Fox Plaza

Bostonian in her immediate
asperity, the rasp,
the Southie vowel drag.
"Package store."

She's a punk rock riot.
We'd talk for hours,
smoke crack cocaine.
I'd slap her back

As she leaned over
the rail, hacking, her blue
dreadlocks adrift
twenty-four floors up.

Linda the junky
was my best friend
for several months in 2007.
I hope she's still alive.

"When it's your time
it's your time," was her reply
to Rob's paranoia.
She and I shared jokes and the sublime.

The Empty Stage

Clang and click, rumble
and bang.  The clamor
of many lives lived
besides mine roar on.
One neighborhood -- small!
A sea of talking
faces each absorbed
in minenowthisme
disconnected from
each other except
by the glue of laugh,
rumor, who did what.
We shared a dream once
outlined on a map
taped to a window
beneath a parking
garage.  In the dream,
synchronicity
and heads like flowers
to the sun turned face
to my direction.
Lips glittered with lines
from a jazz poem.
It's almost too big --
who could imagine
still more life and time
could follow, return
to minenowthisme.
Moments in a pile
each a smooth stone gray
as the river that
birthed it.  They accrete,
an accidental
design -- water glides.
Did you know how they
did that boy?  Sisters
by their radios
lamented his lot.
They mourned the announced
death of a notion:
a quality to
the light, the air's smell.
All were promised pain
to follow as he
was swallowed up whole
by the cracked sidewalk.
A song is all it took.
Fanfare, a flourish
of robes, cheap velour --
trickery, stagecraft --
the main attraction
is billed as the cure
for every ill, ache,
slip and doubt.  A shout
raises the curtain
and the spectacle
none could have foretold
will spirit away
the dumb audience
forever.  They'd stay
a dream that leaves scars
on a world of steel
and coin.  An army
passed through, played a game
unarmed and plain won,
champions of ours.
Dust clouds in its wake
as it marched on.  Dance
in air, then land flat
in the dirt, paper
angel only old
folks can place in time.

Robot

Clinical, round
invisible seams.
Ceramic wedded to metal.

Armatures,
crossbeams, rivets,
girders, a skin

To shame lame
Hephaestus at his forge.
Reflected light

Lends divine
grace to the clumsy
work of man:

Ancient statue
spark to life
and walk among

The broken flesh
you replace.
Fire-hardened men,

Red, kiln-dried men
sag and sigh
as you march by.

Nine to Five

Fog opening out through brown dawn.  Cream in a cup of Earl Gray.  May God speak through daylight gleaming off steel?  Nob Hill looks down on a crane fifteen stories tall at Market and Ninth dropping another wall of drab slabs bundled for the doozers, the beefy handsome doozers who cobble together a high rise.  They repair to the East Bay after five to poker games in two-car garages dotting the Vallejo hillside that once gave us crates of oranges our grandfathers would pack onto trains trundling towards the Rockies and beyond.

Nil Box

Empty room
at the Dew Drop Inn
holds in stasis
an edge of a man

Paper thin.
Origami:  ten
folds in the pink sheet
arms, head, trunk and feet

Kick off air
solid with stars.  Leap
to the popcorn
ceiling and expand

Quantum ampersand:
potent particle
an infinite
range of possible

States.  Faces
diverge to many
rooted in one
heart-stop split-second.

Murmurs and Dust

Black rotary phone
disconsolate
its abrasive ring
not heard in years.

The receiver knows
that crackling hiss
a live line, a ghost
spoke of our fears.

In a windowless
room occupied
by a table, chair
and floorlamp bare

of shade.  What we made
was without form:
incandescent words
carved with flat care.

Scalar

Still branch, laciniate leaf.
The book read, "Susurrant."
But there is no sound;
this is a photograph

of a maple on a hill.
If we are to relegate
this still life
to a frozen laugh

not even a sharp
bark might punctuate
midnight blue on white.
Pigments, paper, daft

counterfeits.  Unreal
order -- the mind eliminates
chaos from concrete:
static sliced in half.

Funeral

Unbidden, the soft gray
moth flutter whispers lust,

beats itself against
the inside of a rib cage

picked clean of flesh by beetles
iridescent blue, each the size

of a fingernail.  We view pale
flame from a distance.  Ghost-white

it rises from the grass.
Our footfall harvests cold tears cried

in the night.  Sobbing wives
left in black, bereft in lace:

"Flores para los muertos."
A departure draped in a moment's grace.

Begin At Portsmouth Square

Brief as a fly's
wingbeat.  Eyeflash
a dead man speaks.
The Taoist magician beats
his cymbal beneath a full moon;
he leads them all
to their tombs --
hop, hop, hop.

Lanterns strung high
floating red globes
above the street.
Rung twice, a bronze bell repeats
the signal calling the townsmen
to the bright hall.
Spring again.
Cold raindrops.

Take my hand.  Let's walk
down a peopled block.
Above the fortuneteller's head:
a cold gray trace of ghosts we've fled.

She Was Once A Working Girl

That brown Buick predates even
the madam who bought it
in a handshake deal
from an old crackhead who lives to this day
alone on Taylor Street.

The freeway is no place
to take it for a spin.
Keep instead to the alleys and
the sleepy avenues that run
from Stanyan to the beach.

This is how she spends her night:
staring wordlessly at the roaring sea,
smoking menthol cigarettes.  She
drinks it all in:  waves, sand,
and colorless time.

Cycle

Scarless youth, unbent
beware those men --
husks who prowl
your thoughts
for what they've lost or never had.

God's fire, once lit
speaks names in raging fits
of white.  Flames lick
the tops of shaved heads
bent in supplication.

Fear is a bracing torrent.
It floods through each
who knows himself
caparisoned in blood.
Annihilating pain.

Extinction is a bone
a girl finds on a beach.
Her father calls her to him
as a cherry-red ember
glows in his breast and then fades.

Bathroom

Run a knuckle
along the marble's
mirror polish.
It gleams like living teeth.

Crushed between forefinger and thumb
a lavender bloom
recalls that sinister
linen cabinet made of oak.

They fairly boomed in your skull then:
enameled voices once spoke
smooth, cruel phrases
later interpreted

As violent terms
of love.  Repeat.  Give
the hissing tap
a chance to heat up.

Steam and an act
of ablution you knew as an infant.
A childhood teeming
with naked faces.

Anchor your forehead,
rest it on cold
porcelain until
the universe folds, after which:

Condensation.  Fogged
reflection.  Two vague
holes for eyes, an empty shadow for a mouth:
Everyman alone reviews himself.

Tenderloin Face

Storefront reflection
beyond the selection
of succulents and ferns for sale:
a smoking male
age 60, I think.
Timeworn, jowls sink
towards neck wattle.
Shadowed cheek, mottled.
A mole above the upper
lip. He looks sidelong at the supper
line. Charity, tender wrinkles and thoughts
silent as rock. Forget-me-nots
behind a smear: the window-washer missed a spot.

My Grandmother's House

"Ping," goes the microwave oven --
salisbury steak.
Gravy smell wafting in from the kitchen.
Linoleum lozenges, brown,
a herringbone pattern.
Curtains white
printed with a chicken wire design.
Outside, a camellia sways.
From its branches hangs
a fat, yellow-striped spider. May
and June frame a web empty of prey.
Drifting to the bookshelves, my gaze
takes in a photograph, black and white
of my Grandmother in Selma, circa 1965.
I lift a corner of the cellophane
off the meal tray
and walk out into rosy day.

Prayer

May the granite weight of regret
slip from your back. May memory
provide a clean room, its great windows
open to a fixed star, hard and apart.
May unpunctuated silence hold you.

Mourning for what never was shall be
an oasis, sihaya, relieving the pallid desert
of uncountable years. Sweet tears,
thank an unnamed kindness, mother-soft.
Yours to wear: a stainless coat, blue.

Herodotus

A page flips. Foxing
patterns a carrion pelt.

A cat's shed spots
caged for naught.

Black and ecru
yellowed wind blew

the uneroded
serif curve.

Vowel hollow thirst
for a buried shell

dead men fabled
nameless, chased down

in the African veldt.
Flashing black eyes

blameless, godless,
pulse unremembered.

A pharoah's sigh,
drumbeats and fire.

Thule

Outermost, vestal white
precise geometries of unlife
falling ceaselessly
under plucked eye
divorced from mind.


A stark line
shutterless time
curved up off
blank heights
free of feature.


Sight gives form
untouched and untouchable
empty born.

Bright, clean arc
spare
no one.

Snake

Cursive glide
armored line
samurai
lacquered scales
gleam and shade
grass dreams tales
told an old man
to a girl
surprised to find
a god in her palm
fluid cool
dry to the touch
a heart unutterably pristine
one lone king
enthroned in jade
his realm is sand
is splintered bone
flicker and sway
the hissing kill
airless under stones

The Owl And The Mouse

Open eyes, brown.
Perfectly circular.

This world flows in,
breathes out round mouths of caves.

Eyes, everything:
a tree gave them place. Lone

scrub oak older
than Father Serra's robe.

Crippled branches:
a bent vantage above

tawny hills. Folds:
a reclining body's

ample flesh. Flash
of white. A harsh, sharp flap.

Stark owlsong. Blue-
tinged notes. Eerie woodwind.

Horizon

Bristling with concrete
gleaming with glass

sky blue bowl draught
clear airy light

contrails ancient now
seem real clouds

westward: a near green wall
eucalyptus palisade

stands five storeys tall
to meet a rumored sea.

Day Labor Line

Agonizing cold
clouds of breath
suspended

fill silver space.
crump: a boot
stomps. A man

among men. A herd
of fragrant draft
animals

jostle brown and denim blue
for the goad to stir
them forward.

Chestnut Curls

Doves coo and a curtain
blows into the airwell.

A girl sits under the watchful
eyes of a gray, silk-clad nursemaid

only she can see. Stillness,
far from men's jackal

nuzzlings. Cigarette burning
between index and middle fingers.

The pale, empty morning after
is an eggshell in pieces,

fallen from higher places
littered with down feathers.

Alignment

Stems' brown streaks:
a thicket sideways.
Thorns and beams,
pencil thin, of gold light.
Black shadows
dapple the mud.
Exhale, then sleep.

Deep beneath trees
a man in crumpled
blue anorak, boots askew,
naps. His lullaby:
canopy sighs and birdsong.
No wait: it's here
but not for long.