Not my wife asleep in the next room.
Not my sister waking up somewhere
above Beijing.
Or my father standing at the canyon’s edge,
staring down the coyote
who just shit by the side of the house.
Not the coyote, bored with the psychodrama,
heading back down
the ravine.
Because there were so many rivers on which to float,
I chose
and, putting drunk back inside
the little packet boat,
it took me only eight hours to figure out who
was the rudder.
The fields we drifted past –
they were empty.
Except for one,
where on a tree stump set back from the banks
a crank-up Gramophone played
Many times you have lingered round
my cabin door.
While these glorious women – they were pouring beer
for famous bearded writers,
they lay plates of Kielbasa and beer steins
before them.
And the men, they clanked their steins.
They toasted to drift —
which is honestly is a lot like
skateboarding through cemeteries:
Olmsted’s Green-wood,
Bernstein, Basquiat, for the Brooklyn Dead…
past the public mausoleum we once stopped
to inspect, the sign that says
All guests are welcome to leave
artificial flowers – they’re made
from crepe paper, dyed pinks that stain the yellows,
with spines of choreographed wire.
And the city on the other side of chain link:
cars turning in and out of driveways,
past the tiny grassless yards,
and the streetlamps, each
equal distance from the next,
glowing in daylight.
*
Not some Mexican Giacometti, we call it Horse-ametti – 50 bucks and you can walk it right across the border.
Not less-than-menacing horse thieves chillin by the service road to Sears.
Not Say something in praise,
God’s creatures, grazing in an alfalfa field somewhere below
Apolena road,
something about the fact
they are not only not cows
they are not nothing
and when you arrived
you had no ambition
of trespassing. Through old
Indian schools,
shopping for images.
See, we almost settled on some plain ol holes
punched into dry wall,
then, jackpot! – a Krylon mural
of a woman’s spread legs
and the words
Fuck this place:
Coming home from work
on the two-lane road linking
Tuba City and Flagstaff, my mother, caught in a thunderstorm,
pulls into a gas station.
No, she gets home a half-hour early, sleeps through the whole storm.
No, she walks in the vicinity of lightning, vicinity of thunder.
No, she pulls the car to the side of the road and pets the other one, the black and brindle,
rips some grass from the ground and lifts it to his teeth.
*
Letter to myself from Berkeley, 2004:
I wake from the smell of the sun
re-rotting the head of a giant sturgeon
resting in the bathtub planter outside my window.
The coffee is strong and the milk
only slightly sour.
A mechanical bird I cannot see
guides me across every
living street.
Today, I walked past two of my old buildings,
the chain-link fence I used to lock my bikes to
nights they were to be stolen,
and an intersection where,
loveless and confused, I often
made a soft left.
When a man in People’s Park
offers me a dried pig’s ear,
I beg off.
So he dumps the entire contents of the greasy bag
into my lap, storms back
under the charred apple tree.
In People’s Park, to refuse generosity
is to invite nothing but pigs’ ears.
To ask the woman why she needs
to bang those pots and pans and snarl
at oncoming traffic
is to invite
“Happy Fuck-the-Police day!”
Soon she will return to a musty living room,
where someone she loves always forgets
to open the butterfly shades –
*
To stand, to go forward into silence.
The cost is enormous.
Too much for one life.
There are some old photographs which show the event.
They’re black and white.
They’re 1970s wash-out
before Fujfilm invented blue.
In one, my mother holds me against her breast.
That winter she went back and forth.
In the meantime,
As I Walked Around Having Feelings
Days like today, I walk to the park
without books or ipod,
and sit and listen
to wives speaking Polish.
(Russian?)
And the silent husband
who comes now to join them,
like me just sort of listening not listening,
just being
w/ background.
A horse wanders by
with no rider. No rider,
that horse.
That smoke from someone’s cigarette
getting in my mouth.
That scream from somewhere
near the nethermead.
That path,
this day:
*
The sky is an Arizona Highways magazine
shredded into pieces.
The ground is mud, packed tight and cold.
The horse is real, but, viewed through the hatchback
it looks so much like the movies,
you sit back,
take it so easy –
The soundtrack is John Stewart,
the Kingston Trio dude,
the song about the blind horsedriver.
The heartiest of all horse shit,
it’s got lines like
About these good old days, well,
the old lady replied, well, there were just a lot of people doing
the best that they could.
And then the lady said they did it
pretty up and walking good.
Up and walking meaning motherfucking.
And as for the old Campaigner –
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson.
Mattress, my name is John Dos Passos.
Dad, I liked the email you wrote about the coyote, the way
he cracks the thin layer of birdbath-ice with a tiny
tap of his muzzle,
then walks to the side of the house to shit.
If you don’t need it for your poem…
See, my postcards come from the bridge I was sitting on
when I wrote the postcard that showed
the bridge. It says,
This is what the waterfall’s doing.
And here’s a single drop to smear the ink.
See, I like it best when the words are nearly
unreadable. I like her best
when she’s coming home from work.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers,
and am happy, to touch my person to some one else’s
is about as much as I can stand.
I make the bed, fill the room with things.
The heels on my orthopedic shoes
are too tall – my head smacks the ceiling fan.
Three teenagers who hang out on the corner
make fun of them,
as I walk toward home
counting the trains I hear in the distance even though they are
Same Train.
Thinking about how
when we say “win win” what we really mean is
win wind, as in
you are such a genius I am going to fart
in your face,
you, the one I love,
who has earned this fart, the wind
on which this fart
will hitch a ride,
the gift of wind
riding
on the gift of wind.