Filed under: poems | Tags: cigarettes, orchards, San José, trees, urban sprawl
Orchards once stretched
for miles
here;
my mother would hide in the trees
as a young girl
and smoke secret
cigarettes.
The most fertile land
on earth
now yields
only fertile
minds
and sterile suburbs.
I yearn for the fruit
that never was;
a million more apples
would have better served the world
than the million parking spaces
that were the fruits
of our plastic labors.
The secret history of Apple
is buried in the nitrogen of the soil it
sits upon
and in slums half the world away.
My mother must have known that.
Surely she did.
Rows of trees replaced
by rows of storage units.
I’m sure she noticed.
The larger parcels of land
left with orchards
were last to go, and the
newly-crowned
high-tech kings
sneered
with envy as they tore beauty
down
and raised up the chip and
A.I.
in drab office buildings.
The secret histories of cigarettes and silicon.
And my mom climbed
down the tree. Surely she did.
I would have stayed,
San José,
if you had only told them
no.
I remember
we took this path before.
We followed it on a hike
sometime in the first few months
after I moved back.
I remember
it was me, you, and David Gullins.
I don’t remember if I drove.
Maybe you drove.
But I do remember the three
of us
marching along through the woods.
We
were quiet
and I didn’t know you well then.
I walked in back.
Those were
my pipe-smoking days
and I held the pipe
firmly between my teeth
brooding
as we carried ourselves
down the trail which stretches
from the foothills
to the sea.
We looked like a train rolling backwards
down the track
with me puffing on sweet cherry tobacco
at the rear,
and you
delivering stump speeches
from the lead caboose
to every citizen squirrel
and finch
down the line.
I remember we stopped
and had a snack before we turned around,
me pulling a bag of tortillas
from my pack
which I was in the habit of carrying and eating.
I wish you could walk this
trail with me now –
Skyline to The Sea –
but somewhere along the way
you turned back.
Filed under: poems | Tags: alleys, architecture, skyscrapers, trains, trees
Try between the trees.
Alleys eke out an existence
pressed between pillars
of architectural excess;
Leaves leaping off the boughs
of trees may move
in any direction.
Dumpsters may only
inhabit
the diminishing passages
between skyscrapers,
like boulders resting
in a rail tunnel;
Verdant hallways
with crooked sylvan latticework
break ground with flowers,
or at least a path to greater
greenery.
An alley is a death,
a dead-end ending in
dead iron doors
to backrooms of
seedy establishments;
Try between the trees.
Skyscrapers may lean;
Trees may only fall
like fawning servants
at our feet.
Filed under: poems | Tags: the ocean, God, books, the sun, the stars, my mother, trees, traffic, His pipesmoke, airplanes, cliffs, Thomas Pynchon, the Old Testament, anachronism, films, AJB
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
