dvii

We’re not relying so much on oxygen anymore.
I write like an insider. Hooftrack to hooftrack.

A friend wishes he were a poet, writes lines like:
and to profoundly deepen the understanding of the

enormous capacity of love to forgive and accept.
Quick note from a Korean restaurant on Wash

ington Street. A lovely summer day. And
over here another contrived collapse.

dvi

It’s all happening downstairs. Our arms are
up in the air, but still below sea level. My poems
aren’t resolute, but they keep returning to water,
jostled love and baffled memories. The
same words in different combinations.

The sky looks like the 60s. How could I
ever know? Hello from September, it’s
December. October meet August.
I felt an earthquake all the way from
the other end of the world, Napa Valley.

Then we went to Santa Cruz, its amuse
ment park along the beach. We were amused,
laid in the sand until a seal popped its head
out of the water. I used to eat at a place called
Baxter’s. I don’t remember it.

Francois Ozon was born five months after me.
It’s a hard act to follow. Now that I’m in the
doghouse, I smoked a bit on the rooftop of
someone who knows Maxine Hong Kingston.
He got a little weirded out about the

whole thing. I cried buckets at the end of the
movie. Wait...maybe it’s all coming back to me.

dv

The need for an analysis of this exploration:
Beautiful day – horrible morning; car wouldn’t start,
it being parked on a streetcleaning side today,
so was trying to move it in lieu of getting

I have it on my calendar and will come by the office then.

strange financial disaster nightmares. Bus late.
Picked up Moby-Dick after touring the Embarcadero YMCA.
Couple minor blunders in the office. 175 pounds.
Guess I should sell my car.

I don’t even remember the word I was going to use.
It just wants the paper. Not the news. It forgot
the texture. Anything that gets lost in translation.
This is and was relevance. Ennui.

div

Forgot collapsing beneath the weight
of him. And whether I took a pill this morning.
How to argue. Forgot the little room. The
old yellow Ford pick-up (a smoked-up truck).
Forgot the motorcycle wreck, the sanding down
of the palm of the hand. Forgot cellphones.
Forgot the living wage law. Forgot infinity
and all of its bodies, their hands and faces.
Forgot the bus. Maroon. Woven baskets.
Forgot how he fit into the curl of my arms
as I entered. Forgot breaking loose.

diii

Love in the middle of the night.
I wonder about survival. I turn over—
curl up—face the wall. I imagine
the wall’s existence—its quality—
I don’t touch it. I turn over—
curl up—face my love. I imagine
love’s existence. My love’s existence.
Can I feel it?
Same day
at the California Culinary Academy
on the dessert crew—no one seems
to care about books. I will join the
YMCA.
Ozu.
Olson.
Palmer.
Spicer.
Whalen.
Intensive care.
Hot Chip.
Clash of the Titans.
Basic tales from a slate-gray summer.
This method of removal doesn’t work.
Back when there wasn’t any artifice.

dii

elm
lying on the carpet with bee-stings

tiger
the beautiful boy on the motorcycle

secret
hung the moon

truth
getting old is inevitable

moon
it’s a heartache

childhood
the beautiful son of the tiger

embrace
lying on the carpet with bee-stings

father
died young

di

speckled human lights
under big eagle godlamp
more like glowworm
I’m talking about the color of a sky over a city but gads the psychologist
wants me to slow down
ohm
close my eyes and listen but not listen
to everything and nothing

he seems to want to stop making rapid rapid
to stop making the chop chop

oh the waters under an august sky
august like majestic
even though it’s actually the rosiest January
there I had to tell you

so now it’s time to take a little break
and define productivity
and then debate creativity versus perfection
never stop with this
simple
only

I don’t want to break his spirit
nor look out the window down the hill
where comes the man with the hose
to wash down the parking lot

d

Filmic,
a limpid word.
I neatly drove into the concrete barrier
—those concrete barriers they put up during construction—
Toledo, Ohio. They’re talking about putting him
on a ventilator. Not the muse
but the father.

This from a befuddled uncle.
The guys next to me are talking about airplane problems.

I’ll be better. As human beings
we find ourselves in a strange situation. (Dorsky)
Then we walked within the foggy city. The muse
took me to something like a weekend on top of a dune
where if there hadn’t been fog I could have seen
all over.

I bought a new jug of detergent
only I had a whole jug I hadn’t used. I forgot I had that.
The same brand.
The same scent.

cdxcix

Close your eyes and listen to the sounds,
concentrate on each one. Count the corpses in your head.

Close Count Concentrate Corpse.

A fine day. Another partition. Another
evocative hint. That’s a lazyass way of looking at it.

I’m always to be in fact. Like purple
blossoms in the courtyard and Philip Whalen on the bus.

cdxcviii

Without saying a damned thing
important to nothing. Real important
to nothing but the roses.
Roses listening to birds. Birds through the trees.
                        Eliminate the swing;
reduce the amplitude of the wave. The big bird wave...

...woken up this morning without birds. Having
finished waking up this morning without saying a damned thing.
Having never woke up with Guston Kyger Whalen
until Woke and Woke and Woke.

        Start some more. Finish naught. Along the
        green words in the park: Mt. Tamalpais,
        two sailboats running late.

cdxcvii

Grab a kleenex, I’m drowning my headache
in a latté, tracing an index finger
all the way around my left ear.
The boys from Texas are in town
with big fuzzy red socks over
filled with PopRocks and kisses.
A taxicab pulls up in under the cloud
where the “No Parking” sign floats aslant.
Over my very own hillside. Two men in suits
swivel their chairs around to face the winter,
point their fingers up at the sky. I watch a man
fill a pothole with black pitch, go to bed
dreaming of death like those across the street
dream of living. Sepia the Cat is interested
in my dreams. Each night she tries
—apparently with some success—
to burrow a hole into my head.

cdxcvi

This is not plot
although the date is important. Headache
all day and into the Ferry Building
where a duck gets shipped
professorially. Flags at half-mast
for Jerry, also the name of my pet rock,
who I picked up in 1970
on Highway 217 North.
What a prognosticator,
me.
Meanwhile,
and the two-headed cat
trying to slurp her food,
I am at Caffé Proust
sipping out wine and acting risotto (or whatever)
where the sky isn’t buttered,
but stippled,
and less patient.

cdxcv

            mauve clouds

Clark Coolidge at Moe’s Books

            salmon patties

and movie-less movie nights

cdxciv

Stoned hills
Mission to Castro
on 21st. Including a
nice veggie on Valencia.
A face like a happy fish.
Nicholas keeps pointing
out apartment buildings
I pretend to see. Interiors’
derangement of art-egos
on Sunday night. I could
write just for fun. Sounds
terrible coughing.

cdxciii

Where my mind is
a long poem called
Did You See the Sky
This Morning? I’m
not used to feeling and
this has nothing to do
with the grand tradition
of filtered water. More
executions are planned
tomorrow.

cdxcii

The quietest hour here is 5-6am.
I walk into Starbucks with
these typos in my head.
They are divine and I’m in the
mist, actually jogging at
first. Every morning
when I get to Battery
the temperature says 56°F.

Then
I write seven pages.
For some reason I am doing this
to forget about honesty.
I can’t roleplay. It’s Tuesday
and I miss proximity.

cdxci

Friday evening after drinks
we take in Croupier
and then hike the Presidio all day
some nude sunbathers and fishermen

now he’s all wet
jogging up the Embarcadero and back
food here is phenomenal

at the Blue Bar
I couldn’t even tell you their names
except this one specializes in Spicer
or Schuyler doting on Elmslie
and whichever other names
are the names of the men with manes
solid men with packages waiting
all wet and white and fleshy (fishy)

there’s always an audience that wants to be counter to the norm

slept nearly 13 hours
while he watched Bresson’s Pickpocket
and applied a yellow coat of paint
to the bookshelf I dragged off the street

must do aplenty
like anxiety/depression this Friday
and having trouble with a foot again
it must be on its last legs

received a swell letter from Mom
including photocopies of Bucky and Papaw
one of Mombam very informative
and the other when I caught that 5 lb catfish 

at the Durham’s pond

cdxc

The best kind of melancholy.
Not even a teardrop with a trombone in it.

I misread it in your voice. That’s how these things work.
We become new creatures on a page.

I could frame it
and place it on the yellow wall next to the banana
with an overcoat. (After all these years
I just noticed he was wearing a skirt.)

First, though, I would need to print it out (or off).
Which reminds me of our discussion about
the physicality of music. And then onto another moment

Is it physically or emotionally?

That wasn’t misread. It wasn’t even misheard.
In fact, each syllable was precisely clipped
and exactly the same decibel.

After I fell asleep standing up
I finally answered that it was physical.
But who can be too sure?

Certainly not someone with an eye for yesteryear.

cdlxxxix

Realizing at last that it is honesty
counts the most.

The rumpling snowplow and the
storm windows...stacked on the beans of the garage.

And then there was nothing unique
about it.

                                   Picture the day
in the park I found on Hayes Street.
It was a time when everything was new.
And then you had to move again.

If evolution equals hypocrisy vanishing
then America is a caveman.

Here’s to keeping a list of
all of my favorite mistakes
which, if you are to trust those in the know,
is my mission statement.

And now I’m off to the next destruction.

cdlxxxviii

Misreading can be the best.

The wind is thrashing at the gnats
where the sun fails. Or

I’m drinking a giraffe.

This morning I finally finished
putting the kitchen away.

People seem cool, in general,
but I’m beginning to wonder.

This experiment keeps happening.

We’re walking down Geary
and I realize you’re a stranger.

I guess that makes sense.
I’m always drawn to the strange.

cdlxxxvii

Question about e-mail lists:
Do you add a new column for ‘deceased’
or just remove them from the list?

How about a temporary moratorium
on contemporary poetry. Back to basics.

The whirlwind won’t stop. I make friends.
I try to live up to the bargain. I try to reduce my
blood pressure. I contemplate the significance
of longevity. Here at the office

full of wonderful, bizarre people; I got the
assignment—to bend something. Now
she is eating it. See,

it’s not just that each citizen has lost
its attention span (nor its lack of proper antecedants).
I took two pictures of each list
and I’m sure they will need an interpreter.

Is that the main problem?
Get back to me soon with your answers.

“Well, yeah, but it’s some good emotion.”