That Fierce Wild Cry in the Night

That fierce wild cry in the night
arriving only now in earshot from another time
a time to abandon everything we have gathered around us

and embrace the shadows like lovers seeking forgiveness
a time to walk away from the fire with the promise entrusted
and speak it to another wall a ship-lap tongue and groove array

of knots and grains that make us weep for the forest of childhood
no time to think here no time to hold on or let go this time
there is no pillow to turn into no soft escape that will muffle

the truth. Oh there will be days when we will ask each other
why such vital life-changing experiences cannot travel in whispers
like first kisses barely touching...why surrender must reach back

so far to the tails of our ancestors the tips of the spine
blunted and vestigial with memory neither easy nor difficult
and languages returning to tongues with a ferocity

that knows no limits and the towers in the night
with their windows of fire along the dreaded coastlines
moving moving in a dance with their own foundations

and there in the abandoned lot some of us stare
into each others' eyes longing for trust reaching
into our pockets for photographs and finding only

money we cannot spend. It's a long sentence
this sleeplessness and we wake up get dressed
in transparent fickle robes of our own imagination.

How Many Miles to the Border

How Many Miles to the Border

How close to the other and his chaos
dusty roads and slogans marked
in stones against the barren hills

The line is there I know the wet line
of the river the deep line that pulls
you in as you swim from what you

are to what you think you really want
the weather too stops on that spot
the clouds too big to get through checkpoints

and morning dew that falls here in the desert
ushered into cubicles and strip-searched
under guise of freedom and liberty

give me the map the red veins and blue
careful not to let the folds and creases tear
more than we already have allowed

whole rectangles of topographic abstractions
dangle over the silent steering wheel
how many miles how many widths of the thumb

can span the mountains and rivers without end
how close how near the other and the smells
of his strange cooking his spices caught up

under fingernails where tired morning
moves its fingertips over the skull
I know it's close I hear his music
and his children crying out to be fed

Dirt Dirt

Dirt Dirt

Dirt dirt give me the dirt
the scoops the shovels.
How about in spades or
trowels? Plowed under
or dug up. Come on

I know you're a mine
of information a veritable
quarry no a canyon
or is it a gulch? A hunch
of gulches. An arroyo
of Hey! Yo! Wassup?

What's down! Why
the grave look it's dark
so dark I can't see
down here in the catacombs
the worm tunnels the filth
the stench of Verdun

the bombed out craters
of rock-ridden backyards
where countless children
played after school maybe
two or three while school

was in session. Under
the fingernails. In the pores.
It takes a scrubbing brush
to see he's really a white
kid a good kid clean through

and through though he won't
eat his brassicas. No! And you
know why? Too gritty mommy.
Too crunchy and dirty he cries.
Silly boy she says. Eat your

greens your sprouts your spinach
your broccoli calabrese and kale
too not to mention sparrow grass
stalks in the night pushing their
way through the old man's
well-intentioned mounds of earth.

Soil he says. Not dirt.

She Gets Me Going

She Definitely Gets Me Going

Otherwise I'd be staying

probably minding my own behavior

since there's enough of that to go

around and come back again

without going anywhere really

not so much a spinning of wheels

as a weaving and re-weaving

an undoing to delay completion

I suppose a waiting because they're

in the vestibule the concerned

citizens the hallway the portico

the front deck you can hear their

conversations in passing feel their

elbows jutting angling like rooftops

giving inquisitive and frankly generally

couldn't care less looks the sort that

confuse lesser mortals but I've got

the ticket you know sorry if this

offends or makes you nervous or worse

something out of my control thank god

jealous poor you if that's the case

but rubber meets the road here my

friend because she gets me going

in definite ways ways that can be

defined in radial far-flung spokes

in the itinerary soul-dazzling star-

bursts reaching the known edges

of the world that's going

wouldn't you say? that's gone

my friend definitely long so long

the birds might be marbled godwits

or apapani goodness and gray-green

coastal granite infused with soapstone

or jagged a'a ooh-ooh dashes and

hyphens leading and poking each

word along each syllable in the going

and the getting and the defining

after all it's a parallel universe my

friend she gets me and me she gets

in a frisbee-boomerang sort of

lopsided spinning kind of way

gasps from the bystanders and

grunts of approval disapproval

from other passengers the turning

long-playing gold record mounted

like a museum piece with the song

always crooning in rising cadences

hardly a skip of the needle

louder and more insistent

I can hear it now Frank

Sinatra doing The Best

Is Yet to Come

Trash Mermaid

Trash Mermaid

On the beach this

morning's murder

of crows. Rocking

their black numbers

where froth and turbulence

reveals food

wearing shells

crustacean clues

perhaps their group

deception is no crime

merely passion for

misleading information

picked-through

candy wrappers

and other trickery

of human rubbish

bottle tops entire mermaids

objet trouvé washed ashore

in the beachcomber tradition

pre-assemblage.

Last seen hanging

on a wall in 

Breakers Café.

La Velita

LA VELITA NARANJITO

Her name was La Velita Rosalita Carmelita Celestina Naranjito and she was hand-picked to go far in this world. It could have been different. Nestled there in her dark leafy green bower, a beautiful cluster of white blossoms highlighting La Velita's graceful proportions, she watched with trembling apprehension the day the great shaking took her sisters and brothers from her life. That was the day people still call The Great Fall.

A shapely creature, La Velita seemed to draw the warmth and glow of sunlight to her without pretense. She was not given to fluttering her eyelashes like some young things from even warmer climes. Yes, in La Velita, all the romance, legend and beauty of Old California were still alive. The people looked at her and knew that the blood that flowed through her veins ran fresh and full of promise. Anyone could see she was without blemish, almost. After all, which one of us can say they have reached their best years without a scrape? Without a tumble?

One faint scar, only one faint shadow and that seen only by the very worst mannered busy-bodies who squinted from behind their faded J.C. Penney's machine-washable curtains. Apart from that, La Velita might have a little beauty mark in an unexpected part of her anatomy, but who's keeping track of these things? Who is the judge in these matters? Is this our right, to be staring at others, looking for little imperfections? What's the world coming to? It wasn't this way in our grandparents' day, I can tell you that! No! In those days, it was the whole person that mattered.

It was the whole of La Velita who stood proudly before the bespectacled man with a mostly white-haired goatee. Of course, she had learned to stand like that, to present a fearless picture of herself to the world. But it was a performance. She was in fact a little uncertain and more than a little afraid. What was he doing? Taking notes? Drawing? Look at him! Now he chooses a red pencil. Now a blue. Now a green. What is he doing? She stood stock still, petrified.

For what it was worth, Miguel Diablo liked to keep meticulous records of his food. That's right! He was going to eat poor La Velita. Where is this story going, you may well wonder. The next thing you know, Miguel's incisors will begin to show themselves like Swiss Army pocket knives from beneath his upper lip. Admittedly, he is twisting his mouth somewhat as he draws and writes. Perhaps he's seen her beauty mark. Or maybe he's seen that faint scar. Is he wondering how that happened? Is he thinking to himself, this is a story standing before me, a story waiting to be told.

Once upon a time, there was a rustling in the house, the top rungs of a ladder being thrust into the leaves and branches. Was anyone awake who would hear? Only La Velita, poor abandoned La Velita, the day after The Fall. No brothers and sisters. No mother and father. Grandfathers and grandmothers long since in the ground. She was alone. And now she feared for her life.

Suddenly she was twisted awake but she couldn't speak or scream. Not a sound from her. Quickly the darkness enclosed her, the soft folds of burlap sacking, the smells of the field, the granary, the sweat of hard labor. Bumping down the tall ladder, bumping against something with a pleasant voice, bumping over the country roads, bumping from sunrise to sunset. Long hours she lay there. At first there was the crazy rolling around but there was no way out in that claustrophobic softness. And then quiet. A guitar. The crackling of twigs in the early life of a fire set in a circle of stones. A song bird settling down in nearby branches. The sound of surf and the tumble of smooth stones at the edge of the sea. Where was she? What was happening?

How can this story end without blood being shed? That is what you are asking, isn't it? Let's see, the young man playing the guitar is taken by surprise by the farmer and skedaddles, leaving poor hapless La Velita there in the scrub-grass and mesquite perimeter where the light from a hastily built fire is subsumed by endless night. Next morning Old Blue, that flea-bitten mongrel who fell out of a beat up '53 Chevy pickup truck with wraparound windows, comes sniffing around the smoldering fire pit. Can you imagine? That cracked nose that used to be shiny and wet, now poking around the sack that holds our precious La Velita? Sniffing and pushing, that big hungry nose pushed past its desire for a discarded piece of filet mignon steak specially wrapped up in a doggy bag by the local diner, to find our heroine, cowering. How the vehicle of abduction becomes a sanctuary! And now that sanctuary broken open by a four-legged question mark in the next chapter of La Velita's convoluted story.

Gingerly, Old Blue caught ahold of La Velita, careful not to bite down too hard. He didn't know the what or why of his actions but the next thing you know, he set off down the dusty road. It was a fine spring day, with a kind of spooky stillness and no sign of rain. In the distance could be heard the big trucks signing their weight in tire tracks down the long north-south west coast highway. No place for a rambling homeless dog like Old Blue. He stuck to the back roads and byways.

Imagine the sight of Old Blue delicately conveying a brightness named La Velita along the weedy margins of the world. Imagine the delight of the runaway girl called Cordelia. Three days on the road, in the fields, hiding out in the woods, fording creeks, sleeping in abandoned sheep sheds, all to get away from her angry, out-of-control stepfather. All the pain and hurt of those months spent enduring his abuse fell away when Cordelia caught sight of La Velita. The girl crouched low so as not to scare off Old Blue and made little clicking sounds and held out her hand. The dog stopped. La Velita looked like a little sun on the end of his dried up nose. With a better look at Old Blue, Cordelia got a better idea. Water. She slowly and carefully reached down and found the plastic water bottle and said outloud, "water, dog, here's some water for you, come on, boy, here's some water, c'mon boy, want some water?"

Now Old Blue knew a well-mannered girl when he saw one, so he went right up to Cordelia to see what she was on about. The closer he got, the more he could smell the life-giving water. Who knows why all the creek beds and usual puddles were dry, but the stuff was scarce, Old Blue knew it in his bones. He got within a tail's length of the girl and saw clearly she was going to share that water. Down went La Velita, out shot the girl's hand, and thus began the next chapter in what was becoming a very long-winded story.

Old Blue and Cordelia made a natural partnership, one for which the dog was quite happy to surrender that small bit of sunshine he'd been carrying so far. In return, the girl stepped up her search for food and water, sharing everything with her new companion.

Now it's a known biological and botanical fact that La Velita's lifespan was far shorter than this story. Cordelia knew this but for some reason known only to a higher muse, she took good care of Old Blue's present, treating La Velita like a precious friend, a jewel, a keepsake, a good luck charm. Besides, it gave Cordelia an idea.

Across the tracks, watch out for the 12:19! Over the far ridge. Yikes, a snake! Lucky. He just had a mouse for breakfast. See the lump right there in that long colored rope of a body? Through the pecan orchard. Hey! Old Blue recognized that pit bull. See how their tails are wagging. Good thing, too. Behind that rusted out abandoned school bus. Under the big water tank. Down the dried up creek bed. Tiptoe past the old lady's washing line waving its faded denim jeans, red bandanas and more underwear and socks than Cordelia had ever seen in her life. Stumble across the stony corn field and whoa! Look at that! A rice field, kind of wet. Endless citrus orchards...Old Blue, come on! I know where we are now!

Until...until the unlikely threesome turned a corner round a handsome cedar barn and found Cordelia's uncle's house, hideaway of the infamous Miguel Diablo Naranjito. Here she knew they would be safe.

She remembered the family stories about her uncle. Once a great revolutionary hero, long since disappeared from the public eye, all he ever wanted to do with his days was read, write, draw pictures and sleep. A good place, dear reader, to leave you, as the sun goes down in this part of the world, where water is still scarce, but love can still be found.

Freedom

Does it ring? Maybe later in life
right inside deep in the inner
ear where you know this
is a very personal journey
all a-buzz at the late stages
and before? before that?
I don't know. Voices mumbling
in coffee shops between
the clinking of forks and
hissing of Gaggia machines
the rustling of old news in print
and the breaking of oil in the bean
as it's ground up yes into dust
and the air is filled with that
evocative revolutionary odor
and rumors of fire at the knees
money changing hands and more
voices who know what everyone
really wants their simple needs
their double shots and single
shot lattés hardly ringing out
perhaps a gentle singing in the heart
that's all it is and children
counting out the syllables with care
and neglectful supervision and
lines lines of people waiting
in that new morning smiling
or not all depending which side
of the bed they were on when
they left

This is a reminder

This is a reminder that on this day in that year
we all remember we did the unforgettable
a thing seared into our collective memories
like a blacksmith's mistake like rare
blue fin tuna over Mediterranean salad
without the olives a dark day a question
mark at the end of the jet stream that
embroiders our planet a day when all
wasn't enough to stop a catastrophe
when we stopped asking each other
are you okay? and the blame subsided
in the soil and the ground retreated
beneath our feet forbidden ground
forsaken wellspring all in the name
of accident risk assessment a child
would want a different version
of this history say for example once
upon a time and a big bad wolf and
three variables each tested with only
one correct answer and everyone
reunited in the end oh yes the end
we need reminding reconfiguring
reprogramming rewriting and
of course restructuring thank goodness
yes our resilience is our brilliance
and adaptability a wonderful thing
did I say wonder did I just imagine
the concept of delight forgive me
now I promise to calm down
pay my respects to the loss of it
all to the one pain greater than all
the pain to the last time we reminded
each other and the sweet bye
and bye between