The weather report
        has one hitch:
It never rains
        on the rich

Your water balloon will always miss
Their lips are dry when they kiss
In a flood they float yachts
In the nose, no snots

When huddled masses lose all
        slammed by tsunami
The rich on high ground
        donate salami
Point a hose at a rich woman,
        she will point you to jail
(and you will go there
        without fail)

Their roof never leaks
Their grass has no dew
The toilet won’t clog
        with their poo

The rich man is one lucky fella
A poor man like me
        will hold his umbrella

In your bleeding cross-section I count
three centuries of wooden wisdom
since that mother cone dropped
on soil no one owned.
Black bears scratched backs
against your young bark. Ohlone
passed peacefully on their path
to the waters of La Honda Creek.

In my lifetime you groaned.
Your bark filled with beetles.
Woodpeckers drilled, feasted.
Needles, whole limbs,
you shed your clothes,
stood naked. I cut your flesh.  

You walloped the earth, creating a trench
two hundred feet long where you lie.
As you fell in your fury
you destroyed my tomatoes,
smashed the daffodils,
snapped a dogwood.

Better you crush my garden than my house
which did not exist nor any of this town
when you first advanced one tender green.
I want to believe the sawtooth less cruel
than another winter of storms.

All good fathers must fall.
Your children surround you,
waving, blocking the light.
My children count rings,
hands sticky with sap.

Q. Is all lumber female?
A. No, only the pretty boards.
Q. Is that why those nasty two-by-fours are called studs?
A. In darkness within walls
they support our lives.

Used to be half a dozen gray geese
in our town's central pond.
Used to strut out on the road
to attack trucks. Grills, tires. Pecking.
If you honked a car horn at them,
then you were speaking their language.
They'd hiss and cuss you out.
Folks in town got so fed up
with those geese that we did exactly that:
fed up on them.

So, stranger,  
welcome to our local tavern.
Let me buy you a drink.
Just don’t cuss anybody.

I am building a brace for the front porch
of my brother who is on the other side
of that door listening with headphones
to a recording of Chinese poetry
(in Mandarin, which he understands)
while he is dying, slowly,
brain cell by brilliant brain cell
in that rocking chair
whose joints are creaking,
coming undone.

He no longer remembers his phone number
or how to count change at the grocery store.
He is in denial of any problem
as he grows younger, ever younger
shedding years like snakeskins
while the crack in the porch grows wider, ever wider
so out here in the rain
I set four-by-fours upright as posts,
then I **** four-by-eights as beams
     lifting on my shoulder
     held by my hands
     pushing with my legs
     transferred through my spine
     anchored by my feet
as the useless joists of the deck
drop termite **** onto my eyebrows
like taunts of children:
nya nya you can’t fix this.
But I can brace it for a while.

Long enough, at least
for my brother to forget ten languages.
I will repair that rocking chair.
I will buy diapers, rubber sheets,
install grab bars in the shower.
I won’t let his porch collapse
out here in the rain.
I will cradle these boards
like a baby in my arms.

His speech is rough,
his work is smooth.
Wait.
Don’t make him talk.

His tools can maim
or make an angel.
He has wrinkles like wood grain,
memories like wood scraps.
Wait, and he’ll carve one.

The stories come
gnarled, with knotholes.
Listen.  
He chuckles like a chisel
working old walnut.

there is magic in concrete
        if you believe

when you work the surface
        flat, in circles,
the float tool buoyant
        on a gray puddle
here’s the enchantment:
with fingertips on the handle you can
        sense the wet concrete, the mojo
        like a sleeping wet bear
solid in mass yet grudgingly liquid
        sort of bouncy
        as you stroke

pebbles disappear, embedded
the tool is ******* cement
        a final thin film, a pretty coat
        over guts of gravel and sand

now hose the mixer, shovels, tools,
        hose your hands and boots
as the water disappears, so shall you
        unless you scratch a name

honor the skilled arms,
        the corded legs and vertebral backs
        the labor that shaped
this odd stone
        sculpted, engineered
        implanted with bolts
forgotten
half-buried in dirt
bearing our lives