On the bus

Her carmine lips move

when she texts.

Her Converse low tops

paddle the floor of the bus.

I wonder what

private happiness

has etched joy lines

so clearly on her face,

as her thumbs

dance and race

across the touch screen

of her phone.

Friend or family

in a distant time zone

who would be awake

at this early hour?

Pandemonium in the pond

The toads were in full chorus

this morning, lustily singing

in the marshy pond in the pit

that formed after the Navy

family housing had been removed,

refreshed by the new year's rain.

Those homes had to go.

The soil beneath them,

was radioactive, spoiled

with cesium-137 and radium

from the USS Pandemonium,

a full-sized fake ship built to train

sailors how to decontaminate 

ships after a nuclear attack.

Now it's home for weeds and reeds,

and toads calling out: pick me.

morning news

It looked like

last night's newspaper

had exploded in the 

Embarcadero station.

The front section,

all war and politics,

weather and scandal,

promiscuously commingled

with gossip and sports.

Real estate promotions

scattered all over the floor.

A muddy footprint

on the face of a child

in some desperate place.

About size ten.

Famous logo.

What am I afraid to lose?

It sits there fat upon the page.

The big fat question I put up:

What are you afraid to lose?

I examine the inventory.

If I lost my sight (what's left of it)

I'd still remember those butterflies

and finches. And sunrises,

moonlight on granite,

the curve of a womanly hip.

Let's just say enough

to fill up thousands of pages.

Hearing? well much the same,

the voice of the Lowell High School choir

singing Amazing Grace (heard it twice)

would still live on in mind's ear.

Smell, must not neglect

citrus orchards in bloom,

coffee brewing, or plumeria,

petrichor (rain on dry earth),

the musk of a lover aroused.

I can summon those too.

What would I create, absent

all those, blind, deaf, and dumb?

If I still had my hands I would make

things from sandpaper and wire,

scraps of silk, glass and fur,

poems made for the fingers.

There would still be the pleasure

of skin to skin friction and pressure,

perhaps more in the absence of all else.

So it would seem that the loss

of the senses would not be the worst,

because I'd still have my mind.

That would be pretty awful to lose,

to live in a world I don't understand

tormented by personal demons.

I don't know, perhaps I could slay them

wielding a broken umbrella like a sword.

What about love, could I live without it?

Probably not, but I trust that I won't,

the times when I don't never last for long.

I'm in love at the drop of a hat.

You might think how callow, how shallow,

but those moments don't fade with the decades.

And each one builds on the last.

However, that would be the greatest loss,

for all the things that I've mentioned

and all those I haven't (too many to mention)

depend on love. The moonlight, the songs

the scent of a lover, those damn butterflies

and gold finches.

If passion for those ebbed,

and there were no person whose eyes

I wanted to drown in, and no one who wanted

to drown in mine? I'd be afraid to lose that.

Here's the best part. I won't.

I've been assured that God loves me,

and you can make up your own mind

about that assertion, but the evidence

is plain to me, nothing ever once given

is truly lost.

Greensleeves

As the day waned

the carillon at St. Patricks rang

the lamenting tones

that the minstrels sang

when Elizabeth reigned.

Grass made the stains

on the sleeves of a maid

who laid in a meadow

with a man whose love

she refused, a sorrow

that still clings to the song.

And I remembered

the church in the desert

my father designed,

named for St. Margaret.

His buildings were mostly

the kind you'd probably ignore,

medical dental offices in a strip mall,

or bank branches.

But that one soars,

a high ceiling supported

by hammer truss beams,

and light reflected from the flanks

of the mountains behind it

bathe the apse and the nave

and the chancel.

Most of my life I've lived in places

named after saints. I can't claim

to have honored their names,

but I hope the only stains that I've made 

are the ones left by making love

in spring's new grass.

reading and riding

She said

Have you ever been to Southland Mall?

Sorry, I'm spying on your book.

(at top of the page I was reading,

the character is killing time at the mall

waiting for a call from his doctor

about the results of a MRI)

I said no, where is that?

She says In Hayward,

it's like a zombie mall

there's hardly anyone there.

No, I've never been there.

(and I have a flashback of George Romero's

Dawn of the Dead which takes place

almost entirely in a well lit modern mall,

zombies wandering through the aisles

between the mannequins)

Then she says, My father sells strip malls,

he's in commercial real estate.

I say oh, she says

sorry to interrupt your book.

Now the bus has made the turn

onto California Avenue

past the chapel which sits

surrounded by acres of bulldozed earth

which will become the new neighborhood.

California Avenue is pocked and patched

and plated so roughly that the bus

judders and shakes so much that

the words on the page jump too much

to read. I close my eyes.

On Avenue H, we pass between

the boarded up World War II buildings

where sailors were trained for combat

in the not-so-Pacific Ocean.

She gets up at 13th and says

Have a good day, enjoy your book

if you're ever in Hayward, check out

Southland Mall, and gets off the bus.

The guy in the book finds out

that he has a brain tumor.

Slow growing and probably not

malignant but unrelated to the hearing loss

that was the reason he went to the doctor.

He forgets to buy the toys

he intended to buy for his sons,

which is just as well because

they are often disappointed

with his choices. He wonders

if he's a bad dad, but is calmed

by the thought that their mother

will take good care of them

if he should die.

I get off the bus at Avenue B.

I'll read the rest of the story later.

As I walk home, my shadow is long,

it reaches all the way across the street

matching me pace by pace.

I'd like to believe I'd have been

a good dad. I might even

have chosen good toys at the mall.

watching my step

I have to watch my feet

lest I misstep.

Especially on stairs

and tumble.

It's happened enough

to keep me humble.

Ass over teacup

is the expression.

From where did that

juxtaposition arise?

I can no longer trust

my unreliable vision,

a one-eyed photographer

just like my camera.

However, now I know

what Saint-Exupery wrote

applies more truly than ever:

It is only with the heart

that one can see rightly;

what is essential is invisible

to the eye.