Filed under: poems | Tags: autumn, city streets, dirt roads, dust, light refraction, neglect, Paris, rain, strawberries, suffocation, summer, sunstroke, the Seine
Sometime past the solstice summer
will kick up dust, shuffling
down a dirt road in scuffed
Converse. If he asks, about to pass
you by, you’re waiting for the fall,
when sweet breezes blow in;
and if you look to the north,
you can almost see autumn, but
for now summer’s heat pervades and you catch a whiff
of him
as he walks by -
sweat, of course, slick
as first rain’s oil on city streets,
and beneath it strawberries,
over-ripe,
and red as rays
of light left after
blue has blown away,
red as lazy, lightly sunburnt skin.
You smell cheap beer on him under
it all, and dry brush and scents
so fused with tattered clothes they seem
woven in. Grass stains on knees
of jeans
and the soles of his shoes.
He wears a white tee, faded,
about the color of his chapped nostrils,
which breathe in the dust and
dirt in shallow draughts.
A flick of fingers sends
the brim of a red ball
cap to his crown,
and beneath the light,
colorless hair
covering his head,
dim, diuretic eyes
and a crooked smile.
He pulls at several days’ scruff
with blistered, damaged digits,
black strips of flaky skin and dirt and food and blood under
every fingernail.
A dry wind sweeps in, northbound, as he ambles off,
and brings with it the stale, sweet smell
of death arcing
off the young, sunsucked man to the south -
a scent of Paris,
of the Seine
in hot August heat:
of elderly French madames
in stuffy tenements,
lying still in bath water brought
near the boiling point
by his relentless assault upon the
Bastille walls.
And as he stops, and turns, and takes
one last look
at you, the high noon
sun hits him from above,
and summer’s shady face is not a cheery color
of wild strawberries, but
a deeper crimson,
blotchy and purplish, like the cheeks
of a child left in the backseat of a car
on a June afternoon with the windows
rolled
up.
And as
he touches cracked white palms to a sweaty forehead,
brushing the hair from his face, behind his hands
his eyes spark with wanderlust of a dog
when the Fourth of July has
brought him out of his cage
to run spooked and mad
with pads raw and red dripping
into the streets.
Summer drops his hand
to his side,
and his thumb leaves a thin streak of blood down
the right side of his face, red
on red on red;
and he turns, and he walks on,
and the northbound wind resumes, whipping up
dust in all directions.
Filed under: poems | Tags: city streets, Duke Charles the Bold, imperialism, urban sprawl
The luck of Charles the Bold
for freeway fingers clutching
at distant hills.
I’m watching a city claw at the countryside
like a man sinking in quicksand,
pulling up large handfuls
of brush and young trees
as it searches for spaces to sink its veins
into the ground.
Someday kids down the street
will make the city into a cell,
and the earth into an animal.
Until then, quick observance
of the failed ambitions
of kingmakers and Patrias
is worthwhile
for those who find watching
stillborn desert empires
being pulled from the womb
to be worthwhile.
Giant
ice cubes
keep falling into the sea,
each a frozen king
with a stillborn empire of his own
he will try to rule.
The luck of Charles the Bold
with a Swiss axe in his skull
and a kingdom-on-the-Rhine
that will never be
for all of us.
When I walk this town
I walk with tempered boots.
I walk this town
like the rain –
softly,
and never often enough.
And when I move,
I hope they’ll say,
“he walked this town
with dignity.”
San José.
With these steps you’ve taught me,
I’ll walk all over the place.
Filed under: poems | Tags: buildings, city streets, death, Einstein, graveyards, Heidegger, Hemingway, Kierkegaard, philosophy, traffic
What are we paying for?
There is traffic that halves
a man’s life,
that puts a boy in a vise.
There is convenience,
convenience stores of
storied convenience,
inconvenient continental breakfasts
in the lobbies of multi-storied antiseptic hotels.
Expensive motels.
Are we paying for the malls?
Those castles I never enter.
Are we paying for the highways?
That speed us toward the unnecessary,
or at least the nearest
gas station.
I would forfeit them.
I would roll the freeways up
like carpets,
and bury every road sign
in an unmarked grave.
A man on a bicycle kicks
over signs
pointing
to an open house
just over there…
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Every one along the avenue.
Are we paying for the mattress stores?
Are we paying for the car dealerships?
Are we paying
principle
and interest
for these hills like white elephants?
Are we paying for fast food
at every block?
Who gave these things to us?
I can only say
I see Einstein
on the back of a green chair.
Are we paying
for the office buildings
that sit unoccupied?
Or incomplete?
A block’s worth
of gray Swiss cheese
cultured in the sun.
Are we paying for the steel beams
that hold up their heavy backs?
For the concrete that
shuts them off from the world.
Stay a while and listen.
Are we paying for these houses?
Graveyards have more life in them.
Slick city streets seek revenge
for our evils.
We who once laid down the roads
will be laid into our graves by them.
For what are the streets
but the culmination of our travels?
When we may fly a thousand miles
and yet find ourselves home?
We may scream down freeways
and busy boulevards
under overpasses
and over bridges formed like stony
interlaced and arched hands
and see nothing.
Are we living to hurtle ourselves
toward death?
We may drive to escape and to forget,
but the roads are clovers,
curves that inevitably resend us
to the center.
Are we living to die
beneath a metal door,
under the feet of trembling others
looking for a deal to validate
their day?
The cities have killed more than they’ve ever saved.
[a poem from about a year ago dedicated to my friend Rosa.]
We were born of the same parents,
you and I,
a twinkling nicety, once, in a young uterus;
worn well now, our skin,
and different like the differing shades in a blond boy’s hair.
Fellow travelers, both,
but you with more memory of the world in you,
and I with the unsteady legs I’ve had little chance to stretch
on foreign soil.
We were so tired when we met
that on the long ride home
we ran every red light until
our fingers pushed past the obstacles
God had laid in front of us,
and the streetlamps rose up in revolt against Him.
We ran the lights with our eyes closed,
and if our sons asked us we’d tell them, well,
we stopped when we were asked
and our eyes were dry from watching for the limits to our being,
when really we’d never known the sound of slowing down,
as if our foot were glued to the gas,
and we ran every red light with our eyes closed.
You were the girlfriend of a friend, then
and the same today, though of a different friend,
but you, the bubbly girl I met sitting on a dark blue couch,
are a very different person to me now.
I know you to be of a kind emotional,
like an ex-girlfriend of mine,
and with that same sort of proud unreasonableness
that lies crouched close to your overworked heart.
I can see you’re bursting,
your arms filled with gifts that fall haphazardly out of your strong palms –
you like a pint glass placed a bit clumsily back on the table,
splashing over the rim in great sloshing globules onto a lacquered walnut bar,
and me the slow drip through a hairline fracture,
both hoping for a deeper vessel
and a better keeper.
I know one day you will find steady hands to pour yourself into.
Filed under: poems | Tags: cities, city streets, evolution, forests, life, selfhood
We tend to step heavy
in the forest
and lightly in the streets;
in the cities we are but one
of millions
and the impact of our footsteps
and our presence
can be
and often is
quickly wiped away.
But in the forests we can make
the greatest impact
in life
though despite our footsteps ultimately the forests
shall endure until the seas boil
while humanity
and its cities
will not.
At some point we must all come to grips
with the fact that we
are nothing special.
We are little more than
the slightly mutated product
of a timeless pattern,
of a timeless mould,
to which our ancestors
have made
consistent and minute
adjustments.
Life
is not something which we can find
in the cities.
The vast majority of Earth’s creatures
live in the wilds,
in forests and
deserts
and near lakes and meadows
and rivers and plains
and streams;
And even what we term life –
and even when we call someone lively –
what is meant is little more than that
they act like animals.
Those whom we call lively are little more
than animals,
and life in the cities
will never be more
than the spectre of Life to be found
in the world.
Why do we run towards
this smallest part
of the Earth’s surface?
Filed under: poems | Tags: cheap wine, city streets, dogs, grass, restaurants, shade, smoke, space, stucco giants, suburbs, the moon, trains, water
I love normal days
absent of any significance;
mediocre meals in restaurants,
small amounts of sunshine,
what little shade there is, muggy,
the air a bit smoky outside,
the food, cold.
Children inside,
dogs inside,
no shadow, no sound,
streets rounding corners into one another
and slingshotting themselves
like a shuttle rolling across the surface
of the moon’s gravitational field
off into other neighborhoods
and through stucco walls
and off the edge
of fake balconies.
Divided by rusted railroad tracks
we trace parallel lines
through ranchos and roundabouts here
in these normal days,
down normal streets
cut off from thoroughfares
and tightened around
choked suburbs
of white folks not yet flown to the hills;
of hardworking immigrant families
tired of the crooked two-bedroom apartments
of past generations;
they all live here.
Still afternoon air
refusing to slide on past homes
not worth stopping to look at –
and the for sale signs sit for months in front of them –
pink and beige giants
adorned with wrought iron,
absent of backyard,
filled up with chilled,
airconditioned winds,
broken breezes
knocking against couch-ends and chair-legs,
hanging over kittens’ heads and babies’ cribs.
We ride these waves,
gulp them down
like cheap wine
and crash onto level streets.
We taste gravel for the first time,
let little pieces roll about our tongues,
imbed themselves in our gums,
let them grow like rows of shark’s teeth
and we’ll mow every lawn down
three whole streets
with them,
chew down every fresh
and well-irrigated lawn
within a square mile,
and run through the sprinklers
and let the water soak through to our bitter hearts
while the world dies of thirst.
Filed under: poems | Tags: birds, buildings, city life, city streets, Dante, death, Greek mythology, Huxley, Norse mythology, rebirth, the woods
Ours is not quite a Brave New World;
though we’ve learned to exist upside-down,
and still the blood in our veins,
ultimately we desire grass and ground to step upon,
and though we value
the perks of our city lives
we may pick up stones to throw
and be pleased to find sand beneath them;
and may still be shocked to discover our cities were built with the bones of our ancestors,
and in a panic call back the wardens we had once chased from our windowsills.
We may seek, then, as city birds to live in the wide and wild open spaces,
to carve a slice of Nature’s bounty for ourselves,
but to pack and move there
is to leave behind everything we own
because there is no room for them, there, in the great expanses,
and it allows no burdens
save for the knowledge that a tree grows, as we do,
and transforms itself into something greater,
while a building springs fully-formed from the mind of its creator
and thus cannot be trusted.
To distinguish in this is to know God.
To travel out from the heart of a city is to travel into the heart of man;
to perch upon a branch is to know the heart of man.
If we follow the rivers of man’s blood to their spring,
and find the woods they wind through,
and travel the rivers’ eastern shores,
and drink from them as we need,
and not fear the leopard and the lion,
though they may shadow us on the opposite bank,
and discourage us,
then upon finding the bitter pools of our nature
we are obliged to settle there.
If there we find the seed of man’s heart and bury it beneath a pound of flesh,
and water it with crimson,
then five thousand years on,
when the great cities have become houses of dust for the dead to lay their heads in,
Yggdrassil will grow, again,
and so shall we.
Filed under: poems | Tags: Caesar, city streets, cocks, geography, history, Latin, money, owls, Rome, the cross, war
I am Vercingetorix
tied to a stake,
tied to Caesar’s cock,
whispering ‘respice post te‘ into his taint,
stationary and starving in a No-Man’s Land,
perched above Cleopatra’s bosom,
held at bay by false hopes of civil war
and dreams of Egyptian grain,
losing the contest,
having my bluff called,
marched in a Triumph and
showcased for Senators
through the dirty streets of a city for sale.
I am the King of the Gauls,
I upturn my little tip jar,
hang upside-down
like Peter on the cross,
like Jugurtha in a cistern,
like a wise owl-king
deposed by the Praetorian Guard,
like the highest bidder,
or the man who accidentally
puts on Caesar’s robe
or like any man who has risen, and fallen,
and fallen once more,
but not.
Vercingetorix, instead.
Strangled.
Lex talionis.
