Oncorhynchus Mykiss

crack swell rot 

cave chip split 

decay recede 

bleed grind

my opinion is that,

and I don’t know

if anyone else 

has figured 

this out,

there are reasons why

and more than that

they don’t listen

to reason they 

listen to 

outside forces

open your mouth 

please good

a bloody business

this scraping

see here: 

rot decay

periodontal 

recession

cavity

apocalypse

the unhearing

with yellow teeth

trout swallowed

by trout

geese clubbed

with putters

take a 

bag of flosses

and a crawdad 

pinching a trout fry 

in a cold pool

with you

the gravel behind

the dam

the molars rolling 

toward 

your lips

your mouth 

is full of 

bloody 

trout

Those Days in the Middle of the Week

Click on the first picture, then scroll to read:

Those days in the middle of the week, when everyone else is working.

I sit out at the plaza, in the café, by the ridgetop table, and do what I do.

The lifelong adolescence in its way. The barking at the commerce of time.

A staff put out against the current of everything.

Constructing semaphore messages always anxious

they’re invisible.

It is not the baby being pushed across the plaza, the immigrant washing the

café dishes, the growing of squash with water from a drying well.

It’s not anything other than the echo of metaphors

bouncing down the well

reaching cool silence

inaudible.

Yet the repetition of anything builds a mooring eventually,

whether it bothers the tide or not to

abide by the new sinuity

glide the new riffle

make way for

its mass.

Ambition is a sham against the tide.

One that makes its space

by taking it from 

the plaza quiet

with the force

of will. 

Were my arm a scythe, I would reap my own head

that the fountains keep flowing

in the plaza bath or the

drip irrigation lines unbothered

by distortion

distortion distortion.

The baby rolls past the dry fountain

the brown skin shuffles coffee cups

the squash dies when the water 

is diverted

to our cash crops.

We'll Always Have Picture Hanging Wire

Hedge Nettle Tea

I went down to Green Ridge to watch a friend’s house

while he went east to bury his father’s ashes.

Four walls, a roof, no fuss.

A riot of garden all around,

succulents and olive trees,

basil and pine.

I was reading a lot of geology, a lot of weather,

trying to get the story of it just right. 

How the Pacific High was throwing wind

our way and the wind made fog

and the tectonic plates 

made mountains that 

blocked the fog and grew redwood trees.

I love even the sounds 

of these big movements.

Subduction and Coreolis, lithic and morphic and upwelling and deposition.

And then I go out to pick nettles and realize that

all of my life I have been wrong 

about which is the stinging and which is the hedge nettle. 

Names for everyday plants,

long committed to memory, wrongly so. 

I don’t know anything. 

I make a tea of the hedge nettle anyway. Lemony smelling 

and all kinds of green. To have mistaken which of 

the nettles give a sting, 

to have not noticed even that. 

Such a thing. 

Vultures circle below the garden,

riding the rising heat.

I watch them through the steam of the tea.

I think they are vultures. 

In fact, I insist.