A bluebelly lizard
basking on the warm asphalt
of the driveway
scurried under the deck
in front of the house
when he saw me arrive.
I used to catch them
when i was eight or nine
or forty one. I probably
still could. And without
breaking their tails.
It’s enough to see them now,
the first one of spring
on the driveway.
Bluebellies and poppies,
that’s how I mark spring.
Such variety, such looks!
that's what happens inside:
too much ugly, too much
of the same old venom
lingers on their tongues.
Too much red, white, and blue,
oozes down from tall offices
or up from the street to the clouds.
In need of an update of the limits:
Too many customers shopping
for ammo, coffins, and bunting.
A river of vomit pours out the doors
of courtrooms, from pulpit to podium,
down the steps of the state houses.
Too much pavement, not enough
garden. We’ve had plenty of apple
for now, don’t you think? So familiar
with falling that we forget about grace.
is as warm as a body.
Your body.
No breeze stirs the leaves
of the Dutch elms
on Elm street.
Just the songs of crickets,
and a faraway train
hauling cotton or chemicals.
The smell of wild summer grasses
and wet pavement
where the wild broken sprinkler
spits into the street
after a hundred and five
degree day.
The mud in the garden
between the roses
is cool on my toes.
Something frightens the crickets,
they go silent. And the rumble
of the train has faded away.
All I hear is my breath
until I hold it. Now I hear
my heartbeat. Can’t stop it.
-I mean he doesn’t have a degree
or license, but some of his designs
have actually been built-
I won’t mention his name,
you can find it easily enough.
I found his paintings in the late sixties
in The Realist, the socio-political-
religious criticism and satire magazine.
His paintings look a lot like
the ones I’ve seen in books that feature
the art of institutionalized psychotics.
Dig it, they like vibrate,
you know what I mean?
And his buildings are much like that,
no hard corners, curvilinear, spirals,
a giant brick snake with trees
on its back. Far out, man!
They’re psychedelic!, but
I don’t think he took drugs.
It just looked he dropped
a few tabs of orange sunshine
or ate a lot of magic mushrooms.
A symphony of anarchy that
somehow hangs together
like a chaotic English garden
in full midsummer bloom.
Or an explosion in a paint factory.
He died twenty some odd years ago
and is buried under a tulip tree
in the Garden of the Happy Deads.
The tiny river
-if it is a river-
will soon live
under the sand.
By Friday I think.
Saturday at the latest.
Now I know
where the robins go
for the winter!
To get fat eating
a plenitude
of berries.
Yesterday’s wind
died before dawn.
The red-tails cried
to each other in the oaks
as day barely broke.
Mt Kuchumaa harbors
ephemeral pools.
Where I heard
the lone song of a toad.
The robins are back eating lunch
in the tree outside the window.
Singing. And no, they aren't drunk.
outside Woodlake, California
down past the pastures
and walnut orchards
at the end of Avenue 332.
He was a favorite uncle
when I was a kid,
the handsome one with a wolfish grin.
Sometimes years would slip away
between visits.
One of those times, not quite twenty years ago,
I hadn’t seen them since......... I don't know,
he comes in from the rain
hangs his barn coat and big white
cowboy hat outside. Wipes off his boots
but they still smell faintly like cowshit and fur.
We drink black coffee
and talk about picking cotton and grapefruit,
how they tear up your hands,
and white folks don't pick anymore.
He tells about the trip
he took with his Daddy
back in 1944 when he was ten
and they drove to Oklahoma
in dented truck with no driver's side door.
How they slept rolled up in blankets
in the bed of the truck.
While we talk and drink more coffee
a stock car race in Tennessee
is on the television. So we talk
about our favorite teams and drivers.
and my cousin Kurt tells me
about his gentle Brahma cows.
At the burial in Visalia,
day before yesterday,
two soldiers folded the flag
that draped his casket
and a bugler played Taps.
The sun burst through
a gap beneath the blackening
beastly sky. My cousin Kim
had put together an easel
with a favorite portrait,
his hat, his western belt,
his lariat, boots and spurs.
Vaya con Dios, Billy.
Ghost motels and secret weapons; Nevada:
the tumbled ruins of pony express stations
wild mustangs and burros graze the sagebrush,
the ones that haven't been lassoed in the roundups.
The booms and bursting optimism,
gold and silver mines, slot machines and brothels
then the fading away, the greying wood,
the cemeteries, abandoned schools,
double-wide mobile homes, bleached and pale
ringed with necklaces of dead Fords and Chevrolets,
a clump of cottonwoods where someone's dream
rode high then died and left a dusty skeleton.
Mysteries: a gravel road that stretches up a valley
marked by a small sign that names some settlement,
some human place in the emptiness,
twelve or thirty miles beyond the horizon.
Basin and range, basin and range,
rock, juniper, and sage,
is this the Shell Range? or the Snake?
the Ruby Mountains? or just names on the map.
the Nevada Department of Transportation
has dubbed one of the roads
"the Extra Terrestrial Highway".
it fits -the asphalt skirts the notorious Area 51,
home of stealth bombers and secret military test sites.
The A'Le' Inn restaurant next to the mobile home hamlet
named after someone named Rachel, population 48,
has a tow truck parked out front beside the highway.
has a small flying saucer dangling from the hook.
The inn sells coffee mugs and t-shirts, refrigerator magnets
decorated with green-skinned big-eyed space creatures
You can even get an alien burger with fries and a coke.
Every fifty miles or so, there's something that used to be:
the guts of a dead motel spilling out into the sand,
waffle irons and coffee pots, broken mirrors and cash registers
a chair. a lawn mower.
A winter naked tree draped
with a couple thousand pairs of shoes,
the laces tied together and tossed
high into the branches by random travelers.
At a steady eighty miles per hour,
you can see where you're going to be
twenty minutes later:
across another valley to another juniper
and pinyon-dotted mountain range
whose name is somewhere on the map
if you can figure out
which one belongs to which.
