Poetry

I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinkingAbout the woman who got shotFighting over that sweat-soakedHeadscarf Teddy Pendergrass threwInto the crowd at one of thoseShows he put on for “LadiesOnly” the year I was born. HowMany women reachedBefore the tallest two forgotTheir new fingernails matchedPurses and shoes? I’m no good.I thought I’d be bored with menAnd music…

Between mud walls and the kivawind off the mesa broke his phrases,as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windowsmelting into blowing snow and the ripped-off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white,we caught bitesabout the time of killing Spaniards under the full moon,after the…

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow bootsshe minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little sillyand wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she slides vertiginously…

I loved to walk down to the café where she workedand stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noirhalfway down the page. She’d come to my tablewith her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressedall in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell,strong and female, would enter me like a sword.When I used to…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…

Even the gods misuse the unfolding blue. Even the gods misread the windflower’s nod toward sunlight as consent to consume.Flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Still, you envy the horse that draws their chariot. The wilting mash of air alone keeps you from scaling Olympus with gifts of dead or dying things dangling…

Amped-up grid lights growl starsonto the hay-baled dirt ring onto blistered chrome and rust-lace,car-shells taped and painted over to resemble shapes of cars. We’rebleachered, gum-shoed, bleached by glare, laughing at ourselvesfor being here, spilling beer and sponging powdered sugarfrom our rumpled shirt-fronts, smiling. Rumbles in the air,our guts, the gears chunking and purring, the stands…

is another thing Nietzsche saidthat hits me as pretty specious,if not entirely untrue,while sitting in my car in the Costcoparking lot, listening to the BalletMécanique of metal buggies shrieking as each super, singular, and self-containedwisdom of this Monday morning rumblesits jumbo packs of toilet paper and Diet Cokeup the sidewalk. So count me a Despiserof…

I shall speak of the tendency among sane and healthy persons to seeimages flash unaccountably into existence.                                                                                     —Francis Galton This is a tale not of science but of blue. Some say this heat is the worst in history, but history is huge and Idoubt it has never been hotter across the Northern peninsula. Still, the bears…