oh rats

So how do you like the news?  I find repeatedly, irrespective of who is in office, that government disappoints me whether it is local, national, or somewhere else.  Perhaps, given human nature, it is inevitable that the temptations of power and money plus the selective exposure of our politicians due to the electoral process, driven as it is by money as well as a need to satisfy disparate needs, should succeed in failing most of us. Now, at the same time that I contemplate this dilemma I am also reading the local posts about Berkeley being overrun with rats and indeed we have seen a few -- Kathleen says they are spoiled, selecting only the more tender shoots from her garden for consumption in the evening, the yard illuminated by little paper-covered multicolored hanging lights, a party atmosphere.  What a far cry from the sewars. Only the finest for our rats; and on that note my thoughts merged

 Some

of you may imagine the lawn full of accent plants

arranged through employment underground to

governments not knowing the rats above in the palms

where breeding takes place at a more rapid pace so

who will die first is not who lives last in the long run

long after lawns are gone the way of governments

probably chewed up by the them they will be super

with a big S on their pesticide resistant shirts and

as strong as cockroaches lifting boulders out of pits

you gotta give it to them rats often unseen yet still

in your life and yard all the time so is that why you

pay taxes thinking it keeps the lawn cut and clean

Find Balanced, one of my old poems, published at http://omniverse.us/

Walking in the Redwoods Near San Francisco

My son and I took a roughly ten mile hike in the Purisima Creek Redwoods, an open space preserve mid-peninsula below San Francisco.  To get there you take 92, which cuts East – West across the peninsula about half-way down from the city to the bottom of the bay.  If you were to take 92 to the coast you would be in Half Moon Bay but if you make the difficult (due to traffic) turn to the South when you are at the top of the ridge line on 92, turning onto Skyline Boulevard, you can then drive along the ridge between the ocean and the bay and in a few miles you will come to several dirt parking pockets aside the west side of the road.  

Pick one, park, and start walking back in time, back into nature.  The trees make their own climate and sounds and suddenly you are immersed in it and rush of driving is drowned, leaving silence, the rhythms of the winds in the treetops approaching and then traveling on, little things scurrying away in the undergrowth – the land speaks to you of the millions of years we have spent there and you are home.

  

We ended up hiking perhaps farther than we had originally imagined but we did not regret a moment of it.  We took what was probably an old logging road down, heading towards the ocean, and then after descending from the approximate 2,000 ft. elevation of Skyline down to around 1,000 feet, we turned onto a narrow path with steep drops off the side (don’t slip!), wandering along the side of the ridge and then climbed up into sunlight before we turned again and descended towards the creek floor at the other end of the park.  From there it was a long uphill walk back to the car.

Along the way there were lots of “fairy circles” of second growth redwoods gathered around the remaining traces of the original forest which was probably harvested to build San Francisco.  It was sad to see how the giants were felled and lost to us.

A Walk In The Second Growth

cow nipple roots hang out of the hillside cut open by

a logging road the straight lines of the giants crossing

down to ferns among the fallen near where the sons

are gathered in circles mourning the cut and burned

stumps of their ancestors who now reside

in the cross beams of your old house

and you wonder if their arms are raised to the sun

in a prayer against another slaughter.

Several months ago Kathleen and I visited a friend in her Oakland hills home which was inhabited with dramatic artwork and plunges  of view to the city and bay.  One wall sported a large piece of junk metal hung against an expanse of white wall, triggering for me thoughts of how the past hauls up in images, fixed relics remembered starkly, inflection points in our lives which define us as we are now.  Perhaps for some it is different and they remember all as though replaying old movies but who has the time for that?

But when we do look at the past how do we see it? I personally have long held that the past is not a place of regret, it may contain remembered joy, but certainly it is also full of answers when we choose the gestalt that exists between the foreground of life and the past which shaped us; within those contrasts lies nothing but beauty.

Did You Turn To Look For Mary Jane?

7251 Albert Street has big white walls,

blankness immense until you turn,

stunned by that torn, corroded iron sheet mounted,

the trophy of urban hunts,

victory pinned to the walls forcing seeing,

so you turn again,

there is a crushed-paper-bag-faced woman framed nearby,

you never looked at her on the street either,

your vision stuck on the unwritten,

confusing youth with beauty,

strange how you love time’s mark on mountains,

faces of eroded rock holding your gaze while

missing messages written on those faces around you,

why don’t you hunt closely, in the mirror,

and reread the novel there,

maybe you will enjoy it more, this time,

there is so much you missed while seeking in the blank spaces between,

surely there is time for reflection,

longing again for when the wind and rain cut at you,

your pocked memories things of beauty --

it makes old men look in school yearbooks,

searching for what they coveted when the world was new,

but finding flat, smooth walls they turn away,

now knowing the beauty of the worn around them,

Shakespeare in every fold of skin.

Samson 

dear me;

you may never read this but you should, as

I have been writing to you on an old bronze vase

my faded scratchings staring out of the myths, so. . .

It took our artist dad to cut your hair leaving

seven locks preserved until

‘Nam, what losses when

angry shears broomed away grasshopper shelters and

stolen summer sweet corn,

fields of heated straw fermenting delight, trampled

grass rich as a fart

cool moss, lichen coated boulders in the woods, then

autumn leaf piles so willing to accept your plunge, oh

what free hunger taken, then

lost to eastern heat,

musky fruits bitten in

50,000 feet up black sky,

bombs opening silently in long B-52 rows;

fish sauce and the years

until back is forward into

paisley, weed, and patchouli oil, wow . . .

lava rainbows surprising Golden Gate traffic,

girls spinning Rumi at the Filmore --

time absorbed by fingertips on nipples, skin --

all those Rapunzel comings and

misunderstandings in a VW bus;

people had auras then, what losses

before forward was back;

life’s patina such a dammed spot !           why

you mowed my Irish ‘fro again for a job; listen

I never liked patchouli oil

just the hunger, you

never want to lose that

regardless of what is done to our hair, sincerely yours.

 Sealight 

by the bay,

as I wait to drive my balded friend to her chemo

I hear the tide and hiss of traffic

flowing past that peculiar two-story;

one side painted bright yellow

reminding me of Mexico

where I heard a biker band symphony,

that yellow sun leaving the sea,

transmuting  eastern walls

on the beach in Tulum; the sun very bright then,

unlike the heavy sea layer brooding down here,

only that yellow-sided house to illuminate me

but then she puts on a golden wig

and smiles as though we are in the Yucatan

and I wash back and forth,

froth on an ocean of limitless depth.

The Rape Of Her Face

in that field she was tender on the rocks,

her fingers ending in polished jade

held near her breast

as she arched her back

in the shade hole of the umbrella,

their long lenses poking

until her smile was worn off her face,

what an excuse,

no one could stare that hard and long

without a machine.

My Son Dropped By When I Was Out

some people just aren’t organized,

leaving elements of themselves everywhere,

DNA at the crime,

old onion peels under the stove,

pencils broken on the sideboard,

virus clothes spreading outward

from the unvacuumed room,

those were the old clues

but now the toilet seat is up again,

I know you have visited here,

and I smile.

 This Is No Wonderland

well the lawnmower

drifted over

pocking holes

with a flashlight

speaking to me

of 30 millimeters

cutting thick brush

and men,

I rabbited

clear out of bed,

woken from

the nonsense of night --

the news chopper only after a sports event --

morphed,

blade sounds

stood my dreams on end,

Alice and I turned from

dining table wine,

dead baby bunnies

at our feet,

the mower running louder

and louder,

wanting to kill more

hidden things

as it floated into

the sky,

such a legacy

of the past

in my bushes,

how can I dare to sleep with such noise.

Burdened 

see this scum

close around

the seam

some people

don’t know how

to clean

their minds,

spiders

many arms

on the synapses

waiting

blocking

a clear counter

until dementia.

Swim To Me

You are in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, points away from here

where I swim unsettled in the wrinkled sheets –

that, and those of my silent chatter,

thoughts flapping in the unbidden wind

which is warmed away when your pulse is near mine,

what a strange jones but unlike that prior woman

I would rather have you as near as those clothes piles

I don’t dare wash,

men get laundry all wrong,

as near as those ointments and salves in the bathroom,

I don’t understand them either but they reassure me,

those tubes and their smells are my oxygen tank,

I swim in the sheets, breathing,

I am held alive by a tube of thought between us,

so elastic that it stretches forever,

through those cities, past all other forms of life,

until I feel your fingers printing

the boarding pass back to our seas –

then I will say welcome, and be whole.