Lying in beds

Tonight I put my hand on your face
as you drifted to sleep--
it covered nearly all of it.
I felt your pulse pushing softly near my thumb,
your cheek warm and bare
against my hand and fingers,
our skin traced in faint lines and marked from
the slow years,
but plain and naked the way we were made.

And it came to me,
how all these other bodies
lie in beds with faces exposed,
yet my hand is on yours,
touching the lines where you smile,
feeling your heart settling slowly,
watching shut eyes dream.

So I put my other palm against my own face and
held it there,
connected us with my hands.
I felt the pricks of wispy auburn hairs
sprouting over my cheek,
as warm as yours.

I thought of the many
other things that try to connect us:
waves and wires and digits,
devices and lenses that capture us,
transmit things through blank screens,
fuel to relocate us;
how these things are powerless
and trivial--
they are not like two faces, bodies, hearts and lives
connected by two hands
in the dark space of night.

Divorce (or small dark scars framed in white)

I miss the sounds of children,
their warm hands slapping against my cinderblock walls,
the same walls that caught their gentle breaths,
sheltered them asleep at night;
and heard their voices--
the way some deepened and boomed,
while others grew tender and lovely.

I miss the midnight pool lights,
lit up secretly during summer,
their droning neon buzz and the parade of moths
that continually danced in the pale lamplight,
the quiet laughter and excited splashes,
the way the lights turned off abruptly
from the inside once discovered on.

I miss the cavalier pursuits of youth
under the stoic gaze of adulthood,
the unconcerned and the desperate
trying to balance themselves within my walls,
in a house where love and joy
made occasional tidal bursts
instead of steady even flows.

I miss the lost looks of the parents,
staring at their reflections
in the bedroom mirrors, the bathroom vanity--
I watched them age,
wrinkles widening, greying hairs lengthening;
I watched their eyes darken into hard black pinpoints,
their lips pursed tight together
as they came and went
and passed each other wordlessly at night.

I miss the hollow hole--unrepaired for years--
hammered through my back bedroom door by an angry fist
and a rough cry of shock and defeat;
all that sleeping in two separate beds,
two separate rooms when I wished it were one;
and the dinnertable quarrels around a checkbook,
because it was all the conversation they ever had.

I miss the moving men,
who carelessly scraped paint from my doorway
with the edges of the old chestnut dresser
(the one with the burnt black incense circle),
making small dark scars, framed in white;
the look of the bare orange kitchen tile,
those once-crowded countertops useless,
all closets empty, walls and carpets immaculate:
abandoned.

I miss those same voices I once loved,
so vacant, so feeble and hollow now,
mechanically announcing quick arrivals and quicker exits
(ephemeral, the way a child can become an adult
and then quickly pace down these old familiar hallways
after so many years).

I miss the sounds of their engines
as they drove away,
separate cars into separate worlds.
The lifeless bonds that
time and remembrance forged between us all
forgotten,
left with a SOLD sign like a headstone
and a small stack of flyers
strewn across the naked kitchen countertops.

Passage of a recovering gasoline addict

I remember how I intended never to pay more than
two dollars a gallon,
then it was three,
then four.

Yesterday I drove to a lonely station,
seeking the cheapest purchase--
but it was deserted, forever advertising at $3.09.
Inside, lights from a Pepsi refrigerator still blazed
and half-empty paperboard boxes held
solitary packages of M&Ms and Snickers bars.
Wooden "For Lease" signs propped against the windows outside,
set in the barren auburn dirt above breaking concrete,
and the bloodred roof shingles were covered in dust,
as if a hot desert wind had flown over them for decades.

At home I untangled my bike from next to the washing machine.
I wiped off layers of lint,
inflated the tires, added a small aluminum rack
with bungee cords and carabiners to secure my things.
I rode out into the streets in the early morning,
felt leg muscles crackling and straining
from inexperience.
I felt the sun's subtle heat as it crested mountain peaks
and touched across my cheek and neck,
impelling me to propel myself further forward,
past pavement and exhaust, intersections and blaring horns.

I rode up through the canyon,
heavy dry mouth heaving from canine panting, thirst.
The motorway sounds faded to a dull growl,
a humming roar drifting backward and
behind me with every passing meter.
I stopped near the small park
where ornamental maples overhang the walkway,
riverside ferns grow along their trunks
and a waterfall plunges lazily upstream--
all of it vacant like the gas station. I sat atop a wellworn
picnic bench, its wood still damp with morning dew.

And with the summer sun now sparkling and clear to the east
I turned about to look over
my journey, down into the valley--
to watch gasoline stations withering in the distance,
their monetary marquees like neon flags
or blinking communication towers.
Insectile vehicles crawl on all fours,
desperately attracted to them, starving, needing them;
without them they see no other way, no alternative:
mechanical moths to a bonfire flame.

Mick Kelly

The old 1898 school, being restored--
a squat block of brick and wood and
newly placed, sharp-tinted windows,
with a slanted steep roof and some scattered shingles,
some plywood angled up and high.
The heat of early March, nearly spring,
and in the purple light of the disappearing sun
I scaled up to that unfinished roof,
up three floors and past grey exposed sheetrock and
pale twobyfours, to a small propped ladder against the sky.
I walked lightfooted and straddled the peak,
the warm wood against my legs; I watched the
darkening light, blazing slowly down behind the distant west mountains,

and I sang out like Mick Kelly--favorite songs,
about existing and knowing it,
about love and dying and holding hot hands,
palms sweating near the lake in the summer,
of being young and hungry and unspoiled, untainted--
fearful even at the bigness and greatness of life
and its sorrows and joys.
About reality.
About all being connected by strands, links to each other,
to soil and cloud and human heart and animal eyes
and a common soul--
a sweeping-blue oceany soul, made of sky and sea and depth.

That sweet taste of reaching infinity,
between all of us and our minds
and uttered from our lips
into a common stream of need and hope and
love.

Eye tonight

I am drinking rooibos tea flavored with gingerbread house icing and lavendar honey.
I am writing about James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus and Stephen and Daedalus.
I am three days behind with this assignment, my seminar paper.
I am almost done with the semester.
I am still awake and it is three a.m.
I am worried about taking four online classes at once.
I am not always motivated.
I am very full because I have eaten a lot today.
I am ready for a departure.
I am prepared for a change.
I am now home from the library. I was there before seven and I left at 1:45 when the cello-orchestrated Nothing Else Matters started playing over the loudspeakers. An orchestrated version of The Legend of Zelda themesong follows that, and tonight I missed it.
I did come home for one hour from 10:30 till 11:30, though.
I was able to successfully find all BYU's archived and bound copies of James Joyce Quarterly.
I am a procrastinator, and sometimes that worries me.
I am dry in this Utah weather.
I am dry though it snowed all day today.
I am wondering whether the mountains look as beautiful hidden in the dark of night as they do during the sunset.
I am wishing that certain magical and wonderful things happened to me.
I am thinking, thinking, thinking, and not getting anywhere.
I am not Einstein.
I am no fabulous artificer.
I do not have a strange name.
But I'm me all the same.

Shadows, seeds

I came out into the high spring evening sun,
my tall shadow trailing behind me--
it looks like me, connected to me,
black and fearless it is me.
I thought of James Dean and his Spyder on Highway 46,
and I walked past the junipers,
the sweetgums and birches,
planted purposefully in green hilly mounds.
I slid my hand over the chafed and chipped handrail,
all rustbrown except on top--
scraped bare to the metal,
the pavement-clacks of the skateboards told me why.

They too had slid across it,
scraped it, and made long shadows
all colorless behind,
brightened and blocked out on hot pavement.
I stepped forward with hands on that cool wounded rail,
the warm setting sun soaking me and coloring the
greens and browns
of the trees, with their soft hanging catkins,
and dry winter branches
sprouting pale new shoots of mossy green,
heavy with bloom and seed.
I sat on a hill and watched the world washed
in color,

while the day pressed to an end and the sky rotated round.
Time did not exist.
I felt this emotion, in this moment:
just a feeling
that I can't express--I could never.
I can't say what it is I want, or what I sense;
it's just a feeling.

So I sat and thought of that colliding car,
of Santa Barbara and crisscrossing highways
and youth and growth--seasons of planting and harvest
and rebirth,
of all the seeds that would never take root,
all the abandoned ideas and half-thought thoughts,
all the lives that would be lost at twentyfour,
such stifled vitality.

I held the prickly brown seed from the sweetgum,
knew that it was like living:
painful and inflicting, yet full of potential,
spines surrounding germs of hope--
and I was the writer without words,
the rebel without a cause.

Daytrip to the meadows

Anxious and hungry, we are thirsty for fluid nighttime lights
and a view from the dead flatness of earth.
And so we soar southward over cool blacktop
in the close, sunless morning--
a small restless flock we are, buffeted about by westpacific winds--
until over Delano and the Tushars daylight crowns, quick and golden,
same as seven a.m. summers when my eyes crack to the light
and breathe in heavy awake the heaving morning air.

The blue sky, pale blue sky colored like
milky soap bubbles on a freshscrubbed sidewalk
blazes through the red sandstoned buttes, the ruddy bluffs behind us.
Edge of the mojave and we patrol the wideopen road;
joshua trees line up the freeway (those hands to the sky),
first guarding the guardrails
then spreading out and off and further,
scattered in forest patches the distant claycolored sand.

On a long desert boulevard we arrive in the midst of chaos,
next to a stadium brimming with colors and bodies
and surrounded by hard white trailers and numbered flags and barbeques.
We are ushered in by these celebrity helicopters, circling closer and
hovering just above our heads like sleek painted falcons, shining
and swimming through sunlight, one-by-one. Policecar lights splay on
chainlink fences and hot double-yellow lines, and through a queue of cars
we stumble past the spectacle, all the race-waiters.

To the architected center,
throbbing heart of a barren land, haunted by
spectres of generations of drowned hopes and sloughed dreams.
Where the earth lights the heavens instead of vice versa,
and society gathers in united strands of joy and craved emptiness--
Where desire is desired.

This city so full of people, so churning and thriving,
so consumed by artifice and laughter and swagger
and erected replicas of places they'd rather be, scenes they'd rather see.
They want the whole world condensed into one small vision;
they imagine adventure and purpose in these diversions.
(But still we come to be diverted by these diversion-seekers,
as if one with them.)

We walk miles till our legs throb and the
children must be carried--pregnant or no.
The heavy sun sinks in the Nevada soil but light never leaves;
dark only in the dimming sky.
Modeled censored girls on hard coloredpaper cutouts
litter the walkways and we trample them,
hear the clickclack of fingers flicking decks of them and beckoning
with hands extended and eyes elsewhere,
tossing mass-produced faceless bodies into the crowds,
bright glaring shirts:
"I can get you any girl in 20 minutes."

Oh Las Vegas must you be so bright
with your sidewalk stench and shine?
and all your choreographed light shows and circus parades,
dancing fountains and megaphone whores with wideopen legs
and soulless stares and the tinkling of glass,
the smell of rum and whiskey sours and thick raisiny cigarsmoke.
But even as we decry it all we can't help but watch, awed, captivated;
we can't help but smirk behind our smiles.

We leave as we came: that stadium we passed,
exploding with colors and flags and movement, all dying away.
And then the slicked waxy trucks, gleaming like greased billboards
with images of razors and two-by-fours and tall beer cans,
trail each other through the intersection taking their racers away.
And back over blacktop we flee, north toward the Wasatch,
away from the little harbor-pool of endless light in the desert.

But even as we despise it we validate it;
even as we walked its streets we gave it breath.

Tantrum after the results

I shut the office door--past six and it looks like rain--
and lay down on the turf-carpet with my face up on it all flush up against it;
it smelled of socks and sunflower seed shells and scalp flakes.
I know my weaknesses, and I'm too logical, too
levelheaded for this tantrum.

I spoke clumsily in whispers and chants like some mantra of "I don't believe" gets me anywhere.

I curled up and in a daydream with my fingers clenched digging my palms
I thought of an old woman holding a mirror up to her withered face
and gasping at the sight of herself she dropped it into the dingy porcelain of the tub
where it shattered and broke, that old family heirloom,
and she said "good."

It's just that I wanted to be the best, I didn't want no comeuppance. I needed,
face to the floor like this.
Now I want to cut my hair and starve myself, to change to be different to be
better. Or just to be.
Always acting so serious, so deep ostensibly steeped in meaning I try to fill
it all in. I guess I try to mean in everything.
But isn't, there isn't meaning in everything./? (<--even in this)
Some things are just pointless. I know my weaknesses.
I'm too clearheaded and I can't cry when I try
or when I need.
But enough's enough. So I sat up.

Then on the way home,
in an old rusted white Taurus wagon with a maroon hood,
a small boy--River Phoenix in Stand By Me--
cranked his window down next to me and set his small hand
on the glass, stared at me and lifted two fingers, waved.
I stared ahead at the road and the pillow blanket of thick pregnant clouds
and lifted two of my own, waved back.

Chainsaw

I saw this mighty elm in a field,
next to new highway contstruction,
and the small man holding a chainsaw underneath it,
eating into the outstretched lower limbs,
the pale, wet wood.

And I thought of mankind mining ore in the earth,
learning to purify it, melt it mold it sharpen it,
place it into that circular metal ring
then power it black with oil,
extracted up from the depths of the earth--
remains of the living, prehistoric matter.

Cut into them mighty living trees,
tear them to the ground, limb by limb, uproot the stump;
make way for an empty stretch of highway, roadway,
noxious hardened black tar set in straight lines,
inorganic, coating the soil:

an unwanted armored shell
to transport us to highrises and complexes,
to tear us off like crooked elm limbs
and then straighten us out like roads.

Lit paper lanterns

My knees up at my chest,
under striped rows of
turquoise and cherry and hazy emerald.
Our reflections hover on
the curved charcoal screen that faces the bed:
Amy in her rosecolored robe, book open,
belly full; and there I am,
knees up, watching the blank television
like we're a scene:
where romantics lie on the bed in bathrobes
and they read and smile and love, and nothing
is wrong and their bare feet touch barely
under the striped Spanish blanket.
Lamps on either nightstand shine together;
they light the string of olive paper lanterns overhead,
illuminating the pages in our books with silhouettes
of bamboo stalks and leaves and branches.
And the tapestries behind and above us stretch and hang down
like stomachs, like a small child is lying in each one--
like pushing up round and warm under a quilt
where hands rest softly and silently,
and that lump groans and stirs and makes subtle movements--
a Herculean youth.

And I stare straight at the slanted screen,
at our two or three shapes connected by lit paper lanterns.