The Thumbprint

The thumbprint stays behind
Wrapped in crinkly paper
Four fingers beside it
Filing cabinet cold, the thumbprint's gold
If you know the story
Black if it's all a myth

The thumbprint's in your mind
Cold in the corner, cringing
Cement underfoot
They hooked the boy to sensors, damn torpedoes
Flying in the sun
Soaring from the magic hills

I wrote a riddle
I read someone else's
The rough knight cradled
His dancing girl
Her hair on fire
Gelatin and cellular
Scarred and cultured
She claimed the hills as hers

Demolition, marriage ended
Streets on fire, merry widow waltz
A parade of little cars
Down the hill, to the canyon
He grips the wheel
She's got a feather touch

And in the plastic pitch of all that's lost
He screamed the names of silent underdogs
Who won the waltz but lost the dancing queen
His fingers touch the gypsy skin of a raging libertine

Her arms with tracing tracks of old regrets
Her balance off, her hair an impish mess
She shakes her hips and hangs her head
Down so we see the back of her white neck

In the little village beneath her hair line
Is a circle, all traversed, a dropping hint
He put it there one night, wearing shoes without laces
His final remnant, his random right thumbprint

December 18, 2007

Middle L.A.

It's as if the weight
Isn't heavy enough to feel
But massive enough to see
Clearly, on a cloudy day
Like today, in Middle L.A.

The kids with cameras
Follow the kids with skateboards
The dogs on leashes
Obey the cats on cell phones
The rain looks as if it's coming
But it won't
The sun will win out
The sky will break out

But weather is weather
And irrelevant
So let's go
To a path of razor blades
To a field of gopher holes
To a river running through
The cities east of here
The continents west of here
The earth is shaky
My eyes are open wide
Let's go on another ride
Demolition derby
County fair and crushy stares
From girls with funnel cakes
But now's not the time for regrets

It's as if the weight
Has bounds and limits
Maps with insets
Here on a Saturday
At ease and play, in middle L.A.

The soundtrack has been silent
Since the broken down version
Of the laminated streets
Put their hex on us
But it's cool
Fires have burned out
Albums have come out
Sequels have panned out
Little lost kids
Have turned their tears to food
For a minor revolution
Marching on City Hall
Misbehaving on the bus
Losing their siblings' trust
Reading books and seizing lands
Writing treaties, breaking treaties
It's a trajectory

It IS a better day
Than the blue black yesterdays
Or the tow trucks in the haze
There are no alleys on these streets
Just the blind and blank at play
In easy breezy middle L.A.

Everything makes more sense
And holds less truth
In the plural

October 27, 2007

Devil Got My Woman Part 2

Among the dropped papers
In the long night of demons
In the short drive from moment to next
A girl, with her hand, in the salad bowl
Recalls the name of the man
In the vision she had
Before she stopped having visions
She shudders because
It’s clear to her now
That the man’s name
Is on both sides of one page in the pile
No picture
No mention of no children
Just his name twice, once in bold

She keeps her hair pins
And her earrings
And her feathers
And her beads
In the bowl
She doesn’t use it for salad

The named man was famous in his small city
For a song about kissing cousins
A charmed man and a charmless woman
Their doomed love, their devout air
Rumors tossed to sea overboard
Grown children skipping through forests
Where snow falls instead of leaves
The charmed man forgot their kisses
Deflected her love like a moonbeam off a Toyota
But the charmless woman never forgot anything
Except forgetting
So she jumped off the bridge
Near where the poet jumped and died
24 years earlier, a year before she was born
The charmed man, her third cousin
Read at her funeral
Like he was the smartest kid at a small town poetry reading
Rhyming “stop the bleeding”
With “5 a.m. feeding”
Then he turned her life into a song
About the deadly perils of doing wrong
It had a melody like a flock of geese

The woman with the salad bowl
Finds the page and files it away
She walks outside for air
And for the opposite of air
She presses shuffle
That song, like a beast of a love gone north for the spring
Plays first
She practically skips down Wilshire Boulevard as she hears:

“This river’s not like
That river, I like
Both rivers until
One takes my true love away”

She slows to a walk
Because practically skipping makes no sense
For a song like that
Notwithstanding facts like
“I like his voice”
“She had a choice”
In glorious noise there’s often the absence of nowhere
The opposite of light deflected
Off the dirtiest greenest dirt-green
Lake of the Isles gosling

Spring, 2006

Far Away From Polk Street

soft hair and hair gel
fuzzy sweater sanguine
sweater sad and selfless
they glide and glide and fall
but not too soon

upright and right now
gray brick wall break free
brick wall stained and star-struck
they fell and now they hurt
but not too much

gone to San Francisco
gone to walls and flowers
ivy and the end notes
staying on, fading out
just long enough

wool hats and hat hair
black scarves out of attics
black scarves sold a fortune
on falling and hurting
and now they’re gone away
to San Francisco

January 5, 1999

Milfwaukee

The trains were loud
The people were coughing
The city was waking
In time for sunset

The parking was rough
My head was pounding
The gerunds flew by
Like oxidized remnants
Of a decade on hold

This is what it sounded like
(Silence, white noise)
This is what it felt like
(Textures, rough patch)
This is what it looked like
(Girls in circles, white lights)
It's all I can do
To remember falsely

The city returned
To its sleeping weeping state
I should have gone home
I would have been happy

But I stayed 'til the end
The echoey blather
Rang in my head
As I drove west with the moon
And listened to The Life Pursuit

October 10, 2007

They All End Up In Glendale

They all end up in Glendale
Where the land meets the higher land
The first one came there with her mother
Their dream home, a small apartment
Two bedrooms and concrete steps
She left, she's on an island now

The next one, it looked like it couldn't end
But it did and now she's in Glendale
With more concrete and more desires
Silent in their immensity
Immense in their clutter

The third one, she's an anomaly
It didn't last enough to count
But I liked four more than three
So in Glendale, she sleeps
Ever the pessimist, she's the happiest one

They all end up in Glendale
The fourth one shouldn't count, she's in Eagle Rock
Which is just down the street, so I'll make an exception
She should have waited
It was a bad week

July 13, 2007

Hat

I put on my glasses
I don't wear a hat
I won't wear a hat
Back at world's end, I wore green
Slept on a green bed, with green and white sheets
I'd take it to the suffering streets
Nodded in that direction
Cringed at the fault lines on every sidewalk
It didn't matter
I didn't live there yet
Or ever

June 16, 2007