Emmylou Sings "Michaelangelo" Live

I can only lead you

To what you may not ever feel,

The unexplainable pathos of the real

Peeled from its shell, delivered cold

Enough she won't go over

The threshold.

                            There is one moment tho

When he gathered up her tears in an old

                            bandanna 

That she could no longer hold a pro's

                                               distance

And lets how she was truly known

      and never realized it

Go out, in her abandoned hope

                                  of love and home,

While the gifts recalled are all around, 

Still glittering like landmines

For the strangers there, like me,

                   saved from the time

When heaven fell to earth

        as the ground gave way.

Stevens Park

Perfect trail, perfect day,

Mustard fields, lilac trees,

Oaks shadow the streams,

Yet it's moments, only,

Of escape from our being.

The dream of the blue Dane

Can't bear this brilliant scene —

The day becomes, itself, elusive.

Santa Barbara

Maybe here, in Santa Barbara,

Where air is clear, views are far,

Can we finally talk, in a garden bar

Or bistro, of things that matter,

As the eucalyptus sways

And the white walls hold the day.

But it is here, in Santa Barbara,

With all her memories, her scars,

Where winds are soothing, sights unmarred,

Our words stay pretty, hearts on guard,

As if to sea was the only way

And there was nothing else to say.

Yet she is kind, this Santa Barbara,

Monterey pines against the stars,

Her smoky docks, bright bobbing spars

That make the grieving not so very hard.

There's only room in the café 

For beauty, new blooms in soft array.

A Lost Girl

Let us tell the truth at last, the past is dead;
    Sunrise is ahead, soon the doves will pine;
    We’ve run out of artful lines, out of wine;
You never let me say what must be said:
I loved you from the time our eyes connected,
    Yet you kept your lashes safe behind a line
    Part fear, part retribution, nothing mine,
Although I wore the fur of blame instead.

How easy you denied your right to be
   Divinity embodied, nature’s way
That you seemed meant to be, Beatrice
   To me, the rise and the fall of the day,
The poetry made out of violent sea,
   An ideal created from love as much as clay.

The Lilac Age

Pursuing her was like wooing the moon:

     No matter how close, still the same distance.

     The place where she fled was an empty entrance.

My light became her, and she said, "Too soon."

Yet she hung on each soft word, every tune,

     As if such praise made all the difference,

     Though her eyes just pitied my persistence,

Resistant, as usual, to my charms immune.

Yet I think of that now as the lilac age,

     When words couldn't worm their way in between,

When grievances desire would soon assuage,

     And a bangle could shake the slate clean,

For feeling was all that was real at that stage,

     The field at the end of the street always green.

The Inescapable Iron

So she’s a ruin, do you not have Rome

    In your local wisdom crypt, her touchstones?

    We’ve lost the aroma, of scholastic tones

From acrid halls where, all of them wrong, the tomes 

Hang down like gyves on open catacombs,

   Words of compulsion etched in powdered bones;

   She sooner returns to dust before atones.

The holy we’ve known, her decadent foam,

Still scars the hillside rubble-strewn tableau, 

    Succeeded all-too-well in her mission; 

Earth waits for us at a higher plateau

    While we watch her spin from recognition. 

Can we 'ere forget what we couldn’t know,

    The bodies charred with our erudition?  

Spring’s Opening Move

Palm Canyon, Anza Borrego

The purr of desert lavender –
This spring will feature purple
In the permanence of blue.

The earth spits out its umbers,
As life that’s still,
And life that moves:

The rocks roll with the tongue
Of the wash, as water
Rushes them to sound,

Datura, desert daffodil,
Each one is a city, with a center
Deep inside a quarry of light

That pulses parts of stars
Like humans walk with minerals
Within their blood.

Tiny buds of grass are no more relevant
Than the thinned and brittle limbs
That seem forever gone

But like the iridescent stones
Are only resting
In the whole

With its circuits of flight, like the wind,
Spiraling around each contained
And uncontainable thing:

The thorns in intricate webs,
The twin flame brittle bushes,
The perfect circles where the chia has spread.

The patterns tend to be unique,
For beauty’s sake, perfection’s need,
But they are patterns nonetheless,

Like those lavender bees  
That traffic the freeways
Between exit blooms

And the angles of escape
From each shadow nest
Across crisp, inhospitable sand.

The grass buds are so large
Next to the ants,
As the outcroppings ahead are

Impossible for me to comprehend
Despite their blood-red stains
And knife-blade tips.

You’d think I’d recognize them,
As you’d think the thin red blossoms
On what appear to be dead sticks

Wouldn’t take me aback,
But there you have it,
Even the familiar is strange,

The way that change
Reveals itself
Like a play

In my own attention span
As in the movement
Of rocks and kingdoms.

So much has changed,
But nothing seems different
In the face of this year’s flowers.

The water has come to loosen
The mica shine and divination bricks
I must find knowing in.

The dirt itself is glazed
With universal light,
As I will localize

The non-local intelligence
Beyond my grasp
Or at least my grasping.

The lavender waves
To break the stillness,
The rock pile and its nerves

Are deep in thought,
Bees humming
A drone accompaniment,

Then the crackle back and forth
Of birds, sensing out the depths
That always ripple.

They escape from tree to tree
To demonstrate some freedom
To me, that feels like

A letting go
Of everything
I see and stupidly become:

The ironwood in the sun,
The potential front-yard stone,
Red as the leaves

Of the high plain ocotillo
In bloom, that a few
Drops of water have turned green …

Oh emptiness,
The promised land
That’s in between.

Song of the Slabbies

Welcome ...

     Keep Away

Found spoons put on carousels,

     Bicycle rims to crown weather vanes,

            Dreamcatchers woven in jungle gyms

Are all ways of saying "I matter."

     They all want to be seen

            Yet be invisible

When they fly their smiley flag

     Or pontificate beyond the fence

           Inscribed with 100 Gulf War Vet grievances,

1000 PRIVATE identities parading:

     The Fallout Shelter Ecozone,

          The "off-the-grid" hook-up for RVs.

There are no rules ...

     You must stay inside your car

They are clowns dancing 

     In the sand

          With hands out,

Yet another way to spin

     The homeless embankment

           As a realized dream.

A BBC documentary was made here once

     Of these implacable East Jesus folks,

          Their perpetual transience

Is part of history now (they announce),

     Something (one would think) only

           The sneaker tree could escape.

Mask Up or Fuck Off ...

     The Last Free Place

There's no water, electricity,

     The po-lice drag the streets

             Yet every winter thousands more 

Arrive from the shores of the fishbone sand

     And war-zoned beachfront property 

             Of an American dream 

That lies well beyond Bombay Beach,

     Looking for this, as something.

             There's a library here

Where you can read and drink, and forget

     You are a normie, by being reminded

             That is all you'll ever be. 

Borrego Winter

Trees with green ice,

Low grey veils 

Shoulder the white

Mountain highlands.

Coyote red

Above the valley,

Brush like antlers 

In the sand.

But there’s a blue moon

Jacuzzi pool,

Stars large enough 

To believe.

The ceramic sun 

That's on the wall

The only reminder

One needs.

Unity

From the Spanish of César Vallejo

On this one night, my clock, next to the altar
Darkened in the temple, balks, as black spreads,
Like a flip of an apple revolver
Whose trigger below cannot locate the lead.

The moon, white coin, motionless, shows us tears,
And it is an eye that aims ... I am led

To how the great Mystery is coined, here,

As a hostile and ovoid idea, in red.

Ah, the hand that limits, that threatens us

Behind every door, and that calibrates

All the clocks — hand it over, shadow, pass!

On the grey spider of your frame it starts,
Another great Hand made of light bears the weight

Of a bullet in the blue shape of a heart.

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

UNIDAD (1918)

En esta noche mi reloj jadea

junto a la sien oscurecida, como

manzana de revólver que voltea

bajo el gatillo sin hallar el plomo.

La luna blanca, inmóvil, lagrimea,

y es un ojo que apunta… Y siento cómo

se acuña el gran Misterio en una idea

hostil y ovoidea, en un bermejo plomo.

¡Ah, mano que limita, que amenaza

tras de todas las puertas, y que abierta

en todos los relojes, cede y pasa!

Sobre la araña gris de tu armazón,

otra gran Mano hecha de luz sustenta

un plomo en forma azul de corazón.

The Trees

Gravity … enlightenment … immortality …

We’ve received so few secrets 

With our butts to the soil,

Where the nets of neural roots

Command a forest

Taller and more magnanimous than we are.

Most of the time my brain is in the wind;

I watch the leaves dance and make believe 

They could be mine. What I could do.

But even the stumps are kept alive with sugar

For the wisdom they remember;

Where, amid the antidotes, climate shifts

And most harmonious modes of order,

There is not one thought of the need

To forgive.

The Black Trumpet

Who speaks of what lives in the dark?
The senses always fail.
At five o’clock, when the clouds sharpen,
Is there hope?

Today it’s a phone call that goes on and on
About cancer metastasized into bone
And giving up on a daughter
He’d disowned too many times already to total.

Every day is like this, with the same irresolution,
Though my wet sheets are piled this afternoon
Atop my dusty car! Still, I must let it go as usual 
Without mouthing verdict or complaint …

Yet, as always, the possibility of a Zeus-like 
Thunderbolt of consequence rears its theory. 
But I can’t even locate my favorite mug and can't 
Predict what next demand violence will accompany.

Another mountain of clothes will be delivered to our door
So we can trip to the floor at 3 o’clock in the morning.
More things will be stolen, despite the locks, and I will endure
More taunting how unhinged I get at mere borrowing.

All this I know. As that there are daughters folding clothes, 
Preparing meals, hearing the complaints of aching age,
But here, an eggshell cracking brings
The mirrors down to the floors,

And if one chooses to criticize this latest ruination
As a less-than-innocent, more-than-natural expression,
However one felt will no longer seem the same anger
In the face of a brand-new pain. 

Timelines

In 5D, we've got our two suns.

We laugh at the puppet consensus reality

As the slaves do the gladiatorial entertainments

In the arenas and on TV.

In 3D, they stay at the surface.

Third eyes are merely tattoos.

They laugh at vril eyes and prisons on the moon

As the wacky entertainments of their friends.

There's so much laughter between them,

In an echo, a kind of limbo.

Only a few words touch on the shore:

"Conspiracy" ... "the sleeping."

Lake Ramona from Potato Chip Rock

The boulders stretch out on these hills,

Resting momentarily.

They are not their brother's keepers,

But there they are,

In warm enough proximity to know

What the individual can't.

So much time to learn

The simplest things.

These meadows, these trees,

As close as home can be.

The Urge to Turn the Dial

The song bubbles like an egg

Its gnosis

Many are called but few

Are susceptible

Fewer still take anything 

Tangible from it

Some judgement

A door

So their squeaky hinge might

Sing with the dead

Mother's Song

     Of course, hearts disagree,

Who wouldn't, knowing your every gesture

Is of love, perfectly understood

By the sun of others,

     To find you do not know

What love is, at all ... for you are told

Such love does violence to the way they feel,

What they know.

This place where you lay requires permission,

But from whom? The one who understands 

Has no need to speak. On the other hand,

The one whose sole possession is

Unyielding animosity, will whisper 

Absolution, so beautiful it burns.

Memoirs of the Party Child

Divine lack of self-esteem,

The good life,

All comforts laid out free of blame

So you can wallow in self-pity like a king.

It looked so much like everyone was blessed

With your infernal spout, the fault 

Lay too deep within the stars of your bones 

To be lifted in the glass for observance.

It's a hard thing being seen and known,

To bear the habits and the pride

Of some candescent fire

Sparkling from wire to wire,

To be part of what is always something else,

The oneness a taunt when it gets this close,

When the home the most familiar is remote

As your journey went deeper in the spirit world 

And pulled such demons from the brine,

With tongs nearly surgical, that sent entities 

Laughing through the creaking floors

Of boisterous bores and whore-eyed slatterns

Full of too much love and kindness

And impossible desires to be unbounded

In the pickling firmament.

In the morning, the glasses were sticky

With martini stones, novelty sex toys

Hung from the lamps. It was too quiet,

The riotous night, was there anything left

The next day but good feeling for another

Just like it, where the stakes would inch ever higher,

Like the seas on a fathom-bound ship.

What shores it will reach mere mortals never tell,

Just shared jokes where you had to be there

Even if you were. I hear your voice, more an oracle

From distant space than a voice itself, yet

No one else edges in. That's the way of the humble,

To be the loudest in the room, to ask for nothing

When it seems the world itself won't satisfy,

Like the attention I am paying is in gold.

Fear of Life as a Take-Out Order

We're protected from seeing

             where we came from,

                         where we're going

So that we don't know who to blame.

       Instead we offer our pain

                          to mama earth:

              ceremonial rain,

                          hands to bury

                                       new life

                                  in the ash,

Believing the unseen

       but not when it comes to people

                                  experiencing

       places we've never been, 

               where birth follows death

                            and not the other

                                         way in.

Homicidal rage is betrayed

                in the smallest requests,

       for the world, merely silent,

                             must be against us,

And on the streets, where the succulents 

       are barely noticed amid the homeless.

They are the gifts that later centuries

       will bow against, but now

They shiver with faces held down,

                   muttering incomprehensibles

                                    that break your heart,

                          inflame your brain,

       wishing only it will go away

Like any mystery spoiled

                          when revealed.

Notes at Darkening

The gulls walk on pink.

Dolphins peer through electric blue.

There is too much talk,

Most of it useless.

There's no truth in it, beyond this beauty,

The mirror of sun on the shore 

In perfect alignment, nothing more.

The wind is purely itself

Yet our voices fill with it

Like bottles sounding water,

What we've been through.

All was lost in the waste of our journey,

To find that melodies from ghosts

Say what the grasses couldn't,

How they must become music,

As we must become truth.

Education

A child learning to read is like the first green

Ringed around the pond, a miracle

Of wanting to please, of wanting to learn

How to please, and identify with those

Who have pleased, the teachers with drawers full of sticks,

Who fret the steps away from spirit's school

Like fretting a lute, to capture angel voices 

With calibrate calculations, correct scales,

Relentless beat.

                                The leaves wave their shadows

Across the meadow. The eucalyptus seems to weep.

Children must leave what's been taken from them

Behind, and forget, over time, what took

Its place, the strict divisions, the condensations

Of thoughts into abridgements, simple enough

To cross, but still too perplexing to trust

Oneself going over

                                      Beyond the grasp

Of birds that can be heard but never seen,

The patterns that escape attention spans,

The things that are remembered without effort 

Or forgotten without a sound, conditions

Of silence where everything known passes

Like a shadow, not separate from us

In our words and worked-up thoughts, the knowledge 

We have to hold, as us, what we possess,

That's just a sense of longing, for what's lost.

Pateresque in Extremis

I remember, somehow, the vapours,

The smell of hay as strange music played,

A peculiar unveiling of notes,

As if a sculptor found a head in a block of stone, 

That frisson of suggestion 

Of an alien taste

That became an impenetrable fort

Created in the black world, by fancy

Oblivious to the snares that leave

The living mangled, forever bitter

In the waves of intellectual cruelty,

The currents of rough-hewn froth.

Enlargement -- derangement -- of the senses

Is not for us, those who know, but for those

We seal our lives against 

With the right approach, the proper turn,

To acknowledge the disappearance 

Of the agreed-upon world, unexamined

By consensus, inexperienced in truth,

No awareness that there was no consensus, 

Only compulsion, no truth, except 

As was assigned -- the openings were too bright 

To admit any concourse with such foraging 

For sustenance, in the dark of meaning.

What lifts away from 

The unassailable logic of another's ignorance

Are those who know to seek

The secret of wings, the insides of mountains,

The rooms in the clouds -- one could call it reaction,

A strike in an opposite direction

But it has always been the same,

The escape into what is just not seen --

How can they prove an existence

That requires in them no belief?

So there are labyrinthine tapestries,

Gems from Byzantium, fragrant scrolls

As holy objects set before the non-believers

By those who once were there, but are now

Interstitial, where gold lies unexplored.

Oh so many books to dig through,

So much reading, in order to know 

That what I know already is true.

Posterity

John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821)

For 200 years you've killed poet poor

     Systematically, every blood-red day,

With the lies of kindness, the lies of war,

     With every acid platitude you say.

You killed him with the true and the absurd,

     With all that was about you too, as well,

The rarefied bird, the consummate word,

     The edens of praise that held him in hell,

For perfection's but another prison

     To keep the blasphemous curr from your door;

The theories of his transcendent vision

     Have come like waters swooned upon the shore

From funnier ones where he had no talent.

So Lazarus must rise -- to keep him silent.

Truth as a Prospect for Crystal

There are layers of truth, like these lignite veins.

It has nothing to do with me or you

Except as trowel to rip the sod loose

Of Sactown, in this case, with its Hornets and Bee,

Its vague air of Paris, moss-covered trees,

Horse-driven sleighs along Q Street.

Harp players sing in Greek before the Court of Appeals

As Sokrates presides over a house of cardboard

By the hat-clad worker statues with California frowns

Before the people's cupola, where a golden bear

Attacks a horseman with a spear, some kind of symbol

Meant to resonate across the state,

Polykleitis doryphores, in an omen of gratitude.

Will the meaning be unpeeled down the street,

At some local haunt like Fat's, by the riverboats

And brothel balustrades? In the River City candy store,

With Walnettos, Chico Sticks, Bulls Eyes and Mary Janes?

There's columns to nowhere in Pioneer Park,

A Fairbanks scale in front of Steamers for San Francisco,

Though the locomotive train is all the history you'll need

Near the proverbial downtown ferris wheel ...

We must seek explanations elsewhere, signs for

Weedpatch, Safetyville, the Elkhorn Saloon

Plum as the day is long, past Schnitzer Steel, 

The Forklift Diner, "Cannabis soil delivered," 

Mosquito and Zinfandel streets, Fondue 152,

The hills of Folsom, that golden El Dorado grass,

Shingle Springs, down Mother Lode Road, 

The Buttercup Pantry, Panic and Swoon, 

The Scarlett Halo, a memorial for the Druids

Of California, then driveways over the crick

On Lotus Road, roan horses staring down the hills

In Sleepy Hollow, stagecoaches in the fields, 

Vans by the river, barns and toolsheds turning 

Into art, towards Rescue, where one can buy me a river 

At the River Store. There's a cabin there, 

Barely human anymore, where gold comes in

When the river floods. A family member owned it

And we don't know what to do

Except dig with restaurant spoons for crystals

Hidden in the brush. Layers of truth, some you may know, 

Some you won't. It lives within being, not a knowing.

Smoketree Valley

The desert doesn’t have to be quiet.
The rocks could scream in sympathy
For the pain that we’ve agreed to receive.
Its thorns could crown our suffering,
The sound of the wind could be weeping.

But it urges us to be strong
In being alone, in knowing silence.
Afternoons like these, it will not be seen
Except in transparencies of light and mist,
The disappearance that admits understanding.

Jazz Bad Enough to Write About

The white alto player, “cerebral” and “lyrical,”
Loosens the blues, let’s them hang in the air.
He circles and sings and scratches the strings of his hair, grimacing,
Prostrate to the divine,
As dangling wounds of light
Catch sound in airtight drums,
And echoing through the combo,
Called-up spirits are contained
In the silence of the crowd.

Query on the Retrocomputing Megatrend

Perfection may feel guilt
But it never does apologize.
Maybe that’s why so many pull away from the future
To make Christmas songs on an Amiga MOD,
McGyver BASIC onto a vintage Neumann,
Bootstrap compilers from second-hand parts,
Cultivate the sacred diamond of memory
Trying to blitt every nibble of conceivable space,
An offset here from payload byte for addressing modes,
A tinier language there where the lags are overcome
With what we now know, but without the tools,
Only the prescience of the itchy modern sense,
Unfathomably difficult, like growing potatoes without irrigation, 
But worth it for the taste of homebrew reproduced with new eyes,
In hopes they will emerge pure in a time when the code
Was not yet corrupted, before the pillages were accomplished
And the pioneers absorbed into the programs, 
Before the mistakes that plague our modern lives were made,
Before we were born.  

They generate interrupts by tripping the carrier detect line with pins,
Manage to pull up instruction slots from nowhere, get email on 68k,
Learn the hard way the most artful use of POKE 33 and ESC-A
And how long a floppy disk can spin before giving way.

They dig like archeologists in the code of early video games
For scanlines, mirrored playfields, ways to read set values.
They port languages across processors, relying on the insane
Simplicity of the hardware to layer enough abstraction to turn
An impossibly frustrating ruin of a machine into something human. 

They spend sleepless months dreaming a way to optimize
The BSP collision system for particle updates 
An order of magnitude faster,
And become so intimate with the hex codes
They can write them directly to memory
And work out the relative jumps as they go along.

They put their souls into a PDP-11 clone
Made in the Soviet Union, with 4 mbs of RAM
And an exotic operating system with 13 commands,
No math, no logic, all programs some flavor of Aztec C
Just to pull some static http from a gopher server —
And know they are Gods for doing so, or at least able
To contact advanced civilizations as an equal.  

Then it’s back to the black market scrapyard for cogwheels,
Relays, accumulators, Psion organizers, 3dfx Voodoo banshees,
Scanning disconsolately for any signs of a Sinclair, BBC micro,
Altair, Acorn Archimedes, a pizzabox for model 715.
They pay top dollar for a Hunt the Wumpus clone
Or a Biorhythm calculator, azimuth screwdriver at the ready,
Waiting for the sweet sound of the modem.

But even Xerox Alto – father of the Gods – must slip further
Into time, to the golden days of FORTRAN and PASCAL, 
The lost opportunities of FOCAL and JOSS
(Themselves a sad decline from LISP),
To UNIVAC and EDSAC, batch processing of punchcards,
Teletypewriters with 5-bit Baudot code, whose characters
Were uppercase letters and a few punctuation symbols,
From which must be drawn instruction sets
Meaningful and simple enough to be written out
(Programmers wrote only ten lines of code per day
And never touched a keyboard) on a coding sheet, 
Handed to a data entry clerk, with enough mnemonic heft
No mistakes would be made.

Or all the way back to binary zero,
The forward slash as the rain seen through a dirty window 
In Turing's "famously dismal" Manchester
On prototypes built with war surplus parts
And nothing more.

The ways of grief are immeasurable.

Temple Pigeons

“Tragedy is the privilege of mortality. In eternity, you limit yourself for the fun of it.” –Jack Parsons

Are the skeptics any less close to God 
Than cats or country girls? They recognize,
In the smallest things, themselves, not knowing
They are the long and tall, the all of it.

Lost in the sky, they make their homes in holes
And reach into the aperture pockets
To find the darkest stones embed with light:
The endlessness of love, and of longing.

They hold the dust the Word has captured
In the warm and moist surrender terror,
Tossed between the fractal and the whole,
The infinite reflection sent back in,

The truth in opposition. The seeker
Sees her own eyes instead of what is sought,
Tries to match the scent to her panting soul,
Love pouring out reformings now outgrown.

Rain at the Imaginary Border

You said I had to stay here forever 

Yet I've left nothing behind.

Geronimo's spirit stayed in the grass

Between Douglas and Chiricahua.

Neither the prairie dogs of Casa Grande

Nor the Tuba City vendor in the fry bread stand

Can say if I was ever there, what secrets I shared

With the land that remembered me.

You waved your lordly hand to let me pass

Into an empire of wind and sand

That turned out to be fields of gold in the end.

They needed this old Hohokam brother to know that, only.

The Disposable Ideal

God you cannot see,
so you create one,
and, like all creations, it takes on a life of its own,
it breathes with you, seems to change with you
and talks to you when you are alone.

But it, like you, like everything, falls away,
to where?  All you can think of are analogies:
the graveyard, the compost heap,
for it is nothing but a snapshot, a momentary peep,
a charging rod that serves its purpose and goes on
like you, to the decrepitude that we call heaven.

The Dream of 60/40

One heart, one drop in the ocean of source

But sometimes I pull away

To drive a spike into the wife I own.

A House That is Now Only Frame

Coyotes

Pass through

My yard at night

Dreams narrow

As the exile

Grows wide

And soon it includes

The whole

Valley of dust

The invisible seeds

Stretched

Towards nothingness

With each 

Lost thing 

Disappearing

What turns to noise

Becomes

A silence

Where the voices

Cannot wait

A minute more

New Years Eve at the 99 Cents Store

There's one whole aisle for Easter Bunny soap bubble guns

And another for paintbrushes, ear plugs, utility rope,

Portable light bulbs, toning balls, hot melt glue guns, 

Aluminum wallets, foam rollers, faucet sprayers, Buddhas, Mary's,

Gravy Train, cockateil food, socks and Brillo all-purpose cleaner.

And then there's another aisle, where everything is green,

And another, more obscure, where rabbit ear antennas can 

At long last be procured. One could come in from the rain 

And not know what decade one was in, if not for this year's 

Unicorn theme: centerpieces, teething blankets, necklaces,

Headbands, throw pillows, stationary and, of course, 

A unicorn cell phone stand! "99'ers," the kind voice said

From overhead, as if it could make 1,000 heart-shaped balloons

Aimed at the ceiling comprehensible, "It's not much of an ask

To wear a mask," and at the end of the longest candy display

This side of a multi-plex matinee, a man with stars painted 

In his whiffle gently totals up the inconceivable item number,

From iris bulbs to chamois cloth to bungee cords to hair net --

Sixteen dollars -- whatever we came in for is long-lost now

In this final resting place of pure consumer lust -- we can trust

The Man with the Star, after all. The world can explode tomorrow 

-- There is no more gold to seek.

The Water Rats

The river from a distance is blue.
Sloops skirr, caps glow, the force of life moves
The cargo of what’s new, from Andalusia
And Vanuatu, some lavender from Bulgaria,
Mongol overtone song, Malagassy kilalaky,
Osmanthus flower jelly with wolfberries,
Ambergris, cinnabar, kalimbas, white tigers,
Cities of painted opinions, lists of theorists
Who cannot be proven wrong, first-edition
Books in indecipherable tongues.

There’s a constant whirr of water, somewhere,
A long-rumored ancient river. Our home, however,
Is in the desert, where rocks breathe, clouds paint,
Grass tells stories with rhythms inexplicable,
Where washes imply oceans, peaks break into flight,
Lizards are the Jesus’s of cool
And birds give every chakral hue a guru.
Today there appeared another puddle
Subtly snaked along the foundation rim,
Shedding its unwelcome sheen like a second skin,

For it ruins what would stand on its own,
To infest with its mold, the mud consensus
Grainy coat of waste, the half-digested
Pulp, composed out of darkness, slippery,
Fetid and fungal, laced with children’s blood,
Pharmaceuticals, occulted playing cards,
Worn out rhetoric and tires, rotted coagulate.
It’s work for the rats, to break down, shit on,
Take what will never be missed, the distant
Insinuation that nothing survives.

On the mesas, with high-pressure clouds
And its desiccate vistas of weeds
For as far as you can see, the colors
Are faded, the noises dimmed, the cactus
And mesquite cruel substitutes for green.
Yet we live here, without hearing you,
Fearing what we may say to your river.
May you ride, may you ride, in your dark, doomed dream,
Never needing to know what we’ve learned,
What awaits down-river, what is already here.

Two Glasses

Gloss on "Wet Casements" by John Ashbery

If you are the ghost in the glass,

How then are my eyes visible?

You are the blonde in the jinni bottle

Who refuses to be released.

Your offer expired some time ago,

Before the wallet crumbled

With your name still in it

On a dished out cocktail napkin.

I had a chance.

That's what they say.

And what is lost

Creates a pirouette in space,

A tango, the only dance you know,

For a possible return.

But we're closer now than we ever were,

Doppelganger, semblable, you who doesn't understand.

The Crowds on Desolate Roads

There are sheep all over Imperial Valley.

They'll eat anything the flooded desert throws away.

They're taken from place to place in crates to graze.

They would lay with the lions if the Bible wasn't changed

And would gladly be with wolves now, without question.

Yet they do not seem content to live this way,

Seeking only the assurance of their neighbor

That it will, somehow, someday, make sense.

They can't be bothered risking their right to think,

For there's no one anywhere not following orders

Except the odd groundhog, who hides underfoot

In the pipes and beneath the planter beds

And survives by knowing everything is wrong

And will never make sense, what is the point

Of being kind to a lie, or of service if you're sacrificed?

Thus it stays within this world of slavery and pain

While the sheep count angels before they dream.

The Geese

A line of them honk like a saxophone choir,

Patrolling the ripple zen flow

Until the mallards are almost as distressed

As the geese, who anxiously sway

To another half-imagined dream,

Animated always by a black bile, 

Ever eager to lower an elongated beak 

Against the easiest trajectory. But most often 

The attack is against their own kind, 

Tongue extended at the rope end of the neck,

Wings spread like a proclamation from the king, 

To rage away something that can’t be seen, 

So deep is the animosity. They even shake

As they pick fleas, like they're not being treated

In the way their position demands, they,

The interlopers, wholly inappropriate 

To this climate, this flap of land. They populate

The hillsides, crouching, striding, flying

With the same restless critical eye

That finds the place lacking. Whatever comes

Out of their sporadic actions is hard to tell.

There's some satisfaction with the way they've held

Themselves against all comers, as if by scoffing alone

The corrupted mud could enter heaven. 

Plaster City Sunrise

Everything in the desert

Turns to stone

Kind words, warm winds,

Bare bones

The air of permanence bends
The cactus needles

Its advice hasn't changed

In billions of years

Perhaps because we don't yet know

How to hear it

So it changes for us,

New mists, new tones,

That will all inevitably

Turn to stone

For we are the one

Who will go on

To greener mountains,

Limitless ocean

Chasing the song

We haven't heard before 

Every song, like the desert's,

Is familiar

Yet the melody

Haunts us in place

Milpitas Wash Road

It's a matter

Of where you 

Place 

Your focus

And all I

Notice now

Is the crystal 

Underfoot 

On the gleaming

Desert floor

It is open

For the business

Of recall

No feeling's

Unrecorded

No thought is

Left behind

Though the light

Is far too shiny 

To be recognized

It inhabits me 

Every peaceful 

Completion

Each hard-earned 

Mistake

Is in the crackle

Underneath my toes

There's so much

That I wanted 

And never got

It is empty 

Here

And I am bursting 

Memories of Cima

Here where the scorpion is king

Everything becomes invisible 

The roots go far below

Chuckwallas turn to sand

Even the wrens are extensions 

Of feathered limbs

In a certain cast of moonlight 

The scorpions glow

And there is nothing 

But they

And darkness 

Across the basin

As if they want to be known

As much as they want to know you

Mohave County

One could say the cactus 

Are angry

Or that they just

Speak simply

That they are misread

Doesn't lessen the wound 

Yet there’s an apology

In the golden light they hold

And the cool blue eye

Of infinite distance

Cannot stop

In the evening

Its forgiveness 

Maui in a Box

Love is a kind of loneliness

It's impossible to feel 

The hillside

As it lets the sun 

Move through it

Or the strangers

As they fall apart

From some deadly 

Hidden hurt

And at the heartbreaking yowl

Of the cat

It's as if love 

Doesn't exist 

It’s all there is

The Resistance to Oneness

I was once an etude like this:

Frost across the desert floor,

In countless strings of crystal

Whisker outcroppings

God, are no two the same?

Each one dies to life in rising sun

As the shrubs shake off the shimmer

To a richer gold

All of my friends 

Have experienced this brief winter

We call them our earlier selves

But they are with us now,

As our higher, future selves

Call to us now

All these layers exist simultaneously 

Outside of time 

The need to be a gust of wind 

A spider's web

A gnat

And then forget

That everything unique

Is held in common

The strangest is the most familiar,

A cholla surrounded by snow

Bouldering in Place

The stones have

Really built something,

A mount, a view,

Some proof

Singularity fits

Into the whole

The irregular and small

Kiss

Like a jigsaw puzzle

As if this monumental urge

To awe is something more

Than the shallow passage

Of cloud through sky

There is a need

For embodiment,

To represent, even in uniqueness,

Peace in permanence

No need to speak

To brethren

When the world can be set

Against its isolation

View from the Harmony Motel

The rocks orchestrate the sunlight all day

As the duet of wind and greasewood is played,

Sun and cholla duel.

                                       The frills of palm fans

Oscillate at a higher frequency,

Sounding out the gusts.

                                            Mountains never stop

Their variations of blue, half vapor,

Half form.

                      And even the clouds are alive,

Presiding their allegro over a

Giant ligature, carrying browns and greys,

And birds, across the sky, only to

Disappear in time. 

                                      The scale is too large

For the human to absorb, except in

Chariscuro of alpine topographies, 

Drunken abstractions, upholstered fabrics 

Rolled out for gold carpet admiration.

One hill and then the next comes into highlight,

To show its wares of stone and face. The dust

On distant roads is yet another phrase

Thrown from the unnameable distance, some

Fact of life beyond our sight.

                                                       When the sun

Exposes the pinkness of the crags, they 

Seem as vulnerable as any of us, 

Before it sets to purple's deeper wounds.

And the evening lights bring the silence.

The moon hangs on the staff like a long rest.

Route 62

A full moon wobbles like a drunk

    through a tear in the sky

As the restless lights of Twentynine Palms 

    flicker like tracer fire.

It's been a hard time

     seeing the truth go down

And darkness welcomed back

      as an friend.

It's not so bad the nights

     when the moon is disguised,

But on nights like this,

     when it cries like a sailor

A shiver runs through 

     the whole community.

They are kind in their eyes,

     gracious to a fault,

They follow a code,

     as if word of

Nietzsche's theories never made it

     to the sticks.

There's a red-marked road

     to the base and to Amboy,

And what's beyond, 

     no one really knows,

Though the talk is like

     a roaring flame

That no longer is allowed,

     even in the middle of nowhere.

Night Thoughts of Trini Lopez

The quiet has become total

           yet the mind keeps 

     spinning around itself,

Reaching for the ghost limbs

                             of the dream.

All that's left is a feeling,

        like a half-forgotten song's

        remembered charm.

It's an ancient book of fiction,

    of knowledge and its makers

    on a cross to be the victors

        over the ennui of disbelief. 

The key no longer turns.

     The station now is static.

It's dawn before the noise begins,

                            pure, white.

The Rolling Question

The war is in the wind 

         the branches shake

     as immovable objects 

                         collide

Outside as well as in

                     the mind

The trees shiver

     in their still being

               the palm blades

                                bristle

     upright, but are still 

     maneuvering 

The world that is

     against the world 

                      that will be

How easily the sides

                       reverse

Currents and vacuums,

     in-breaths and out,

What is empty is filled,

     what is full empties

Whistling for the new

        and the howling

                         refusal

                       to move

But the force this time

     shakes 

          the foundations,

More needs to change

             than will yield

The walls are hollow,

     the invisible

                        is fierce

The reins pull

      as if to hear

                        the bells

Mid-Winter Confusion

They awake in stages from dormancy,

Holding against the water's trickery.

The golds and reds are still a match for green,

And the pinecone scent portends a beckoning.

Sage has intertwined with gray-limbed brush lines.

The squirrels have turned a deeper bronze.

The ice plants are thick, with their first purples

Hidden inside. Clouds glower in puddles.

Even the fallow flax field has now been

Infiltrated by a thin sheet of grass,

The tufts turn the ochre up to blue hues.

Leaves push through black beanpod clusters.

The nests are resting on the bare branch crooks

And a few lone hawks patrol the stillness.

The afternoon sun hits places it hasn't 

In months, so long it has been forgotten.

Rims of green around the stream, already

The slow death of humus gels in moist soil,

Overgrown grass, mushrooms, ferns!

Opening

The clouds break to massive forms
                                      in empty blue
Red and grey kanji 
                               saying something
     as reward
                        for the merciless rain

Floating bravely
     scarred by the war
                 rolling towards the ocean

Unconcerned

                          their warnings
                          are things of beauty

Descant for Alex

I'd like to say you're in this three-foot cell
For your beliefs, that would be easier
Than the facts: you let indifference get to you.
And I'd like to say that soon you'll be released,
When your senses return, and time has had
A go at painful wounds, but, as you know,
That's not to be, you tried to kill your family,
Who could only respond to your pleas for justice
With worry.

They'd been warned about you, yes, that you'd get
Violent was a given, from the daily media spin,
That you'd become unhinged was apparent
From the terms you used, which came, they were told,
From terror cells. And when you vanquished Satan
Their saner minds failed to imagine what
Compelled you to concoct in such detail
Such a garish allegory of evil.
There will be a reckoning, you are right,
For all they could not see, the people shoveled
To the side, at the very least.

It was a steep grade of hatred for our
Wheel to shoulder against, my brother, or 
Brother enough, at least, for me to be
Kept in the family fret, of theories too extreme,
Delusions too uncomfortable, passions
Stirred up by the wrong kind of news.
Yes I made friends with the outraged, who shared
The latest hidden-in-plain-sight affront
As it went like a droplet in a well so deep
It never made a sound. The sound was of
Our fury, always too small, always too loud,
Always outsized, as victims' cries must be,
For those who can live without knowledge
Must not be let off too easily.

Yet they slipped, again and again, the noose,
As if God in Her infinite mercy knew
How they needed protection from the truth.
No proof was enough to get them to see,
To think, when in conflict with what they believed.
And yes, it's a story as old as time,
The facts on the ground v. dogma,
But when it gets inside of your home,
Infects your room, and sends its eerie singing
Through the air, your last refuge, it burns.

And I suppose I should be concerned
At the lengths they will go to keep themselves
Enslaved in their preferred illusion,
But I don't have the luxury, the way
That they brood, how I came by my beliefs;
What voodoo took me in? The eyes of pity,
Fearful silence, as if the angry bear
Had ripped away his shackles and ambled
Away into the dark grove.

It's pointless to say I did this for truth,
How could such a nebulous feather
Hold such power? Even a butterfly
Chaser knows how strange they appear to those
Not of their kind. The world is not as I think,
They say, it is beautiful, and it is,
And the people in charge do the best they can
With flawed theories and imperfect wills,
And they do, but the thought that there's some ogre
At the center of the labyrinth
Who exerts unholy control!

The madness that is my reality
Must become my own, entirely. And I can smile,
Share copious notes on the weather,
Serve my family, my county, my tribe,
Without a thought that it is wrong
That I've been ignored the entire time
And am only allowed to play by a set
Of rules that are rigged to keep all the lies  
From being known, for at every moment
There's the threat of something getting through
And that's too risky.

But there is no risk in waiting out
The return of the prodigal, for the warmth,
However wrong, is preferable
To what can be seen when one is alone.
Will the bird fly back in the spring? Or is
This finally the year, where there finally is
A lesson, of loss, only?