The Requirements for the Degree Of

TASSAJARAKEEN

Creative Work submitted to the faculty of 2^ ^ i San Francisco State University *n P31^ fulfiUment ° f *P — — The requirements for The degree of

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing / Poetry

by John Walter Darrow San Francisco California copyright by John Walter Darrow 2019 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Tassajara Keen by John Walter Darrow, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Fine Arts: Creative Writing / Poetry at San Francisco State University.

Paul Hoover Professor of Creative Writing

Maxine ChemofF Professor of Creative Writing TASSAJARAKEEN

John Walter Darrow San Francisco California 2019

13.7 billion years ago a singularity of infinite density exploded. All that now exists began its inexorable rush outward from that point. Approximately 379,000 years after that event the expanding universe began to accrete in places and separate in others. The slower bits fell together under the pull of gravity to form matter, while the fast bits continued to radiate at undiminished speed. It's been like that ever since. We are some of the results of all that bumping and radiating, but essentially nothing has changed. The universe and all its parts are the grand map of an explosion in progress. We are a brief arrangement of some of those parts. Radiation lights our way, reflected, refracted, dim and scattered. Six degrees below the horizon at dawn and dusk our sun offers a civil twilight, enough to see by but not too much to blind. Here is some of what I've seen.

I certi: stract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ' {Aftru • Professor Paul Hoover, Chair, Thesis Committee Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

Begging Strangers for a Ride...... 1

South Coast Highway...... 2 Big Sur Hot Springs Inn 1966...... 3 Boar Hunters ...... 5 The Goat House...... 7 Robert Stops Time...... 8 Snakes...... 10 Time in County...... 11 Rabbits...... 12 Amy in Cairo...... 13 Washoe County 1966...... 15 Shotgun...... 17 Sabong Jesus of Tagaytay...... 21 OCW — Manila sa Tokyo...... 24 Sampaguita Girl...... 25 Tweakers skin Bambi in the driveway...... 26 Motel on Route 66...... *,.27 Going on 14...... 28 North Beach, Cafe Trieste...... 29 Central Missouri 1965 30 A Place to Rest...... 34 Bach on Muni...... 36 Waiting on the Owl...... 37 Haight & Central...... 38 Judah Beach ...... 40 Going on 14...... 41 The Widow’s Gone Riding...... 42 Getting in the Door...... :...... 43 Visiting Madrone...... 44

Downbeat...... 45

Erie...... 46 Waking Rude...... 47 j|l it. ^ H (The Firebombing of Tokyo)...... 48 Eschatology...... 50 Cleromancy...... 51 Lost over Idaho...... ,...... 52

v Thoracic Stigmata #1 / pre-surgical prayer...... 53 Thoracic Stigmata #2 / cutting into an open heart...... 54 Thoracic Stigmata #3 / post-surgical notes...... 55 Ben Lomond Boys ...... 57 Utopian Turtletop...... 58 kind of a riddle / kind of a charm...... 59 Solstitial Racket...... 60 Wikihow: the float ...... 61 The Landlord...... 62 Starting Work ...... 63 Loose Acetylene...... 64 Before the Wind...... 65

XOXO...... 66

The Art of No...... 67 Alchemical Generation...... 68 Fixing up the Place...... 69 Zippo...... 70 Partially Wrapped...... 71 Glowworms ...... 72 Mannequin Hermeneutics...... 73 Button...... 74 Grazing...... 75 Lemon Buttercream...... 76 The Red Pony...... 77 The Slicky Boys...... 78 Restraint...... 80 Remington Pump...... 81 Patience is Overrated ...... 82 After the Fall ...... 83 My Bent Angel...... 84

Family / the Gift...... 85

Kathleen's Birthday...... 86 Katn Disembarks...... 87 John's Carotid...... 88 Bold Kiersten...... 89 In Shalom Annex...... 90 The Gift...... 91 Paradise, California...... 92 1

Begging Strangers for a Ride

I'm racing a stomped-on Rattler in a downhill scramble hoping to lose. 2 South Coast Highway

I rode my thumb til I was blessed with a lift from Santa Lucia, hitching up the Coastal Road.

She straddles the front seat half-standing, 60 on the straightaway cliff drops on the left in a low slung Malibu.

Pistons knock and rattle, oily gray spews out the back, some guy’s convertible from Limekiln. It's okay, he owes her money.

I can barely see as she rides the center line with a light touch on the necker knob knuckling a Lucky.

She rolls down her ragtop And takes me all the way, sucking wind to Monterey, her head bent back, black hair on fire as the day goes down. 3 Big Sur Hot Springs Inn 1966

(Neal Casady in memory)

Kneedeep in the cold water porcelain bathtub, I shiver ready for the plunge.

Neal’s in the hot water brick tub palming ajar of peanut butter.

We’re perched on the trembling lip of the Coastal Range. A cut in the cliff spouts an iron-rich spring, falling all the way down to saltwater.

He prays to the blessed spread. Would this be a better butter if it were not peanut butter? Peanut Being suits a butter such as this. How are we to know? The taste will tell us so. I know by the spoon, the spoon that dwells within, and scoops without. Does the spoon improve its better Buddha Nature? O Amitabha, we salute your peanut butter on your way to sundown in the pure Pure Land. Then he stood up naked in the tub and hurled the jar as far as it would fly, out into the restless Pacific. Boar Hunters

Back up Salmon Creek moonlight tossed on meadow grass floods my scrub oak campfire, casts the shadows of two sallows slung with guns, 30-30s by the barrel.

Carhartt jackets with floppy pockets full of live rounds and spent shells, dead bugs and squirrel skulls, they crouch and settle in to share the lick of my small flame.

Their blackmouth curs slink up alongside. One shot is all you get, says a Carhartt, cradling the lead bitch. I f you miss, the pig 11 gore you. You ’re just food to him.

His dog shivers her ribcage, her spine contracts. Knobby bumps in a line raise the skin down her back. Her master gropes between her legs. It keeps her happy, he says offhand. Monterey Sheriffs busted some guy down on Highway One, north of Gorda, thumbing for a ride. He had three fingers, not his own, wrapped in a red bandana, tucked in his back pocket.

He confessed when pressed to troublesome appetites. So when Carhartt says he worships Satan and asks if I believe I have to agree there are some devils around. The Goat House

Nights I sleep in a slat pine loft built over a shaky room. Days I pass with the mean boys, rolling weed in the brushy shack.

When the goats have finished eating they leave the place to us. We push leftover bush aside to sit on the dirt-packed floor.

Outside Mark thrashes gorse with a tie rod, hoping to cripple a snake, beaten, it waggles away. He re-enters the room to squat across from me.

His sticky hands have oil stains with ragged, scratchy nails. He’s stretching his pocket and pulling the threads for a joint, or a bug, or a light.

Cool, he cocks his arm, a black oxide Buck knifes through the air to the plank by my ear — that over-loud thwack as it buries its tooth in the flesh of the goathouse wall. Robert Stops Time

Fred is hiding in the Goat House, crouched behind the pine slat door, just open with a loop of chain. I know better than to enter. He thinks we called the cops. Half-way up the dry bowl ridge we don’t even have a phone.

Poking through the bent door frame he meets me part way, offering a scrape of rock salt benediction in my palm, to banish fear and bathe the slice his file struck in Robert’s side just along the lower ribs.

I was picking steel strings on a lightweight folkie lip. Fred beat time with a bastard file, clanking on the bench vice, his own signature, vigorous and harsh.

I was trapped within the tune the more he beat, afraid to right the rhythm. He got angry happy and hit the iron hard. My hands forced the melody, compelling Creole Belle. 9 Robert had small ears and a big mouth. He wanted to play too, so he walked right in between us, talking, knocked Fred off his time, who didn’t break his swing but wrapped it side-wound, rib high, drawing blood. I jumped and dropped the box. We ran, Fred shouting after us, Do you know what he stole?

I did know. that’s why I take the salt and accept his blessing, Watch out. These days are full of danger. Snakes

Snakes sleep on an unwalked trail as the day warms down, like withered squaw wood til they rattle, raise a crooked neck and whip a shaker tail.

Scrambling down from Gorda Ridge to Villa Creek, we crushed our way through pine and chinquapin. I gave my friend a warning. “Watch out for the Diamondbacks. They’re quicker than you think.”

I hadn't meant to hex our descent the mountainside is serpentine, all the curly bark, bent pine twigs underfoot, every ground squirrel in the brush mistaken for a snake.

I sleep on the needle bed beneath a strong back sugar pine. A muscular wind makes them sing, as cones drop all around me big as porcupines.

I stack the pinecones end to end, a banish or a binding spell, to bar the rattlers who want to snuggle in beside me while I sleep. Time in County Sparks, Nevada

Lyle likes to smoke the bible. He rolls Bull Durham up in Epistles and drags it down to ashes. For me, the pages are too thin, too wordy for flavor.

He combs his ginger slack in strands against his skull, cracking dry from alkali shampoo, the harsh bars of jail soap.

Cell doors open twice a day, all painted thick, a pale green, along a wall of concrete blocks that form the corridor.

Thirty minutes, twice a day outside the little room, I shower in the morning and pace the afternoon, collecting butts the others crush and toss, break open the tobacco and roll it in a page

I tore from a book on the library cart, to avoid the taste of ink the blanker the better. 12 Rabbits

It was maybe because we’d been waiting so long under a dry white sun, or because we were eighteen and ignorant, thumbs out by the side of the road as bugs sang in the brush when a two-tone Chevy shivered to a stop, leaning into a soft right shock,

that we scuttled inside, she by the door, me in the middle next to the guy in the back with three more up front, young men driving around, fumes of tobacco and burnt motor oil, masking wildwood cream.

The driver steered with his hands in his lap (the back of his neck was quite clean). The one sitting shotgun talked for them all. We’re taking a short cut he said. The Chevy nudged onto a thin county road. We were quiet for over an hour.

It was maybe because we’d been riding so long under a dry white sun or because we were eighteen and ignorant and shivered like rabbits at bay. Mr. Clean stopped the car at the next paved road and the guy in the back pushed us out.

Shotgun leered. Were you scared? he asked in almost a friendly way. The pack peeled out, leaving us brindled, stood in the ditch, the day most gone. 13 Amy in Cairo

One am outside of Cairo, the toe of Illinois, me & Amy hitching in the crotch of the bright lit highway Y merging Route 61 south to Memphis, or go back north didn’t matter, so's we get to California, lame and tiny stuck in trucker ' s alley as rigs in waves wash by.

Hickory slim and dark to the touch, Amy fit inside my hand. We stand between the forks on the cluttered gravel shoulder til a long cab Peterbilt stops behind its pilot car.

The driver leans out, looking down. “Where you going?” “Same as you.” “Not much room up here. I can take the girl. You ride in the short.”

I look to Amy. 14 His sleeper window opens another guy sticks out the door in a white T shirt and baggy underpants. He gives his balls a scratch and grins; He throws a friendly wave. Come on up.

Amy shakes her head in all the racket in the highway glare. Hipper than me, she had to be. We waved the bastards by. Washoe County 1966

It was the week before Christmas. Ron the drummer, his buddy Edwin, and me, all three, we’re hitching Highway 80 in the dark when a ratty one-ton flatbed out of Sacramento stops to let us cram into the cab.

We crawl up over Donner Summit. I’m sitting on the floor beneath the dash, my back against the metal heating vent, feet against the bent rod floor shift as it knocks up and down the gears. Ron cups a joint and passes it around. We’re calm and drowsy, dropping into Washoe County as the day grows light.

First the driver has to see a guy then he’ll take us farther east. He drops us at a bus stop bench. Fits and starts of morning snow blow around our feet. The local black & white rolls by and then rolls by again, scoping us out sizing us up, local circles on an early winter day. When Ron thinks they’ve gone he shoves his four thin joints into a Marlboro box and flips them back between his legs under the bus bench slats with an off-hand crook of a drummer’s wrist.

Right away the black and white pulls up, they stop the prowl. They really think they scored, a gang of hippie dealers dead to rights.

Handcuffs all around and a celebratory jam into the cruiser. Everybody in the back.

On our way to County the good cop gives advice. Man-to-man he warns his wayward boys:

Don’t sell those dirty drugs. If we want to get ahead, make some money, live the life, we should be taking pictures, pretty girls doing things without their clothes. Shotgun

We’re in the middle of Kentucky, down by Bowling Green, out past street lights where the road turns dark.

Amy’s freckled, thin and tough never been to California, her mother’s twisted up coat hanger and a bloody kitchen table, chased her from Fall River.

Approaching midnight with no moon a rusty Fair lane two-door stops to pick us up.

The driver leans across the seat feral and intense. He shoves the roadside door ajar, flaps the passenger seat forward and beckons me inside.

Stretched out along the length of the worn back seat lies a grey-water blonde.

Long and supine she could have been a ferret if a ferret were afraid or a dull yellow dove the way she shivers on the plastic carseat cover.

She tenders up a smile that breaks the comers of her mouth, hoping I won’t hurt her.

I can’t go forward I can’t fall back I’m stuck upright in my traveling shoes.

The owner lounges back one hand draped across the smudgy plasticine.

He flaps his fingers at her. I don’t like what I see? He’ll sweeten the deal.

She squirms aside to show what else might be in store for this night’s lucky man.

Stuck in the crack between the bench and the back, she’s been lying on a long shotgun.

Filament reflections from the dome light shine along the barrel, pressed against her back, the unpolished grip and stock of a lonely machine. Amy, unaware, steps up right behind me she’s all set to take the ride.

The driver hadn’t seen I kept my own companion. I stood between her and the owner’s open door

He books and leaves it flapping. We find a patch of grass in a cemetery close.

Grateful for the refuge from the road, we fall asleep against the stones.

We’re yellow-beamed awake by the stark official glare— the spotlight from a local Black & White.

Prematurely round with a pose of nonchalance a Trooper casts our licenses for signs, of perpetration; he’s checking a complaint of commercially lascivious behavior.

A driver that he stopped claimed I was selling Amy for a ride.

Our sleepy ignorance absolves us of the guilt that we all carry. The Trooper leaves us by the cemetery gate, 20 our birthright in the give and take of begging strangers for a ride. 21 Sabong Jesus of Tagaytay

“Sabong” = “cockfight” in Tagalog Luzon, The Philippines

On the fertile shore of lake Ta'al corrugated steel roofing shields the groaning risers, bloodsportsmen in throngs, hundreds shouting on the tiers surrounding the arena. The guy next to me slaps paper money across his forehead that sticks in his sweat. That’s his bet, a 500 peso headband.

In the oval cockpit below, mid-pit stand two handlers cradling their cocks each nestled to a rib cage muffled docile prior .to the fight.

Each bird’s left leg is wrapped with tape or nylon fishing line that binds a razor spur for sincerity. The gaff can slash a careless Sabongero. Designated Jesus stands aloft between the tiers, robed barong tagalog, arms outstretched, fingers wide and wrapped with folded pesos, in blessing for the gamblers as they yell their bets and pass him their stakes across the crowd.

On its way my neighbors brush their money through the hands of my fair companion just for luck, or because they have a sister, or another Hail Mary wouldn’t hurt.

The birds ablaze, red, black, and copper gold feathers arch in angry fans, plumes to warn his enemy. Beak to beak they’re poised in the cockpit spur to spur.

The Sabongeros assail, and release their cocks in combat, arcs and leaps and slashes for a minute, maybe two. What’s left is pulled apart, the bloody feathered carcass, the victor from his spoil. Kristos Mnemonic keeps it all behind his eyes. He remembers every shout sa pula, sa puti and calculates the odds, granting winnings for the wise or loss of face and peso for the losers blood knows its own. OCW — Manila sa Tokyo

(alay sa manggagawa sa labas ng Pilipinas) dedicated to the Pilipino overseas contract workers

Butter knife wings of a Japanese plane carve the oversweetened air, as a worn round woman in a thin print dress stares out the plexiglass.

Her cadent fingers pinch the beads, the bones of her faith and pull the beads, her babies.

She recites their names as she flies across the China Sea to tend the children of strangers, while her own await reunion in a small, dim room, cooking their dinner alone. Sampaguita Girl

Stuck in an acrid cab we balk the stall of traffic.

Downtown Manila — crushed durian rankles the fruited air.

Smudgy fingers tap the glass as sampaguita girl claws along the taxi window, hawking with a facile smile homemade jasmine garlands.

She was raised on the willful blow the red knuckle warning, so tonight she sells her floral rosaries, woven vespers from the squatter camp.

With little brother safe asleep and uncle well anesthetized she practices an upturned palm, tangled supplication from the verge. Tweakers skin Bambi in the driveway

with Sally Barry

A roto-tiller grinds up the backyard. Blackberry brambles shriek against the blades. His home-pricked tattoo smeared across limp muscle, my neighbor unloads eight rounds into the blue metal halide streetlamp, bringing it down in convulsive showers of gas and glass to lighten the atmosphere of his fresh-plowed garden. A city truck drove up to replace it two weeks later, so he shot it out again.

We found a genuine cherry laminate television console at the comer of Alemany & Sickles, smashed in the screen with a roller skate and planted hydrangeas inside.

Angela set the controls for the next lunar eclipse. The Perseids arrive as venison dries in the garage and all the spoons start to curl in the kitchen drawer. Motel on Route 66

Winslow, Arizona

Blue lights up the bum-scarred box. I finger news with a sticky remote, standing on a greasy crush of shag carpet polyester in my socks. On the ledge of a laminated vanity there stands the glass, cloudy witness to the all night carnival — firemen, covergirls, boy scouts on a jamboree. In a crack of pale tile along the shower stall

I pick up someone’s broken tooth. Borax-beaten to a pale gray the pillowcase exhales a germicidal fragrance I’ll pass the evening listening to the dial tone, heartbreak music on the telephone. Going on 14

I shoved a rotary mower through two summers of cut grass, signing loopy spirals in the neighbors’ lawns for a Greyhound ticket: 13 and solo, Cleveland to Seattle.

A slim, freckled woman took the seat next to me in Chicago, 36 hours of the nearest, closest I ever was alongside a woman in the world.

For two days as we talk her drab cotton blouse gapes open and shut at the second button, showing a strip of unfamiliar flesh, like bleached spam, and the strangest thing— a pad of pale foam, resting on her skin, tenting the blouse.

This device is new to me, but I get the point. We're all on display. I would like to be in the running, so I tell her I'm 14. North Beach, Cafe Trieste

Voguish bums well self-possessed hoard notebooks of the unraveling. Crabbed bitter fills the margins.

Hand after hand sweeps flakes from the fare, a soggy croissant, a jelly danish, the unnibbled remains.

A dissolute copperhead lets loose her silver soprano, from a wooden cabinet phone booth with a bi-fold '50s door, the room is off the hook.

A wall of black & white, the almost-might-be-famous rubbing elbows with the wall paint Rauschenberg's dirty milk tomato soup, compromised mustard. 30 Central Missouri 1965

Since noon we’ve been standing in the middle of Missouri where grass grows through the gravel on the Interstate.

I stone the signs: Pedestrians Forbidden Speed Limit 70

We stopped sticking out our thumbs when the day went gray

As the day goes dark a cabover semi pulls up scratching gravel at our feet.

We climb up to the cab hand over hand clinging to the long chrome bar.

The driver wears a cowboy shirt, arrows stitched along the pockets. He flashes an embroidered grin snap-on abalone buttons, and a Resistol hat the color of dirty water

Next stop Joplin. Are we tired? We can sleep in back. She’s okay. I do. Her fingers tug my pants cuff She drags me back from sleep. We’re not moving in the middle of Missouri.

He’s straddling the hump between the seats, a body block between us.

Amy’s pressed and small against the door. I can’t see her face.

He wants to close the deal. In my pocket I’ve got nothing but a pen.

I join the conversation, talking like I’m drowsy. The pen is short and blunt.

He turns to face me. “If she doesn’t put out, you two are back out on the highway.” on Interstate 70 stuck on midnight in the middle of Missouri

We cannot give him what he wants. Thank God he doesn’t take it.

I understand his desire. I want her too. I’m almost a man myself. The Sleepers of Pere-Lachaise

Tenants and their guests alike dispel unquiet dreams, herds en file alert to steal the odd granite briquette or soiled efflorescence.

Coughing, Chopin cracks a door to lean into the air, ajar. Thin fingers wrap a finial prelude to the clarity of wind. He sounds a rapt berceuse to soothe the neighbors and bestill their friends, disarm sciamachy, as embroiled communards salute the bullet wall.

The lupine red Louise Michel prefers the hoarse throat battle flag of anarchy a fury not as yet in tune, futile Internationale.

Slimmed to crisp perfection, Callas left an empty urn. The culture minister kidnapped and spread the scalloped coloratura upon the wine-dark sea Aegean. Honoring the ass's skin, Balzac dominates the view, vain rubble crawling larval heirs of all the great abandoned, wrought and rusted vaults.

In diminishing ellipse the moon falls ever earthward in surrender to the tease of gravity, egalite, incorporeality. A Place to Rest

Cypress in oils a celebration of Iris led us to Auvers where the Chapel of our Lady dominates the view, stone yellow block walls laid down a thousand years ago the painter rendered fluid, snaky, distraught along the river Oise.

Behind the church, just past the wheat field where he fell, another course of stone guards the graveyard.

Fellow travelers, we slip through the crusted wrought fencing of an iron gate at dusk and hide behind a gap-toothed row of granite slabs.

Photos framed in tin, and worried by the rain, the dead in better days, are propped on pink-flecked tombstones: a faithful wife, a baker's father, the briefest of babies. We crouch beyond the stones until the sexton locks the gate and leaves. We're all alone with the distemperate brush-chewer and his brother, Theo.

An ivy comforter covers them both in one short plot with two dark stones. Locked in, we slept beside them, fitful pairs in common. Bach on Muni

patience means be happy while you wait

a dreadful end carries you away Angela well raptured this harmonica adorn yourself, dear soul she blew out all the stops on the N Judah

fall with thanks, fall with praise playing Bach Cantatas off the ground

I’ve grown much more forgiving since I gave up hope give way now, dismal shadows She bought me this harp when I was too weak to walk standfirm against sin when all I could do was wheeze and wait for dinner my heart swims in blood Marine Band blue brought down the Golden Gate you will weep and howl, but the world will rejoice I don’t hate everyone Waiting on the Owl

Turk Street dazzle, crushed bits of windshield scatter the street light, the red stop flash in the broken glass.

Junkies on bicycles circle buzz the muni stop. Bus riders glaze their eyes, waiting on the Owl

Greasy cardboard beds the doorway, sidewalk tenants pay the rent in piss. Some guy’s drunk wife spit-slurs on my shoulder, Are we home yeft

Camped-in-a-phonebooth dude tears pages from the big damp book. Looking for the long gone, he mouths their names.

My sneaker tread is wearing thin. I’m getting closer to the sidewalk. Clocks are really ticking now. Haight & Central

April 1967

We are cranking shrieky beats out the window of a second-storied vacancy, a clash of instruments on the psychedelic comer, innocents at rabble playing prayers to bounce and jostle, sort of like communion. Everybody likes to dance.

The crowd spills off the sidewalks, filling up the street, stopping traffic at the beat stop sign.

Outside up against the walls Diggers scale the escapes, clinging to the brick, to banner butcher paper, a scroll of characters, unhinged, demanding bread for the circus in the street. From Central down to Stanyan the blocks are jamming up, Diggers shouting down from the facade. But there’s no anger in the air. No one’s in the mood to be a mob. The merchants see it different. They call the cops We’re rowdy boppers stinking up the street.

The cops break down the door, knock it clean right off its pins and rush into the room, boot the amps and capture electricity.

We never saw them coming. They shove us down the stairs out into a black van that idles at the curb.

Cuffed and clipped and stood in line, getting booked, I wait my turn inside Park Station to tell the old cop at the window who I am.

The bully guard behind me facilitates internment, shoves me at the shoulder with his stick. “Are you a boy or are you a girl?

Tell him, boy or girl. What are you? Tell the man. Next I hear a metal snap and smell a sweet alarming oil.

A tiny wheel grinds a scratch of flint. Bully holds the Zippo flame against my hair and fills the room, an acrid crackle and a stench like burning ants. Judah Beach

trash can crow casts a fish-eye my way

no mercy for the stale panini no mercy for me

all the beach birds hustle at the trash bag hop Going on 14

I shoved a rotary mower through two summers of cut grass, signing loopy spirals in the neighbors’ lawns for a Greyhound ticket: 13 and solo, Cleveland to Seattle.

A slim, freckled woman took the seat next to me in Chicago, 36 hours of the nearest, closest I ever was alongside a woman in the world.

This device is new to me, but I get the point. We’re all on display. I would like to be in the running, so I tell her I'm 14. 42 The Widow’s Gone Riding

A Bel Air blocks the driveway, trash stuck under the wheel. Magnolias sap up the paint job, unfinished powder blue.

Rusty geraniums clutter the walk up to a shut-tight door. The window’s blind and you can t see her private highways.

Inside the widow’s gone riding Getting in the Door

Hitching oceanside down California 1 I catch a ride with the dogs in the back, splayed and clinging to the oak-lined flat bed south coast bound.

Above us, lighter than air, October moon bobs the ridge. Crossing over Samhain into full lunacy, she throws a fit of bewildering radiance, way out of reach.

It's her word against mine. Crazy won't pay the rent but it gets me in the door, a hedge against deflation. Between the two of us we’ve got a full deck, that and this tomato crate illuminate the highway. Visiting Madrone

Fogblind you might stumble through a tangle of salal to reach the patrimonial home of Evergreen Madrone. Her landed families took root along the cliffs of Puget Sound.

To her guests she offers the barely-edible alizarin berry favored by the mourning dove. You might eat it out of courtesy as you pass the afternoon in conversation with the evergreen Madrone.

Her attention elsewhere, she is always dropping things: tiny clustered, white bouquets, leaves that clatter underfoot, cinnamon-colored bark in strips split and curled, fresh skin exposed pale-orange, an innocent immodesty.

As the mist recedes, her leaves reveal vii al hue, cankers on a pacific complexion, confirming the rumors of decline. Madrone will not acknowledge your alarm, as she continues to discuss the pleasures of the rooted life until it’s time for you to leave. Downbeat

Miles Davis

a neural twitch slaps down the airborne beat never a nice man, Miles carved with a bebop jackknife

Bill Evans

a seven-layer bow fingers curl on a flat nine without a prayer the doctor practices chromatic faith healing 46

Erie

I like the crack of lake ice when it breaks the news of thaw to the fish Waking Rude

Someone tossed the brain of Robert Rauschenberg.

I found it in a dumpster back of Happy Donuts in a box of day-old glazed. If all the world were styrofoam and all the seas caffeine the dives along the Tenderloin would blunt their sleepy needles, save their blood for better days.

Through the specky window I can see the minister of quantum gravity draw the map of creation (an explosion in progress) on the back of a napkin.

I sleep in pieces like the moon, one slice at a time, my ritual wounding. Everyone has a ghost point. You just have to find where it is.

Loan me some light til I get on my feet. ^ ^ ^ (The Firebombing of Tokyo)

I. how to cook grasshoppers

March 9, 1945 After Tokyo was incinerated the people lived outdoors.

In rice fields after the rain children chase down dinner in surrender time they glean hoppers in the burnt grass cloak them in jute sacks hung from a singed branch.

Let them be for a couple of days. Twitching, they will cleanse themselves.

Dump the dying in a steel wok set on a crackle fire.

They will leap against the sides and fall back charred into the hot oil at the bottom.

Tonight as the purified saute everybody gets to eat. II. homesick in the night of black snow families fall to earth as ash sanctuary a pious neighbor threw her baby in the river homesick strawberry runners soon green the bum-scarred bank Eschatology

"And after the angel had opened the seventh seal there was silence in Heaven for the space of half an hour." Revelation 8:1

Shirley wept hyacinths enough to fill a cut glass bowl, bled fuchsia sufficient to christen all the babies on the block.

She plucked her eyebrows bare to greet the next apocalypse, not this apocalypse which has proven disappointing, a spew of tepid soup.

The next apocalypse, will star the lords of shouting with a mighty revelator. Every day he will write the book in blood.

Seven seals loosed on this blue and circus ball will bark while we all dine on wormwood and the remnants of albumen. Cleromancy

The wind is an honest player, seven or snake eyes. The air doesn't care. None of your new shoes laced to the eyelet none of your old wounds in pain when it rains will change the odds.

The wind is an honest prayer in spite of her lazy eye. No plea to scry the what-may-be or the enflamed dirigibility (Oh, the humanity) that threatens her soft landing will change the odds.

Lots are cast in ruins sortilege has no respect for persons or the plans of compass rose, our thin scratches on the grimace of a world in heat. Lost over Idaho in memory

When Timothy taught himself to ski he launched himself legs wrapped with rope, ankle-bound, irrevocably parallel. He sliced the mogul field fall by fall learning curvature, edge, and weight.

When Timothy taught himself to fly he tucked himself beneath a thirty-foot mylar wing above the clear water forest in a kite sling cocoon.

When a contrary thermal recalled the soul of his machine he fell to earth in descending tones, an obbligato of brass and wind. Thoracic Stigmata #1 / pre-surgical prayer

Halo light my way my heart's in the hand of a merciful tailor.

Illuminate the delicate thread the near infinite needle point.

He'll give it back red, wet, and better than it was still beating. Thoracic Stigmata #2 / cutting into an open heart

I am chilled like cherry jello, presented with a garnish of silicon hosery.

The surgeon stitches me into the robot heart beating for me, while I'm prepped for hypothermia.

The perfusionist re-routes. He celebrates communion, my extracorporeal circulation, a routine damnation.

Cut loose from the pump I study respiration, rising up out of sleep in ragged breath Thoracic Stigmata #3 / post-surgical notes

Entirely tubed

Morphine and sugar water drip through a slice in my forearm. Another tube provides each nostril with continuous, canistered breath. Another my unmanning, a catheter for effortless relief, the drain of humiliation, assures my fluid balance. Three punctures in my chest accept flexible siphons that drape across the bed, curl up over my head to drain the lower fens of the heart.

All the solicitous machines that live for me while I lie still. Four coils of thin steel wire bind the fresh-cut halves of my split rib cage like the spine of a thesis on aesthetic instrumentality, Tinguely's influence on the work of Survival Research Laboratories.

The doctors come and go, each pausing just long enough to offer a bland inquisition, doing all right, are we? until one stops to ask, oh, by the way, would I prefer the tubes removed? I would.

My liberator shuts down the suction of a wheezy machine, grips all the siphons with both hands, leaning across the broad white bed. They come sliding out from deep within me through the punctures in my chest, the end of my pupation. 57 Ben Lomond Boys

in memory

This rain-long winter secret sandstone pocket

was cut in the sheer face of a granular cliff

Two of the wilder neighbor boys hide from the evening storm.

Lit by the flustering votive candle stub

Orange faces share a stolen pack of Camels.

The water-burdened walls collapse their cave beneath the weight of winter rain.

Earthed within the sand hill as shoelace trails wash away. Utopian Turtletop

She rocks the hat she could have grabbed off Marianne Moore, flustering West Portal Peet’s, one eye blind behind the bent tin dimestore brooch that secures her pinned-up brim.

A silverish pendant evokes the age of art nouveau. Neo-bohemian, it bangs against her chest, a fluted weight suspended by the sort of cord save-the-Tibetans pray by.

She leans on an acrylic cane wrapped in bows of duct tape and artful lace mylar, twisted round a draping chain of six-pack collars. She unsnaps the rubber band that binds a cough drop tin, once painted yellow. Nickels, dimes, a quarter here and there, she pinches out a stack of coins along the counter, In payment for her non-fat double shot, no-foam. kind of a riddle / kind of a charm

Are we bom blue or simply poured into the sky?

Are we worn through or basted on the seam?

Do we ring true or fashion to the lie?

Are we drawn to war, clotted in the cream?

Are we bom blue or simply poured into the sky? Solstitial Racket

No one likes a rude sunrise shades drawn, sleep in order noodle take out.

Crack the cookie— my lucky number is bristlecone.

It looks like rain but isn’t—we'll make do with a secondhand sky.

When the weather comes it comes so slow you can’t tell a drop what to do.

She gives me simple gifts a bruised apple still beating.

Praise the loom, a warp of light the sun takes up his bed and walks. 61 Wikihow: the float

Gravity got you down? There’s a trick to floating, where you step off the sheer drop edge and flop your bony arms, accept the air, loose with the weight in your shoulders. Uncork the whiners; I know what they say, but you don’t have to fall. You can rise on the thermals, bobbing like any half-assed albatross. Some do drugs, but there are better ways.

First try floating up hill, less risky if you don’t get it right away. Stop with the plod; relax and push your body up the grade like a boat adrift. For how to do it right listen to some Bossa Nova. The algebraic guitar pulse and the perfect Bahian baritone, maybe Joao Gilberto, will carry you without half trying. The trick is quiet on the one, samba with a flat five. On windy days The Sons of the Pioneers, with The Everlasting Hills of Oklahoma, and the illusion of elevation. The Landlord

I held a basalt shard to my ear at timberline, to listen to the wind around the cornice descending in a mad glissade, to hear the rush of sulfur gases spew magma, tephra and its ash, corrosive blankets of scree and timpani.

The belch of an unsubtle steward, the southernmost Cascade might evict us all chinquapin, bruin, human and fir.

He keeps a shotgun by the door, pyroclastic weaponry, in case he wants to shoo the locals on a whim. 63 Starting Work

Seven thousand watts drag up the chainlink cage walls open to the wind,

packed in the manlift, five sparkies, one gangbox and a grunt.

Twenty-one stories over Market we get out on the slab and kick away the birds.

Luminous fog leaves us day-blind.

Iron workers ride the sheave or hang on the hoist-crane or shinny an I-beam,

gripping a spud wrench spike as it slacks the rebar bundle.

twenty-one slabs on a skeletal frame sunlight shot highrise. The scratch and rattle

of the violet scorch when the welder strikes his arc, the overbright will flash your eyes the burning stings for days.

You can't help but stare when the slag sparks glow,

then you have to look away. Loose Acetylene

A steel bottle tipped; its valve cracked, split. The loose gas spits through a broken brass nozzle.

A sweet stench swarms the long dim garage. I smash the glass. Horns bleat their alarm in mechanical panic. Strobes shriek hysterical light.

In the stumble to escape we scuff up gray clouds of dust and slag along the concrete floor.

Soon the air we breathe will bum. Before the Wind

A professional applied the make-up just this morning and it suits her.

Lately she had lost the knack, smearing mascara and blue about her eyes

Cheeks overly rose, pinches of talc, unsuitable for sunlight.

Today it looked just right, except her bone-brown skin, the tone was off and chalky.

A long goodbye, a short goodbye, it's all the same to her.

The halting line of friends and family remains. Nobody wants to be there.

Nobody wants to leave, planted in the pews like hollow stalks of yarrow, trembling in place before the wind. 66 xoxo

two soft plums stain the eggshell bowl beside our bed

really saying something she's a sight for sore eyes baby's got her pain dress on The Art of No

It's a wrong way down and every window breaks open on some face staring back from the bowl of a spoon with a wide-ass grin, greeting a heap of nougat familia in a blue willow bowl applauded with milk.

When first she fell, unspoken for, entranced, Prince Alarming delivered the keynote address at the National Conference on Dismissal. She asked her chthonic homunculus how to free herself from desire. Dim the lights, his best response.

There followed years of tooth upon bruise, bruise upon tooth, a beach of broken bones. In the end she thought it best to avoid belief entirely. The Real? You're soaking in it. Alchemical Generation

One's body has the good fortune to be built of very lively material, the sublimation of a benevolent plasm suitable for the human aludel. But the right stuff is not enough. Virtue is proven in the amalgam.

Scholars of the Egyptian science uncloak the Mercury that weeps from the cracks of stone pregnant with cinnabar. When washed in strong water, the ore will yield a precious mother, the fluid silver that sparks vitality.

So much for the spirit. Now, to add corporeal substance, Copper, properly refined, conjoins Earth and Aphrodite. Bring it all to boil in the heat of copulation and allow the sublimate to encloud the nascent form in gestation.

Students of Tycho Brahe sought the true souls of the elements, thus our souls' true constituents. Those quickening essences distinguish agency from gravity, ferocity from dismay, the creature from its originating earth But the quick is not derived from antimony alone. What kills the monk may cure the master. Fixing up the Place

She bangs on the light in dim rooms whenever she comes home. She forgot a sock, maybe a scarf, a blue tube of face cream stuck behind the mirror.

He pries a cup loose off cold grease berry-jellied crumb rings on the kitchen table, wants to give her time to settle down. Sheetrock patches hide splintered ends of lath, the gapes of yellow plaster.

He's fixing up the place to bring her back.

A five hundred watt wire-caged quartz light, huddled in the comer, glares up the walls. Heating the damp mud rock tape, it cooks out a faint ammoniac.

She caught him at a bad time.

He was trashing the hide-a-bed, unused for years. He had just pried loose the rusty frame, dropping mattress clumps across the linty rug. They both stared at the nest within, mounds of gummed and shredded cotton, piss-stained and pellet strewn, the debris of furtive tenants. She's yelling now, not calming down. She won't be back for days. Zippo

(for two voices)

Thumb she grinds a scratch of flint, the tiny knurled wheel, an unlucky strike dearjohn word up on proper payment to spark her smoke. Daddy’s legacy, the lighter and the flame, dollies do accept pancakes as gratuity illuminates a red-headed woman with a pickaxe frame. but pimpanster will be pissed if you slip them extra butter She throws this little girl voice pitched high and off-key, a seance of invisible friends. hold your syrup no slap A scar of timbre renders a crushed adorability — fashioned to delay an intimate enemy. a whole lot of fat on them cakes wrecks the hydraulics Cupped hands shield one windy drag then a snuff in the puddle. Partially Wrapped

for L. V

I dreamt you were partially wrapped in pale silk lavender ribbon, some windings loose, some wrappings tight, the ribbon crossed between your breasts, bearing an embroidered crest, three ships in fine white thread: one setting out, one mounting the waves, and one entering the bay. Glowworms

Vespina Yellowjacket troubles the drunk pulp unplucked deliquescent mango. Its flesh turns sugar in ferment,

Bugs rattle in the open air, the squeaking ankle rasp amidst a mad halo of chitinous wings.

Envenomed, we forestall intoxication until anaphylaxsis opens your mouth.

You can light your tongue as I lit mine with the luminous imago. Glowworms eat us from within. Mannequin Hermeneutics

Clowning high style, we ape the lingerie mannequin waltz on a Fillmore Street sidewalk, glaze in the window of a dark boutique as the bald models halt their arch strut on the shoppers’ catwalk.

She turns a thin leather shoe red with ballet at the broke glass barre, coy with an ankle she snapped at the wrong bang of an African drum, too slammed to stop.

We never talk about her boy, her vandal skater boy, the fresco saboteur. He emcees nights at the Boom Boom Room, the pride of her angry life.

Every sullen kid I see on Muni with a rack of paint, unbuttoned Molotow, cans of Kolour tucked up in his hoodie pouch I wonder: is that the kid she goes so on about?

She sees herself in the sodium vapor discharge, blind to the beauty of her own reflection. 74 Button

please undo the button

do the button there please

when it wants we all undo

don’t we undo the button too

please not that one there

this one here un done 75 Grazing

The back of your neck inclines as the palm of my hand intends toward the length of your nape with a lick from the rough of my tongue to the pulse of your throat, the gulp of your breath when your breast crimsons.

You loose a swallow, a split-tailed swallow, and we lose the will to rise. Lemon Buttercream

breath I fight the chill bang outside your door coaxing a glow from fmgerbone kindling

a still life in icing your frosting kiss skews my balance on the jamb

you shut your eyes so I could see how you look in the dark

my window went blind maybe I'll get lucky and dream of you Partially Wrapped

for L. V.

Vespina Yellowjacket troubles the drunk pulp unplucked deliquescent mango. Its flesh turns sugar in ferment,

Bugs rattle in the open air, the squeaking ankle rasp amidst a mad halo of chitinous wings.

Envenomed, we forestall intoxication until anaphylaxsis opens your mouth.

You can light your tongue as I lit mine with the luminous imago. Glowworms eat us from within. Mannequin Hermeneutics

Clowning high style, we ape the lingerie mannequin waltz on a Fillmore Street sidewalk, glaze in the window of a dark boutique as the bald models halt their arch strut on the shoppers’ catwalk.

She turns a thin leather shoe red with ballet at the broke glass barre, coy with an ankle she snapped at the wrong bang of an African drum, too slammed to stop.

We never talk about her boy, her vandal skater boy, the fresco saboteur. He emcees nights at the Boom Boom Room, the pride of her angry life.

Every sullen kid I see on Muni with a rack of pi lint, unbuttoned Molotow, 3ans of Kolour tucked up in his hoodie pouch I wonder: is that the kid she goes so on about?

She sees herself in the sodium vapor discharge, blind to the beauty of her own reflection. 74 Button

please undo the button

do the button there please

when it wants we all undo

don’t we undo the button too

please not that one there

this one here un done 75 Grazing

You loose a swallow, a split-tailed swallow, and we lose the will to rise. Lemon Buttercream

breath I fight the chill bang outside your door coaxing a glow from fingerbone kindling

a still life in icing your frosting kiss skews my balance on the jamb

you shut your eyes so I could see how you look in the dark

my window went blind maybe I'll get lucky and dream of you 77 The Red Pony

My blood entertained animals in 1963. They ate at my ankles and knees. For half a year rheumatic fever bound me to my bed while I recalled my unconquered Melissa.

A stalk of wild Iris, any wind could bow her head, or fold her arms and wrists in improbable collapse, an artful devotion to frailty.

Dressed dull black in crepe de Chine, she played the cat at parties, a college girl mewing up faculty hems, a pinch of pant leg between the knuckles of her fist.

One morning as the Crickets sang “That’ll be the Day” I received a pasteboard box postmarked “Lovingston, Virginia.”

She sent me tin and paper toys jee-jaws from the dime store, jujubes, cinnamon hearts, Black Jack gum, and “The Red Pony,” a paperback by Steinbeck about a feverish boy. The Slicky Boys

Your husband and I talked like we were friends long after dinner while you freshened up —

his service in Korea on and off the map, undercover intel, hacking bushes through the minefields that lace the DMZ, t the goddamn Slicky Boys sneaking on the base to run their scams,

how they ate the frozen beef stolen from the mess, raw in gristle chunks, mad ready anytime to fight,

how the GIs warmed their tents: a punctured bucket hung, splashing drips of gasoline against a glowing fiy pan, tiny fiery explosions when the temperature hit 17 below. 79 Then you came sorry down the stairs for talking so long on the phone. I could tell that you’d been lying to your other lover, the guy from Italy. Restraint

We could leave tonight:

She’s on the edge of her chair, thin shoulders crouched, Vogue on her lap, thumb and finger peel back the slippery pages.

Pack a suitcase:

Evading his eyes, her finger traces a sullen figure, photos of the spectral women poised beneath the clutter of their clothes, a fulvous blouse from Saint Laurent. Sempione’s lemon ruche, crimson sheaths by Givenchy.

Leave this place behind:

The mantle clock strikes six. Hands leap to her mouth. He’ll be home soon. She slips two buttons back in place, twisting strays around her finger to drape behind an ear.

We belong together:

He takes her hand. She pulls him in. come She grabs his finger with her teeth and bites down hard enough to stain her lip. Remington Pump

She's awake at the crack of a raspberry snap, ready to beckon backdoor her prowler intent on the prize.

Will her husband jerk awake to the creak of trespass alert and reckon the cost of a severed relation? Patience is Overrated

You stand like an antelope before barbed wire, taut skin across beautiful loose bones.

You have the sweetness of an olive, the wisdom of a raisin. I feel like a fool before you.

But how long will you stand undecided, while mad joy awaits the fortunate traveler, while stones roll around in their beds?

You know you will not be eaten while you own the teeth. After the Fall

Beside her vanity peignoir open to the mirror she tames her reflection with a nettle brush, drags red paste across her lips, coloring outside the lines.

His hand scrapes the harp of her hair as they renew their dark pavane pacing measures of appetite and compromise. My Bent Angel

My bent angel drips butter on burnt toast, serving breakfast on the kitchen floor, while her gibbous dentata throws fits of bewildering radiance, lunacy waxing ruby lip glossolalia. She is really saying something. We are down for the count. Family / the Gift

Kathleen

I gave her up to strangers eyes still shut through the baby glass I'd know her anywhere

John

panting with his mother's pain we waited all day for the shy boy

Kiersten

in a hurry girl dives headlong into my bloody hands

Kamiko

speeding crunch time between contractions I hate every stop sign Kathleen's Birthday

I met my daughter in a bright green room the color of day-old soup, her new eyes shut, pink fingerlings curled against a cotton wrap, in a row of steel baskets, through a window of warm glass.

I left her with my name in Richland County, where clerks and secretaries store the spoor of errant parents, forever in the care of kindly strangers.

Then stowed away and cradle-bent between the smeary Brylcreem seatbacks of a nightward Greyhound Bus I dream of anything else: mad angels flock the window pane, brittle moonlit shadows tossed back in shatter bits. I leave Ohio, a wreck upon the highway.

After eighteen years in Berkeley California, 4:30 in the morning, Richland County called. The case worker on the line asked for me. Did I want to speak to my first-born girl? Kathleen tracked me home. Katn Disembarks

Last I saw her was her birthday she was half an hour old. Now she's almost grown, a stranger, a new voice on the phone, touching down in Oakland.

I'm waiting at the gate. A chorus line of faces, audition for the role of firstborn.

I recognize the curve of her neck and the way she's unaware of her own luminescence. Her mother didn't look like that. Neither do I.

We see familiar light as bodies in a crowd, as singular as our own. John's Carotid

My boy's in sheets, airlifted out of Shasta Mercy bleak after the Jeep flipped.

His right carotid wrapped and bent past repair— It feeds the brain, the doctor came around at last, with a stab at comfort. He's alive with a right-sided weakness.

The saving grace— two carotids feed the brain. John had a spare. Stroked, he came around himself behind a hemispheric scar, but stronger and pretematurally kind. Bold Kiersten

I caught you rushing out a gift from your mother after midnight, our sheets in shreds, wrapped in blood, the cord adrape.

When you were three we took a walk across the chill white crust of Red Fir Flat six thousand feet up Shasta.

Girls squat to pee but you refused, arms akimbo, legs apart, a bold spray upon the snow. In Shalom Annex

We rented six black polyester yarmulkes kippots cocked back to cover our bald spots.

We slow-walked my mother and her raw pine box across the well-fed grass.

A shawl of astroturf sheathed the precise gape, slicing the clay-brown ground.

She came as an outsider, but was lowered in Law, glatt, pareve.

We kept organic, her fluids unfiltered to quicken her return. 91 The Gift

Strangers helped my father break his face in bars one red bone at a time.

The last time I saw him he flared his reconstructed cheeks as he lied to his dry bride, 12-stepping out for a drink, and to steal me a birthday present, an answering machine from Radio Shack, where he clerked and drank in the back.

A lawyer dislimned, he lost his gift along the way, blazing his trail with a thousand self-inflicted slices. Paradise, California

December 23rd 1970

The five dollar rent was due we didn’t have it, but I figured we could get it. Parasites infest the limbs of California Live Oak mistletoe rings Paradise.

I snagged an A-frame apple picker’s ladder to a high branch snap and gather the fungal brooch in cluster set with waxen berry pearls.

We paired the sprigs and bound them, red ribbon curling down the stem, and stood in downtown Paradise Just past the police. A gray snow fell around us as we held out twigs for sale, mute and stiff with courtesy in hopes the mistletoe would catch the passing shopper’s fancy. No one stopped or looked or bought, but another beggar laughed, the dark jabber of a junkyard crow