Summer by Georg Trakl

At evening grieving stops
From cuckoos in the wood.
The corn leans deeper in,
The poppies red.

A thunderhead looms black
Over the hillside.
The old song of crickets
Dies in the field.

No more do they stir,
The leaves of the chestnut.
The spiral-wound stair
Rustles your dress.

Candlelight still
Inside the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts it out:

Windless, starless night.

---------------------------------------

Am Abend schweigt die Klage
Des Kuckucks im Wald.
Tiefer neigt sich das Korn,
Der rote Mohn.

Schwarzes Gewitter droht
Über dem Hügel.
Das alte Lied der Grille
Erstirbt im Feld.

Nimmer regt sich das Laub
Der Kastanie.
Auf der Wendeltreppe
Rauscht dein Kleid.

Stille leuchtet die Kerze
Im dunklen Zimmer;
Eine silberne Hand
Löschte sie aus;

Windstille, sternlose Nacht.

Landscape with Water Fairies

I can’t be what I am
               For I can see
                              There’s something else
To envy:
                 The scent of the sunny side
                                                    Egg flower
—The two dogs who carry one stick
                               In their mouths—
The gnats who dance in rapturous patterns—
The egret in thickened muck who sleeps
                               The sun’s rays down,
                  Pond skin jostling like a skirt—
Even the brown summer stalks that
        Accept the drape of white
                                                   Sunned glaze
              Are secure in their nobility,
                       Their purpose is their essence,
                                      Organic
                                                    As breathing—

While I, I go crazy
                                Being only an eye,
The richness of it all
                 Goes into my system.
We want to become everything
                                    Because we are nothing.

A quiver comes over us
                                         Not like the breeze that
Thinks the bees
                    To the roses.
Dust rises from shoes,
                    Ignites the late air,
Stilling the moment, only for us
             And only for us come violet spheres
                         Bubbling from the sun
                                 —Letting us in on the secret—
They dance like the gnats
             And join into shapes
Of violet, blue, maroon and green energy
In pendulous sway of glistening light
             And fly out over the water.
                                                                We all see it.

But then the periwinkle mist rolls in from the sea
             To cover the spreading sun
--Too much incandescence, it’s too acute,
Too naked this revelation
            We’re not supposed to view…

Fading to purple like the carrot
            With the red, red leaf.

After Reading Charles Wright on a Windy Day

The trees are always shaking
Yet we pretend that we don't feel;
It's the way we take it to something it's not
That makes us stand uneasy

While we continue confused, so hidden
We don't think of ourselves as real.
We claw at that first dart of identity
To pin hopes of honesty on

But the shroud, like persistent cloud cover,
Never lifts, the wind buffets and fills
Our clothes, our purpose is tossed like a stone
We may, so we hope, claim again

With generous mathematics and the tenacity
Of the condemned. All the while the world outside
Won't waver from its tasks; it knows to fill
The cistern up, without being asked,

And does not question humble things,
Like why the sky won't yield,
It merely lives in what's-not-passed,
Those self-sustaining springs.

Day Without Fantasy

I awake to a morning without dream.
The sun made me blind.
                                     The mind failed to catch.
I only hear dry gears turned in some grey
      Distant sphere,
Predictable, repeatable, mere process:
       A washing without object,
      Exercise without effects.

The bird sounds have no place to go.
The forest is left to bullying crows
And rapacious squirrels
Corrupting the air itself, all skill,
      Cleverness and intent.

And I no longer a boy
        To look on with wonder
Or a God to ascribe sacred patterns
              To motions,
I see a garden to barricade
And a window to close,
Mechanical catches to suppress
      The nothingness
That permeates the empty room
              Of the dreamless
                              Present.

The bird that is not there,
A grouse or such,
Is no longer in the air,
It does not sing with the bagpipes,
It does not devour the lettuce flower.
A tarpaulin has been laid down like a law,
              The pleats made strict.
I am only myself again, hopeless
To enlightenment, paralyzed to grace.

Is there nothing else?
                                Surely in this peopled world
There is something of value?
What stands on its own, apart from my own
        Possessive thievery,
Is like a far island veiled in grey,
Horizons obscure, ridges indefinite
And a chorus of critical winds
               That chide, deride and deny
The authenticity of its mist.

The tracks are closed east of Ontario.
        Piles of scrap litter the depot.
The women are needy and fat,
                                                           The men intolerant and distant.
The children’s pleadings carry as they
               Act out the madness in the suburb sulfurs
While the loner always leads with his fists
And shape-shifting vagrants have vape trysts
By the lazy housewife beans;
Another happy protest where exalted victims
        Dance on strings like would-be escapees
               From the consensus illuminati reality,
But the party ends when the bongo player stops,
        And it’s like the ideal
               Was never real.

By evening the hoodies return
        From the park
Carrying tunes in their walking gloves
        That mark at the time but won't soothe
The fever in their minds.

Life could be better.
                                        I could be better.
The wires should not be so thick with charge,
But then the dream that erases them
Would not play on
Like Victrola wax, endless music that
               Never existed.

According to Plan - As Usual

While we were too busy asking "who am I?" instead of looking at the sky, they filled the casinos with Sacagawea gold, and, instead of closing down the long-running Hamleton rap-assassination play, voided the Waxsaw rake from the current sea, for he hated native races as much as he hated furren money, made Tubman Mississippi the new capital for the poor, 2 large become the Tub nickel, to be passed around like pennies used to be, see: that's me!

Mesquite Flowers in Lieu of Tears

The cactus turns blue
as the sounds end
and the jackrabbits come
from the tumbleweed.

Life is a gift:
we all have to hide
from the terror in our own minds,
what we call an eye.

View from the Candy-Apple Ladybug

Wild sunflowers in the sand,
a thousand yellow points to be adored,
a vibrancy too large for just one heart,
it burns one's eyes, how everything is yellow

except on the edges of the hillside,
where purple's like a hue that's not
supposed to be; it takes over,
for being stranger and rarer and braver.

The yellow is now nothing at all.

Variations on a Line by Aiden

An island of truth
                on the dry river bed:
a mattress
                that swims with the sand
and keeps it secrets hid so well
                it seems ever at one
with the mallards and killdeer,
                lawn chairs and golf balls,
the stick nest springing in the tire.

The sun shines on all of them equally,
there's no way this
               tennis shoe
                                    can't fit
in the desiccated strand
               of cat tail and thistle,
where muskrats still hide in coyote tobacco,
               ping pong balls
in the transient cliff side,
                                     
                                         but an eye
can see them all, a mind can choose to judge
               or not
the unresolved past
               of coffee cup plastic,
take-out black
               and Natural American Spirit packs
(litterers' favorite).

The birds behind blinds
               of milkweed and castor bean
chilling at home
               don't pay it no mind

until we come to claim it
               like a stone on a sluice
and they run, to the endless air,
               their voices, for once, breaking.

Spring Implications

The fields of yellow stars

dusted by the sun
         waver
                  in clear air

as individual or general

          as the heart that moves
                                through them

                  will allow
whether it nurtures

                                the lost
or explodes to the call
          of the all-pervasive idea
                   that says
                                 nothing
                                 with one voice

soft clover and
         cactus spur

like lovers clustered
                                 red heart
         bulging like an apple

as if when they match our desire
         it's the source of all our wounding

the pure

         (love and hate is the same gesture)
         we’re protected from

then the sun drips in the sky
         and mustard flowers fall into my hair
as if I’ve learned there’s truth
                                        in all our meaning

54th Chorus

Brave Jesus
Spiralled into darkness
Still we are surprised
How flesh gets all dismembered
As if it holds no answer
Or two.

A Thought that Blew in like a Weed from Chicago

The great violet smoke
Understands all, sees all
And sits perfectly still,
Unlike that rock,
Which will tell you
All that you need to know.

A Sunday Moment

The nursery's full of surf punk rockers

nodding their heads to themselves

as they push wide shopping carts

past sweetbroom and snapdragon,

a kind of beauty, turning on its carousel,

not to be touched without impossible permissions

from the angels who escort them

wearing leather boots and speaking of Texas onions

as something to desire this warm afternoon.

Tattoos that show through rock'n'roll suicide t-shirts

and the shh of dragging shoes come alive

with a blast of thrash from a modified 

pickup truck outside, and eyes connect,

ashamed almost that it is cool

to share for just a moment what is freedom,

what is life, for fear of slipping

down that hillside, with eyes no longer

ones to trust, but black inside.

You, But Not Your Sleeves

Everyone needs seduction candles
and therapy pillows, a guitar
beside the riverbed, by the light of a girl
gathering pine cones.

There's no distinction
between the wind and your breath,
the shine of the land and your eyes.
You are the earth embodied and disrobed.
Your bangles click as you touch my hair.

Costa Rica Suite

At the Airport

Delayed between Guatemalan hair

and El Salvadoran sadness,

a friendly voice warns "don't leave your language

unattended", as children at midnight

hold eyeless bears, and women bear

unbearable grievances, and men, unable to be authentic,

still talk a good casino at the Sea Legs Café,

where they play private LA beats

above the din of rolling rrr’s

of those trying to please or be pleased.

No one is doing what they want to be doing

but they all are doing something just the same:

drawing rainbows, sharing earbuds,
working out the fantasy of world integration in one's mind,
tossing tissues at outstretched hands,

explaining the travail of life in a yellow cowboy hat,
shaking a thick mane of hair, grabbing empty

packets to place in his one-piece PJ pockets.

Arrival

The crystal light floats across San Jose at night,

shimmers with a code higher entities understand
and squirrels on the ground bow in honor to,
but it seems to us like pretty lights,

how they almost gasp for breath
in the swirl on the surface of the world

swallowing the houses.

The Meaning of La Pura Vida
God gave Costa Ricans the land

He was keeping for Himself
because they had such a pure heart.

A man in a wheelchair
in front of a home without windows
smiles.

Tribute to the Other Brother

He holds a musket and a bouquet

by Alaheula cathedral
strung, like the blue schools,

billboards and bazaars, with razor wire.

It’s an economic miracle

of indigenous eviction

and farmers abusing oxen for tourist photos

holding machetes saying "pura vida".

Pigeons are free at least to move
in the fountains of Mango Park.

The Only Thing More Depressing than Poverty Is Trying to Sell the Virtues of Poverty

A grey afternoon in San Jose,

everyone is waiting:

for a customer, a bus, a meal.

Each shuffles in a private hell

that glows in Spanish neon

like the shoes hung on the walls

in the "Total Liquidation" Zapateria.

There's nothing between a head

and the polished floors here,

barred doors make some other world
seem hopeless, where one is free
from lords and mercenaries,
the great white culling,
the prison wire like theatre lights

for the tour bus to look down on

with equivalent despair.

At the Coffee Plantation

To be a blue butterfly

and float through paradise

drunk on hibiscus and banana,

reward for a life spent

on the streets of San Juan.

Looking for Monkeys

Behind the veil, a bouncing bough,

the monkey’s white eyes hide.

We hear him cry, through mists of sky
and think of pride, the monkey's eye

we see looking as he hides behind the veil.

Then he swings outside

to find himself a king.

At the Volcano Pool

The smell of sulfur,

the boy said, is

“Indians making omelettes

when someone dies.”

The vulcanologists say
there's nothing to fear,
the earth moves every day
and every day some people die

but be careful of the sulfur,

it can kill you.

Wherever there are volcanos,

there are silly adults the children have to save.

Beyond the Mustard Cliffs

The steam speaks secret poetry
then clears to blue cerulean

and the fairies we can't see

are mirrored in the lake
like time-lapse moons,

and in a flash the density of grey

rolls over again like a thick, thick sheet

on closing eyes.

Rain Forest Voices

Even the elephant ears
have been nibbled down to stems

yet a squirrel makes the fern tongue flap

and a voice resounds in thunder

but I only hear an insect

no larger than a whisper:

"what to write."

Above Eye Level

In plastic trees

a spider weaves gold galaxies from its black hole
for the Gods who do not know they roam the earth.

By the Candy Store

A woman licks an ice-cream cone

the same pink as her lip gloss

while strolling through a high-end mall

where marching bands plays Christmas songs

with drummer boys in white face

and gingerbread men on stilts

backed by six white sousaphones

and is horrifically depressed.

The Farm of the Happy Cows

They listen to Bach

and graze by hydrangeas

on flower cloud hillsides.

Birds in Captivity

Caged parrots with their broken wings withhold from us their song.

The grey owl wants no pictures, until we move along.

The ostrich thinks that she's in charge, scared eyes move side to side.

The emu thinks she's beautiful, knows everyone has lied.

The peacock turns her plumes like car show models spin around.

The crested guan Camaro cools his pompadour surround.

The conure nest in dead tree milk, to sing their songs of life.

Great curassow, huge grieving eyes, comb scythed as by a knife.

The spoonbill tries to hide in trees, but he, alas, is pink.

The boat-billed heron disappears, emerges in a blink.

The ibis sits on bamboo as from Egypt we remember.

The cormorant unshackled looks with black wings to the future.

R2D2 bleep, then a high-pitched radio shriek,

The green toucan learned who he is after breaking off his beak.

The mangrove swallow, white-necked stilt, tanagers say nothing,

The purple gallinule just let its colors do the talking.

Snowy egret question mark neck leans down from wet roots
Of walking palm to beak an eel, a honeycreeper flutes,

And hummingbirds share love with blooms, they float instead of fly

Until another pulls them off to greater love up in the sky.

On the River

A piano bird spreads its macabre wings
as it grapples with the implications

of a bare tree in the green river

then, without apparent consultation, dives

to dance like a snake charmed neck above water

to melodies of snook and tarpon.

At the Oxen Torture Center

Before the coffee was planted,

before the impossible train to the sea was built

there were oxen drooling, pulling brown men's burdens

up and down the mountains, hoping to survive

through constant work.

Now an empty ox-cart

painted with red parrots

is the symbol of the working man

whose back remains unbroken

though his whip is old and frayed.

Along the Universal Country Road

Men sit on benches outside of Soda Willie

where bags of onions and bananas hang down

as if to impress Soda Lily.

Costa Rica’s Mystery

Perfect stone spheres

too buried to be found

and heavy to be moved

until the Gods had been replaced

by man’s machines

-- you know the story –

some signal to above,

receiver from below,

there are these patterns

but they don't know,

the science and the history

still erased.

Resort Living

One gets bored with bathrooms fit for Louis Quatorze

by cabana bars where mint and rum, Brazilian

new age jazz and rave are mixed

for the precise predilections of mojito-sipping swingers

from the far side of suburbia, who hold the world's

sum knowledge in their phone’s chip,

as they stroll a Spanish mission for the God of hedonism,

where umber floors are sparkle cleaned by someone who’s invisible…

until one’s dealt the playing cards beneath the palm-leaf fan.

The numbers never cease to amaze.

In Guanacasta
"Welcome," said the boarded up shed
cotton-candy pink, Esmerelda Poett's
Lost Iguana Hotel, Macrobiotica, Microcervezia,
Eco-boutique, Ferreteria, Discomovil and internet café.
She offers us 12 New Year's Eve grapes and Coyol wine,
so we'll be drunk again the next day with the sun,
and a taboret beneath the ear tree, symbol of equilibrium.
Just be careful of the duck police, the vicious
beaches, the cold killer eyes of ennui
on the crocodile uncomfortable in its own leather.
We're the largest exporter of coffins,

she, finally, excitedly said.

Rain Forest Notes
Everything moves but the waterfall,

the green that can't stop growing,

yearning to the condition of sky.

Red crabs on the forest floor,

torch ginger and bitterwood blooms

like specks of blood in the beard of life.

A sloth on a branch top stares at the blue,

the canopy swings its hairy air roots,
the distant marimba of monkey music.

Above it all, in endless sky, 

vultures circle like the forest flow,

black in the mid-day sun.

Conclusion

The history of this place,

of warring white men's
hungers
and alcoholic despots

who kept the people fed,

seems to have changed
everything on the maps,

in the books,
in the mind,
but not, oh no,
never could,
on the ground.

The Disinherited

I am the Dark - the Widower - the Unconsoled,

The Prince of Aquitaine in a Tower broken:

My only star is dead - and my lute of gold

Wears Melancholy’s low, black sun.

On the night of the Tomb, with your solacing art,

Give me Italy’s sea and the Posillipo,

The flower that so pleased my desolate heart,

And the trellis where vine marries rose.

Am I Love or Phoebus? ... Lusignan or Biron?

My forehead’s still red from the Queen’s kiss;

I dreamed that a siren swam from the abyss …

And victorious twice crossed the Acheron:

On Orpheus's lyre in turns I vary

The sighs of the Saint with the cries of the Fairy.

Translated from the French of Gerard de Nerval:

El Desdichado

Je suis le Ténébreux, – le Veuf, – l’Inconsolé,

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :

Ma seule Etoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé

Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,

Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,

La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé,

Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ?… Lusignan ou Biron ?

Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;

J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la sirène…

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :

Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

Artemis

The Thirteenth returns . . . It is the first anew;
And still the only, — or has time not passed?
As you are queen — first or final? — are you
King too? The one lover or only the last? . . .

Love him who loved you from cradle to hearse;
The love from the sole one tenderly flows;
She is death — or the dead ... O delight! O curse!
The hollyhock she holds is a rose.

Neapolitan saint with hands full of light,
Rose violet heart, Saint Gudula's lantern;
Did you find your cross in the desert skies?

White roses, fall! To our Gods they slight:
Fall, phantoms white, from heaven that burns:
— The saint of the void's more holy to my eyes!

From the French of Gerard de Nerval:

Artemis

La Treizième revient... C'est encor la première;
Et c'est toujours la Seule, - ou c'est le seul moment:
Car es-tu Reine, ô Toi! la première ou dernière?
Es-tu Roi, toi le seul ou le dernier amant? ...

Aimez qui vous aima du berceau dans la bière;
Celle que j'aimai seul m'aime encor tendrement:
C'est la Mort - ou la Morte... Ô délice! ô tourment!
La rose qu'elle tient, c'est la Rose trémière.

Sainte napolitaine aux mains pleines de feux,
Rose au coeur violet, fleur de sainte Gudule,
As-tu trouvé ta Croix dans le désert des cieux?

Roses blanches, tombez! vous insultez nos Dieux,
Tombez, fantômes blancs, de votre ciel qui brûle:
- La sainte de l'abîme est plus sainte à mes yeux!

Golden Verses

                                  "Well then! Everything is sentient!" - Pythagoras

Man! Free thinker - you think alone, you think,
In this world where life bursts from everything:
The same force you wish your freedom to be,
But of all your advice the universe is free.

In each creature there's a reaching spirit ...
Each flower has a soul blooming in it;

The metal that sleeps beams love's mystery:
"Everything is sentient!" - And your being is mighty!

Fear, there on the blind wall, a spying stare
That attaches a verb like a prayer ...
Don't let your service be the unholy kind!

In the dark of being a hidden God lives;
An eye awakes in covers of eyelids
As pure spirit grows under the stone's rind!


Translated from the French of Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855):

Vers dorés

                                  "Eh quoi! tout est sensible!" - Pythagore.

Homme! libre penseur - te crois-tu seul pensant
Dans ce monde où la vie éclate en toute chose:
Des forces que tu tiens ta liberté dispose,
Mais de tous tes conseils l'univers est absent.

Respecte dans la bête un esprit agissant: ...
Chaque fleur est une âme à la Nature éclose;
Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose:
"Tout est sensible! " - Et tout sur ton être est puissant!

Crains dans le mur aveugle un regard qui t'épie
A la matière même un verbe est attaché ...
Ne la fais pas servir à quelque usage impie!

Souvent dans l'être obscur habite un Dieu caché;
Et comme un oeil naissant couvert par ses paupières,
Un pur esprit s'accroît sous l'écorce des pierres!

LA Portrait

A sailor from 1948
Walks wide-eyed through Union Station
Having lost all hope
Of catching the long-delayed train to Reno.
Nobody smokes
But children wear tattoos
And empty their lives into silent walkie-talkies.
Still, not much has changed;
The women still have breasts.

Facts for Believers

The sparrows nightly fly
Cross the baby shower sky
While frogs sing cricket key
And the river turns calligraphy

The sun is squeezed like a dropper of ink
In river light that could save us from the demons
But it's only not yet emptied sky
For we refuse to see

In lifeboats we worship the liquor
Of patterns and God as machine

January Rattle

What the bean locust tree says
is everything we can't hear otherwise
from the aching outside to be heard
by the aching inside to hear,
what we call "imaginary."

Inkblot Sky

LA noir at its most serene,
Mr. Groom saying "the emperor has no chain,"
And her reminding him "It's a fwee countwee"
As if he ever could forget.
So the day pulled away the vested handkerchief of grey
To find that smudge of lipstick evening pink.

At Sunset Beach

Thought is no different than other viruses;
It propagates itself to survive.
The oil's mixed with plastic jetsam from the eddies.
The gulls fly bamboo sticks over the tide;
Why we can only surmise.

Sunrise Blues

Pink snow mountains,
Palm trees still asleep,
Sun on a white stone wall...

The world is too beautiful to see.

The Well-Read Boy on the Train

Poets and intellectuals
work the data mines
for hopelessness seems
close to the solution
in a world that's hope-bereft

Students still read Paradise Lost -
it gets simpler
with each passing year -
we, sinners all
still shake our fear crosses

Still people build their houses
outside of corruption
albeit they're aglow
with all the reports of it
from some central dispensation

Do we listen to this Satan
omnipresent and eternal,
or is the voice just too
damn inaudible?
Yes the symbols are embedded

In every program that we see
but we thumb our noses
at all that, riffling the dial,
blinking as our heroes
genuflect before it,

That's their deal, see,
not mine, you know,
I still can dig an orgy
but not if there's too much
blood

The yearning's secret
in every heart
for something
beyond that power,
something one can actually hear

In the wind and the birds
and the streams, life is real
and death is a rumor,
and anyone with half a mind
can read that gossip rag

With names like Milton,
Blake and Shelley,
who still work
in Satan's mills,
as if they haven't changed.

The Purpose of Piezoelectric Barium Strontium Titanate Crystals

And all of this
To watch us glow,
To track our
Enlightenment
Though we're deathly afraid
That they keep us
Asleep
By dimming the sun,
Ending the world,
None of which counts
In the instant of life;
All their smart dust
Just a button we push.

Eyes

A cold sea
Goes as far as
The white sand
Still numb
At day's end
To touch.
At a distance are some houses.
Their windows are on fire.

Histoire

They looked through Ronsard's forms
As we, far from any Geneva of the mind,
Look in the folds of cloud
For what is false,
What is real.

The Last Gift

Christmas crows in orange trees;
they know that ribbon's coming.

But now they shriek as we make frowns
behind the scheduled miracle.

That little patch of morning light
too pure for us to contemplate.

We must ignore all slights and wounds
to fight what is.

In the Red Light of December

The poet speaks
The world recedes
There is no sound
Left of his breathing

He draws the void
We might believe
If there could be
An end to reading

The words erase
Each tiny thing
But there is never
Really nothing

As the theory
Would have it be
Meaning glows like glass
Cannot empty

The Light Inside the World

The sun behind Catalina
Makes all Surf City pink
Except for the eastern mountains
Violet already.

The Gift of Seeing Purple

City of joy
in a broken world,
like a smile on a busted toy.
God shines whole through every
weathered Camel pack
strewn in depot pebbles.
Still we make of Art our God
to salve a wound
too deep for even knowing,
take such comfort from the false
because it can only condemn
with opinion.

The earth has been more patient
than the sunset ever shows,
it waits with solace for our
quivering minds
when we recognize there is no
roof above us, there are no
stones inside, the concepts that we
trade like food are vapor
in the void.

The voices in the wind,
the faces in the shade,
speak always of the one
— the alone is the only thing —
it is all.

Haiku

For once costumes fit
Little Tokyo Halloween
Bats watch from windows

A Thought Freed from Context

You don't understand unless you misunderstand.
What else can we learn from except our mistakes?
What else is there to life?

On Dog Beach

Riding with the dogs
In the ruff curl as it rips
And the twilight surfers
Pearled blue
Taste Catalina embers
And people sit on beach chairs
In irridescent shadow
As walls of burly wave thrash
And the dashing full moon glow falls
On a pink bikini tossing a frisbee
And night anglers tieing flies in front of a tiny TV
The dogs and gulls and children squealing
To agree:
"This is a day to be happy."

Five O'Clock Voices

The fountain burbling
does more, says more
than the campus full

of fretful smiles

but we only understand
the ones that go: "don't
do that, don't say that

ever again. Don't scare me

ever again like that."

Filters

There are no ghosts screaming from the memory hole,

No black glass towers shuffling money on the hill

Or the smell of weed and urine along the string of bare hotels.
There is no man on a walker asking me if there's anything's wrong,
No wheelchair panhandlers
Or bums for hire with dog.

There are no cops on segues bantering Batman-clad ladies,
No luxury excavations beside the shopping cart clan
Or jewelry stores where Navajo security guards stand.

There are no "free smells" of coffee,

No Hollywood wannabes still red-haired and half-naked
Or John Fante Square.
There is only a feeling that won't go away
When I looked in that one man's eyes.

The Osprey in the Bare Tree

The osprey in the bare tree sees:
Crabs perambulate to keep the world
In front of their testing claws;
Insects that use every joint and leg
To circumnavigate quivering leaves;
Steel-eyed rabbits glisten in camouflage
Waiting for cover of walking humans to move;
Schools of fish in furious slalom run
Silver scale shine in the sun...

It is enough, this choice, to make a bird
Feel humble, to gather its wings
In will and prayer
For the holiness of being worthy.

Lotus

A squalor beyond the Music Center:
papers wrapped 'round weeds
with all that value's let skirt free;
beauty's richest soil.

The All-Seeing Lie

Everyone is an adult but me.
They seem so real, so fully formed,
as if I know their stories and their smells,
have lived their lives for them already, 

as if I know the eccentricity where they will fail.

Still I look in longing like the child I am,
eager to learn what illusions to believe,
what losses to sense, what fragments to call whole, 

as if, in every word I know before they speak it,

there is something not yet me.

Day and Night in Corona Del Mar

Rocks like penuche fudge,
Sunset's white surf
Below a slow burning sky
That fights the night.

But soon the moon calls the rocks from the sea,
Dances mercury along the waves
To open up what is to what could be.

The Light Within the Window

The refraction grows abstract,
Its fuel blurs into purples
Inside the turning fires

Which consume what’s recognized:
All that the dream says is true.
When light breaks through this prism

The monster in the middle
Will glisten instead of roar;
The forms it sought to merge in

Can’t clothe the invisible
Any more. It’s now too raw
For the world and its people

— Grid of junk calligraphy —,
And everything kept at bay
Becomes a God who’d acted

As acolyte in bow down
To saints from miracle clay.
What have we to show this God

So patient and forbearing?
Only prayers it finally can
Reveal itself without us.

In Seattle

A sweetness brief, the days of sun and cherries
Passed around by bums in cups like wine spod-ee-odie,
The way that cigarettes are currency in the pen,
The pits like butts scraped down to the hard end,
So close that those who haven't bitten
Can't really say they've lived.

As the Water Moves In

As the water moves in
Fish race over canyons
On tracks that spontaneously appear

From an intelligence like ripples and bubbles.

We Cannot Believe the Pyramids Were Built

We cannot believe the pyramids were built
By man, mere man
Yet volcanos of ants do the same thing
Every day.

Bunker Hill Lunch

It's the kind of a day where everyone in the city looks like someone
       I know
And everything they are doing -- from eating sushi to tying balloons--
       is just the amused moving of the universal mind,
And out of that forms vast conceptual structures to explain
       existence through all of its facets,
A sea of patterns we can always love into coherence but as models
       they collapse because they only refer back to me
Who doesn't exist.

Furioso He Claimed

Furioso he claimed
But the old man's elbow of a tree limb
Barely nodded.
The snails stuck to its underarms
Had listened to his crap all along.

Crane Walks on Water

Crane walks on water
Stands buddha still
Flies like an angel
Purer than sound.
To her the drones and trash do not exist.
To us that's all there is.

White-Eyed Pigeons Fluff Each Other Up

White-eyed pigeons fluff each other up,
Fastidiously scouring feathers
Like a priest wets a newborn face;
They must be very clean
To beg in this town.

In the Air All Discontent

In the air all discontent
Dancing invisible words
The butterfly settles on a branch
And becomes a leaf.

Although the Squirrel

Although the squirrel
Eats with both hands
His black eyes are fixed
On the call of the leaves
From another world.