High Wind

It’s like the world blow-dries its hair
in a strange mood,
giving you dust-winces and grit in your drink,
like the air’s pitching a fit—

bad hair days even the big hedges shiver,
leaves curdle in the stairwells,
the lawn at the airport ripples.

Sundowners and live planes both do this
trick of conjuring turbulence,
a violent quick that shouldn’t be our model,

but men and women traveling together
sometimes do impressions of a manic wind,
meeting noise with noise—

often I do, feeling sharp and old
as a lizard, and just as green,
then walk home repeating,
weather is better alone, down here, down low.

But sometimes I do another thing,
hearing in high winds
a world that isn’t mine
or all fury,
which visits my neighbors’ variant lives
in the same hurry
and, having found them, fits their designs.

Yesterday’s Love Poet

Tenured at my humid desk
I know I shouldn’t risk
wanting you, but I do.  Your
life is a knock at the door
of the house I live alone in.
Today is busy, bare, and thin,
a gravel wind pulling the palms
apart around the office park―
I wish I were calm
in your purchase, in the dark
bin of your hair and skin
where I don’t know where to begin.

Tenured at my humid desk

I know I shouldn’t risk

wanting you, but I do. Your

life is a knock at the door

of the house I live alone in.

Today is busy, bare, and thin,

a gravel wind pulling the palms

apart around the office park—

I wish I were calm

in your purchase, in the dark

bin of your hair and skin

where I don’t know where to begin.

Migration Days

Each story has a day and this one’s was
rainy.  I went lurking for books, had coffee
like a wild pilot, watched people
scurry under rayon bowls,
and came home after the rain quit
(still knowing nothing public)
to thin responses from the green stuff
in my yard,
something like what is enough.

After rain, the sun oozed
a syrup which did not prevent
cold sweats from the interior,
a must of squalls on the Santa Ynez.
Gulls carved up the clamshell light
and, green with sea winds, I called
the gingko’s balding rack
best structure on my land
after the rain quit.

Three Poems in October

Not the bravest title, I know.  But it fits the feeling of the month, which is one of fragments and dust-ups.    -R

The Corn Maze

The back edge of the great corn maze
is an ordinary fence
thatched in dry Queen-Anne’s-lace,
and beyond that the truck yard.
Without these, it is not a farm
and there is no corn maze,
but they are the end of mazes,
breaking the child’s faith
in idle spaces.

Orange Abner

his scent like clean cotton
in the aisles of a fabric store,
like maple dust, closets, bread.
the granular cat.

Living by the Pacific

not “breaking” was this wave
but a milky quickening
like someone unzipping the sea
then the sand a soda.
I was a doctory griever
when the wave toppled,
far from my home, full of water.

Three Poems in October

The Corn Maze

The back edge of the great corn maze

is an ordinary fence

thatched in dry Queen-Anne’s-lace,

and beyond that the truck yard.

Without these, it is not a farm

and there is no corn maze,

but they are the end of mazes,

breaking the child’s faith

in idle spaces.

Abner

his scent like clean cotton

in the aisles of a fabric store,

like maple dust, closets, bread.

the granular cat.

Living by the Pacific

not “breaking” was this wave

but a milky quickening

like someone unzipping the sea

then the sand a soda.

I was a doctory griever

when the wave toppled,

far from my home, full of water.

Morceaux

Beer-spun over some teenage reversal
or a triumph that spooked me,
I fled the house
where the only high-school party
I ever went to went on,

and ended up, after a few swipes
and lurches down some good streets
where sugar maples gloomed
over the curb like trolls,

in the walled garden beside the Episcopalian
church where most Sundays I took communion
with the aging congregation.

In slack November it’s a stone crate
where the air congeals,
everything slight water
and a mossy ache in the year’s last legs.

No new debtors in the rumpled grave plot
to my right
through a door in the fungal brick
under birch and hemlock―

now we drive our bodies to the town’s rim
where new suburbs are, turf tracts
with nameplates and plastic lilies
like pins in a private golf course.

Shooting for par,
I took a bench and leaned around,
forgot why I was there
in the tubercular almost-frost
of a rusting Blue Ridge downtown,

no God in the boxwoods,
my breath a toadstool
breeching mineshaft air,
the clammy trees

scratching their racks together―
I forgot and,
for a second there, began existing.

Muggy Weather

Weather you damp the page with.  Weather drinking pink wine out of cups.  Sky come down a pestle, the air is leaking drugs.  Rump weather, soft-boiled weather, sweat leeched through the hours, loose angles, fatted doors.  Fumes from the lawn.  There’s charcoal and the stoop.  Weather feral with itself and dying of its fruit.