Local Boy

The mind is a rough neighborhood, don’t go there
alone. Tell me about it. A poison skillet
the cops watch from busted Crown Vics:
corner boys scatter like pigeons when they roll by,
the radio squawking bad Latin
about someone bleeding in a walkup,
or no one there at all,
gyros, muzzle burns, Bics,
more knocking on doors and calming down
white girls mugged after yoga,
museum duty for the blessed—
crude summer does that
to a city, baiting the blocks, goading them
till we’re all in cuffs.

Anyway, the mind. Like a junkie in the bushes
I took too much, too much, my blood
pouring trouble, all tiger drips. Grades got me out
to the next part of town, which was nicer, kind of a plaid
that smells like parks or paperbacks,
and the houses are boxwood-bright.
I saw the governor there, he was begging
his gardeners for stones to loan a mistress,
but no one spoke Spanish. Later I heard a Prius
hit something and sobs in a bonsai garden,
but their kids have all read Rilke
and their kids are into getting hold of Vicodin.

So a mind found a place in a different belt,
co-ops, pale ales, and coke,
the Guatemalan food was tight, the wine dive
next door too. Public school was the thing
but they offered AP Art and band
so if you had kids they could expand there.
I’d walk to work—used shirts—then girls most nights
in boots on bikes, mellow as half-sleeves.
Two a.m. got dicey: last call drew the sharks.
Sat on the beach, smoked weed, and read Gucci,
heard Philip Larkin and stole Mozart’s loosies
under skies like blue corduroy.
My shirts took off with the local boys,
who took them to shows, so I went online
till Brooklyn and Stockholm helped me sell the store.

Eventually mind bought a house,
not much down. This hood had gardens
near its farmers’ market but still needed
that district station after dark, but still
the blocks were getting good. Young doctors.
We fixed the sun room, saw Cairo on foot,
grew basil. Because I had a study
my imaginary son would read, I would read,
but his mother slowly dipped out.
Once I dipped out to the corner store
and came back and she told me more
than I wanted to hear, trust me.

My mind later found itself an erstwhile lemon grove
where no one was at noon. The Valley nodded
its plunder while I kept summarizing
what she’d told, quiet like a lawn,
and even later, the mind, not getting on with the neighbors,
gets loud some nights about itself
and the sales and palm trees at Target,
its latest beef with the world.
Who owns the main road?  One of you knows.
My cell vibrates—
“Hold on. You’re going in and out. Someone’s firing.”

All Daughters

The porch is cool as a planetarium
at the fringe of daylight-savings.
My girls hack at marigolds
and roll gourds across the yard
or act like blackbirds on their phones.
From the start they scanned but didn’t rhyme
with their dad’s unfolding plans,
and that’s what made them artists
with a talent for happiness, and gave the man
from whom they came, but aren’t,
years of poems instead of quicklime,
because they’re twenty years of poems
in a language that isn’t mine.

Living by the Pacific

They don’t break: waves
are the gash oars make
in a stream,

like someone unzipping the sea,
then sand goes into soda
and the salts regroup,

but sometimes after a dozen it’s dull,
you check your cell,
driving home takes you elsewhere . . .

California’s so big you can’t see it.
Elsewhere, branch water rubs limestone
into pikes and funnels,

I hang off the continent’s cuff
thinking of a cavern’s painted bubble
I toured as a kid.  Waves burst, I buckle

for streams I didn’t think I wanted,
grieve at my lack of those doctors,
far from my home, full of water.

Stop-Loss

Day gets skinny in December
when I bring out the snow lights
and hang my wreaths,
huffing fog like a dray horse.
I do what I don’t like, bedecking
a warehouse of beds,
the house cold as a clock,

because winter’s white archive makes me talk
by way of Yahoo and Sprint:
my boys, husband, and brother are abroad,
all my men, one in the desert with the Guard,
two Marines stomping Kandahar,
and a trim sailor glassing lanes
off the Horn.

Before work, while the car outside starts
to warm with oil, I watch my inbox,
because they’ll send me pictures
saying they saw nothing,
and they’ll admit how bored they are, which is true.
Brian Williams has no other news.
Hurry up and wait—

Mom did it when Dan was in I Corps,
me too.  One day the airport, all of you
deplaning in your boots.  This year
Christmas by Yellow Tail,
Oprah, the bathroom lights,
my men outside chalking off freedom’s body
and securing my lonely rights.

(forthcoming from The Texas Review)

Famous

As occupational hazards go
this one isn’t bad,
still it’s galling that
only doing poems
doesn’t make you a poet,
that living is riddled with tasks
you didn’t request.

Early writers string the bow expecting scenes
with women by singular means,
lunch with critics and publishers,
ad-hoc clubs in their honor, the fan letters,
free bottles, and laurel
piling up in the study corners,
a life of nights and days
beyond the reach of dishes
where you’ve got a hero’s spine
and the stars are kin, or psychiatrists.

It’s true you get some of this,
mainly (rejection) letters (or bills)
by day and dishes at night,
plus many times
(most of the days and nights)
when you can’t string a line,
not even a borrowed one—

once you get past twenty
your nights and days
remain free in the worst way
if you thought poems alone would be plenty.

You need prose bones
because this task, the one you chose,
matters when it doesn’t happen alone:
poets do unpoetic shit all day,
they buy Crest and shoelaces,
pick insurance, see their dentists,
watch football, consult the bus lines,
get spooked by the undefined
and go to bed and wake up again like other people,

and nothing routine or required
is ancillary.  Deny this
and you risk tiring early,
a half-poet.  Philistines
refuse to balance their books,
and those who don’t look
closely into art believe it can erase
life’s vital dullness, abolish pain,
the rear brain, and wage labor,
taking it for the main course
instead of what it is: a flavor.

As occupational hazards go

this one isn’t bad,

still it’s galling that

only doing poems

doesn’t make you a poet,

that living is riddled with tasks

you didn’t request.

Early writers string the bow expecting scenes

with women by singular means,

lunch with critics and publishers,

ad-hoc clubs in their honor, the fan letters,

free bottles, and laurel

piling up in the study corners,

a life of nights and days

beyond the reach of dishes

where you’ve got a hero’s spine

and the stars are kin, or psychiatrists.

It’s true you get some of this,

mainly (rejection) letters (or bills)

by day and dishes at night,

plus many times

(most of the days and nights)

when you can’t string a line,

not even a borrowed one—

once you get past twenty

your nights and days

remain free in the worst way

if you thought poems alone would be plenty.

You need prose bones

because this task, the one you chose,

matters when it doesn’t happen alone:

poets do unpoetic shit all day,

they buy Crest and shoelaces,

pick insurance, see their dentists,

watch football, consult the bus lines,

get spooked by the undefined

and go to bed and wake up again like other people,

and nothing routine or required

is ancillary.  Those who deny

this will write lies and flag early

as half-poets.  Philistines

refuse to balance their books,

and those who don’t look

closely into art believe it can erase

life’s vital dullness, abolish pain,

the rear brain, and wage labor,

taking it for the main course

instead of what it is: a flavor.

In Arcadia Too

1.)

We could do it this way:
wild cotton banked like wet smoke
behind the garden, the oak
a sun colander

over snapdragons
with paisley gullets
nodding off (it’s hot)
in the green hash,

bees with live syringes
stitching their nests out of sugar,
even the threadbare possums,
and deck chairs that glisten.

Then of a prescient morning
mushrooms like yellow fists
creak up from the leaf-
cloaked roof of our garage,

bursting the enclave’s lie again—
that when you walk here with friends
everyone talks and nobody dies,
a scheme lifted from dead Greeks.

Outside the fence, the afternoon creeps
along like a platoon of thieves,
like this, this, which reminds
you of streets, and their crumbling trends.

2.)

Rosé utters a calcium pink,
this quibble of rocks it gives
you in parks, and thanks
to friends who bring it,
the chalk plush, light ink
to write the real holidays.

3.)

You choose one thing: be dogged
for the rest of your life
by mistakes this version
of you didn’t make, or
take your chances living
ransomed to the present.
This is it, there will not
be revisions or the time
to explain your odd routes
and clumsy things you said.
You are no editor,
you have no homes on earth,
you won’t be here again.

4.)

There’s no percentage in lying
in your shabby bed with someone,
but nothing shabby. Days are made so.

Yet men insist on making puzzles of the gift
of women (same for them)—
anatomizing how they begin to lift
each other through a hum
of partnered skins.

It’s good for minor life
to play its major hours
through rented bedrooms
over parking lots and poplars and gyms,

until you’re shocked by the luck
of your hunger, your being live carbon
still seeking, on the galaxy’s cold fin,
women and the other men.