House Sitting (a "B" movie) for Amelie Frank

1.
The Monahans are in Europe,
leaving les objets de papier,
two ancient dogs, and two
patrician cats in your care.

It's late, the Sylph is sleeping, and we

(employing laughter)

have achieved the specific gravity
of children - two human balloons
with our backs and feet
against the cottage cheese ceiling.

We bump and nuzzle,
compare notes on the feng shui
of the room, and fly into fits
at the cat's astonished stares.

Here:
hours, minutes, and boundaries
have become meaningless.

Here:
everything is waveform and wingbeat.
We speak the shibboleth,
we know the semiotic semaphore.

Here:


2.
Yours, sister-friend,
is the peculiar grace and tenderness
of freight trains.

The sheer tonage of sorrow
in your tow is so stupendous -
your grasp of night song
so non pareil.

I commend myself
for uncoupling you from these
however temporarily. And as for me
these visits

to a childhood neither of us had
leave me breathless
as the boy I never was and wanting

more.


3.
We put each other on (and off)
like costumes.
We visit empty envelopes,

or burn them and scatter the ashes.

We laugh,

until the isness of everything
sideswipes us again;
things take weight
and we fall to the floor -

cinematically.

Letter to the Doctor, or, The Lycanthropes Lament


Rumor has it you’re resorting
to your pipes and syringes again, your world
contracted from planet-sized,
where your friends are all at large,
into a fist-sized ball of opish. Little brown orb
where it is always summer, under an albino sun;
where there is no place for regret,
and all the pretty girls and boys
are required by custom to go naked,
so that the wearing of clothes is shameful.

Symptomatology, mine which only occurs
when the moon is full, and the dew upon the grass,
monthly, like some weird repeating menarche
involving other’s blood.

Yours, catalyzed by almost anything, a word, a star, a photograph,
happens at random times and places. The outcome is the same –
both of us oblivious to morals, mores, conventions –
both of us loping through the streets, unclad,
laughing.

I am no longer safe even in sunlight. Nor are those around me. Those nearest me.
You have never been safe. Nor have those who’ve loved you.

I write, I suppose, to let you know your diagnosis was correct.
To ask you for a word, some hope, perhaps a silver bullet,
if you ever come back from the haze.

Keep in touch, I must go now, I can hear the moon.

Jade Blue


Solar flares and proton storms,
noctilucent breakers, the happy resolution
of recurring dreams; all the hue
of Buddha’s Seventh Stone.

On a midnight walk in Arizona
we saw the once-in-a-century appearance
(at that latitude) of the Aurora Borealis.
It made us think the mountains were on fire,
until we saw striations in the shifting red sky curtain
turn slowly to

the perfect color
of the time we saw surf light up at night,
on Venice Beach, when we searched
for the Holy Barbarians, (who had already
made their getaway). We stumbled across the sand
to see that all the waves were luminous,
glowing with

the perfect color
of the final installment
of my recurring childhood dream –
swept overboard in a storm
I would always startle awake; that time
I found to my surprise that I could breathe
underwater, gliding graceful as a fish
while the storm raged above me.
I swam, untouched by trouble, at peace.
in a warm and welcoming sea

the perfect color
of your eyes, that day,
the first time that you said
you loved me.

airplane poem


like tin pushers sitting in darkened rooms –
the better to see the green spokes circling
the screens; the better to wrangle
the calculus of transponders in motion –
watching, hushed, while
little alphanumeric scribbles
representing unbelievable amounts
of metal and flesh at high
altitude and speed
tick their incremental way
across a video game version of flight.

a hundred years from kittyhawk
to here, darling, where we live
beneath these aerial pathways.

remember in the barrio, how the roar
of inbound to LAX bothered us less
than the loud late night mariachi wafting
on the weed-scented breeze,
or the occasional drive-by bullets?
while three blocks away behind the invisible
barriers of their manicured lawns
the well-to-do worried more over
plummeting property values, than
planes falling out of the air.

how oddly fitting that our address
and fortunes have changed –
yet our circumstance remains similar:

now the roar of inbound to john wayne
is the whitenoise we’ve grown accustomed to
up here on our hill, above the taquerias,
the carnecerias, the noise and graffiti
of all those sweet brown people who
pray god into their cinder block and wrought
iron walled yards full of cars
to protect them
from falling airplanes and from
the whites who live above them
like tin pushers sitting in darkened rooms.

unpunctuated tercets ending with haiku


at a loping gait we catch up
with the subject of this sentence
the third millennium

a tertiary parenthesis
playing bumpercars
with its brothers or possibly

the third of those monkey statues or then again it could be
the smokebound eastern seaboard
of a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch

you may notice our voices echoing
when we speak inside the hill
blown up to build this place

this peaceful feeling
is the kirlian residue
of that thirty million year old stone

(breath)

we are divining our future
in the vermicular calligraphy of the sun
dried night crawlers on the sidewalk

studying our past
in the mating patterns of raptors and the mourning
doves nesting outside our window

wishing we were hollow
boned and alate fertile as these smug
birds returning in an unseasonable spring

(exhalation)

according to prevailing theory
the planet is a pirate ship
manned by chaos finest contraptions

a loose knit crew
flaunting the second law of thermodynamics
exchanging high fives and piña coladas

while they commit mass suicide as art
poke holes in the ionosphere
make swiss cheese of the protective force field above them

while they raze the trees
that breath the gas that blows the bellows
which fires the coals

of life on a ball that chance built
or again this could be
all by design like

smooth rivers washing
all of our sorrows down to
oceans made of tears

The Catalog of Unwritten Poems


A cellar full of wine
bottles, sleeping on their sides,
heads down, dreaming
drunkards’ dreams.

A rhetorical question,
in a Yiddish accent, George Jessell
(with a lazy eyelid) asking:
“who is like god?”

The attempt to write
upon the inside surface
of a wedding band,
purchased for “the other woman,”
by another man.

The epistemology
of insects, and brown-skinned
fancy-dancers,
chanting.

The portrait of the artist
as a young automobile accident.

An attempt to decipher
the acid vision hieroglyphics
of acoustical ceilings.

The moral imperative
of extensive tattooing.

The portrait of the artist
as a middle-aged credenza.

A secret history
of the victories
of small potatoes.

The learned distrust
of anyone named Howard.

The endorphin junkie’s lament.

Epiphanies in pop songs –
life changing illuminations
in box-office flops.

The portrait of the artist
as a Dead Letter File.

Sidereal time in a bottle,
(from the cellar in the first stanza),
decanting streams of data.

The elegant flare
of a young girl’s hips,
drawn with deft lines
on the insides
of your eyelids.

The death of love, displayed in toto
from Chain-Stoke to rigor mortis,
and finally its ghosts arrival
on your doorstep,
carrying
a toothbrush.

Oneironauts


In my sister’s dream redemption comes
in the form of a pick-up truck.
In mine, my father, dead for decades,

drives a yellow bus to the shore
where bilingual fish explain
all secret knowledge.

In mother’s dream Christ appeared to her
after the manner of Yahweh disclosing
his backside to Moses,

but it didn’t involve vehicles –
just a tree, a red flannel shirt,
and dungarees. Cars are omens

in my wife’s dreams; their portent
depending upon make, model, mileage,
Kelly Blue Book value, but above all –

who is behind the wheel of this latest model
augury? Who drives my sister’s pick-up
while she pulls the walking wounded

over the tailgate into safety?
And who could possibly imagine my surprise
when the folding door hissed open

in my dream, and the driver of the bus
was my dad, finally come to take me
to the place where all the real answers are.