Painting in California

Spring stretch.  Dodger Stadium buzzes
in the den.  You’re on the porch again,
another aspect of the west
smoking, staring away
into the interior counties
of the Union’s prize:
rosewater mountains snaggle-backed
and going Irish on their low slopes
after the winter soak, green fuzz
of chaparral following last year’s fires,
and, down here, you think in images
of laurels and imported oaks
donning new coats of chlorophyll,
strawberry ditches, curdling surf,
coyote tracks near porches,
the early jasmine billow turning on,
Christmas lights still up some places, sobs of frost,
the way cars burrow through air, car-surf, car-brush,
fallen fronds like clubs,
ordinary things, groceries, duplexes,
arroyos and driveways
and your soles like taffy on the rain-patched sidewalks,
out for a night walk
shields down and breathing
like happiness,
a translation to elsewhere.

Tea

               fuckin hippies    -Anon.

The bitten silt, raw silk on the tongue,
uncuffs boring afternoons
and friends without cars or tables,
becomes meditation, it wanders.
I am my drinker’s keeper and get him
a cup, tea isn’t kept on islands.

What about it concentrates us
into a taproot?
Fresh metal hot, cure
for July when cooled, this parliament
of mushrooms prone to being drunk by people
in sunlight. It is like the fan blades
a sago raises, honed and old.

No one’s cup is new, they’re all footnotes
to a bush first men saw fit to drink of,
the water-conjured companion
once Asia’s, now a world tongue, plucked
and sunk to ripen the pulse
of daylight’s homely measures.

(2009-2012)

True Confessions of a Backyard Apologist

A recent one I’m not sure about, though I do know it’s done.  Dig in.  -R _________________________________________________________
Green animal,
sketch of carbon,

the mint plant almost asks
where are we?

and right then, drooping from a bin,
the basil shakes off whiteflies
and slurs its chewy scent.

You see that raccoon?  The one
with its young getting some
earthworms under the garbage?
Carbon pawing carbon.

The backyard is sort of a going storage
for more than me, I just help with the questions.
What does our stamp require? (this from
the caterpillars).  Bees, creeper, live oaks,
a good rake, and you could shepherd here!

Bacterially time happens and isn’t wild
a lot of the time.  Never a zen thing,
it just is, slow food.  Things feel bad
but you’ve got to admit
Miracle-Gro works and that Bronner’s soap.
I’ve heard there’s a co-op

where nature’s still natural,
all potted greens, our shelter once risk
reaches the backyard.
You’ve got to live somewhere.  More than fine,
hummingbirds lay me in mind
of elephants drinking,
snow fields, backpacks, cranes,

and it isn’t mine, not my job to set designs,
though I’ll probably cash these crops in time.

Georgic

“Come quickly!  I’m drinking stars!”
-attributed to Pierre Perignon upon his invention of champagne

Posted in a Mission bar, I know
Booze has nothing to do with poetry,
Only poets.  I like my glass’s lip
But that’s not where I got the lift for this.

It’s that I’m drinking a field of grain
And yeast for weeks and tractors and vats,
That everything used to be something else
Down here in the compost.

Poetry is a farmer, too, one of the last single-plotters
Who gets a kick out of taking
Boring seeds from someplace weird
Like far away (or close to home)

And, mostly by patience and mistake,
Designing lucent meat, pole-white thorns,
Or one bud that ducks like a seahorse
Of psilocybin hue.

A country nuisance, these mutants escape their beds
And propagate like kudzu, hiding the parks
Under a hot green pelt,
Crowding the golf course and the silos,

Twisting around a neighbor’s boots
As she gardens all night,
Laying crackpot seams across each road
And marrying into all the local ditches

Until the landscape’s weird enough
To startle Dorothy waking up
In a field so like the shadows in the ones back home
That, stretching, she decides to have a look.

A Thoughtful Bachelor Prepares to Mow His Yard

My soul had been a lawn

Keats

Arabesques of leaf shade pool
And cooled air settles like soot,
A good eye approves
The piss ants on a peony’s gills,

Rubythroats copping a fix
In the jacaranda, my yard’s
Flush of vine, petal, root
Spoiling the tidy neighborhood.

Pokeberry seeps at the property line,
Thistles crust the drive,
Disorder keeps me sane, but the town
Issued tickets so I hack it down.

Getting time, it’s time to get
The rotor going
Across the cross-thatched grasses growing
Somehow on cindered dirt,

Back to grass, back to work,
The Craftsman starts with a pissy jerk.
I would rather laze
Letting the carbons go berserk

Since all days are the dog days
And nothing on earth makes sense,
But it’s OK, tonight I’ll be
Blissed to the gills on saffron of pollen,

Asleep on sloped air
Assuming me as first stars
Prick the sky’s arc,
Sparse light growing large.

(2008)

Green Going

We like these
First tulips, each stem
A green straw.  Even
Better, trees.
Why them?
We’re born, grow, sicken,
Disappear,
They almost stay here.

(2005)