The opening of a blossom
reminds me of birth and death
but—all at once!—the strange
transformation of aging balances
between the budding and
the fading; the flower spent
its youth already, yet it remains
full of promise; the blossom
peaks out, hints at itself
with a swirled petal, an
unfurled leaf that cups
the edge of a blossom tenderly,
like how a lover would hold a face
between his anxious hands…

I imagine a great bell
in two dimensions, a graph
of life and death itself, with
the edges held in place by the
bloom and by its reverse, the anti-bloom:
the final contraction of petal against petal
into the blossom’s drying death-bed.

And these are my favorite flowers:
budding or drying, full of life or
full of death but still
full of beauty either way.
It’s like the beginning and ending of a song;
it’s like a grandson on his grandmother’s lap;
it’s like early Spring and late Summer—
a single season pure, filled with only either
promise or memory, and the full bosom
of hope and regret.

In fact, I think I wish
I could order bouquets just like that:
filled with blooming and fading
with the young rose tight and supple
and the dried rose ravished and graceful;
I hope that when I die
I remain just a wilted form,
an echo of every decade of my life
nestled deep within my leathery petals…

Even my small chihuahua
who protects me from the living room window
from strange passers-by
barks with all the might
that eight pounds can muster;
you’d be surprised at how much life
can be wrung from that amount
of muscle, bone, and sinew.

But then, how strange are living things!—
these glowing sparks,
these white-hot embers
God has flung out against
his cold and ancient world.

And as my dog regards me
with big brown eyes of bright concern,
and waits for my responding glance
to reassure him,
and then sinks into his blanket,
I receive the warmth of love,
like a morning sun-ray
that wakes you from your sleep.

I know Winter in San Diego
by the Santa Ana—
dry and hot and something more,
it dresses the sidewalks and streets
in a peculiar heat.
A Santa Ana season breaks just like
a fever: sudden like when you plunge
into the frigid ocean,
but also just like a fever
in that it inflames the senses;
flowers drool their scent, their pollen,
insects bumble more slowly,
and the horizon of asphalt swims in the air
like the sun’s shimmer off the sea…

Blanche DuBois must have visited here
to know exactly that feeling
to hold an afternoon within the palm
of your hand, to roll it between your
fingers…

Also like a fever—the air burns so slightly
and anything lying in sunshine feels as warm
as skin, as the blood rushing beneath;
somewhere someone on I-5 unrolls his
window to a flood of warmth, somewhere
someone sinks into a pool while the garden’s
final fall flowers sag and blur color in heat,
and every green thing loses itself, loses a bit of
life…

And as I step out into the warm darkness in Santee
where it feels like the night itself holds you
in the deep palm of its hand, holds you against its
beating chest, I feel
somehow
baptized.

The towns like petals, centers, clumps,
I call them towns, neighborhoods, communities,
municipalities, camelots, townships—
what do you call those things in California?
Unreal city Eliot would say,
and mayble Los Angeles is but
by the time you get to San Diego
—dropping straight through Orange County—
it’s a stew, a group, a cluster
of so many little pieces,
with freeways like so many tubers
that form the bed beneath the dirt
beneath the garden;
even Los Angeles isn’t Los Angeles
so much as it is the Valley
or Santa Monica—
so many little worlds
with only the freeway that rushes through
to even know of the outside world,
to even know that this little twenty square mile strip
isn’t everything there ever is,
isn’t in itself the world without end…

California approaches time itself differently:
a string of moments like links in a necklace,
a daisy chain of realities,
and as my mind flies over and
surveys it all indifferently, like a
pelican off the coast hunting for fish,
of course I think of you
of both of you really,
the two of you, one 24 and one 40;
it’s something about men and time…
time just happens to men
—not like women, who mark time with their bodies—
and when it just happens like that
it kind of never happens at all…

So alright, 24 or 40,
either one of you
could steal me away
without so much as a moment’s notice
to ride the freeways
in your car:
5, 805, 405, 10,
because I know that there
as I sit next to you
and as the road mixes dirt and grass and whatever is growing
into a perfume of motion,
and as we pass down that majesty
—human will visible from space, the American Great Wall—
I murmur the name of each town, like a prayer
when the passing freeway sign announces it;
next to you, there, the towns will be
that daisy chain
and honestly
I can tell you, even as the sun sets
it won’t ever end…

“Who’d have thought tomorrow / would be so strange” —REM

Everyone gives a good hard look, now and again
into the mirror, good and hard and long enough
to see a glimpse of a stranger—
and that right there, that’s the face of
tomorrow,
because that is going on right now,
beyond memory’s wavefront
now is the tomorrow of memory
and we all remember ourselves
in a rougher draft
than what the mirror presents.

And yes, mirrors are fraught,
often used to describe love,
or the lack thereof,
but remember Narcissus didn’t even recognize
the person he saw in the lake…
…he reminds me of Li Po the Chinese
poet and drunkard (if that’s not redundant)
who reached out to embrace the moon’s reflection
in the Yangtze River
and drown; I like to hope
in his last moment he finally got a taste
of moonlight in water—was it as sweet as wine?

But we were talking
about the face of tomorrow
and I guess if Li Po left
any kind of a lesson
beyond a beer mug or bong
it’s to embrace drowning
in the moon,
to peel the image off the mirror, and
stick it to your face,
like a Cracker Jack tattoo,
and dive head first into that water
cold and clear and breathless
breaking against the beach beneath you
that tide as it rushes
spray and salt and grit
that tide as it advances
torrential
into tomorrow.

The song that I heard
came remote from the tiny radio,
the kind with only one speaker
so that no matter how deep or bright it can go
it still never sounds like stereo;
it was a small and bright song
just small and remote like the radio
itself, a wakeup song, bright
obviously meant to be played aloud
through a one-speaker radio…

…and like any song, it clashes against
the rocks, the cliff-face of
songs in my mind,
songs with notes that never
quite die out, even in silence:

Moonlight Serenade
Rhapsody In Blue
Stairway To Heaven
I Wanna Be Your Dog
Niggas My Height Don’t Fight
I Hate Myself And Want To Die

And this song, like all those songs
plays out against a double harmony
of all the notes that aren’t there
and all the notes ever played before it.

Should I keep it a secret? I had saved it
for the end, but really like a
nervous insane man with a nervous tick
maybe sucking at his lip or squinting his eye or
rubbing his crotch at the worst times possible
like him I am obsessed—
with that eerie green light
green like it is beneath some
tropic ocean, I imagine,
the whole car cabin like that
seemingly under water, it even
gleams, glistens
though that is the blood
of course, blood pitch black
in the drone of the green light.

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights…

…and the whole scene is a pieta,
a sacred tableau to the flow
of the world we’re in, the word
that encases us like a giant
glass sky-dome, the word now
but only so much more than now
for it is now and now and now
and tomorrow and forever after
and you can’t escape it, not even
underwater on a busy London street
nor fleeing 90 miles an hour
along a California freeway
except, maybe, if you’re fleeing to desert
or some other timeless place
(there are fewer and fewer these days).

So, this was the song I heard
echoing off the sky
taking its place among the others,
even ones I forgot to mention, like—

Purple Haze, Siegfried’s Death March—

among all those songs that strain the air
that etch themselves into time until one day
for no reason except that God would know
you find yourself humming them.
I think I’ve written about this song before,
about its ending, but like I said, I’m
a crazy man, obsessed, underwater…

I fell into the bed and grazed his cheek
and everything became shadow
underneath the covers—
second motions,
second sensations,
as each flex and quiver
echoed through our skin
down into the muscles…

There is no color in contact,
only the subtle shade and smell
as heat frees the chemistry
trapped between the pores…
…then, the crucible,
the stretched flame
that pierces that dome where you feel like
you’re enclosed within a body…

After the machinery sputters and halts
and the twin factory cools and metal cools
and skin cools beneath the cotton-polyester blend,
the shadows forged in desire-iron
linger, glow, radiate
until the shadow of time
finally steals over the bed
like a giant quenching wave,
a wave only so bold as to pass
through the spent ruins of a moment…

I feel like I could dissolve
into nothing but these shadows
and that trace of heat pregnant in time now passed,
and now that we’re talking of shadows,
and now that we’re talking about a double-part,
and now that over a decade has passed,
in the tide pools of our bedroom,
at what point does the figure recede
into the shadow?

Hiroshima—

where the shadows burned in place
and I could say love is like that
I and would, except,
unlike an American holocaust that sears the sky
love contains grace,
love contains mercy,
love contains a shadow’s subtly, and its shade…

We call it “kisses”
but it’s really a tongue
that probes up into my ear
into my nose
and I swear he can taste snot
and just on the other side of my revulsion
I realize the strange contract
—the lupine ritual—
fulfilled in slow time:
time on my lap,
on the couch, licking his paw
after a walk…

Saliva, germs, intimacy, immediacy, whatever;
kisses mean something different to my chihuahua,
except that they don’t—
behind the lips
behind the teeth
remains the potential of fear
that he could rip my face off
that I could dash him against the wall…

Faces together, born from
the deadliest predators on the planet,
we share our pack—
we define ourselves
in sleek, sharp delineation;
we are “us,” we are friends,
and the rest of the world
will see the teeth and not the tongue—
the rest of the world is meat.

Let go and just let it happen…
at first I think about riding a bike
or falling in love—but—
it’s something more, something delicate
like when you touch your tongue to
the top of your mouth after drinking
something scalding: you feel it, roll it around,
and just let the pain happen…

Or maybe it’s like when a toddler falls and no one is watching;
not even a cry, just a look of surprise blooms across the face,
across the soul… All that careful attention, dashed against
hard ground and—and—it’s okay, though.

Eisenhower said something to the effect that war is impossible
to plan for, and also you must absolutely plan for it;
and while war is a close cousin—
one who visits on vacation, plays with all your toys at grandma’s house—
this is more tender and more precious,
like the memory that clings to those toys
at grandma’s, that memory that soaks into
them and into the mints in her purse, into
the cologne in grandpa’s drawer.

It’s like when you catch a sunrise in the corner of your eye
just before you look at it…
or when you’re walking back from the mall
restroom and you see him and before you
—almost instantly—recognize him, he is
so handsome, leaning against the rail in jeans and a hoodie…

It’s like those thoughts that wander in when
you want to lie down but don’t much feel like sleep,
the thoughts that spin and dance on your
dashboard when you’re driving alone, in silence.

Or maybe, finally, it’s like when you finally
decide to plunge down the playground slide
for the first time…
…and air rushes and you smell the metal and plastic
of the slide, it vibrates, creaks, and then—
dirt.

It’s just like that: finishing a poem; watching yourself dying…