California Dirge

I've tried my best to be true 

to the nature 

of my beauty state. 

Not to wake the dream of the poem: 

Don't spit bits of broken tooth and disrupt the 

vapors- 

my beauty is for you after all, all of you

this is all for you, all of you, 

my dream translated for your pastime, 

all of you, 

And

I don't want my last refrain to be some

California dirge:

but sometimes it feels like 

all of my little bones are crushed, and 

I think about that sparrow, flying wild

into Grandma's big window

beneath the balcony on Dublin Avenue. 

Here's the truth: 

I am at least a thousand years old. 

And no one I have ever loved,

will ever know,

how deep it goes. 

And no one I have ever loved, 

will ever see,

what all the losing, 

and gaining,

does to me:

what all the fluc-tu-a-ting does to me. 

And I'm sorry Grandma but I can't seem to take it easy. 

The daily billowing and sagging, 

seagulls feasting on trash, 

poison wafting through the city. 

Sometimes this love digs into my side

like the hilt of my own

half-concealed shank 

(all the elders call it a pen knife;

I'm full of 

doubt)

and I do talk to her ghost when I'm grappling 

with the usual procession 

of kindness and kindling,

the loss,

the bereavement,

sweet clarity.

The bare breast struggling like 

a sheet pinned to the line, 

I try to breathe the wind in and it skips me every time-

I see us all standing around, 

palms full of irradiated seashells, chalky 

cage armor. 

I see you sleeping, hugging 

my leg like a bear.

And I wonder if this is 

another relic

I'm going to have to throw into the tar pit.

The translucence of my loneliness

in spring, summer, winter, fall, 

clarity. 

Live, die, lose, gain, reciprocity.

Love, hide, reveal, clench your teeth as you cry

he doesn't want me does he. 

She doesn't want me does she. 

And oh gosh!

There goes the sadness again, 

a low kingfisher sweeping, 

"The scenery without you fails to amaze me. 

the whole panorama fails to faze me." 

And sometimes the tune is so vague 

I can hardly hear it. 

And it doesn't even chink the armor of ignorance. 

And I achieve nothing with my own mind, and feel that

I'm the cyanic heart. 

But when a new morning is gentle, I can almost see 

a more honest anatomy. 

I remember the heron sanctuary,

the blue lungs of the old estuary. 

-I feel a little woozy I think I'm approaching 

the hands of god here.-

They look exactly like my own mind 

when I'm not in my way. 

They look exactly like that fat marine layer on the bay-

the opalescence of familial love

the wish for a softer future

and the earth is giving us an awfully knowing glance,

as it grasps its bleeding side 

in the dirt

Marine Layer

Marine Layer

I wrote Perry a letter about fear. I said

do you feel safe? I do and do not.

The feeling of time's passage touches me.

Loneliness can make crossing the bridge

such a wrench.

A marine layer obscured the usual view

of nameless hills and their bounty.

All was almost well, and probably well,

but how I hurt, deep in the hope chest.

How I hurt like a tired echo, and the

fabric of my future sometimes

seems shot with today's cringing

failures.

(Though what is in a failure but

a bunch of vowels any way, and a sense

of veracity probably misplaced.)

Perry says our sadnesses reveal us,

but cannot be borne alone, like water

from the well.

Well well well. My sadnesses reveal

a heart as big as anything at all.

The world knows

my heart is

as big as a sun.  

Berkeley Marina

At the Berkeley Marina

Love lost is love gained for this flawed vessel,

and if this is bad, this is not so bad

after all.

No one knows it but I'm as vicious as some

animals. I have the vicious will to love my neighbor.

No one knows it but I'm largely obsidian,

largely water. I am unbound and I expand,

like every universe.

Don't see my love as something which falls generously from the sky.

Don't see my love as a resource sucked from the ground and piped through systems.

Don't see my love as a pressure on your uncovered head.

See my love as the deepest lake of the continent.

My love is the deepest

lake of the continent.

It doesn't belong

to anyone at all.

It is entirely earthbound.

I am not even mine.

I think now that it is very hard to be anyone at all, which

I have thought before.

But I can only speak for myself. And

I will live fearlessly and like a child.

Be bitten by dogs.

Put my hands on hot things.

Pet cacti. Bark my knees.

Get burnt by the big sun

on long new days

And if this is bad, this is not

so bad after all.

This is just life. It's a

complicated organism.

And I'm one woman

negotiating an exploding star  

Los Osos

Through photographs, I was almost

there! Wading among the sumac

of my own baby's cradle,

where all the children grow up singing

oh my sweet calamine,

cleaning tar from feet with cooking oil,

trying to negotiate with a faceless wind.

And solitude is a long, indestructible

bone, a dry finger,

stroking madrone,

feeling the bruise of etched initials:

she was here,

he was here, they were there,

Los Osos.

Solitude: it's a heavy sound

on the tongue, has weight

but contains sun: 

see it there: sun. 

There used to be ghosts hunkered down in the dunes.

There used to be European diseases.

There used to be a town called La Panza,

perched on waves of quartz, and

little girls sleeping there

dreamt of bears.

Sometimes I worry

my own heart might become a ghost town.

I rejoice in gentle artifacts still mobile,

bouyant, bristling,

you're so very alive, you there,

phenomenon. 

Both literally and in some larger sense

a bird. 

And didja know, didja:

ten years old in Los Osos,

I walked out in my nightie,

entered a windstorm.

It knocked me over like a sapling,

like a cruel love or hard time-

the crouching oaks all rattled

like diamondbacks,

and somewhere all the diamondbacks were

sleeping, I guess,

beneath rocks, on the waves of quartz,

dreaming of bears.

Time wound sideways through

the sand. Indefatiguable. Oh boy. 

I've heard that some oaks became gunpowder.

I don't know where the bears went,

but there are still bear-crossing signs on the highway.

And the oak moth is still a glutton,

and I am too,

still trying to capture the bounty of

the season,

still almost attempting to apply taxonomy

like all the others passing, mapping,

she was here, he was here,

they were there,

Los Osos