what they ask. To remedy the inconvenience of sound,
we recommend turning siren screams into song (See page 7).
Pomona,
Roman goddess
of agriculture,
would not
feel at home
these days
in her
namesake city.
Little left
of farms
and fields,
or grapes, oranges,
and strawberries,
for her to
grant her
blessings to.
She walks
the paved
and over-
developed
streets like
a homeless
person,
forgotten
and out
of a job.
“There has to be somebody sober
at AA meetings,” she insists, a woman
retired, widowed, beyond wish for a man.
“I’m Mrs. Sober, and I’ve been an alcoholic
for forty years,” she tells her people,
seven days a week, at meetings all over town.
It’s fall now, and she flings her
lint-flecked Irish walking cape
about her shoulders and pulls a seaman’s
cap down over cartilage-stretched ears.
From inner folds of her ample bag she digs a fist-sized
ring of keys that’s tethered to her purse strap
by clanging links of biker chain. Ka-Jang!
She’s on the move! Holy terror in low gear,
she will cruise to more than four dry and
“anonymous” bacchanalian covens today,
scaring the cloven-hooved of both sexes
and states in-between by sharing her stories,
embarrassments, alienation and rage.
Like her erstwhile students, many of the defiant
will poke fun at her. They’ll rile against her words,
sneer over her child bereft state, her isolation, accuse her
of senility/insanity and continue their ill-advised revelry.
Yet Riverside’s sprite of Erin, flaming with ire
and product of an old, banshee-wailing lore,
will persevere. She’ll wag bony fingers at them
for “falling off the wagon,” she’ll flash a twinkle of
the devil’s own recognition into their hazy eyes,
and infect their debauchery with mocking delirium,
with needling gall, with a dread of old English teachers,
and with the high, dry, smarter-than-you-ever-dreamed
cackle of impending doom: “You see, I am you!”
Progenitor of orange tree turn-of-century magnates
A pretend small town at the top of the east of the valley
Its Victorian turniptops in purple and pink overlook canopy
Of crepemyrtle and peppertrees who with sprinkler help
Have taprooted below desert to watertable hiding
1950’s downtown State Street with white lights in carrotwoods
Betty’s Diner’s limp fried food & Wurlitzer jailhouserocking
Gourmet Pizza’s Girard’s dressing and obscurely bottled sodas
Fifty-five float Christmas parade where Y Circus unicycle kids
Balance and propel agape smiling audience red-sea parted
Giant inflatable kid-slide ponyride and kettlecorn popped
Bags of oranges, clutches of gladiolas, and street performer sounds
With gatherings of black-garbed teenage smolderings
Five-personed oldfashioned rally on street corner Sunday
“Stop the war for oil! Bush is a liar! Honk if you like peace!” fete
Whilst spandex-bright sunglass’d helmets swish by on light-as-feather two wheel racers
Past Ford Park with the tennis courts and most expensive gas in town
To top of high Judson Hill and survey commuter-collected professional people
In their above-ground construction and mismatched streets
Under the R carved, 400 ft tall, into purple San Berdoo majesty,
Between downpointing arrowhead and Seven Oaks Dam enormousicity
Prospect Parked, Morey Mansioned, Kimberly Castle Crested
Pledge of allegiance drummers of Japan romeo & julieted
Arias and orchestras outside in family-night June
Where bronzed Smileys stand, Lincoln’s artifacts entombed
But I’m afraid of the University Avenue offramp
Blindsides in every direction, cars collecting behind you
Pushing you out the chute to deal with the ghosts of cars darting
Swerving appearing out of nowhere and you tumbling
In the stream beside the banks of white wooden crosses
Where sidewalk shrines have with loss enflowered
Wallace Stevens never worked Wednesdays.
Just like the frog from Budweiser
(even if his folks did come over on the Mayflower),
he’d croak his lines, find the mot juste,
until he and his words merged
and he surveyed his city of hope.
No illusions about the duplicity of hope
for Bukowski. Sunlight made him wince. Days
went by, he never knew ‘til he’d emerge
wanting what he couldn’t find in a Budweiser.
Everyone knew he was juiced,
but then, see what did, what may flower.
They say John Keats was a delicate mayflower,
that he died of blasted hope
because some critic took his latest work and juiced
his best poems. Pique or despair ended his days?
Not likely. Listen, maybe he didn’t chug Budweiser
like Dylan Thomas, but what he wrote was no whim. Urge
drove him. His beloved watched him submerge
as he left. What drove, through the green fuse, the flower?
Hint: it was not a Budweiser,
or Persian visions of domes with the simplicity of dope.
Keats loved, he loved, he could not stay.
Dylan and Keats were pushed over the edge, used
to feeling like they’d been juiced,
and still their systems urged
them: Listen to what the winds say,
forget about the folks who left on the Mayflower,
whose version of a city of hope
wouldn’t equal the buzz from a Budweiser.
Freeway commutes leave you sadder but wiser.
Better to be broken than never juiced
up into complicity with hope!
Pursue, until your breath fails, your demiurge.
They too ended up dead, who took the Mayflower.
Give me bards when the days
are all Wednesdays, full of warm flat Budweiser
and Mayflower prudes, give me the juice
that I might merge with felicity, with hope.
* * *
Author’s note
All telutons were found between the 605 Freeway and Claremont, as follows:
City of Hope has the canswer (billboard);
This ramp will be closed on alternate Wednesdays (CalTrans sign);
Mayflower moving van;
Jamba Juice truck;
Lane closed ahead/please merge left;
and of course, the unmistakable smells from the Budweiser plant.
Spring Peepers, Summer Flowering
invisible singers
awaken from winter
slumber under logs,
loose bark
at the edge of bodies
of water
sounding courtship songs
my father and I
share a memory of
staying awake to witness
the night-blooming cereus
white queen flower
a balm for the heart
blooms in the backyard
just once before withering
Inlandia: A Literary Journey 