Dreamed I was in the back seat of a car with Robert Downey, Jr., a big black Packard like in a James M. Cain story. We’re making a movie, we’re making out; we’re being filmed through the side window by two guys crouched behind an old-fashioned camera shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. Robert wears a white shirt. He bends over me as I fall back against the vast upholstery. There is a driver, black suit and skinny tie, half turned in his seat. He gestures, and we look behind us, and framed in the back window is the top half of a huge rising moon, craters visible on its surface, moonlight shining in so that Robert’s white shirt glows and glows, the light nearly shattering the blue glass of my eyes.
The Red Disk
—for Joan Miro
one does not
blanch
a river’s
milk in
a trench
The Cheated Will Shape It So It Fits
she—he—& me:
three little glooms
three wounds corralled
I will drink to that
& to hammers
& to their flat, red impacts
Wheel
Weeds blow
among ruins. Stones
cut to fit tight, fortress
razed to three
stones high.
People selling antennas,
fried bananas,
brooms, scratch
their chigger bites.
Cuenca’s cathedral,
where I place my running
shoes on the steps for someone,
light a candle.
Ornaments, vessels,
tools for killing or making music . . .
Incans lived without the wheel.
Vendor piercing
the square with ice cream
cries. Little hands,
sticky with ice cream,
washed in the colonial fountain.
In the market,
so many
chickens on spits
and a girl sobbing
beside a wire bin,
so overbrimmed
with chicken heads
they slide right off
the edge of the rim.
Mosquito Logic Three (We the Help)
Emerging from your chrysalis, you were welcomed by an ignition of light that caught you and held you there. The warmth of crossed hands, pudgy and sterile. Is this true? Can belief be found in a place full of failed attempts to coalesce?
Peter says that he really just misses his kids and thank GOD for those emergency workers for talking him off that roof. You think sort of less of him each time he says the word God.
You’re waiting for the coloring session to end, to show a blackness sans blackness and then he brings up his kids again, each time he says kids he blinks like a falcon.
Paper Revolution
Paper stays with us, black and smoky like the sky above the roofs but behind the trees and there, automatic, it wasn’t, that thing that made me turn the lights on, car alarms buzzing and shouting, a noisy night of mammalian thunder and siren’s arms spilling out of cars. When the bomb hits, it’s only one, and wow, what a brightness and forth of July to a dead revolution, but bombs still burst. Here’s me in my quiet bed imagining blood. If only those soft curls fell on wounds, if only the snow, but why even talk of snow in a San Jose drought? This will be forgotten; an impact arises and grows from ambition, is that right? I doubt it. There’s door-kings of glass to grab, but leave the door closed. All the belts behind the door hide their history and the sky is cracking. Where are the soft hamburgers of pointed pain, a mess, but popcorn helps. It has no edges, only a plaintive mew. The bombs scratch the sky. Did we really do it all on purpose? We bought it, the breaking of many branches.
Lookout Mountain
Stuffed with the tongues
of hummingbirds
the snapdragons
stoically choked
through August into
fall.
Mother heard
the thunder
days before
the storm.
Of course, her nerves
were a spine
of army ants
on fire.
A Tiny Crown
O Bug bug bug bug bug…
—John Hollander
Little musical hairdressers, His
favorites sing with nail and comb,
natter rhythmic clicksongs in His ear,
so many variations after the first
essay: pool skimmers to slide over
shady waters, little kitchen demigods
ruining the flour, nano-lumberjacks,
and you, assiduous worker, proud
to roll your ball of dung in the broad
field of His approving gaze: a God
so plainly fond of you if otherwise
unknowable, capricious, obscure.