Swirl devil wind,
reek dusty havoc.
A mustang watches.

Silly hermit crab,
try on a new home,
a Budlight can.

Longacres racetrack,
ghost horses called to post
by Boeing trumpets.

I would decoupage
our love.
Life for art's sake.

My hanging fucshia
attracts a humming bird.
The nectar's on me.

" I was not looking for a cage
       In which to mope in my old age." --- W H Auden

Turning sixty-five is not without its pleasures,
though the parameters of youth are rendered void.
You discover illusions are become a virtual reality,
a chimera you never outlived whose core is unmalleable.

So, one finds solace in their granddaughter,
who is unshackled by your paradoxes,
who presupposes only links to the obtainable.
And yet, she loves her "silly grandpa".

Old age is unexpected and doubt arises in the doctrine of wisdom,
a daily glass of prune juice becoming regiment.
Yet, granddaughters can connect the dots,
and, just maybe, afford us that second chance.

In those days all thinking took place in his heart.
It had no favorite suburb, no shelter that was home,
immersed, as he was, in the Mojave of humanity,
memories of only former places through which he'd drifted.

Yes, there were women, storms of passion, brevity in bed.
Today, they only took him back in time,
reconstructing scenarios more of actions never taken.
Bedposts served as bivouacs for the nomad.

Here in this desert water assumes a circumstance,
the nomad becoming as fond of it as ambition.
Here silence need not be kept at bay, rather welcomed in,
though it looks down upon him in uncertainty.

Out there on the horizon he hears a sigh,
a mother tongue corresponding to his own.

To this life,
replete in unconnected fragments,
           you are glue,
                       bonding disjointed existence,
                       exhalting impassioned communication,
                       raising love beyond visible heights.
                                       There are no sounds without receiver;

what good are nimble thoughts,
           without the same --- a lover
             with whom to share?
                       Every separation is a link,
                                making closer the rendezvous.
                       Every revelation a mortar,
                                 cementing admiration in opposites.
                                           I need to know

the unknowable you,
            dissimilar as we are,
            routinely disagreeing,
                        reinforcing our mutuality.
                                             O delicious paradox,

delight me,
           in the not knowing
           in the riddles
                     of relationships.
                                          We both appreciate

Carroll's Rules of Jam ---
         Jam tomorrow or jam yesterday,
                      but never jam today.
                                           My trusted ally,

who but we,
           shall prevail against such logic?
           Let's share
                     *six impossible beliefs
                                         before breakfast.

The rotten fruit shall be shaken* --- W. H. Auden

Do they somehow envision sainthood in the homeless
or extol the virtue of the millions toiling for minimum wage;
see themselves as the feudal overlords of trickle-down,
their enormous profits banquet omelets for the common good?

You know the politics whereof I speak,
the Me, Myself and I of anachronistic yesterdays,
the concave years of soup-kitchens supporting high-rise condos
and batshit crazy presidential candidates admiring selfies.  

I wonder if it's all because they can't reach ******;
impotence and pharmaceuticals which fuel our economy?
A nation moans from the exhaustion of despair with
forgotten cityscapes of odorous blacks and blues.

She has decided to grow her hair.
Not for frugal reasons, mind you,
rather, to see the extent of the future.
Or, how tangled it might become at length.
Why do women grow their hair?,
she postures to the mirror.
It's like deciding to go to market,
when there's already sufficient in the pantry.
Pouring water through the tresses
to cool like an Icelandic fjord,
trickling bubbles down to a spurious sea.
The squeakings bring enjoyment,
a sense of karmic victory.
*Knot it and make mysterious!

They had begun to question consciousness,
turning solid matter into fuzziness in their brains,
rendering not atoms, nor photons, nor particles,
only cold energy, halucenogenic stardust joints.
For the exclusionary few to whom the material
had never meant **** to a tree or a **** to a rabbit,
it was the cash-cow of quantum reality,
ambiguous poetry for a Beat Generation,
Uncertainty in free verse chapbooks.
So they wrote of our interconnectedness ---
the Ginsbergs, the Levertovs, the Ferlinghettis ---
till the gravity of space-mind curved imagination,
a nation falling unheard without a whimper in the forest.

She came down from Mt. Rainier
wearing khaki park ranger's garb,
a female Moses descending Sinai,
clutching a leather chapbook,
survival notes for a “Dangerous Life”.
Nightingales were songbirds for the grief,
as MS stole in like 'Frisco fog,
unnoticed by a comet-blinded public.
And when the awards came,
strokes of jackpot luck,
acquired enthusiasms soon were
dropped in excruciating back spasms.
She touted poetry as civic-glue,
paste for a populist purpose.
Olympia’s oracle rarely leaves the house,
curtains drawn, newspapers unread,
writing feverishly, as “The Body Mutinies”.

“Beyond the Last Lamp”
                            (Near Tooting Common)


By Thomas Hardy

                                 I

While rain, with eve in partnership,
Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,
Beyond the last lone lamp I passed
                 Walking slowly, whispering sadly,
                 Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:
Some heavy thought constrained each face,
And blinded them to time and place.


                                II


The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed
In mental scenes no longer orbed
By love’s young rays. Each countenance
                 As it slowly, as it sadly
                 Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance,
Held in suspense a misery
At things which had been or might be.


                                III


When I retrod that watery way
Some hours beyond the droop of day,
Still I found pacing there the twain
                 Just as slowly, just as sadly,
                 Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were
And what wild woe detained them there.


                                IV


Though thirty years of blur and blot
Have slid since I beheld that spot,
And saw in curious converse there
                 Moving slowly, moving sadly
                 That mysterious tragic pair,
Its olden look may linger on—
All but the couple; they have gone.


                V


Whither? Who knows, indeed. ... And yet
To me, when nights are weird and wet,
Without those comrades there at tryst
                 Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
                 That lone lane does not exist.
There they seem brooding on their pain,
And will, while such a lane remain.

Memories diffuse,
like sunbeams glint off a lake,
become phenomena, evade the tangible.
In unsteady light I see my father
rowing toward our favorite fishing cove,
the wavelets of our wake
real as that late August evening.

We bait our hooks, conversation
merely phatic communion\ I know he's cheating on Mom.
Words anchor heavy.
As my face turns into the wind
to dry tears without his seeing,
questions rise in my throat,
like a volcano about to erupt,
but I have no voice to ask them.

So we sit, dangle mono-filament
thoughts in dying twilight.
Father and son,
brooding statues of Buddha,
mute as bullhead on the bottom.

Seafood stew
A basil, saffron brew
Sea Robin, Congre, Scorpion Fish

Pernod provides a hint of flavor licorice
Vegetables and shellfish help complete the dish

For authentic travel to Marseille
Ambrosia's put in play
Bouillabaisse

My first sense of the aversion raised by Frost,
Walls swelled under, yet, I could not exhaust
The barriers confronted on life's twisted path.
Too enervating loosing one's sole ****** wrath,
I pierce the wall that poets have not crossed
And speak to you, my audience, in verse,
Trusting the directed words that I asperse
Will convey the meaning hoped to impart,
Even more, some verbal beauty from my art,
Into which, fair reader, you elatedly immerse.
Gratified, I, the poet, have but you to thank,
The wall of separation loses one more plank,
Between us communication is not lost,
Better that understanding be dispersed.

We speak and therefore are, Descartes,
Worth much more than gold or any cost.

Heroic in the face of fate,
nooses cinched about the nape,
ransomed at the city's gate,
sackcloth their adorning drape.

Bearing keys to England's King,
the six against a town compared.
Bad omens that their death may bring,
thus the burghers' lives were spared.

Redds shine like new nickels on the dark river bottom,
salmon have returned to spawn the Deschutes,
navigating by primal memories written in DNA,
an internal Tom-Tom GPS wired in their brains.

Watching them struggle up the ladder,
consumed with a drive to leave offspring,
they are herculean athletes battling
the current and the inexorable pull of gravity.

Were these the fry I helped to seed four years ago?
A Squaxin woman told me once,
ghosts of her Coastal Salish ancestors
ride the salmon out to sea and home again.

Roe in these redds dream also of the sea,
their salty eyes and nostrils perceiving
spirits in secret claret-red kelp beds.
The waters ask only to be haunted again.

Through the airport window pane
isolated, I watched the jet
traverse the field in silent shimmering motion.
My vagrant gaze remained
fixed upon the infinite horizon
long after the shadowy
plane had passed from view.
This seemed to me to parallel
my motionless furtive feelings,
as after one I've loved
has migrated in another season.

It was not long after this
that she re-entered the room,
bathed in the murmur of
alluring fragrance which
quickly drew my mind from
the solitude of thought to
a sensual appreciation of her perfume.
How easily she drew my mind astray
from pleasant thought of you and yesterday.
I recalled how earlier this morning,
as she lay neither asleep, nor awake,
but somewhere in between,
I had tried to touch her outstretched hand,
yet, uncannily she had withdrawn it.
The smoke that wafted above our bed then
was the only pervading reality and
not the Mona Lisa smile on her face,
nor the emptiness of my longing hand.

She's said, She's ready ---
--- that her bags are packed ---
and shouldn't we be going?
Yes, Yes I suppose it's time.
And a wind howling in my brain recalled,
I'd either been here once before or
seen it etched upon an empty sky.

It's a feminine eye that first detects
absurdity as a condition of existence.
In the deepest resources of my unconscious,
in that place where ego slept in the ****,
I knew she saw through me like
Roentgen X-rays of my soul.
Ultimately, it was my pride that
caused us to fly in different ways;
burning love had poured
from the lamps of our bodies,
shrouded in mystery,
like the day of a king or
more adroitly the nights of a queen.
We had found identity, yet
all signs of subtlety,
any shred of relationship,
were forfeit to the pale mackerel sky.

It'll all be over in about eight minutes,
Give or take, depending on your side of the Earth,
Plasma therapy for the masses.
Just like that, we're all crispy critters,
Pork rind skins flavored with dehydrated sea-salt.
That beautiful aurora-generating magnetosphere,
Shrinking daily, as the planet's poles reverse,
Will puncture like a too thin prophylactic.
The Christians will have just minutes,
Reminding us that we were prophesized
To all go out in fire and overlooking
That we're actually being ionized with radiation ---
A mere trifle to the True-Believers.
Will the Dow-Jones sell off in those final moments?
Will the Russians attempt to launch a Soyuz?
The Brits will take it all in stride with another pint;
Aussies venture on their final walkabout.
As for me, I'm gonna saddle up a pony
heading straight out to greet the Joshua trees.
I want to meet annihilation on my own terms.

I have hidden incognito a decade in this desert,  
enscounced in the Bad Lands of a wasted life,  
evading both politics and the Bureau of Statistics,  
immersed in maths for senseless games of chance.

I forget promises and birthdays with equal disregard,  
attempt mental reconstructions of past events,  
seeking the forgiveness I have no power to grant,  
all my atoms expanding heirlooms of critical mass.

The gravitational attraction of lifelong friendships,  
dithers perception at the horizon of a span of years,  
warping the wormhole space between our arms, our minds.  
I need only for you to ask that I should stay.

Dusk and dust envelop this intriguing Amish couple,
as she watches through the windshield of her parked car.
She's been observing sporadically for well on seven weeks,
as they've taken the old relic of a house
from disrepair to today's refurbished splendor.
It will be their home.

Away in the adjacent field, his straw hat barely visible,
an elder guides a team of Belgians five across
from the furrows of the tract toward the dying sunlight.
She follows them with her eyes, marveling their magnificence
and his unassuming control of their power.
They are the source of the dust.

Outside the house another Amish woman, perhaps
their mother, unhanging clothes, while a baby
plays upon a blanket on the ground. Black bonnet on her head,
flowing soft blue dress, and bib apron, she works
serenely as the sun melts warmly down the western sky,
leaving in its wake the dusk.

Dwindling moments of a day that mark a turning point
for the young couple and their unseen spectator.
For them a place to make a loving home amongst
their brethren and for her a revelation in her life.
She's committed once again to love's entanglements.
Dusk and dust have claimed another.

He sits atop the fence,
a transient from the endless circus,
eyeing a prickly pear cactus flower.

Meditating its ephemeral beauty,
he asks the eternal question:
Fleeting flower of yellow and pink,
is the will to charm still there?

My son, how could I not
be charmed by your
exquisite roar, followed by
the delicate blooming of your innocence?

Then remember me that I
may remember our predicament!

Onyx night drinks up the stars,
swallows the moon alive,
a constrictor engulfs
my eyes as prey.

Ghost roars its displeasure,
lest mortals dare to stare,
past the line of trees,
that burns to galactic core.

My sight averts the horizon,
forcing this universe
to make quantum choices,
who sees what and when.

Concinnity of rapid motion in balance and proportion,
round the ballroom, like the synchronized frequency
of vibration in a crystal quartz. Whirling contortion
of bodies embraced in movement's revealing intimacy.

They are partners. They are dancers. They are lovers
wantonly stoking libido's hot glowing embers;
promenade affirming keen awareness to the vigors
of the steps, footfalls and technique of its pretenders.

Gown and tux attired, passionate accessories to the cult;
merengue, fox-trot, rhumba, abandonment's fertility rites
to gods and goddesses, danced with such elegant result,
they are immortalized in time --- divine service to the night.

Put on the old LPs tonight, Alex,
from a time long before you were born.
Top of the queue was Petula Clark
belting out Don't Give Up,
defiant as an alley cat in a street fight.

Remembered how in her heyday,
she'd been forced to conceal
the fact that she was married ---
all performers being mysteriously
virginal in those days.

Thoughts segue several years
to my time in the service and
a female lieutenant who was my OIC.
Served a 20 year career,
but never knew a finer officer.

She realized leadership was saying
the things that made you want to follow.
Just after making captain,
due to pregnancy, she was forced
to terminate her service career.

Today, women routinely travel in space,
perform extreme surgeries,
design skyscrappers;
one just might become president.

And somewhere in the tenements of NYC
a young poet spins metaphor
straight from the streets and the cosmos,
constructing a world in lines
we'd all wish to enter.

Changing buses at Flamingo and Decatur,
a Sister ogles my comped leather jacket,
while braceros mill about across the street,
awaiting any drive-by job offer.

This is the Vegas never seen from the Strip;
a town of cheap gifts and off-the-books labor,
where paychecks disappear in Dollar Loan Centers,
every cranny packing a local's casino.

A hundred taxis queue outside the Palms,
like pilot fish seeking ectoparasites upon a shark.
Inside the thousand dollar escorts hustle
overextended gamblers busting hard 16's at the tables.

I told the Sister I'd won the jacket. Impressing
her that anyone would ever be a winner,
watched her intentionally cross the street
to invite a bracero out to breakfast.

The 103 bus downtown ran late.
Leaving my losing parlay tickets on the bus,
I walk through the parking lot of despair,
the casino's glass doors awaiting me.

Durgan
for J.M.

At Durgan waves are black as cypresses,
clear as the water of a wishing well,
caressing the stones with smooth palms, looking
into the pools as enigmatic eyes
peer into mirrors, or music echoes
out of a wood the waking dreams of day,
blind eyelids lifting to a coloured world.

Now with averted head your living ghost
walks in my mind, your shadow leans
over the half-door of dream; your footprint lies
where gulls alight; shade of a shade, you laugh.
But separate, apart, you are alive:
you have not died, therefore I am alone.

Like birds, cottages white and grey
alert on rocks are gathered, or low
under branches, dark but not desolate;
shells move over sand, or seaweed gleams
with their clear yellow, as tides recede.
Serene in storm or eloquent in sunlight
sombre Durgan where no strangers come
awaits us always, but is always lost:
we are separate, sharing no secrets, each alone;
you will listen no more, now, to the sounding sea.

Regardless how precise the assay of their life,
Most men must remain an enigma;
Their motivation fired by inner strife
A polymorph for which no sigma,
Nor algebraic symbol will suffice.

No If and then which personality
To a course of action thus relates,
Nor can it be hypothesized conditionally,
The turmoil emotion intrinsically creates,
When alone they stare into death's reality.

Two dimensional is the biography of any man.
We see his length and width, never grasping depth,
Though fortune deems we live within his span.
Much like this into my life have crept
Those I love, yet may never understand.

.                                I.

The sand is perfect ripples undulating to the bay,
as the 6:00 A.M sun flashes open a sulfur-eye,
yawns and apologizes for its January warmth.
She emerges her tent, much as she has entered the world,
naked, but filled with wonder and an attitude.
The glassy water winks her an invitation,
morning's blank canvas beach
etched only by random footprints of seabirds.
Taking advantage of the serenity,
haltingly slipping between the waves,
her skin bristles, subsumes cool ocean freshness,
surfboard bobs obediently at her side.

                            II.

On this planet we have friends, who
pose no questions and pass no criticisms,
who the more they trust, the less
we can afford to make a mistake.

                            III.

Like a pat of butter skimming a hot pan,
she lolls blissfully on the board, soaking up scenery,
heedless to the approach from the rear,
yet, sensing she is being watched.
Dorsal fins break the water's surrounding skin,
as a pod of bottlenoses dance and play,
pretend to be oblivious, as she floats within their sights.
Their presence startles, still, she quietly observes their folly,
willing them to come ever closer ...
Her outstretched hand beckons them to
circle with puppy-like curiosity.

                            IV.

Arguably, the perfect couple is a mother and child;
babies do more to females than make them mothers,
they bond them in a sisterhood of knowing recognition,
to which others need not apply.

                          V.

Coriolis swirl of scarred dolphin bodies evades inquiring fingertips,
eye of the alpha-female fixed intently on the floating visitor,
who in turn looks back in shared wonder ---
between two mothers of the Earth, a psychic trust is formed.
The bottlenose rolls a streamlined fusiform body,
revealing  a smaller version of her own,
tucked safely against her white underbelly.
The sun was racing Apollo's arc, as they silently
slipped beneath the plane and were gone.
She knows they've been fending off shark attack,
wishes for a way to fend off trawlers with gill nets.
A singled tear rolls down her cheek,
trickles off the board to merge with salty blue beneath,
reaching compassionately for her sister in the sea.

You would not come with me
through constellations of Jack-in-the-Pulpit,
your reasons shrouded in obscurity.
I went there once to pray ---
Did I tell you? ---
I spied a grey squirrel
gnawing a cherished butternut
in a fury of drunken hunger;
forgot at once my prayers.

You went instead, alone
to the Kingdom of the Mushroom.
I sealed my mouth
afraid to enter there.
You saw violent phosphorous rivers and
vivid galloping colors,
that were of mystical internal origin.

We might have eaten
vine-ripe strawberries and
drunk cold mountain water,
that gushed from the mouth of
the cave under the cliff.

Perhaps, like me you were afraid,
terrified by florid fields and familiar female.
How sad ---
Sometimes I am so dense ---
I should have told you,
*I went there in the distance
as a girl.

Sadness never signalled us a sign from the cosmos,
left us to decipher the bones of history in quest of omens.
Unheeded, despair overflowed us like a desert sand storm,
buried us in credit ennui and economic laissez-faire.

World leaders formed escalating groups, G-5, G-12, G-20,
still the banks camouflaged in oppressor's language,
invented derivatives against all uncertainty, save their own,
till Wall Street acquired the stench of backed up urinals.

Only when the desperate sallied into the world's streets,
emoting songs that gushered from the wells of outrage,
did rolling blackouts of democracy unearth the buried cities,
freeing a wind that whispers ruin in uncompromising sunlight.

We sat in the overlook above the Serpent Mound
in the heat of that garish July afternoon,
sunlight scorching our pallid skin,
like rays through a magnifying glass,
till we could endure no more and
sought the shroud of skyscraper elms ---
halfway houses of leaf, bark and cellulose.
Minutes before we'd signed our names in the visitors book,
like giddy high-schoolers autographing a yearbook,
recording our wayward lover's sojourn
to a site the Hopewell worshipped in celebration of existence.

For what purpose do we worship this ground?
I wondered as we walked beside the curving icon,
that undulated in rolled earthen coils down the *****,
sine-waves loosed from a colossal oscilloscope.
Are these coils symbolic of our future's meandering relationship?
Her exploring hand upon my ****
drew me from thought to evaluation of this unexpected caress.
But for the heat, I'd have shown her what idle foreplay begets!
Great Serpent, this was not Eden's carnal karma
acted out in a second Genesis! ---
though a symbolic egg spews from your mouth.

Two souls once stood against the night,
upon a mountain in a distant valley.
And there in anguished shrieks on loud,
screamed most primitive betrothal vows.

Now many winds have swept the mountain's face
and time has run its endless jagged course,
while the souls like frightened deer have run
to where the frozen brook of fear was sprung.

The great stag drank and was refreshed,
though heart and soul were nearly drown.
The white doe running on to catch a dream,
fearing turbid waters of the foreboding stream.

I cannot save the beauty of a snowflake,
for the warmth of my love will melt it.
And severed will those souls remain,
divorced by nature for its wanton selfish gain.

With snow capped peak bending like a finger,
Gilboa Mountain beckons me to come.
Yet, I fear my hopeless mind must be depraved,
for it offers me a home, I'd sooner call a grave.

"And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger."
                                        --- Leonard Cohen

I'm the most surprised person on the planet.
Your coming to see me off at the airport
has my mind scratching glass seeking words.
Why is it that in this relationship,
you seem to have gotten all the speaking parts?
You're well aware that I have loved you
for the better part of two years,
bottling that emotion, afraid to pop the cork.
Your eyes implore mine, rotating like
a searchlight over Baghdad seeking
the stealth laying carnage to your heart.
Twice in the last week you've made it evident,
the Grail was mine, but for the drinking ---
That and finding a shorthand for adultry.
I'm guilty courting the love of a married woman,
made worse, you're here at my departure
telling me we aren't free to choose who we love.
I know my desire must die of thirst,
so I turn, boarding pass in hand,
the last words I ever hear from you,
Write me! --- Thirty-five years later I have.

Since those long ago days in Latin class,
I have endeavored to speak your echo, Crystal.
How I longed to be amongst your trusted inner circle!
Alas, I had no voice then to speak these things to you.

Mrs. Tinkler must have sensed my blocked emotions;
always coupled we two to do textual translations.
I deferred and let you be the intellectual leader
feeling wholly given over to being your infatuated scribe.

It was always your property to be simpatico;
you were the giver of kindness and smiles,
your latent brilliance subsumed by outward caring.
What forlorn chance did my jejune heart have?

And now, at length, I can finally speak these things,
trusting in the smiles that touching substance brings.

Meteor streaks an onyx sky,
thoughts vaporize without a tail

Words have seized the winds,
usurped control from ideas

Page absorbs a mutant slang,
lines malinger with an attitude

Inspiration silhouettes reason,
unblemished by banality

Grant language mellifluence or
condemn the poet to monologue

Lost are themes, jewels of a lifetime
separated by melancholy vicissitudes

I cannot restore the lakes that teemed with fish,
nor the maples cultivated by the Mohawk,
the Adirondacks now more remote than boyhood,
a lost dark conversation with jejune oblivion.

Events became the storyline of my life,
and events were always stronger than resolve.
My journey took me inward without time schedule,
dredged up expediencies as layovers.

Still, I felt drawn to the people,
who bejeweled my dreams in neuron flashes,
became therapy, billboards along the escape route.
Turned out that vital knowledge would suffice.

Nowadays, when I see the ocean foam
slick the beach like a colossal latte,
when the autumn forests change
their primary colors playing leaf-frog,
when the jonquils fight up through
springtime snow-melt in defiant coalescence,
I remember that last day I saw you,
your *** swaying in those white shorts,
a mesmerizing metronomic heat in pants.
Ordinarily, I would not speak such things aloud,
but then, regret tends to amplify
walking empty streets at night
with only icy stares from stars to reprove me.
Eventually, I'll slumber beneath my satin comforter,
and dreams will dance like the aurora
at the foot of my half-empty bed.
It's then I'll see those legs again,
emerging from the white cotton shorts,
yet, no cosmic connection will bring
this vision to the woman haunting it.

I.

Sunday mornings in Vancouver
even pigeons sleep in till 10 A.M.
Undaunted, I walk down Granville shortly before 8
seeking lox bagels with capers, red onions and cream cheese,
two breve lattes, and a newspaper. In truth,
panhandlers on the corner of Robson
have far greater chance of scoring.
An unexpectedly sunny February morn
suffices to spur me on. I am attuned to all vibration.
Breath of the awakening city
exhales manna upon the shop awnings.
Bagels rendered superfluous,
I scarf images instead ---
trolley buses, an umbrella shop, falafel stands ---
delicious Canadian visual cuisine.

                                 II.

Vancouver is a nymph. Of that I'm sure.
I hear flirtatious giggles trill
from darkened alleys between hotels.
Spotted her once across the street on Dunsmuir,
seated on a walk bench reading a Margaret Atwood novel.
Bus passed between us and she vanished.
Caught a later glimpse through the window
of a walk-up dim sum restaurant in Chinatown.
Flew the stairs, only to find an empty table and
discarded napkin smudged with candy pink lipstick.
She watches me.

                                                III.

Turns out there are no Sunday morning papers in Vancouver,
but I locate the bagels and espresso backtracking on Helmcken.
The barista smiles as I approach, sets down her Atwood novel.
I leave a Toonie in gratuity.
B.C. wind pushes ******* my turned back,
as I rush our breakfast back to the Executive.
A nymph goes roller-blading by toward False Creek.
The Gastown Steam Clock whistles that it's 10 A.M.
A flock of pigeons lifts in flight.

Third day of this trek descending
rapidly from cloud forest into high jungle habitat,
alive with hummingbirds and orchids,
her Q'ero porters guide the tour group
to Intipunko, "Gate of the Sun".
At 4:30 AM and 10,000 feet altitude
biting cold cracks stone, eats exposed flesh,
stealing breath as she gulps pale sunlight.
Coca leaves wadded in her cheek
forge mind against the acts of atmosphere.
A lifelong pilgrimage to this purpose,
observation of the sunrise over Machu Picchu.

The Q'ero pass around a sack of pemmican.
What meat it is, she doesn't ask.
It smells of canvas, but tastes of apricot.
Her fate entrusted to these guides,
she eats what they offer.
This Inca Trail is marked with their scent;
they follow signposts painted on thin air,
read morning mists like road maps.
They have brought her to this citadel,
Lost City of Peace and Power.
Her life for now at equinox,
shaman-guides have opened her vision
to the hitching post of the sun.

She's manifested today like a ghost
appearing from a haunted house.
Desertion is that inhabited manor
from which the voices in her head
urge her into exile, urge her phantom existence.
Sitting upon the berm overlooking
the beach and lighthouse of Coos Bay,
she wishes she could ride the setting
Pacific sun to New Guinea or beyond.
Below five athletic young women
contest the physics of a soccer ball,
imagining the red-white lighthouse a goal.
In other times she'd ask to join them,
but she must lose her personal history now,
remain hidden in plain sight.
The loneliness of this subsistence
a charnel house blackening her heart.
She's Amelia Earhart about to crash
the Yukon's heartbroken cry.

Toss away sheltering umbrella,
Seek to samba triumphant in the rain.
Edit dramatic doldrums from the novella,
Relate an easy tongue of the urbane.

Call a friend as helpful lifeline,
Castle Queenside for defense,
Debate the speed of light with Einstein,
Let love be your sixth sense.

Swim out through the breakers,
Surf the hurricane back home,
Reject the quackery of fakers,
Let rain cloud be your geodesic dome.

Vilify politics of standstill,
Wink the lowlands of the moon.
Pitch an idea to the gristmill,
Sing impromptu to typhoon.

In soft darkness my aura of sadness emanates.
O'er cresting notes my lonely whistle treads.
Night birds sing to me their potentate
And lull the drifting images in my head.

All this my emptiness devours,
It feeds upon such times and moods.
My youthful optimism cowers;
Ideals tonight are mere exotic foods.

Do not look for me 'neath street lamps.
I shun the light, as wolves would shun a fire,
Preferring the company of street tramps,
Who seem to understand a man's desires.

So foolish are the rash, deceiving hearts,
Which convince our minds that love is rare,
For not infrequently a couple parts,
Never realizing the secret was to care.

I peer behind
a tattered paperback
in hopes to glimpse
her satin lingerie,
praying my laundry's
spin cycle runs
on molasses,
rather than quarters.
Phantom of the Laundromat,
got to get a life!

that I ran into my friend Vic was a good thing
because we leaned on the shadowy cars and he gave me
some new words:  Faith,  Reconciliation,  Continuance.
But driving home, they began to fill me up with grief
so I tossed them out the window like a finished cigarette.

And I went down to talk to the creek, who was filled with a grief
of her own, a grief of too much water having fallen
in too few days.  And she had me dash my empty beer bottles
against her tortured stones that night, had me make
the shrill cry of a hawk as I let each one fly.
And with each crash she gave me back my former words,
my old & tarnished words, the fs and ts
honed sharp enough to really hurt somebody bad.   And sharp
enough to hack a trench into my chest, so the water could roll in
like freshened blood, roaring the way it roars against
the creekstones:  girl you're alive, alive, alive . . .

I call the creek a woman because she had a woman's wisdom,
a woman's bitter tears, even had the housewife's old cliché
about how all love ends in either death, or separation
from those we love.  And the creek made me remember
how they want you to believe the only way off the meathook
is by dying first.
She said: *whatever you do, whatever you do
don't let yourself be the one who dies first.

The fundamental phenomena in nature are symmetrical
with respect to interchange of past and future.* --- Richard Feynman

                 Millions for Defense

In the Cabinet room of Monticello, clutching Decatur's letter,
the President removes his wire-rimmed glasses ---
Frigate Philadelphia has been burned.
Decanting a bourbon, he pours and quaffs.
Outside in the piazza the cicadas' din is unbroken.
The Pasha of Tripoli has his tribute!
In three short hours warm rays of sunlight
will greet the outstretched arms of Earth,
but for now the bourbon scintillates.
Ink splatters on the blotter,
as he pounds a clenched fist upon the desk.
Not one cent!, he pronounces to the wall-clock.
Cicadas hold sway in the Charlottsville night,
but on the Barbary Coast a fire is raging.

"In Modern Drama we turn a critical eye
   into the conditions of real life and morality." --- Arlen Rambush


           Modern Drama 101

Her life had become an Ibsen scenario,
cloaked, as it was, in furtive AOL chat rooms,
seeking the romance no longer orbed in marriage,
rather to be panned from the internet wellspring.

It wasn't so much inconstancy, as it was whimsy;
more a channeling of Deneuve, than profiling Gabler.
And she found they flocked to her,
pigeons to be shooed away, should they get too close.

Soul of the house, everything to husband and family,
yet, it was in cyber tryst where she flourished,
that informed the powerful intellect at intervals
with mother and a carte blanche ingénue.

It's possible she sought to reform them,
tear them down --- or no --- it was conquest.
It was not she that needed men,
it was she that absorbed them in hedonistic pleasure.

The stars once more have lost their race
Through night-sky versus mercurial moon.
In this defeat no dishonor will debase
Futile efforts to intersect upon the lune.

Desert scents of juniper and Mormon Tea
Waft fragrant above the comfort fire smoke.
Banana yucca roasting at my knee,
Fleshy fruit consumption for us hungry folk.

Nevada nights nip raw this time of year;
Our lot is cast by glowing embers,
Whose reflector stones essential to survival,
Stave off cold that we need not fear
Frostbite to peripheral members,
Till sunlight returns with warmth's revival.

I would like this life of endless
Greyhound time schedules to cease.

What self-inflicted alien abduction
tore me from the valley of my birth,

leaving me to wander empty streets,
each the branch of a coppiced maze?

I grow weary of quotidian fastfood buffets
downed with the aid of espresso baristas.

My legs have lost the muscle-memory
that strode the river cliffs with no regard.

Time to end the sleepwalk of forty years;
rejoin the forward guard of Iroquois.

You do the math and I'll provide the irrationals,
as I tend to cling to panic in the asymmetry of life.
In this Twenty-First century women still suffer
from laws streaming out of councils of men.
These are not self-stabbing heroines,
they do not ask the heavy deluge of derision.
They are faced with laws stemming from an abbatoir,
from men who wish to usurp the birthright.
Men who have become strangers to their own mothers,
men whose ***** dispense a fouled milk,
men who deserve an **** ultrasound colonoscopy.
So, I beg you to balance the inequality of the equation,
gather our sisters in this non-Euclidean space:
this is one we solve by inspection!

At the going down of the sun
will the world be less complete,
the cinched robe of night less intolerable,
as she ebbs away on cosmic string,
emulating a massless, dazed neutrino
blinking in and out of existence,
unobserved and uneffected,
liquored and unloved?

In the wake of a June flowering,
when foxglove lures the honeybee
in six day flash, bud to corolla,
blossom to blossom, parade of stigmas,
digitalis stamen braved, anther at his back,
the bee comes gathering where none else dare.

Mr. Ivories

entertains with elan,
daily during cocktails on the mezzanine level.
Jolene always orders a Black Russian,

mine is a Dewar's and water.
We drop a fiver in his basket on the Steinway,
along with a request for "Ebb Tide",

Jolene's personal favorite.
He conjures an image of Fred Astaire at keyboard,
his tails flipped elegantly over the piano bench,

like long black raven's plumes.
Jolene points out two announcers from CNN,
seated opposite. Makes us feel

important by mere association.
Our waitress asks, would we like another round
before the hour's end, as we speculate

about Mr. Ivories' musical propensity.
Time escapes in moonlit harmonic vapors,
leaves us already longing our next soiree.