Sunday, January 12, 2014

If Then

SETTING: OPTICALLY PURE GLASS ABOUT 3.5 X 10-4 INCHES OR 9 MICRONS IN DIAMETER, CAPABLE OF TRANSMISSION OF INFRARED LIGHT (WAVELENGTH = 850 TO 1,300 NM)


SCENE 
(Voice): Do you?

(Other Voice): Maybe we should...

(Voice): Okay that was better next time...

(Other Voice): Yet it is now more perfect than perfection.

(Voice): Still one and one makes; if you ever feel then that it is you know I don't feel...

(Other Voice): Me too!

(Voice): If then...

(Other Voice): If then, if then if then! If then! If then! (ululates)

(Voice): If then trains are running, if then outhouses can be made from flower petals?

(Other Voice): Somewhere a little closer in? Bubble wrap and, and who wants to die alone?

(Voice): A dog in Spain, I was only in that serpentine canyon once. In Utah. Serpentine. And a reciprocating saw.

(Other Voice): See how the arrows fall over there? And the slings right here.

(Voice): Another one like you, another one who was prehensile.

(Other Voice): Squatting or making mortgage out of potatoes?

(Voice): Lace, cherry cake, dishes if necessary.

(Other Voice): Yet neither with intention nor having the proper pulleys, the trains in Amsterdam.

(Voice): I see. So tired. Would you be offended if..

(Other Voice): I said what is these fruits anyway? (sighs)

(Voice): So, where then?

(Other Voice): Right, where then?

(Voice): Too bad.

(Other Voice): Pleased ta meet-cha!

(Voice): Good luck!

(Other Voice): With all of that. 







Wednesday, August 14, 2013

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




Tuesday, August 6, 2013

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.

Friday, May 10, 2013

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.