Poetry

Leg

Balloon tires rusty rattling
roll to a stop on the melting summer
black macadam, (braids undone),

her foot

(its journey from the
humming pedal soft
with ocean salt dune crust
to tufts of roadside
grass and dirt)

is sneakered down to rest

while our car passes
and her short breath (sipping
her back to this same road
where her 10 year-old self
I catch a flash of–-hip toweled
now and 57—but ragged shorts then
with three brief months
before the blood leg flow
teen boys aching her
into their hard lamb skin world
parading and gasping
to pearly children

can be calmed
now to here where

it’s all gone by
like us in wakes of wistful
sweet exhaust and she can saddle older
rise herself again
back up on spokes
and weather home
to where her bike is hung.

Axiom & Camera

Axiom

A rhyme
a day keeps
the monster away.

Camera

So you step off your metal steed all salt and pepper beard and panavision confident, gentle banners flying.
You woulda been at home at some round table in the 14th century, a side kick to kings
with an eye 4 the daughters (but subtle about it, guarded, a chivalrous hand) searching for the holy grail of horizontal and vertical: the perfect tilt to catch
a face, fingertips, a sigh. Fleets of shining armies
have swept across the arid plains again and again and you have often been there to capture it because
because (as many of us know) beauty knows no pain, in fact sometimes it conquers it.

The Man

He strides in w/a deep blue canvas bag
over his Hemingway shoulder,
thoroughly muscled. My age.
And when the black (jovial)
male nurse calls us pre-ops
I overhear that he came
by cab and has no relatives
to contact.

He moves better
than the rest of us,
the bile of fear rising
in my throat
as the math problem
that I’d like to solve
of my wife grows smaller,
then disappears altogether
around the white corner.

The pre-op room takes us
like a well oiled restaurant kitchen
and I overhear he’s getting a hip replacement
and he’ll take a cab home after.
He laughs more than the rest
of us combined, his jokes robust
while my body feels frail as they take
my clothes away (my wife will
keep them) and I become childlike

in my pale green gown. I remember
my father (in his 50’s too.) Heart
surgeries: two. At 57: dead.
My kids had called me in the lobby,
had seemed unworried.

There were others being prepped,
a very fat woman.
They couldn’t find a large enough gown.
Used two. They were mostly Jamaican,
these nurses w/sunlight in their hands
and I was cold now.
Fighting not to shiver.
Asked for a second blanket
as his voice rose above all of us
more confident than my high school coach.

And after needles
and a light sedative
my wife floated over me
(she’d snuck back here) and then

the struggle to figure out what
had happened. Sheets. Machines.
My feet rising like mountains.
Cotton. Tightness. Pain. And then

I’m alive? Everything’s fine? A doctor briefly.
The pulse checked and then

birds fly out of my fucking chest as
my bloodstream sings bigger than Beethoven
because I’ll see everybody again.
I’ll hold tiny hands and big hands.
I’ll swim in fresh and salt water
and learn to sail and finally speak Spanish and then

they wheel him in. Fast, sleek and I
fade, drift. All is well until

the screams. It’s him. Flailing.
Nurses trying. His hands stutter.
He’s calling. Wailing.
I know it’s for his mother
but he can’t find that word.

Careful There, Pardner

The flickering morning bus to my right
(passing the Rite-Aid at Beverly and La Cienega)
proclaims from her metal flanks
that the joyful black boy billboard prince
wants a bajillion McDonald’s McNuggets.

And a head turns.
I spot it
(the guy in the Caddy in front of me,
dawn sun across his retrogressive bow
just his silhouette).

A frown?
A Jesse Helms stiffness in the neck?
Yes.
Hating the African American boy’s joy.
His black and chrome fenders fighting
for his Ronald Reagan California,
and the John Wayne of it all.
And keep these people where they need to be.
And all those wars that make our world free.

What’s happened to our Eisenhower pure streets
those liberal fucks? And I start to pull around him.
Get a good look. Scarecrow arms.
Sends contributions to Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft.

He turns again
can’t help himself
bristles at the boy again.
Rage at his pickaninny youth
that could be one day president
and Rice/Powell/Thomas. Shit.
Over his tight ass dead body.
And the NRA.

Ah, the day
when the cops held sway

And the racist steering wheel
as the
sun flashing,
unblinds me,
pulling up even
(the creep)

a peek
and I see
the man
instead
is black
and old
and content.

The Enron in My Face

The Enron in my face is unmistakable
for I have borrowed millions
against the accounts of my father,
secreting them in the hope chest
of my parents’ wedding dreams:
a large pine box affair
with a red heart painted
on the upside-down lid.

Though we kept the creditors at bay
for generations by appearing to scrub
the dishes with soap and misery,
it fell to me to lose sight of the ball completely
and seal the bankruptcy.

I must now let the Lear jet of it fade,
head into the desert outside Houston,
find as many false gods as I can and pray.

As with indigestion, I keep telling myself
I had only a little to do with it,
but the overeating of desserts gives me away.

Democracy

I windshield shimmer her
jaunt down Wilshire Blvd.
just west of Rodeo Drive,
her beauty all past benz
and maseratis

legs,

dear god, she wears
nothing
below her belt
(pudenda v
as clear as black)
her dancing joints,
no skirt, no pants,
I’m lost. A prostitute
on drugs?

And brown as Africa
this deep princess lost
just past our dawn
as business men retreat to work
and I drive east,
her limbs a puppet’s gift—

no

my mistake up close
a mini leather, lace and gold confederacy
are mocking my slave owner’s naked dreams
as she, amphetamine dressed, and graceful
stutters on past grinding gods
of glass and stone and stainless steel

her lantern dim held humbly high to bless me, god,
for I have liberty from what I feel.

2Helga@80

2Helga@80 by Stephen Gyllenhaal

Is there a mountain taller than 80?
Could you show it to me, please?
For instance, take Mount Everest:
pretty tall, I’d say, except
when it’s at its top, or near its top
can it begin to talk
of having loved,
of having brought into this world
a single child?

And sure, the view will take away
one’s breath and more:
the tracks of animals in snow,
the sun, the moon that leaves
a ghostly glow,
the cliffs that bring on death
with one mistake,

but does it hold a candle
to the hand that holds
a husband or a daughter moving on
to their own undertow?

Will that gigantic mountain cry?

Or take a building like The Empire State
with all it’s steps that one can climb -
will that come ever near as close
to heights of giving
one small hug or
even a cookie to little fingers,
bones and lips that hunger

for a sister, mother, grandmother, great grandmother?

Or what about the taj mahal, the pyramids and all the jewels
of all the royal kings and queens and masters now
of all the giant crowns of global reach (the cokes,
the nikes, microsofts and kingdoms yet to come
to rule us all and tell us what they think we need)

how do they stand a single chance against a single
glance, a smile, a touch from one who’s reached
to higher than them all by far

for by simply breathing 80
you’re the closest here
to touch a star.

New Age

I have set out from that port
(years ago now)
with what I knew
in my Spanish heart
to be the most progressive
thinking (for instance that
the world was not flat.)

I have sailed with
my courageous crew,
using the most modern
navigational gear available
only slowly learning it was
not up to the task which
demanded even more of my men
in those extremely tricky seas.

I, and my investors,
had hoped for
Indian Spice and
Chinese silk and a
cheaper less circuitous route
than the one used at the
time through the
Gobi desert, etc.,

I have instead found
vast new lands and seas
so filled with swimming fish
that you can walk from
an anchored boat to the land
on their backs

and I have confirmed to all
in the civilized world that the
physical world is round.

So it does not seem
unreasonable to me
that all of us
on this mission
deserve to settle
into comfortable homes,
particularly me
who has captained
so much.

And while it’s true
there’s been some
difficulty involving
the red tribes
(an imperfect people,
though filled with a kind
of primitive and powerful
belief system that
might have held
some value for us)
there was plenty of
resources for us all, so
it should have gone better.

And it’s not our fault
that these red people
are particularly upstreperous
around alchohol and I
don’t believe I can be
held responsible for the white
souls who came after me.

And while I must admit
I’m not proud of all the
deeds I’ve done here and
elsewhere (though if you wish to
take the time I have explanations)

still

it seems unjust to me
that our God has found it
so necessary to lose me in
this desert so much worse and
more bewildering than the Gobi,
destroying me humble cabin
and leaving me no clothes but
these rags on me back and
turning all me current dreams

to black.

The Kitchen Vase

We understand
how it comes to this:
the oven door,
the gas turned on,

a flower bending

as we carve
our wicked smiles
and try to match
what matches us.

And when we do it right
as we’re bound to do
with everything undone,

even our clothes left for dead,

scrabbling to put
the pieces back
or take them out
or let them go

our only hope

as we slam out the door
blessing the dirt
that only grows
more crying

is that the next time
from the lessons learned
we’ll not die trying.