Pass

High fog hides Goat Mountain's peak
and casts a glow the color of rotting pearls
to blacken a row of digger pines, transforming them
from twisted sentinels on guard in a line
to a great beast's bottom teeth
fresh with arterial blood.
Selves we made who saved lives
quail at the roar of wind we remember from before.
All is quiet here except in our minds.

Old Colusa

Over the green levee to the bench -- it's missing a plank, 
as well as an inscription thanking some lance corporal for his death
in some rock farm thousands of miles East.

The bench is simple and was once red; from it we can watch
the Sacramento glide by: a shattered, nickel-hued mirror -- clear
on this December day overhung with mottled gray.

Make a silent wish as we tip our beer to men we held dear.
We'll kiss each other before it's too late
under trees bare of leaves, by water swift as fate.

La Resistencia

"Tu puño es rosa,
pero está en la muñeca izquierda."

So averred Placa
as we screamed around the fountain

surmounted by Our Lady of Death.
I tossed a nickel in

from the scrub side of her ride --
a fucking e-Golf, homes!

So this is the town of Juarez,
where my sister and I

dream into being an army
of girls; they throng the street,

each bearing an obsidian blade.
Los caballeros bar the doors and draw the shades.

Indian Knife

Obsidian blade,
sinew, and antler:

a knife made
by a Wintu-Yuki

sits on the shelf.
Letters above spell

the family name.
This winter's rain

drove the deer
into your barn,

you complain.
They raided the place,

spreading straw
across the dirt lane

that winds up to your
dilapidated kitchen door.

Wood

Kindling the ax split
sits by an old gray stump
in a pile.  Make a fire.
The sparks rise
heavenward.  A knot
in a seasoned log
looks back, startled,
like an eye
suddenly aware
it isn't part of a pair.

Winter, Stonyford, 2014

Meager white sun
reflects off the table

by the crepe myrtle
in my mother's garden.

November reigns:
this is the month for licking

wounds.  Iris bulbs divide;
clay soil clings to my fingers

and newly sprouted grass
sports dew like diamonds.

Possibilities from wrath,
promises of a better spring.

Vallejo

Jade green
rippling water.

Set back on a hill
a house where town fathers

saw whores.
Blackhearts, sailors

drank and ate their fill.
Barbers' razors,

hot towels -- a noon brawl:
blood spilled.

Questions to Allay

The Pema once averred, "Feeling fear
_____means you're approaching the truth."

"Bullshit," is a valid reply.  Abstruse
_____sunlight reflects off jade

Waters wherein William and an escort
_____played out a drama:

Will you, natty and not a slattern as you are, play mama
_____to my sociopath paramour?

Junky

[Note:  Controversial if popular entry.  Toyed with the idea of deleting it.  Suffice it to say, it is a fictional narrative in prose, and was not intended to cause alarm or strife...]

Have you heard the plaintive cry of the owl?
Each night she begs you to remain

My love.  From the kitchen you make a scowl.
Why should your mother restrain

Herself when she and I talk under starlight, the porch
scorched with our cigarette ash?

The scholar loves a warrior:  unseemly to these
Chinese eyes.  I proselytized to a whore.

Yet you saved money well not whoring yourself.
Relax.  Under this gibbous moon

She merely asks, in a half-chicana Napa roar
why you have to leave so soon.

She asked me, as I am to her a son-in-law.
You mentioned that you wish to live no more.

Khonsu

White line of surf
crash and roar --
ocean black as night.

Sky fills with moonlight.
That old god's eye views
the heart.  He replies.

Shifting sand, high dunes.
Do not stay
Through the blue break of day.

He knows you have betrayed
a trust, a love.
Blood from your vein, flayed.

1,000 Forms of Fear

-- Inspired by Sia Furler's album title

She'd never felt vertigo until that trip to Spain.
She laughed at her husband's white knuckles as the plane

lifted off from O'Hare.  She kept secret that thrill
she felt at the turbulence warning.  Still

spill your heart to her?  The leaves and rocks with which
she weights her web are gimcrack.  A twitch

of a thread and she is the same spider, more scared
of him and his arachnophobia than he is of her.  Spare

the audience who would think nothing of her climb
to the monastery.  At the top one feels suspended in time

over a tumble and splat, that's that.  Death be mine.

I-5 (Nocturne)

Diesel exhaust
the savor of it
and the rumble, low
of 18-wheelers at dusk.

A trucker's focused
on this single point:
the yellow light
swarming with gnats.

He hands the girl
behind the counter cash;
she remembers that
detail because no trucker hands her cash.

He's hauling gravel
in a trailer pocked with rust.
He won't be seen again --
this is his last run.

Confessional

Crisp as water drops
on granite, black and white.

What shape had the stone
before it was worn

round by time and the stream?
It must have drank itself from a square.

Would the water cut a channel there
to dull it's knife's sharpness,

so fearsome, or must I forever sit
apart from what would cleave me?

Either way, I may be no more.

Colusa County, Fall 2014

Autumn here has tawny hues, amber and gold fused by a vast loving hand -- that hand shaped the grasslands hereabouts for cows, for the kind of people who eat acorns, who doubt the masks of interlopers.

The star thistle is a relatively recent arrival; its thorns never quite reconciled to life in these parts, like some Portuguese immigrant who made a killing in almonds or rice, but never lost his accent or the ways of the Basque.

Sites

Golden hill, round as the firm breast
of a woman on her back -- it's broken open:

a scar one-third of the way up
marks where the rust-spotted bulldozer's parked.

Reddish dirt, congealed blood of Mother Earth,
reveals sandstone and rock white as bone.

Brown cow, peer up from around the quiet
pasture, your sleek flanks glossy in the sun.

There is nothing from which to run,
merely burnished August days in a string, blended into one,

as hazy and amber-colored as Summer's end.
A buzzard flies high above, her neck bent.

212

Infinity in mirrors opposite each other.
Time stopped by fear.  Tears for mothers
we must bury.  Voices laugh in our ears;
their cruelty is our fault, our cross to bear.

Elephants of Kenya

Tusk-stained-by-bark
Left the herd.
Pachyderms -- mothers, calves --

Everyone is coated in red dust
To the tops of their tree-sized legs.
Gray patches show through.

Tusk-stained-digging-through-fruit:
That bull left the herd
Just today

To mourn at the grave
Of his mother,
Near the Summer water.

States Street

From Castro
to the staircase
terminating States Street
I walked through night fog.

Hard climb uphill.
On the way I picked
a sprig of rosemary,
ate it, and invoked memory.

Moving Aric's Planter

One of the yellow
pansies is beheaded
by a baluster.

I reflect with sorrow:
men who were so radiant
now rest; flowers cover them.

Bottlebrush

Buckled pavement
_____ruptured by roots --
callistemon:
_____red cilia, dark
foliage.

_____It's branches beckon,
saying, "Look up!"

What a prankster,

to grow unnoticed for years
just for the chance
to trip a complacent man.

Tenderloin #5

Startled by the hard sun,
he blinks.  He walks
half a block to the corner store.

There is beauty in the lore
these streets speak --
the scummy sidewalks

littered with shit
and detritus remind us
of men who before us stalked them

on their way to gigs
at the Blackhawk;
they hired fast girls

whose legs would unfurl
for cheap gold
and priceless laughs.

He walks half a block
to the corner store
pinned to his path by the traffic's roar.

Pacifica

You moved here when your boyfriend fell ill.
You found that you loved it:

A gray-blue bungalow set back
from sheer sand cliffs

off which paragliders dive
like dandelion seeds;

they drift into the thick-as-chowder fog
that trundles in from the ocean's throat.

I wondered, as you poured me a Coke,
why you were jealous of me --

why you didn't instead pity the doomed, cute
party boy stuck living in the City.

The box of a jigsaw puzzle, still warm from his ghost
sits innocent, childlike, on the coffee table.

You neglect to put on music, and we are lulled
by the water's roar and crying seagulls.

If I were you I would never pull my roots up
from mother Pacific's edge.

Sausalito

That ferry trip
to Marin was the one --

that's where our hearts parted.
We couldn't bear

to promenade arm in arm.
Instead we split up; I walked

alone by the docks.
I set out to see

galleries filled with locals'
depictions of the sweep of Bolinas shore

or of hushed, cloister-like
Muir Woods, all green and black.

At the arranged time
that afternoon

I joined you where you stood
in line to return to the City, the fog.

From then until we went to bed
we exchanged nary a word.

Ad Infinitum

Killing costs at least a buck.
Laugh until you drop.
I promise I will, too.

Look, at spiral eyes, tight
as the end of your wife's
life with you.

Boy bitch, you thought
me the hippie with the didgeridoo.
Eat me, drink me,

break me in two.  My mouth
fooled so many of you.
Soaking in senseless

need, you're a pair
to stare that hard.
You envy me mine.

Take my eyelids
and pay me attention.
I'm too much to mention.

Shoot me through the walls --
all I wanted was a clue,
your excuse.

Wadi

Scream -- a Tomcat:
a blur and afterburn.

Sere field of rocks,
jagged as the panicked talk

from near that mud-brick
hovel.  Shots fired;

a metallic ping:  the echo
hangs in the air (cold wash of fear)

with the choking red dust.
God must be with us.

Hunting Ground

Look now
from Liberty Hill
traversing the bowl-shaped town:

A train of pale mist;
it hovers above
Mission Creek,

hugging the contours
of the now-buried
old canal.

The hard, bright sun
will burn it off
by 9 o'clock.

With it will go
the ghosts of hunters
who stalked this land

when whales spouted
in the dark-green bay
and no man overstayed

__________his welcome.

Unconsoled

Stars pierce the dark void hard --
unpitying, glaring, static -- when seen
__________from beyond the veil of sky.
It is the air we need to breathe
through which we spy them
__________that makes them shimmer and blink
_____as though they were fragile,
ours being their maternal focus.
We read their peregrinations
__________to be fates' signs,
but it is over heartless eons they, unmoved in truth, shine
and would though charted by no one's eye.

Fucking

The soft wooden clasp cracks open with a snap,
then the sibilant rasp of our bodies on the sofa
is the only sound we make after that.
This life passes to quickly -- only half
of yours has been lived.  I'm sure you know by now
how we spend so much of our time seeking happiness;
we've found it for a spell, in the lingering sun.
The air smells like carnations and our wine, now drunk.

San Francisco 2000

Face daybreak, clear-eyed.
Rise to the toothpaste-stained
bathroom mirror.

Out the window, a clearer
view of downtown in fog --
wilderness of glass.

This is someone else's place.
You met at the Crow Bar
night before last:

two dates.  It might be love.
For once, on the window sill,
not pigeons, but a dove

struts back and forth.
So you were born up North,
then descended, angel from above...

A dot-com job,
a Tenderloin box,
a new heart you've lost.

Steinbeck Country

Amber sunset
_____haze of this day's
traffic_____and_____labor

hangs there.
__________Mother Califia's
draped robes._____She bears

in her arms
_____sheaves of corn.
Catholicism, Indian scorn

thread up a trail
__________West, beyond
the coastal range.

Here in the valley
_____we welcome night;
light_____pollution_____estranged

the stars.  Frogs sing
_____us to sleep
__________anyway.

Oracle

Pale blue smoke wreathes a mountain.
Black shadows birth vultures

that circle over a point in the distance:
divinity and dhamma: bones picked clean.

Ask the pine trees, "What does it mean?"
The wind is a wide-eyed gray rush, wordless.

Dolores Park, Sunday Afternoon

It sickens you:
"Just look at them."
My eyes bore into her,
all parasol and overstuffed
black lace, pudgy pale
fingers flying over her iPhone.


"They've ruined this place."
I disagree, but in my heart
chide the Ohlone for not speculating
in real estate.  "The only killings
they ended up making
had antlers or blowholes."


There is a lie I want to be true
but I cannot distract you
from hating the only town
that would have you.
"I hear Buena Vista
is an old Indian burial ground."


You ignore me and frown
as though in reply
to what you wanted me to have said.
Gay men in speedos
litter the fruit shelf around us.
I secretly make plans to visit the dead.

Fort Ross

Pale, thin fog, white
weaves like soft, sheer lawn
along the rock-strewn coast.


We swing past the fort;
its onion dome
is an odd Russian touch


to an oddly pristine scene,
devoid of gulls or seals.
Not even sea shells


are to be had today.
No, not one.
Solitary, a man runs


towards us from so far away.
Vast, this world shows us itself --
vast and freeing.


We are not seeing
where we are as we are
(for once) but as it is.


All we need today is set
to the sound of lapping waves
as the sun shatters over swathes of gray.

Drought

I

Pregnant sky hanging baleful and gray,
draped between mountains, stay

forever a promise that we may
be drenched by a mothering rain.

II

Yellow yarrow trembling in this cold breeze,
tell my prayers to God.  Spring

storms hush the rustle of pine trees.
We may yet have our way.  Let's see.

Bear Valley

Honey bees bustle over purple rosemary blossoms:
industry in the setting sun -- it is March.

The air is clear and static.  Awesome
distance pours a sterile blue sky

Through a mapped valley green with spring.
Budding oak trees, shameless, naked white,

totter off towards chaparral-draped mountains.  Birds sing.
A black-tail deer mounts the nearest ridge.

Hearing this place is not a choice.
Do not strain to listen to its voiceless voice.

No Return

Hours slip fast.
Give back
the gloaming light
(purple, pink, bright.)
No one knew it would be the last.

When Nyx descends
her raiment bends
a milky river of diamonds over our heads.

Such nights as these
are cathedrals in which we grieve.
Cry for childhood's end.

This is how we spend
our final moments all:
silent, looking up.
Our mouths fall
open in defeated awe.

Decoding

One could choose to interpret
the embroidered naked men
in the river (nobility gently
ignoring the swimmers)
as an expression of reverence
for the present day.

The lady-in-waiting
whose tapestry this is
seems to be saying,
"It is impossible to be wrong
as long as one is with God."
The land is brown, the grass, tan:

A world made correct by a needle in a woman's hand.

(Stitched by one who arrived at the convent,
somewhere in Normandy, under a shadow.)

Aisha

"Am I a thread woven on a loom?"
A sister bends her chador-draped head
to the task at hand.  Soon.
Birth of her choosing:
a zig-zag, a quiet rose, a hidden cross.
When her husband comes home
she looks lost
yet works perfectly well

in the kitchen he leaves to her
as her domain -- "Stay,"
she says to a friend
only she could make,
"Stay for a spell and drink some tea."
She pours from her mother's service
for the friend only she may see.
Aisha has gossip to tell.

Ambition

On the highest vine does my fruit grow;
I shoot at it with bow and arrow --

Fall to Earth.  I feast
on marrow.  Death leaps

In to tell me one day I, too
Will die.  When I lie

I shorten my life by years.
Why?  I should end it then.

A Spider's Tale

One Saturday we met --
Some friend's apartment.

You glanced my way,
Saying my name twice

Dear Lord!  Did I think?
I drink to people this nice

Who early grow old,
Who told stories and sold

Their recycling at the store.
Origami men arrived before

My date.  Hire a whore --
This one gives me the hives

I'm sick to death of him.
How lucky to have had the chance to sin.

(On Earth as it is in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.)

Danse Macabre

Tonight the dead do magical feats
We watch them, clap our hands to the beat

Streetlights and headlights mingle and glow
They add a reverent overtone

To the eternal funeral of a home
Buried as its former tenants roam

A busy Earth unhappy to see
Where in the end we none of us can but be

Evergreen

Water is coldest here.
The timberline is to my right.

Close enough to hear
sunlit pines murmur,

a continuous rush
or a low, low roar

spread thin for miles.
One seed drops, spirals

to the forest floor.
In a year, a sapling

will grapple with nutrient-poor
granite-ridden soil.

It is the toil of the tree
to live still and free,

to tower above man,
to die at the end of a golden hour.

Shade

These are your thoughts
Captured on film:

Glowing green and white,
Casting shadows on the window sill;

They speak to you with voices who've been
People you've neither met nor seen.

Softly, you speak to the television set.
Smell mowed lawns on the wind.  Rest.

Marlena's

Chablis, a cabaret song.
Rick at the bar laughs;
bitch's wig is on all wrong.
Drag done well
sets the ladies from the boys.
You have to take it all in stride
with grace, guts and poise.
Every inch of viciousness
and the thrown drinks, too.
Also, it doesn't hurt if you can work blue.

Off I-5

It starts to fit:
the wood porch
collapsed after years
onto brick feet
recalling a drunk love
draped on his girl.

Moss-roofed, boards curl.
Backed by hills
on the flanks of which
cows are as black ants.
The sun runs warm gold hands
through the doorjamb

time has twisted, neglect has bent.
It sits in a field:
a rotting house.
Abandoned, it never seemed
so much like home,
a cabin of soft gray bones.

Vehicle

Gate of horn, gate of bone
Through which gate do I go?

Alone but for the hornet on my
left eye:  a sting for the guy

Who wrote The Golden Bough,
and one for "Death be not proud..."

Words to a carcass carrying me
For want of a toll, a cash fee.

Think briefly on what you're allowed to perceive.
Nirvana comes quickly to those of us who grieve.

Three Leaves

Happenstance design
Scattered (what fortune)
In my teacup
A geometric proof
Awaits transcription:
My ticket to fame
In academia
All in the accident
Of appearance.

Constant Gardener

Your roses look their best in July.
Some leaves aphid-eaten, but their red buds
and blooms were by a miracle of fish meal,
a magic of manure profuse.

You never cut them to display inside.
I always wondered why.  You made a playful
grimace like an ogress and said,
"What's most fun is to cut them back to nothing for winter."

Delevan

Blank face, a vague tracery on the faded, hand-painted plywood sign.
We drive by flooded fields of rice.

Dust kicks up off a rock-strewn dirt road.
An angel's voice sings an ode on public radio.

Then a pledge request airs as the white noon sun
Bakes us, heat rising in waves.  The open trunk

Contains a shovel, shotgun, orange vests. They'll
Put on waders, trudge through autumn stalks with the dogs.

He'll tell you the rest over a round of beers a guy sells
From a styrofoam cooler near the canal locks.

Birdsong

Starling in the sky, sing bright
Starling high above take flight
Your shadow against the noon sun
Unfold your simple song for everyone
Soar from coastal range to valley floor
To San Joaquin, to Pacific shore
Starling, starling, yellow, black
Sing your song, bring them all back:
Father Serra and the Indian's names
Mark Twain and people from the plains
Jack London's courageous men
Steinbeck's Cathy, Sutro's den
Starling in the sky sing bright
Lead us to a moon-bright night
_____Filled with all of them.

1997

I saw you once at the Fuck Jesus Show
You wore a Wendy O t-shirt.  You had blow.
Pomade in your hair, love in mind
You took me to a bathroom stall to unwind.
"No here, no, there."
We fumbled, panted -- we didn't dare
Get caught by the doorman
It wouldn't have been fair.

Shrike

Hunkered like a lover
over prey
as awkward as a man
who has to pay
tear at what's yours
today is the day
you offer nothing
but take what they say.
Stench of beetle, spider and fly
bits of carcass, gloss so bright
talons pin what impaling fails
to keep in place.
Space in the barbed-wire fence
glitters and fades.

Bleeding Heart

Open fuschia
scent of something split
under fern
over moss
damp, northern grit.

Pendulous, purple, red --
a row of lanterns
by a new bride's bed.
Cool and dark
curtains part

A girl
with a flower's name
gasps with a start
as sunlight cleaves
the canopy, the sheets.

The Enforcer

Eliot Ness, where are you now?
Belts of rotgut at the bar with your pal

La Migra, it's rising star?
Will you marry the ICE queen?  Talk her up?

Knock her up and out?
Where is your noble warrior's doubt?

Discretely furrowed in your brow
For a moment and only one.

Who is hiding in the drum
You chop at with an axe?

A stool pigeon who's too foul, too afraid
To speak anything other than fact?

Who do you see in the full-length mirror?
One man or many?  Clearer

Pictures are drawn on the napkin by your drink.
The worst that could happen is that you might think.