Casing the Promiseland

Hot middle-aged women jog

Through the subdivision in September

Following their strollers

Soon they will be charging on

The cafés for skim lattes

Reading Elle and Real Simple

But they remember the land

Before golf courses, the river trail

Lined with marmots in March

No cell phone, tevo, trans fat

When they still snuck away

For a cigarette before bed

Though they are happier now

That efficiency has become virtue

The dog’s head out the hybrid window

Power walking to the promiseland

What type of agave nectar

Is best to sweeten the fall?

On Montague Island

Afternoon’s furlough, midsummer

Anchor down and the skipper

Sleeping beside the chessboard

We took the skiff ashore and

Filled ziplocks with blueberries

A fawn reclining in a dry creek bed

The mechanic cradled her as though

She was his very own everything

He didn’t care about mosquitoes

She didn’t fear the look in his eyes

A swirl of smoke and

We throw handfuls of earth at each other

A gesture of love, a reminder

That dry land is not a myth

But a thing, blessed in its objectivity

The pines, the time dissolving until

It is a faded photograph in a crowded room

In a big city where mystery is a profession and

Everyday the sky grows nearer. Lo

Silence is not a myth

What talk of health care? Which man

In your memory, flicked his moustache

Before explaining the particulars of your death

What became of the pies? Of skipper’s queen

Felled that day the summer after next

The Ancient World

Remember the simple things we wanted

And the simple things we had

September spirals tackled in the leaves

National Geographic and that beer

After work. A few major chords

F, C, G. A dip a day (the Longcut)

Why did we have to read

“The Gay Science” and “The Order of Things”

Was it better before we knew

It had a name? Was it

Good to toss and turn and

Wake up with fistfuls of flame?

Yes yes, but it’s better now

That we wake up with

Fistfuls of something we’ve

Never seen before and

Will never see again

Unless, unless

I traded my switchblade

For a fistful of Percocet

On the Fourth of July

You met an old friend’s little sister

And she wasn’t hot, she was beautiful

At a party with blunts and 4x4s

We got lost on the road from Quechee

Bought forties for kids you babysat

When the towers still stood

That was the last time I knew anyone so well

The bobolink at dawn, the tall grass at dusk

A clean window was the whole world

The Last Days of Summer

To be mid-70s and mild

Where Chinooks blow, a final drop of Big K Cola

Splashed a browning blade of grass, Black Hills

Bleak Hills, Andrei pointed south with the wind

With eyes not closed just yet

When you wrote ‘struck gold

For the first time in two years’

What did you mean?

Was it a turn of phrase?

A perfect dream?

Lawn chair lonesome in the

Middle of a field (thunderheads, etc)

Australian dog shakes and the air

Fills with the dust, the dust of a heat wave

Sunflowers hang their heads

What kind of a party

Will accompany out reunion?

And (must I ask?) are you afraid

That someday the muse will tire of you

And leave you with only your hands and feet

But now is not a time for hesitation

The cold will come, in this world

And the next. No matter what

Darkness lurks in the lunch hour

We do our work, and in doing, it’s done

Say the Magic Word

I mean, ‘Life is a dream’.

When Harpo whistles an elegy

I’ve just poured my sixth

Seven and Seven. ‘The moon

Is a piece of tea’ steeped in the sky

The people of Mali sued the World Bank

A friend was foreclosed upon

‘It’s not so bad’ he said, ‘still

If the rain falls on the just and unjust alike

How do I know which I am?’

The lights go out at the dive bar

Silencing the karaoke

Street sweepers cross my brow

Buried in pillows I traded for blankets

In other countries, long ago

When talkies came it killed the Tramp

Chico asked for a flash and got a flush

In ‘Dream of the Red Chamber’

Bao Yu learned to depend only

On his own coherence

The dream was not sidereal, was not the

Stuff of a dandy. We walked up to

Treeline. The mountains black

‘The moon her magic be’

I clasp my hands, and take a knee

Latenighter

And sea stir up hopes

Where once we caught fish now

Evidence disappears. To fathom

I have been angry, cruel

The good, at times, obscure

Riddle me this: time is not passing

If “truth is not the secret of a few”

Why are there so many clocks?

You had one (St. Cloud?) which sticks

In my foreground like we just toasted Walt

Or Larkin (The Maiden Name)

“Make the city landscape soft”

What summer? What fall?

It is still, will always be

The day is your and you are me

Even Wallace cried for lobsters

Even Hitler read a poem

When night fall on the interstate

And all the semis start to roam

I’ll wish at last I had a home

So small now and so quiet

A spider in the water closet

A photograph falls from the pages of Proust

Boy in library, glasses, shaved head

It was just a few moments ago

Michael

Attach wings to your heels and come

Where I long to pour cold brew

In a Kerr mason jar. Place it

Between your fingers tired

From 10,000 miles at night by sea

The rugged coast is memory

Silent Sunday sidewalk cracks

Now populate the gloaming

Alone in the city and cloaked

In its hue and shimmer and hum

A passport on the tenement floor

Part time serving perozhis

To cops and robbers off Lombard

What if we were swimming

Together in Baikal and Titicaca

The commuter ferry at dawn

Sourdough fumes, the fog line

Earthquake insurance salesmen

Multi-volume Talmud in the shade

Sun sets on Presidio barracks

Teaching Vimalakirti at San Quentin

He came home, shot his wife and her lover

Fifty years later the cell is holy

I told him all about you

Street ball across the wide wild country