A catfish laughs.
It thinks of other catfishes
In other ponds.

Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
into wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.

Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.

At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great
lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.

Calligraphy of geese
against the sky--
    the moon seals it.

penning a poem in his Oakland
flat, he was stuck at double nines
each of the lines was fueled
by a Winston, each stanza, cheap
red wine, and quiet desperation

outside, the beat of bongos, the pop
of zip guns and the wail of sirens; if
the summer of love was hot at Haight,
nobody told the Panthers who crashed
in the pad below his

he wanted to tell the world this,
epic style, an odyssey on asphalt
a choreography of elbows breaking glass,
and boys running fast, in 'hoods where
every mother's son died too young

but he couldn't weave the right words
to end a story that started with **** filled
hulls of ships, the crack of whips, a war
of bro against bro, and Jim Crow to keep
the nightmare alive in the light of day

now the "Man" snatched them up
with draft notices, turned boys into men
and men into monkeys to be mowed down
in jungles in a question mark on
a map most had never seen

stanza 99, where were the words?
another Winston, another swig of sweet
red wine, though nothing came, until he
heard it--a baby crying in the night
and he picked up his Bic and wrote:

Here you are, coal black child of a distant star
calling out in a language as old as time, "I am hungry!
Hungry for more! Fill my belly with mama's milk,
my lungs with god's free air, and let me grow strong,
straight and brave--brave enough to dream through
all this dreaded darkness."

Oakland, August, 1967

If the quick spirits in your eye
Now languish, and anon must die;
If every sweet, and every grace
Must fly from that forsaken face;
  Then, Celia, let us reap our joys,
  Ere Time such goodly fruit destroys.

Or if that golden fleece must grow
Forever, free from agèd snow;
If those bright suns must know no shade,
Nor your fresh beauties ever fade;
  Then fear not, Celia, to bestow
  What, still being gathered, still must grow.

Thus, either Time his sickle brings
In vain, or else in vain his wings.

Birds singing
in the dark
—Rainy dawn.

I am reclaiming silence inside a crowded skull

deconstructing voices once gracefully assembled

I am rewiring panic into reasonable hums

manifesting madness as a casual observer

I am watching the sun retreat into shade

as if overwhelmed by its own creations

I am consumed by an obscure obligation

finding sense in shattered jaw logic

I can never blink fast enough

so many perceptions denying reality

I am doing my best for an accidental existence

one operating under the illusion of transparency