Stand in the sun, soak the day’s rays. Observe semper virens. Gaze upon Tamalpais. Rescue the recycle bin. Wait for Silby’s sister returning from Phoenix. Visited friends in Mill Valley on east coast time didn’t utilize stimulants and found myself with the Trappists’ Chimay slouching, one leg over the arm of the white couch and another on the thick coffee table, man in the smooth rocking chair his wife in the opposite, her new published work on the table in front of us, their infant son to sleep without a fuss, extremely unusual he’ll sleep through the night solid, weird given what we’re used to. Poured last night some streets flooded Interstate 80 shut down zero visibility snowfall measured in massive accumulations of feet, and somewhere along Big Sur Highway One closed as usual after major storms. Scuba divers survived tsunami in the Indian Ocean interviewed on cable. Watched because visiting sister’s house a special treat, possibly, and Navy wins a bowl game, followed by another bowl game, and another, as the death count rises above a hundred thousand.
A restless, violent world and the Holidays
A restless, violent world and the Holidays cover all possibilities people return home from their winter break. They leave their families, gather new gear, infants dangling, strollers to the side, so many babies, so many wearing new sweaters, carrying our bags, hurrying through Chicago’s O’Hare, four-cheese pizza at the counter people watch, walk to our gate, CNN ceiling-dangling – again; always – men women and children, First Class first, class-class, economy chattel upgrades or smug leather jackets? We sit in the absolute last row takeoff jangling. Next to Sophie who is nine traveling unaccompanied, missing her middle teeth, long, thick hair, pink backpack. She is sad. Her dad lives on Cape Cod and her mom in Petaluma. She has a step there and a step here. She’s quiet and reads over my shoulder when somebody is killed at the irrigation ditch, a slough once made famous, when others die. She seems bored. Silby and I switch seats and they play games, 20 Questions and Mad Libs. Sophie sleeps with her head in Silby’s lap. A young girl seven stands and speaks to the row behind her: “Hi, my name’s Patty and I have diarrhea so we’re going home. I didn’t sleep well last night.” Overhead bin and waiting to disembark. Her parents are embarrassed and they pat her head, incapable of staunching flow.
This the part the sensitive man and woman hate
This the part the sensitive man and woman hate: going away, the last evening, the goodbye. His nephew wanted to climb the stairs all day. When did uncle’s strength fade, when did he call it quits, when will he see his nephew again? There are discussions about setting the alarm, who will wake whom, who’s driving to the airport and who will take the youngest brother’s girlfriend to the train; and who will pick them up at the airport clear across the country when family and friends out of town for the new year, visiting family and friends elsewhere; they discuss the Super Shuttle, pick up the car parked at the friend’s keys under the mat. Some say they’ll wake for hugs. One says to himself before sleep that he’ll rise extra special early to play with the cute two-year-old in footy pajamas. The wife of one and the wife of the other spent a few hours packing, suitcases with wheels, carry-ons, backpacks, duffel bag, tote bag for the plane, to go through security, gifts released carried one way and gifts received lugged the other, while the dramatic dead tolled, though famine-stricken or desert war not counted, not recounted, not shared with us. Tall man razor-and-cream must decide what to do with the electric gift, still humorous as the dead wash ashore, brown mud tides, smear, the sad end.
Poems for the happy westerners who argue abortion
Poems for the happy westerners who argue abortion or global warming or shit bricks over profanity and violence in holiday movies and box office numbers quoted in the paper, with a petty testiness quickly smoothed over and additional overeating, stuffing down sweets from tins, round tins and goddam rectangular tins, all the while a 9.0 submerged in the middle of the Indian Ocean caused a tsunami of radical proportions death-toll numbers climbed for days, from twenty to forty to sixty to a hundred thousand dead; burials quick a third of them children, many unidentified: all you know is that your daughter or son’s missing, perhaps you’re the lucky one who gets to identify the dirt-and-mud body in the makeshift morgue in an old school and you see your loved mangled and muddy and purple or blue; woman wailing, unfamiliar clothes, hands clasped to her cheeks mouth open wide, teeth lips anguish, while we gorge turkey and shit-kick over boardgames or bowl games on television tonight the Independence; corporate money for these contests a funny number to know; the president said many private donors would step up, when, during this time of disaster and giving we were called the stingiest on earth.
An argument the last day of family vacation
An argument the last day of family vacation over the sweet happy holidays in the backseat driving home from freezing Northampton, coffee in a chain, and Forbes Library with dad before the drive and the argument; it spilled down the cleared walk shoveled, dad aspired to environmentally friendly salt; it trembled into the living room from the walk and became public; and Susan Sontag died one son read on his phone shared with the rest in front of the still-sparkling tree before the window, and the balcony ice hadn’t melted; sister-in-law attempted mediation; a simple, stupid argument about whether or not they should attend the seminar while parents visiting an escape from winter; he doesn’t want to and his wife wants him to and the argument was stupid and simple and it didn’t help that an old girlfriend called and suggested coffee and the wife caught him talking on his cell in a dark, cold room upstairs even though he said he couldn’t and agreed, yes, it was too bad; snippiness trebled throughout the house on the last, hens pecking ankles over morsels; then they ignored it; his brother argued with his own wife over departure time, their son’s bite of turkey he’s supposed to be vegan.
Wife Who Wants To Get Pregnant Reads
Wife who wants to get pregnant reads. Son demands of father and mother, as dad carves free range turkey desperately in the war-zone kitchen people loud in the living room and dining room and basement, that they turn up the heat. “Word on the street is . . .” he says, after whispers son’s wife and sister-in-law enough is enough – crazy-damn cold in the house thermostat 67 window draft – something has to be done and they send him into that frontline kitchen, swearing father, as their representative. He starts with “I know this might not be the right time but . . .” and after a few bits argument they allow 70 and he does 72 and everyone voices appreciation and sister-in-law high-fives. We’re talking the small family within the family thumbtacked blankets over windows in the guest room on the cold side, and youngest brother taken to falling asleep on the brown leather couch under blankets his room frigid, the study with desk and PC too cold for hurried emails, and fireplace unless you’re sitting hearthstone isn’t soothing jack. When warm people smile. They play Chinese checkers and checkers and chess and Taboo at the dining room table. Caffeine bookstores with corduroys crossed basic requirement, amoeba slow-moving, urgent-less, fed.
They coaxed their task-driving mother
They coaxed their task-driving mother from the kitchen and encouraged boots for all and the call was the meadow walk, while young nephew took his nap and presents still wrapped and mother waiting behind. One mentioned new snow arrives on Monday. Jenny’s grandmother died this evening during dinner, on Christmas Day, surrounded by her family, grandma’s son Jenny’s father. She died a day after the nephew and the brother and his wife Jenny visited Virginia Beach, where she at 95 lay dying, and Jenny said that she had a premonition. Nephew runs and wants to walk up and down carpeted stairs without hands. They say she lived a good life had been dying for a while but how do you tend the finality, anyhow, really. Their mother left the kitchen “for a half hour, okay?” and she climbed into heavy clothing and they walked through the woods past wetlands along the periphery of farm fields and homespun lumber, one two and three, the entire length to frozen Lake Metacomet. Returned along opposite sides of each successive field, crunching frozen puddles with heavy boots and he carried home one of the glass pieces, broken from its freezing frame, as an offering, and set it on the deck and nephew when he woke from his nap touched the ice with his finger and laughed along with the rest. Soon as he played with his new puzzles family opened presents till eleven that night.
Warm color-lighted tree viewed from outside
Warm color-lighted tree viewed from outside, man on the frigid deck, without heavy clothing so he knows it, staring at the stark chimney in moonlight and tall, capillary, naked, hard, enduring oaks fractal against cream sky. Through the glass he notices presents circled underneath the tree spill, gifts and the love contained, expressive, warm. Fire waves surrounded by brick and iron mesh, youngest brother’s hips perpendicular to the plane of the brown leather couch, position of obvious fade, attempting to maintain his read in the warmth seen under quieting stars. And the growing, proud moon, its time to shine. He remembers his brother and his nephew, the first. Sleeps in a bed with his warm wife and the large window without curtains, and on his back soaks stars and so much promise. Morning frosted and clean and clear, solitary patch of snow, the gifts, evening’s meal on one side of inertia, kitchen heat, table cleared, tree and sunshine, paused, waiting for brother who called from cold Danbury, contemplating interstate or scenic highway, expeditiousness versus curious used-to-be intuitive elements of an unpressed freedom. He’ll notice beauty either way, we’re certain, and parents nervously plan, fuss, and hope for their grandson’s well-being a young family’s arrival.
In my oversized one-piece green snow suit
In my oversized one-piece green snow suit, my brother’s blue, we threw snowballs at cautious cars on main street, under the light we’d watch from inside the house to see snowing or not snowing, praying for no school. Most cars paused, angered, and continued. They were German because we lived there, in the village near the area of the fishing hole, in the woods on top of the mountain, outside the city, gray wet pavement. We had a superior position to the road, holding the high ground, aiming our bombardments, our shower of shells, our surprise attack. Autos on the snowy road, quiet main street, no school over the holidays, we were warm and precious, protected, and brothers. We knew the back cut-through just in case, up the stairs past Frau Beckerbender’s house – she and her daughter living as widow and spinster – through a black gate and the orchard’s open fields, where the young farmer chased us on a tractor once and I thought we were gone for sure. Row houses in that field now, the whole way, from road to road, one apple tree remaining. White Volkswagen Bug drove and my snowball hit the windshield and the man driving stopped in a skid. He opened the door and we bolted, a race across the backyard to the secret stairs, beyond bushes, a higher road into the apple trees. We paused on a hill, panting. After quiet minutes the car materialized instantly in front of us, we weren’t ready for it, the angry man jumped out wild.
Six Inches of Snow
Six inches of snow across fields, naked trees, sidewalk curbs. Peter Pan rolled from Boston to Springfield, Northampton to Amherst. Brother waited for brother. Snow-spray windshield fluid flick constant. Another family, a second, a split. A brother from another mother. He smiled; losing hair at 26. Wore a baseball hat to cover. North Face vest his New York girlfriend bought and she’ll be out on Friday. Christmas Saturday. Some Christian wrote a card said candy cane Letter J for Jesus and red the blood of Christ. They’re taking over the world and they rule the country. A cyclical thing. To lay low or not to go, bro. Brother shook his head at the box of candy cane, battalions under cellophane. Waited to trim the tree. Mom and dad ran errands. Brothers walked through Cadwell woods, on Mt. Lincoln, to a small, icy brook runs into the Amethyst, and the Fort River to the Connecticut. Stand on the slope and know water running. Warm enough in the snow to remove gloves. Near cascades recited lines and gave breath to prayer. About something; anything; everything. Guest room in the basement and it was three degrees. There’s a wood stove. Bathroom an ascent, far away at three a.m., a lone nightlight wigging the way, waking. Youngest slept hand/chin with the muted, flickering TV.
Still Smell the Big Man with the Neurological Disorder
Still smell the big man with the neurological disorder in my wool. Walked earlier near the fountain of Plaza Bonita, at the end of the street, underneath the huge Riviera mansion. His wife was walking in semi-darkness and she asked me for help. We shook hands and gave names. Her name was Jill. We moved to their large BMW sedan, the newest. There suffered Joe, her husband, three hundred pounds with braces on his lower legs. Sweat on his upper lip. When I tugged at him I felt sweat through his red sweater. He was not happy experiencing his pain in front of a stranger, this person his wife snatched off pavement stones. We shook hands and I repeated names to make sure. After all, we were intimate. As I reached under his arms and attempted to heft. We tried to swing him upon the pivot of his spaghetti legs from the driver’s seat to the wheelchair. Three times and still we couldn’t do it. He said “fucking” once and I said “ass” twice. We lifted and he fell to the car’s door-well, fearful of falling the rest of the way to the garage floor. He cursed and seemed afraid. I pulled from the passenger side, both arms under his armpits, and dragged him back to his leather interior. Jill pushed and pulled his pants. I smelled urine, diaper down there. On the fourth attempt he wobbled, turned, and fell into his wheelchair, a loud cry. We rolled him over to his chair-elevator. Another scene to heave him into the lift, traveling upward, agonized.
My Mother's Cousin On Her Father's Side
My mother’s cousin on her father’s side came down from one river to another with his wife. “Well, I don’t like to think of the boys’ father,” mom reminded them. Ah, yes, of course, we forgot. We drank martinis and sodas and water (spread among us) and ate off holiday paper plates with holiday napkins and the clouds arrived gray and thick. On our walk sporadic rain and sleet. Then snow, blanketing surfaces, wet defined, hardly holding on, ephemera complete. The girl I once ogled now has her first son and her husband coaches high school football and “he’s never home.” She is the daughter of my mother’s best friend, divorced, retired, hearing aids, reads continually, a librarian and an English teacher. I played with the two-year-old and we were like this. Soon revealed that the daughters of my mother’s cousin, from one river to the next, had my father for government or humanities and for Model United Nations. Laura became a lawyer. My dad must have been doing something right. This cousin had lived where I had lived, children schooled where I had been, streets mentioned, do-you-remembers. The cousin’s wife, too, very well put together, holding it as she ages, worked with my stepmom at the middle school. “Oh, yes, I knew Sue.” My excitement should not have come as a surprise, with young Mac hanging on my feet screeching, and our sharing, though brief, was intense. Mom never mentioned this connection.
My Mother Prepared For Our Visit
My mother prepared for our visit. Excited, anticipating. My aunt allowed as much during a phone conversation weeks ago. I see the plausibility. Why is it like this? Four days a year? To diaspora joins the nuclear family and extended divisions, revisions, additions. At one time I had eight grandparents. Here, there, north south, everywhere. Summers away from school a rock band on tour a politician on the trail, sometimes groping for stability. So I see her once a year and many say I’m lucky. What happened to mom in the rocking chair in the warm kitchen telling stories, quotidian moments or holidays? Went somewhere and can’t tell you we’re doing better. It’s not holding on to some old way, back there, idealized. It’s we’re all missing something. Gaps in the family maps. Not convinced the new augmented man finds sanity in corporeal sanctity. Screaming TV preacher isn’t offering what we need. Football America’s violent release, and beyond Friday nights or Sundays does it provide? I’ll take some silicon breasts and a face lift. Move to LA. Hungry for my own show. My mother I miss her throughout the year and now we’re here. House clean, mirrors sharp shining, clock wound, decorations, sparkling oak floors, knick-knacks, small touches. I see her getting ready.
She Wants To Have A Baby
She wants to have a baby. We will try soon, close to right about now. She’s plotting our course again, with a thermometer and charts. Not exactly the gas lamp, snow-stone of Dylan’s Christmas. I know the sweaters, the cold, the red cheeks, the village markets, the church with the spire and those clucking chickens. Know because lived in central Europe during the Cold War, built upon the twentieth century. I cannot escape it, that century, and those wars not mine but my father’s and his. A sensibility. Imagine being born today and what you’d say about ’68 or ’73, in turn attached to ’48, an awakened West and a vibrant America. But the baby. We spread the news upon our first moment of success. Then had to send recantations. Everyone sees fit to tell you then that they had one or two miscarriages themselves. So-and-so, too. They heard about. “We had four,” our landlady shared. As did a professor at the university. As a brother about his brother and sister-in-law. Said that we cannot conceive here, in this house. Where the vibe was off and where that first girlfriend on my birthday in my brother’s room under his posters of bicyclists. A room now stepdad’s office. Though the cardinal there, and the pine, and the naked oak, and the baffler on the feeder, and my mother, all wonderful and beautiful and real. Cannot. The period over and the time is now, so says the moon and the charts. We’ll try at dad’s up north.
“I dispraised thee before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with thee”
Next to her the one I married
Next to her the one I married. She sleeps soundly with the alarm a waiting devil. Much has been mentioned about the clock and its special button. She will rise and drive over two bridges to make the other side of the bay. She sleeps on her stomach. We are in our niece’s room with the alphabet animals ringing her walls, up there by the ceiling. Hannah once had the W removed because it’s a wolf. Scared to death of the wolf, she implored me “No, no, please don’t be the big bad wohff.” My wife sleeps on her stomach in pink pajamas next to the wall. A shirt hangs on a doorknob. The guy reads a Robert Bly simply titled “Selected Poems,” that collection with “Walking Swiftly” in it, the prose poem that describes everything in my world and yours. The same used book with the card stock mark in it that says “Dear Allis/ This brought me delight/ I hope it does you too!/ Love Anne.” The mark from that store in Hermosa Beach. That time Anne went there and bought her Bly. There was a spark of love. I see the Zebra and the Yellowhammer. There are Hannah’s impressed feet in 6/01, shy of her one-month birthday. Hanging from a nail. See more letters in the mirror, but they’re backwards. There’s a Newt, we can tell that much. She’s sleeping on an air mattress in her parents’ bedroom. At dinner she sang a holiday song about Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. That there’s Swahili. She sang it through her stuffed doggy and made my wife cry.
Of all the lives I’ve lived this is my happiest life
Of all the lives I’ve lived this is my happiest life. Easy to say with the black-wet live oaks large and gnarled from wearing years. The way soaked boughs cross, snag and crease the sky. A sodden, dark footpath a sharp line through the lime green clover and new grass. Amid the shaded boulders placed there from collapse. Past the three young boys wearing wetsuits in the large open field who with skimboards run and drop to a slope and surf the wet slop, the slick earth and their wet hair. Obvious they rule the earth. Past the crumbling walls that too exist from collapse: every and all things rumble down fast or slow, an eroding earth, a slashing, wild sea. Across the footbridge last summer Mission Creek was dry. As it is half the year. A man stands and throws back his head this laugh. Now the creek a brown explosion, water ripping at trees and tossing boulders and tearing with constant pressure at man’s concrete. Water blasts skyward, spits and froths, churns a living cataract through ours. Tempestuous and mean, pitched to a fever, it serves no master save gravity. And even then it loves defiance with upward jumps, backward spins, the flight of brown, silted liquid birds. Don’t neglect the trees, though you’re captivated by the vision of your impermanence. Turn away from the torrent and see them, whorled, rising, falling, in apparent stasis; wet living, very wet with their dark meat and searing, green dripping hearts.
“Getting up early everyday and going somewhere sucks.”
Silby on going to work
Before my time was up on the last day
Before my time was up on the last day I stood outside the calling, final door. I was with her, Katherine, the highest exaltation of love. She didn’t want me to go, either; but she was closer to the truth than I, deeper went her roots into the world. I said, “Wait, I want to plant one more garden.” And so we tilled the dark soil and added nutrients and set into the world our seedlings, growing, desirous things, vines and stalks and green reaching for the sun. When it was time for the honors, she watered and I watched. Wait, one more sip from the creek, I whispered, and stooped low for my puckered, thirsty lips. We should set up a compost bin, I said, and we did; How about one last trip to the farmers’ market downtown, underneath the sun and all of their hats; one more poem and one more song, we’ve got time. Fresh-squeezed lemonade in April with organic strawberries, once more, I can feel it we’re not begging. I’ll sign your petition, down there on the street, this time, sure. Melons and we ate those carrots in the car. I noticed the mockingbird and the wave curl and the volleyball weekenders and the joggers and the giraffe’s head peeking above bushes, seeking the sea. Wait, before I step inside that door, once more please let me sit on the deck and gaze at the passing whales and playing dolphins and last surviving otters, let me note what was here and leave you a whiff of it; My sweetness and reason for being, allow me to stand and enjoy the soft skin-kissing breeze on cheeks.
Faced with prospects of a good life enlivened with Contentment here on earth
Faced with prospects of a good life enlivened with Contentment here on earth, so long as the proper choices are made, based on profound philosophies and the teachings of those who have long and deep understanding, I stared at the following question with some level just shy of agony: to read a book inside (all of spirit and mind contained within the text), with the sun and the flower and the tree right there, or to go for a walk. One must commit something. An eye fixed upon a star and eventually you are rewarded, arrive safely and always in time. Many have reminded me of this but Dante was the latest. I knew it before he showed up, however, given my aboriginal nature and my relation to soil and sky. Then I was perplexed. I could be one or the other on a given day, my last in life. For an hour, both could not suffice. The day before yesterday I chose the book and from sunup until down I read and dreamed and lived within some other world, carried by Emily’s dinghy, seated in her corner room, my body pained and withered. Yesterday I chose the walk, through the live oak and along the living creek, and once an inhalation of earth gave song and courage to my heart. I did not read the poem on my list; I gazed at it, drifting there on a table. Today I sat between the two, immobile. The fiery god stationed and we here spun in front of it. Could not open the words; would not walk without firm choice; in darkness with no time left I curled lost to my side.
Opened my mouth to swallow the universe
Opened my mouth to swallow the universe and turned inside-out to reveal my guts to the world. Spread wide on the table and opened my ass to give birth to the sun, holding steady fire and power, drawing the rest of you a million miles an hour, whipping a mean scream, creating a fierce wind. Threw my foot and watched it orbit myself. Swam naked toward it and gulped it down whole, removing parts, flicking with my fingers those space-frozen toes. Unveiled my hose and watered the garden, a giant piss, and out flowed the first of many seas. I swam in myself and licked along, omnivorous and strange, assuredly impressed to find you around. Took you inside of me and you ripped open my ribs, vomiting my heart into my hand. We watched it beating, and your smile was a new star, fresh from its awesome explosion and an agonizing pressure that we cannot fathom nor explain. I described it to you and your tongue was mine. We continued to swim, swim, until we found the rest of them. It was fine, there, in the darkness. When our eyes sprouted trees and visions dripped from the leaves, we knew we were stuck beyond time. We were that beginning and that end, and the dust of the infinite present that the rare beast learns we inhabit. Chomped a bite out of Saturn and spit it a bug on the wall, wiped your Milky Way in one swipe with my nipple. We both yawned and out flashed the final ocean, roiling in spins and spawns, trickling.
Dedicate something to my friend
Dedicate something to my friend; acknowledge the man with his family, his job in the city, a decision at 26-years-old to buckle down, reaping benefits of a decade; may as well dedicate the lake and the mountains and the sky to the man who shared it with us: The way the pontoon ferry works is at the end of the day, after our Algonquin hanging not quite literary, he boats the ferryman back across the lake and returns alone to tie up on his own dock at Edgecliff, underneath the peregrines who are serious on their granite slabs carved by glaciers, and the two loons who sport this particular crystal the summer season long. Drunk and stoned with the best of them most enthusiastic, I jumped along for the ride. We carried the talkative Vermonter, big guy obsequiously angling for the man’s best ear, accent closer to those of the country to the north than not, slow lilt “yah, okay then, see ya.” My man turned the boat around and said “Let’s see what this thing can do.” After the goddam putting of the ferryman. Garth killed the engine in the middle, as awareness dictates, and we idled silently, gazing skyward at the sparkle that is the splintered moon. As in the best of lives, as it should happen to friends in the open space of a lake at one in the morning, blazing across our minds spit a meteor, a brushstroke of fire directly above in a swipe to the horizon cliffs, where it exploded in a burn before us and vanished; exclaiming turned to high fives.
