Passing a Ditch

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

I overturned a rock, and worms were under it. Beetles, grubs. I had a nightmare after that. When our fathers turn away, we turn after them, following angrily in the turbulent V of their wake, the outboard motor smoking. A rancid, acidic smell bites our noses. We keep following the tall man in the buttoned coat who covered our faces in shaving cream and shaved us with his finger long after he has stopped looking behind him, over his shoulder to where he came from, where we are trudging hopefully. He will never turn over the stone of his past expecting a radiant vein of quartz to shout up at him from the black, newly broken moisture under the stone–and find us.

A Discarded Nest

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

The pencil tip leads nowhere, is nothing. A funnel of mathematical points, infinitely small, narrowing to a single impossible point. It is a school bus full of the unborn souls of children not yet conceived, a Saharan waterslide, the funny unreliable wand of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Still, when I guide it, it glides–agile as an ice-skater–over the unknown tundra. The graphite tip is compressed, potent, a shaman’s rattle full of his enemies’ knucklebones. I hover over the paper the way a mother robin hovers over her chick, knowing instinctively that regurgitation will help the small ball of feathers find flight. All around we two, supporting us visibly, woven into the structure under our stick feet, bits of the world peep out; a stolen watch fob, a torn open Mars bar wrapper tucked tight, twigs that never grew into branches. Carefully and deliberately, I push the baby from the nest.

 

*****

Dot by Dot

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Back home there’s this mobile of red dots in my living room; shadows follow each dot like dark matter dogging stars. In storm gusts, the mobile becomes a wind chime, the dots striking the ceiling ringing, their usual translucence gone, or transferred to sound. The mobile is in my mind, the red dots swirling, as I negotiate the hiss and onrush of traffic sweeping toward the Presidio. My body races across streets like a sandpiper when the low wave crests and releases. The mobile is just one structure but has a hundred shapes. I’ve seen hundreds, there may be thousands…. Now it is Robert Artisson’s “stupid, staw-pale locks,” demon-struck hair gone everywhere, now a palmful of tiddlywinks going back into their sack, the drawstring wincing shut like an eye at what it doesn’t want to see. I get to the water’s edge where a deep chill invigorates dogs and their owners, the dogs leaping the snowlike dunes, running as far as they can, and then looking back with a questioning whine at their owners–for the OK to go on, to keep playing.

Their people are indulgent, distracted with their own thoughts, their models and mobiles, the gas left on in the kitchen perhaps, and they throw stick after stick over the sandy hill, out into the bay, a safe pocket of ocean. The distracted, indulgent people talk among themselves as they saunter, unconcerned should the busy dogs find each other, their heads lowered, nostrils wide, tails wagging energetically.

Waking and Walking

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Knowing things and not knowing them, which is better? Water forgets it’s part of the Yerba Buena fountain, the icicle remembers its cold sorrow. All day I am knitting my mind into decorative doilies and practical pot-holders, yet keep dreaming I am sewn into someone else’s quilt, my skin pulled taut by the curved, urgent needles of invisible seamstresses. How can I plan the place to which my sleep will kidnap me? I duck my shoulders under a dark archway and cross my fingers, the habit of religion helping me hunch. The garden pillars point up without an instructional plaque, calm as orthodox monks being robbed at gunpoint; the tai chi class I am passing on my way into the conflicting stripes of the SF Moma flows in some other time zone than mine, their hips and hands pressing into a clear honeyed liquid composed of moments. The contemporary Jewish museum defies gravity the way a koan escapes closure, stock-still as a dredel stuck spinning on a Hanukkah card, the facile rabbi stumped by revelation. A box closes, its little tail tucked under its feet; who knows what it might contain? The child closes his eyes hugging a parent. Praying hands seem empty, but who knows? I go in under the archway, through spinning glass.

North Beach

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Stripper poles stand upright in darkness, tubular bells or an abstract sculptor’s impression of lightning. Turning off the main drag from City Lights and Vesuvio’s, I roll into what I’m told is the oldest stripper club in San Fran, The Condor. The first “bottomless” voyeur’s venue. There’s an historical plaque alongside the place, with a dulled, coppery state bear declaring its significance.

Seeing these girls twirl and plié looks like the innocent fun of our first grade playground when we were all kids. Back then the little girls, Amy, Tracy, et al, wore light trumpety jumpers and shiny shoes. When they attacked the jungle gym you’d see their tiny socks and flashes of their white underpants–the red, curled ribbons in their hair coming undone by naptime.

The whole experience reminds me of my last, heart-breaking love affair. She approached her relationship with me cynically, often declaring that she was just using me “to avoid thinking about death.” And, indeed, she left me high, dry, and hard–a Moonrock reduced to use as a lady’s loofa. But at least she felt bad about it; she always felt bad; she left with a bad conscience and no confession.

“I’m glad you were my first today. You made me laugh and get turned on. You’re alright.” I moved back onto the street, hunching into my coat like somebody’s grungy uncle.

 

*****

Point Reyes Parkinglot

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

On our quiet way back to the parkinglot, at a verdant V between conflicting trails, we saw a goofy quail nodding its odd way among the pea-green grasses. The dunking bob-white call at once put me in mind of Hillary back in our college days of twenty years ago, stretched out on her beaten-flat floor mattress in her cheap off-campus squat, chirruping a quaint quailese to her pet quail, rescued from who-knows-where who-knows-how. Outfitted in her own outrageous punk get-up, lovely in her disarray as few even perfect sculptures manage, Hillary steadfastly refused every advantage beauty such as hers offers youth so that she might be the creatrix of her own soul.

A Needle’s Eye

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Perhaps I’ll force myself through to some conclusion. I want words to fall softly on my ear, a pelting of crumbled dusts. I push myself through heavy underbrush and bracken, a svelte companion before me, at the hot park near Pt. Reyes. Light filters through like a stranger at the door: tentative, prepared to flee at the first impatient glance from the host. These woods are heavy and strange to me, a tumble of clumps and harshly angled trunks blocking-out the sumptuous sun. The path goes always upward, more toil than revelation. My guide keeps some secret in her back pocket, and I am drawn onward. The filtered light and the humidity induce a dream-state in the unwary walker, a state where hunch and intuition gather momentum. One feels as if he were moving slowly through a “zone of knowing,” where the next overturned rock or aerial of caressed fern will tell one the answer to all the “whys” the traveler has carried with him in his fat backpack. A few native birds trill out of sight, an indecipherable narrative offered fleetingly to the blind. As lost as I feel, my feet seem to know that this small mountain, this ramp of rock, is lifting me higher nevertheless… that some progress, or at least progression, is occurring as my boots lose traction and my vision smears. Here in the woods’ dreamlike semi-dark every structure is fabricated of life, is living and vivid, and presses forth like some subconscious welt to break through at the back of the eyes. There’s an immanence here on the underside of sunshine as the purple briars, bright as a wrestler’s neck-veins, inscribe hieroglyphs along my exposed forearms. We stop to examine the festive destruction of a long, rotting log consumed by live beings: a wildfire of worms white as angels and the horned faces of rainbow-backed beetles. A whole hive of hatchets is at work here. We drop with a grunt to sit in the dirt, in the deep shade, trying to look outward from what must be a high vantage point, and we each gulp a globe of water as warm as sweat.

The Hill Path

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Humidity on the mountain path keeps me unsatisfied. Humping through limitless colonnades of proud pine and Sherman oak where every step is an entrance through grandeur and an exit to exile has left me with no place to go. No light knifes beneath a doorway to egg me on. I have been everywhere. I have been everything. I have been a chameleon on a leaf, adapting to every dapple. I have been the red squirrel with tufted ears, head-down on a holly trunk, laughing at mankind. I have been the stealthy snail in circuit around this rock, lapping it languidly in a one-footed race as day and night flicker past. I have been the erratic beetle with wings all colors, the mushroom domed in shade, a dewdrop evanescent and airborne, the shaggy hawk, the moony owl, mouse and hare and all else.

Now I am simply Moses 39 years in.

And then, unable to see any doorway, I am thrown through. With new suddenness, like the discovery of oceans when we are three, I break into a world of soft meadows, a private dell vast in variable greeneries lighter than an Irish iris.

The Mountain Cat

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

In the blue-green glen we go off the path a little ways. It is a dry path, small dry stones marring the dust like the eye lost by those weird sisters, the Graeae, having fumbled it on a forward pass so that they must now live in the blind woman’s shoe with a helper dog. We sit down in Walt Whitman’s uncut beard and unpack our picnic. Small pita loaves, opened for stuffing with sauerkraut or blueberries, iced tea in a sweaty mason jar, two melted power bars whose wrappers flash in our eyes like reflected pool water on a low ceiling. My feet are red and sore when I unpeel them, flattened a bit and webbed, like the things a hovering tern grabs the aft railing with when the fog-wind blows too strong. We look up from our hungers, up the beautiful bowl of the dell, curved simply as an inverted skull painted green. Up and away, crouched in the scooped roundness of the abandoned forehead, a daub of yellow calmly surveys the valley. We recognize it after a minute when it crosses its paws and licks its whiskers. A cougar has lain down above us, its view of the coming sea that we can only hear much better than ours. We look at the cat carefully, passing the field glasses between us absently. Even in close focus, the cat is like one of those sun glints in the bend of the wave, the whole sun put down in one wet flash. After lunch I attempt to approach the lion and its folded paws, but am afraid.

There’s a Wildness

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

There’s a wildness to living, as to dying. There’s a letting go and a letting in that is not decay, is not the destruction of the body but a liberation of it. These red ants that criss-cross my checkerboard sneakers follow an invisible trenchline with their licorice antennae. They know only whatever the first ant has declared, the disposable scout who responded only to her own hunger and sense of adventure, sliding down a rainy leaf, shouldering through untold crumbles of sand. Her wildness set the pattern. The sun lays down on the earth, fiery and sleepy, and the earth responds with these lightest fibery blades of grass and their invisible seeds, sprouting and flying everywhere until the air is dim with fertility. Somewhere in me, I realize, as the Pacific lumps into a passive purple as plain as grape juice, there is an invisible seed seeking its adventure; a seed wanting to take off with wild glee from Pt. Reyes and jetstream down the sinuous coastline to the Andes and sprout there among Mayan gods and bitterness. I close my eyes and imagine myself upraised and sacrificed among alien peoples, my grin tight against my teeth.

Lapping at the Great Beach

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

The whiteness comes and comes, a charity for the eyes. At first one stands convinced a lost shoelace is tangling back and forth in some nearby tidal pool, a polite white smallness with the grace to be noticed. Then, as the chipped rail of the high observation post glows colder against your hand and the sea wind swipes your cap, flattening your hair forward over your eyes, you are abruptly made to remember that you are standing at the altitude of a small plane, a country doctor’s Cessna perhaps. You are at the top notch of Pt. Reyes and look down like a parachutist at a long brown beach, a spread of smooth peanut butter that floods north and away from the mount you have ascended until low clouds lick the sight clean. The waves along the beach, creating curve after curve uninterrupted by pier or jetty, demonstrate a process of movement through space as pure as a leaping ballerina. There are so many waves, so many curves, that they seem to be the business edge of a serrated dinner knife laid down alongside the turnip paste, okra and rice pudding prepared for Thanksgiving, the turkey still whole and crisp at Dad’s end of the table. Before and below me, as the wind tucks my chin, the endless blade scrapes the land lovingly, back and forth.

Flying the Islands

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Hillary had been out there, at the edge of sight. The small islands, Los Farallones, float nearer out of the mist, as if the continent were hunching over a grasshopper waiting for it to jump. From here, on the grassy prow of Pt. Reyes, I think I could fly there, into the oyster greyness, landing lightly as a kite handled by an expert child. Out there, birds gather in gabbling cities, and their human watchers are silent, writing in their snowy books, walking the bird islands in thick socks. For the birds, the islands are no more than a convenient anchor, a stone to push into the sky from. This is the place where the bunched string wraps itself in the child’s sweaty fist and pulls them heavenward.

Shindig

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

The Western Saloon’s half-gate doors swing and creak. The air is powdery with the dust of legends. Dimly at the far end of a very long and empty room loiters the bartend, a middle-aged lady brewmeister who looks like the unsmoked half of a two day old cigarette. Slow country music pumps out of a full-display jukebox, amber and chrome, cradling a burning hell-light within. I get a large scotch straightaway, neat, after a long day of hikes and wildcats. In my palm, too, in the dying light, there’s a crystalline reflection of damnation. I feel the burning tongue of my Unmaker when it goes down like glue from the tube.

Another patron wandered in by the time I was down to my last dreg of firewater, looking like Witch Hazel and bearing a tied-together suitcase, and a second, very small suitcase–or so it appeared to me. She cackled and traded a joke with the crusty barkeep whose costume jewelry was peeling from gold to a chewed-gum color underneath. Hazel put the smaller suitcase up on the bar, and I could see now that it was a dented and travelworn Planet of the Apes lunch box festooned with brocade and appliqué gems. This object caught Hillary’s eye, and she introduced herself with a question about the little box’s manufacture. To me, it was only fit to be a New Orleans’ coffin for the family rat, and any further purpose was stewed hypothesis.

“Oh, I done made this myself,” Hazel reported, her odd eyes filled from corner to corner with solid color. “Look what’s in it!”

What appeared to be a tan handful of religious brochures spilled out onto the bartop. Hillary politely turned one over. “Wim of the West. Seven Poems of Heartache, Bars, & Redemption.” Hillary looked at me over her shoulder, “Gregg, I knew you’d like this place.” I ordered another round all round. “I’m Wim,” Hazel said with a broad wink of her strange eyes.

Hillary unloaded all of our change into the jukebox, making a run to her truck for the last of the treasure. She punched the numbers for every classic punk cut that she could conjure from “the cloud” that fed our squat bandstand. “Sonic Reducer,” “Gimmie the K-a-s-h,” something from the Saints. Hillary addressed herself to the pulsing light and began a bewitchment of hips and nodded-out head rolls; all her moves were compelling, unique, sassily sexed, with a mighty side of unhinged.

For me, the whole business had a kind of time-machine Doppler effect. I was catapulted back to the dirty punk clubs of the 80s; every individual in clashing gear, and no two faces decorated the same. Every song hit my ears like a drunken bird’s soliloquized invention–half threnody and half fuck-you.

Wim and I debated poetry politely, then angrily, then with hoots of cool laughter as the next round arrived. Wim was persuaded to huff out a few of her lines: “When I was, / a semi-young girl, / I had me / this cowboy….” Her face contracted a moment, then grew sly and happy. “I shoulda called him an Ow-boy! Oh, boy.”

The music wore us down. Wim went back and forth on her barstool, twisting in her fringed leather coat, tight at the armpits, with grinning gaps in the tassels. She tapped her shop-new boots, beaten silver tips and heels that rang like change whanged against a Mercedes when she twirled to show us the Nevada reel. I wound up dancing too, of course, going solo with my wild Indian high-step around the four corners of the pool table.
“Buck it, y’ ol’ white bronco, buck it!”

It was only later, leaning against the pickup’s open door to catch my breath, that I saw, as I strewed my belongings along the narrow bench seat, that on the back of Wim’s pamphlet was a muscular, laconic horse’s ass.

*****

Traveling

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

When I set out, I had wanted deserts and waterfalls, other oceans, the small chinked crying eyes of my friend at midnight across a smooth table of booming wood. Pushing myself through the stratosphere like a milkweed seed blown doomed from its pod, I got them. Happy with one dusty blue balloon, one lick of cotton candy, I came home loaded down with double handfuls of sparklers, my stomach pushed out by sweetness, sore with the good weight of being loved too much, kissed in too many ways until my lips are swollen, puffed and papery. When I sit and put down roots in ink and heartache, my memories blossom furiously, bursting out, flying over new meadows under a silken moon full of the silent cries of baby spiders.

It Wasn’t Winter in NJ

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

It wasn’t winter in NJ, this pink trip to the crinkly land between Sacramento and San Fran. It was spring herself, loaded down with armfuls of flowers. Stems and trumpets of flowers so large they could be armfuls of luminous brooms, their whiskers on fire… the woman shushing and cooing the flames with a calm moue. It’s when the mouse ran by under her skirts that she threw the brooms into the air, her arms helpless, open as the arc of a lawn sprinkler. The rainbows inside the waving spray, it seems, following the sprinkler arm, become visible only now, in memory, as I hold in my palm this souvenir crystal ball I got last minute at the airport, chuckling at the little flitter of snow inside swirling around the fat sea lion with the striped ball tipped up on his cold nose.

Returning Home Nothing has Changed

 Prose Poems, Sipping Beer in the Shadow of God
Aug 172011
 

Back in the Garden State, my duffel bag jammed still-full into the back of the closet, I think of Eden and the apple I found half-finished in a ditch by the Parkway, its exposed edges brown as burned newsprint or antique parchment. Memorial day weekend in Princeton brings out modern Colonials in blue and white, red heart-shaped buttons holding their tail-flaps on as they unfold from their humming Volvos, lifting primly their oft-polished muskets from the ski-rack. On the way to humid fields prepped by rain for the re-enactment (that enchanted pretend-when of whimsical historians), Princetonians of all ages stroll by, orange and black as Tony the Tiger, rah-rahing the sedate parade that cheers down Nassau Street.

Mercer’s Oak, shot down by time, has been replaced by a fenced-in sprig, the few leaves flapping as large as hands on the wiry limbs. On the yellow-green square of field, the uniformed men fire a refurbished cannon gladly, elbows sharply out and fingers dug in their ears. A cat’s tongue of flame causes the grass to steam. A small boy in blue and white, with a special black stocking cap slapped angled on his head, advances sharply with the ammo for reloading. Retirees in straw boaters and orange-and-black blazers mill around the lemonade stand, the lone representative of commerce at this re-enactment, manned by two teenage girls texting and flirting with the sons of liberty. The crack report of the brass cannon makes everyone’s heads go up like a flock of storks wading for fish in the marsh.

There are rich black ruts in the earth where the cannon has maneuvered to the hilltop. The Redcoats it had once glared down upon in this field centuries ago have evaporated. There are only ghosts to shoot at now, and only the memories of adventure to chew and meditate upon. The wind that came sweet and odd down the back of Half Dome, fresh as a morning fern in the Pleistocene, is stilled. California is for lovers and others, those dressed-up beings who people my dreams, my dramas. The cannon bangs again, flaring its terrible flame. The lemonade is cold and good–the crystalline frost that lives inside the uncleaned freezer in August.

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