Poems of the Four Times
dpress 2000 sebastopolArtwork by Claude Smith
MY ESCAPE FORWARD
What's up?
What's down?
What's there to do?
What's done?
It doesn't matter if I go up the Congo
down the Mekong
or follow Strawberry Creek
if I go far enough I'll loose my mind
Strawberry Creek runs down the hill
past the Cyclotron through Faculty Glade
I sit by the stream
and my dreams are full of heavy metal
My freshman year at Cal
Professor Parkinson says my essay
My Home
is the worst thing he's ever read
These squiggles are my class notes
for Atomic Radiation and Life—
must be the paths of neutrinos
no mass, just spin
Frank Chin takes off his Rotcy uniform
and sticks the barrel of his rifle in the ground
Walking off the drill field in his shorts
he's no chickencoop Chinaman
The Un-American Activities Committee
is in town—Black Friday—the police
fearing they are loosing control wash
the protestors down the courthouse steps
At breakfast my dad chokes on his toast
I'm on the front page giving a sieg heil
What he can't see is the mic
I'm holding for KPFA
A child might wonder why
the earth seems flat
note the lines
connect the lines
Eventually, they form a circle—
Bosnia—East Timor—Kuwait—
now that your world map is complete
the name of the game can be changed to
Genocide for Control of Oil
The New Super Bowl
It's an end run...
the SCUDS vs the Patriots
It's a blitz
on a fortress, on a mosque
creating a gulf of blood
and a nightmare of smashed faces
And in the aftermath
open sewers and squalor
with a half million children
dead because of sanctions
A war machine slouches towards Saigon
I hear the litany of the dead
A protest movement is born—
the formation of a hive
Released from the Darkness
a pair of calipers measures my skull
Is my brain pan enlarged?
by Tibet, by Nicaragua, by Burma
A child might wonder why
the earth seems flat
note the lines
connect the lines
Eventually, they form a circle—
Bosnia—East Timor—Kuwait—
now that your world map is complete
the name of the game can be changed to
Genocide for Control for Oil
The new Super Bowl
It's an end run
the SCUDS vs the Patriots
It's a blitz
on a fortress, on a mosque
creating a gulf of blood
and a nightmare of smashed faces
And in the aftermath
open sewers and squalor
with a half million children
dead because of sanctions
HOOKEENA VILLAGE
Camped on the beach at Hookeena
an embittered youth goddess
slightly overweight, says she's been
here a month and not been hassled
A couple of scuba divers surface
and wade ashore—a sunbather rolls
off the table she's been sleeping on
and waddles to the Chew Chew Caboose
I look around for my shoes
and find them on a bench
where I left them yesterday
when I was cleaning fish
I'm continually pelted by mangos
Wind scatters and gathers
Buddha sips a beer and says
"All this is transitory"
PAGE OF WANDS
for Noella
don't you want to know what is going on?
black on black on
black, black dress, black nails
black eyeliner, blonde hair dyed black
dog chains
and combat boots with 4 inch soles
you want to learn tarot
but don't care about Ancient Egypt
or what is hidden in the cards
just how to read them
so gothic
my mood, your costume
no need for all this blather
ok, I'll forget the traditional path
take you to a coffee house
look at the art
here, let you play with the cards
go off in whatever direction
from whatever vantage point
correspondence
with whatever comes next
that girl's tattoo
it says "broken" across her back
in bold letters—
the coal miners' strike in Harlem County
Kentucky in the 70s
no kidding, things get me down
better now we're sitting in this café
note my inflection and the emphasis
put on precision, value, fun
coming at you sideways
first a double mocha, then history
then a balloon
inside, I write, "Poot was here!"
and vanish into air
I KNOW NOTHING
Silence before me and behind
preceding speech
What I am now saying is false
The sky passes
passes through my senses
Everything smells of mock orange
I skipped today, went
around midnight into tomorrow
FLOWING
It's morning—everything's ok
if I can get up,
if not, I'll crawl
all the way to Australia
The clerk at the health food store
gives me a dead look
and blandly wishes me a nice day
I order some whey to go
Outside, I see a little dog
I wonder why he doesn't have any hair
I wonder why he doesn't have a tail
I wonder why he doesn't have a head
I wonder why he doesn't have feet
I wonder how he trots down the street
I'm a distortion in the fog
a man without form
a man with one arm
a man with one lip
an old man I finally understand
WHAT IS MIND?
Dad awakes, he's shaking—
says he's embarrassed, he's wet his bed
and doesn't know what to do
Here I am
bringing diapers to my main authority figure
He also wonders if there is a drive on
to change the color of the grass
I can buy into this
I wouldn't be surprised if there is
Friggin' scary
even a bit moribund—
feel this way because I am still
indulging myself
in life
and fear the weirdness of dying
MAGICIAN'S APPRENTICE
I cough, sweating, with knots in my shoulders
He knows I know where the drib lies
where the energy emanates
My nausea is the key
Follow my stomach, follow the heaving
find the spot in the earth
He points to a rock
moves his hand in a circle
I remove the rock
He hands me a sharp stick, and I dig
I hear chanting in the yurt on the hill
It is daylight, but it is like a long night
He points to a new place a few inches away
and I dig there, another address of agony
He points to a spot a foot away
and after more digging
a piece of paper appears
I can see script bleeding in the damp
I want to unfold this dark treasure
but he makes a gesture for fire
both hands upturned, fingers wiggling
I build a small fire with leaves and twigs
A wind begins, then vanishes
although it's still here
I cough and blow on the flames
as the paper catches
and curls like a question
My nausea is gone
At the sight of him
in his robes and tennis shoes
doing a playfull shuffle
I can't help but laugh
CORD CUTTING
Yeshe asks me to be her surrogate father
Lloyd, born 1917 in Arkansas
Shirsten will play the part of Emma
the mother, born in Peru
We meet at the sweat lodge
Yeshe is wearing peasant clothing
a long skirt, a white blouse
Sparky Shooting Star and Tsultrim
stand to one side to guide us
The three of us form a triangle
with a ribbon around our waists
and Emma and I speak to our daughter
how she has lived up to our expectations
time, now, for her to be on her own
As she wrestles with this separation
we cut the cord of one too long in our service
and her tears fling aside the pretence of the rite
and hammer home the meaning of being grown
NIGHT OF MYSTIC RAIN
I have been watching a cat
and now it's dark
and the cat appears blue and yearning
with claws ready to scratch the night
I am going out
to look for you on the bench in the park
expecting to find you wrapped in newsprint
alone and sleeping red in the dark
Rain in the yellow trees
there is a song under the table
I have enough love to make the stars ache
and I can afford to buy the silence I become
SAMSARA IS AN AIRPORT
SURROUNDING A DELAYED FLIGHT
I'm stretched out with my eyes closed
listening to the travelers and the intercom
"...want my money back..."
"...want to be in San Francisco, now..."
"...really no reason for this..."
"...is it really raining there?..."
"...will my luggage arrive?..."
"Will the pilots for flight 2807
please report to gate A6?"
This presence
that is all
that is
Given
each moment
each breath
"This is your final boarding opportunity!"
VISION QUEST: SO MANY RAINBOWS
The mothers sat by the fire chanting
I could see them in the lightning flashes
Rain came down in sheets
I couldn't tell if it was all rain
or the mothers' tears
ALL THIS INSIDE ME
I enter the quiet
where flies buzz and leaves rustle
in their immortality
The silence ends at a yellow bird
a Western Tanager—I looked him up—
atop a stalk of last year's mullein
POINTLESS POEM ABOUT
THE EXISTENCE OF NON-EXISTENCE
Sitting in Mercy Hospital in Durango
I wait for Lama Tsering
An obese lady to my left in shorts and t-shirt
paints her toes copper
A tall Indian in a set of tails, his hair in a braid
turquoise and bone necklace
dark glasses and cowboy boots
paces the floor
A tough-looking dude with a tatoo on his calf
blood on his shirt
his right eye mangled
bounces a baby on his knee
Aliens 3 is on the TV
STORY MY MOM TELLS
1939: Globe, Arizona
and in the spring, about May
we visited some friends
lived up in the mountains
That was Geronimo's territory
and I asked Mrs. Craig
"How did you ever exist up here
with no roads and having to ride
mules to get out and to bring in
your furniture and Geronimo
running through the country?"
"You kept an eye pealed," she said
"and your kids close at hand"
REFUGE
Don't look at this poem
You are staring
I stare back
Your eyes are clamped here
It is damp here
but my throat is dry
This poem is a shamble
down an alley of broken glass
relief from rowdy talk in The Tav
You are asking questions
this poem
cannot answer—
at best you can rest
here
I cannot answer
but I can sing
