Bricks and paint and trees

There’s an Austrian painter I dig,
an architectural visionary, like crazy, man,
very outré, you know what I mean?

-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.

Sand and berries, hawk and toad songs

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.

Uncle Billy

My uncle, Billy Smith, the cowboy
died this past December.
Peacefully at his home

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 alien burgers

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.

Class Photo

Glossy tints of grey
and white, a photograph,
the kindergarten class picture
at Brisbane Elementary,
nineteen fifty-eight.

Twenty girls in pinafores and chiffon

saddle shoes and Mary Janes,

jumpers, Peter Pan collars, gingham,

pigtails tied with ribbons,

bangs. barrettes.

Six boys in striped or printed shirts,

tucked, belted, one with a bow tie,

one with suspenders, and one,

with faded jeans, scuffed Buster Browns

and a dark tee shirt, me.

Our shadows pool at our feet

our eyes squint against

the glare of noon, lined up

in three rows, on the steps

outside our classroom.

Our teacher looks faintly beatnik in her

black dress and black-framed glasses,

those pointy cat-eyed ones.

pale short-cropped hair,

long beaded necklace.

Does she go to smoky north beach coffee houses?

Sip red wine poured from reed-wrapped jugs

while some goateed guy in a beret

reads poems in counterpoint

with bongos?

I stand with dangling arms

and a trout-mouthed gape,

a puzzled forehead.

is there some trouble

I’ve forgotten? I don't remember

There is no grass to play on

just asphalt marked

for dodgeball and foursquare

where we run and shriek

and give each other cooties.

We trade wax lips and fangs at Halloween,

and suck on orange pan pipe flutes filled

with sugar water and red dye #2,

preen and pose like grownups

with candy cigarettes.

Was I impatient for the bell to clamor?

Itching to roam the hills and look for lizards,

pull off sprigs of wild anise to smell the licorice

or taste the burst of nectar from

the trumpets of monkey flower blossoms.

I don't know,

I see my open mouth

in that creased photograph

half a question frozen on my face

or was it just a breath?

Coyote

There were no other campers
at the lava beds park in late September.
The heat of the day began to ebb.

Then a she coyote walked calmly

into our campsite and jumped up on the table.

Silent, regal, but she looked at me expectantly.

I fetched a package of hamburger out of the cooler

that was beginning to smell suspicious.

Put it on the table in front of her.

She took a few bites then carried the rest

to the foot of a juniper and buried it.

A cache for later? Or perhaps an opinion

about the quality of the meat.

In the morning it was gone.

Atoms

Saw a wren in a rose bush.

Descended from dinosaurs.

Every atom in the bloom,

the thorns, her body, and ours

has been here since the birth

of the universe. They just

-move around.