Solstice

All of it cyclical,
Expansion, recession,
Biorhythms,
The wobbling of a spinning globe
Towards the sun
Then away from it

I lay awake in another long night
But I know that for the next
Six months
These nights, at least,
Get shorter

Santa Ana

Three thirty in the morning
And it's unseasonably warm
Beneath a sprawling fig tree
Its branches barren against the silver light;
The warm air moves,
Taking the last of the dry, yellow leaves
Pulling them from the now dormant limbs,
They fall to the ground, these little lonely hands
That once opened to the sky seeking warmth and sunlight
And now, cast away, they go where all things go when they die,
To be torn apart and used to feed other things:
The other lives that still go on

Riptide

I know, I know
The wave pulls you
Up along the face of it
And throws you back
Down to the bottom
The sand churning up from underneath
And the water below is cold,
Very cold,
And it's dragging you out to sea
You manage to get your head
Up over the water
You gasp for air and blink
And can see Catalina
Out in the distance
For a second before another wave takes
You up, spinning you again
And you look back at the shore
Getting smaller
Everyone seems so far away
And you can't hear yourself
Yelling over the roar of the ocean

I know all of this
Stop fighting it, I say
Stay below a second longer
And go with the current
Let it take you for awhile
It'll be okay
You'll come up beyond the breakwater
And you'll be able to breathe
Deeply, fill your lungs with air
And lay on your back for a minute
Look up at a clear blue sky
And just move with the current

These things, the water around you
The air you breathe
All they are is life
And you know how to move within them
You know it

Just catch your breath
And start swimming along the shoreline
It's quieter out here
I'm right next to you
Just swim to the sound of my voice
And you'll get where you want to be

I tell you all of this,
But you're not listening

Tomorrow

We walked out into the chilly night
Across a crowded parking lot,
I was walking you to your car,
We hadn't discussed it really,
We'd just started walking
And I was looking for your car,
Holding your hand
Closely, but gently
Your hand was there, with mine,
But it wasn't quite squeezing mine.
Yet.

Groundhog Day

A long winter, this,
The sun was out for a few days
And then retreated
It's morning and I'm in a suburban coffee shop
I don't drink coffee
But it was where you were,
And we were talking quietly
Amidst people buying coffee, scones, preparing for work,
I held your hand and it was warm
But felt somehow fragile
And we stole 25 minutes that way
And went back to our days,
You kissed me by your car
Quietly, softly, twice,
And then you were gone,
And I drove to the office under a grey sky
But it was okay,
Spring is coming.

Pachinko

Choices, choices
Where to drop the ball
How fast? Spin?
When you have enough choices
Sometimes you feel like you have more
Control than you really have
Because it's really just physics,
Brownian motion;
And once the ball is gone, it's gone
You reach for your drink and wait
As the ball bounces off one pin left
And down, another right and down,
The ball freshly cast, reflecting the blue and red lights of the parlor, going where it goes

We all did this,
Did many of the things you did,
Some the same, others different by degrees
But the pins bounced us back to the middle,
A place they never took you
There's a reason they say that's the way the ball bounces

But there's more, and you know that.

Last night I went to the pool with Lovey
And it was empty and Lovey wanted us to snorkel
So we paddled around a deserted pool,
Lovey following me as the sun set
Violet beyond the palms
And it was him and I and we were happy

And I've had more of those days then you did
And some of that's because of how the ball bounced
And some of that's because of the the choices you made
And it's all unimportant today,
You landed where you landed

But along the way you had friends, family, a son, women who
Loved you,
You saw the same sun and moon I saw, walked the same ground,
Breathed the same air,
Moved in the same space and did the best you could,

And hopefully, where you are, you know this
So sleep now, it's okay, we're all still here

Just sleep

Super 8

Twenty four years ago
my best friend and I
were standing outside our school,
waiting to get our class schedules
but really looking for girls,
one that I had liked had looked
at me and said "Francis,
your father is here", and I
turned, looking behind me,
and a priest was behind me,
his black robes absurd in the summer heat
and I laughed.

I have to remember to tell my son this someday:
when you're sixteen years old
life moves like a Super 8 movie,
it jumps and skips
and you look away and look back
and you're someplace you never expected
to be,

Five months after this day it was
cold again and I had left my best friend's house,
my clothes packed in suitcases in his garage,
it was dark and he was going to bed,
I snuck out a side door and walked out
up the neighborhood,
a few blocks away was the junior high he'd gone to,
I walked around it to the baseball field,
the dugout was a bench, aboveground,
protected by a chainlink fence,
I laid down on the bench,
the fog rolling in, diffusing the light,
I held onto myself tightly
and waited for the night to get colder, colder.

Pluto

My exwife parked in the middle of her driveway and I can't fit in, I drive up the corner of the driveway, across a trapezoidal piece of concrete where the trash cans go on Wednesday nights and stop, blocking the driveway. 15 miles from here is the house I grew up in, in this spot outside of this house my father poured the concrete, it is still there; he poured it on my third birthday. I don't remember this. I know it because I've been there recently, the trapezoid is still there, he engraved the concrete when it was still wet, our names, the date, our handprints. We've been here. We've terraformed this small space, marked it, temporarily. I don't remember it, but we were here in the late spring of 1972.

This is what I'm reminded of. There are no markings where I've parked. What marks this house is the mail in the mailbox, the toys in the front yard, ephemera, I knock at the door and my son comes out, he's been given an electric scooter and he asks me to assemble it for him, he gets tools for me, it takes 10 minutes and he asks me to watch him as he rides it up and down the sidewalk. I want to leave but he wants to play longer. I watch him. I wonder where my place is here, my mark on the concrete.

These Things That Are Not Mine

Open air, cold on my face,
I'm awake but spinning,
around around around around
I know things:
this ground underneath me
is not moving
what my brain is telling me
is wrong,
try living with that knowledge
when all you know is what your brain
tells you
how far can you shake
your faith and still have it?

What is it that you live by
when everything's gone?

I tell people I trust my brain,
my reason,
but the reality is that
I'm happiest when I jam the
signals from my brain
over all frequencies
long wave, short wave, microwave,
and let the angels take me

Confidence Interval

We were laying together afterwards, her leg curled over mine, her head resting on my shoulder, sleepy, I pushed strands of hair off her face and kissed her forehead lightly and she rolled away from me. I pulled my hand from underneath her and rested it first on the small of her back, then, closing my eyes, beside her hip, curling a finger around the string of her underwear. She stirred, still facing away from me.

"Why do you always do that?" she asked me.

"Do what?"

"Hold onto my panties like that when I sleep."

"So you can't leave me in the middle of the night," I said.

"I'm not going to leave you," she said.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "Everyone does."

"And you think that that's going to stop me if I do?"

"No," I said. "But it's all I have to hold onto."

What If The Steak Was Shaped Like A Cow?

Just to refresh your memory:

I hadn't talked to you in nine years
and I was with my friend drinking one night
and we text messaged you
and you blew it off, (you tend to do that)
and that was okay,
I sent you an IM a couple of days later
and we started chatting, at our desks
four hundred miles apart with the world
going on around us,
sneaking a conversation into the margins of our day
over a technology that will probably be obsolete
by the time these words see the light of day,
but the technology is unimportant,
none of it is really, I bring it up only to remind you

That it was early on a Friday and I invited you out
for a drink for happy hour and you pointed out
that I was four hundred miles away and I asked
how soon you could get to an airport
and we worked through our day and I bought you
a plane ticket, and five hours later I was waiting
downstairs for you at baggage claim wondering
whether we'd even recognize each other,
and you had a couple of mojitos at a Cuban place
close to the airport, you sat against the wall and
I looked at your hair in the candlelight, your flight
home leaving in an hour,
you wanted me to kiss you when I dropped you off
at the airport, but that too is unimportant,

And so is the next time I saw you, three weeks later,
when we went back to my house and I opened the door
and wheeled your bag in, sitting on the edge of my couch
and you leaned against me and I kissed you, the door still
open, your purse still crooked in your elbow
the sun setting outside, and suddenly gone and us still on the
couch kissing, and hours later still on the couch and the light
of the rising full moon through the window and in your hair
as I looked at you and leaned up at you to kiss you kiss you again

None of it important probably.

The important things were maybe the things we knew that we
hadn't told each other yet, the things we didn't tell each other
the next time we saw each other a month later either, which turned out
to be the last time we saw each other for a couple of years, the things
that were scarring us

But then again, maybe not.

I'm not the person to judge these things, I live my life inside small containers,
a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of beer, my skull,
but I know this, I know it:

However far apart life takes us, that happened, it was real,
and we were alive.

A Very Short Story At 4:00 In The Morning

It's beyond Lovey's bedtime and we're just getting in from an afternoon at Disneyland, takeout from Taco Bell in my hand, we sit down on the couch and I find a movie for us to watch, I open up a box and remove my plastic fork from its plastic bag and slice off a bite of food, lifting it up to my mouth when I hear a panicked "Daddy! I didn't check it for poison!" so I hand the fork to him and he takes a bite, chewing slowly, holding his hand up to make me wait, chewing, chewing til finally he nods and I take a bite myself. I unwrap his quesadilla while he sits next to me patiently and I bite into his food, chewing, swallowing, until suddenly I hold my breath, roll my eyes back into my head, and fall backwards into the couch, mouth open, unchewed fast food still in my mouth. Lovey looks at me, laughing, and then I sit up and say, "False alarm, it's okay," and he starts eating.

Check it for poison, I think to myself. Three hours ago a girl has told me that "you're a nice guy, but..." This is the poison I need him to check for.

Where I Go

I write on a laptop in my living room
on an Eames lounge, legs stretched
across to the ottoman, laptop across
my thighs, it is afternoon. I open the
front door to circulate the stale air,
I look at the laptop screen as I type
but the screen reflects what is behind me
out my front door. I'm looking at a screen
full of letters but in the corner there is blue,
the leaves of a lemon tree swaying,
electricity moving through power lines,
planes flying overhead,
the image blurs as I type the keys, focuses,
blurs again.

It would seem if you saw this as if I was
looking forward but really, the world
is behind me.

Polaroid: 39 Years, 362 Days

Summer was still a month away but the waterpark had opened early, for a few hours on the weekend, and I took the Boy there. We had things to do in the morning and only had two hours by the time we arrived. I had bought us season passes on the computer, but we had to stand in line to get our cards made. The sun was out but there was a cool breeze and the line moved slowly. The Boy was excited to go on the waterslides and was jumping in line, swinging the chain that provided order to the queue. I was irritable, feeling rushed, tired of the wait, I told the Boy to keep calm as we waited, stepped forward, waited, clouds scattered across the sky, fog collecting on the coast. We got into the park and laid our things down on a chair by the toddler's pool, and the Boy wanted to go on a small slide that was shaped like an elephant. I stood on the other side in 2 feet of water, waiting, watching the time, wanting to go on the bigger slides that we had come for. Someone else's child had paused at the top of the 6 foot slide, crying, afraid, his father in front of me, watching, telling him to come. The Boy waited patiently behind for his turn and I was anxious. Just get the kid down, I thought, people are waiting.

The Boy slid down twice and I told him it was time for the bigger slides and he took my hand and we walked across the park, me walking fast, he breaking into a jog sometimes to keep up. At the bottom of the slide yellow inner tubes were stacked up, and I took a two person tube from the top of the pile and the Boy wanted to help carry it; he tried holding it by the handle but the front end would drag on the ground and I said "if you're going to help carry it you have to carry it, you can't drag it", and he stuck his head and body through the hole in the tube and carried his side in both arms, happy. The line wrapped around the slide and up steep narrow stairs and the Boy was in front. Two young teenage girls were behind me and whenever the line moved they would step too close and their tube would bump into my leg and I would turn and look at them. "Can you not bump my leg with that?" I asked them.

We got to the top and put our tube in the track of the slide, a long, curving black tube. The Boy got in the back and I sat in front of him, we were next to go down and the worker told me that the tube was backwards, we got up and turned the tube around and sat back down, the Boy asked me if he'd been scared last time we went on it and I said no, you liked it, and the worker said we could go and I held two metal rails on the side of the slide and pulled us forward, leaning my head back as the water pushed us into the tube and it was dark and I reached back and held Lovey's feet and he was screaming as we slid down the long dark tube, spiraling down down, the cold water splashing on us, brief rays of light coming in through holes in the top of the tube, shining on us briefly as we sped through it and back around a turn into the dark until we came out of the tube into a shallow pool and Lovey yelled "that was awesome!" and we stood up and handed the inner tube to the worker at the bottom and walked out the exit and I asked "Where do you wanna go now?" and Lovey said he was cold and wanted to go to the jacuzzi so we walked out and across the park to where the jacuzzi was and we crossed over a footbridge that spanned a circular river that flowed slowly around a large pool and there were empty blue inner tubes floating in it and not many people and Lovey wanted to go in that so we hopped into the river and climbed on the blue inner tubes and the water was cold but it was okay and Lovey was off ahead of me and I leaned back, head on the back of the inner tube and paddled my arms to him and caught up to him and I grabbed his foot and held onto it, the river pushing us slowly around the big pool, sunlight on my face, Lovey next to me, and I was as happy as I'd ever remembered being, moving in the water under a blue sky with my baby boy as I closed my eyes, felt the light, breathed air, and I thought that, for once, I was finally the person that I was supposed to be, and the river circled around to the other side of the pool and steps led out of the river to where the jacuzzi was and Lovey asked "can we go in the jacuzzi now?" and I opened my eyes and looked at him, smiling against a blue sky and took a deep breath and said "Yes. Yes we can."

Movement

A light breeze blows late spring
into my yard.

Figs fall from my tree, overripe,
half eaten by squirrels.

The grass gone, rubbed to dirt from
lack of water.

The leaves at the top of the trees rustle,
their shadows dance across the brown floor.

I sit, waiting, as the shadows
advance, recede, advance again.

Darkness is coming, I can see it
move, and I am sitting, waiting.

Poem For Jessica

Raymond Carver never had a problem
making weight, nor did Buk,
Williams never left his day job, nor did Womack,
and Phil had to write to eat,
but when Hemingway got fat
his writing did too; Salinger stayed
thin but he stopped living, he hid in his study
with the ghosts of dead characters and Hindu mysticism

there is no secret, no craft, only action.

it's 1 in the morning and I'm curled up
in an old chair that I salvaged from the
flames of a burning marriage, it may not
be here much longer, nor I if
Monitor Investments LLC has their way,
and I write this on a phone that may not work
next week at the will of the
American Telephone and Telegraph Company, I'm almost 40 years old
and with the exception of a nearly 6 year old
boy who doesn't know any better yet
everything I ever had is gone, it's
late at night and I'm alone.

and I don't know if this is going to turn
out to be any good or not, but I do know this:

it has no chance of being anything unless I'm
honest enough to admit that everything
I lost went away because I wasn't good enough to keep it.

WWCD?

With Cuba in the rearview mirror
You land in Veracruz
with ships of tired men,
Aztecs to the west
and no way home
the rest of it gone,
ablaze in the Caribbean,
the tides pulling the ashes out to sea
and I understand; I'm with you on this;
when there's no way home
you've got to make your home
where you are, with what you have left,
and all I have left is a good sword
but that's all I need now,
the house, the job,
the marriage, the money
Burn it all, fuckers,
go ahead, I dare you.

6 1/2

I'm running north
from the Balboa Pier
on a pathway next to the sand,
it's late afternoon
and I'm looking ahead at
Newport Pier a mile
in the distance,
it juts out into an
uncommonly still Pacific,
it seems to connect to the
end of Catalina Island,
the sun, orange, descending
down into the heart of it,
light bathes the houses I pass
in orange and pink light
and makes the glassy water
a metallic blue,
crossing the pier I run towards
the river as the sun disappears,
passing men on bicycles
and women running,
I'm not wearing my contacts
and their faces are blurred,
I just see their shapes against
the water, the purple sky,
the haze over Long Beach,
the sun has gone behind the island
as I reach the end of the strand
and I run up 36th street
and onto Ocean Front,
I take off my sunglasses
and it's dark now on the narrow street
in between two story buildings
and quiet, I listen to the sound
of my own breathing and run
faster, looking straight ahead now
and my stride shortens but gets quicker
and it feels like I'm gliding on the asphalt
and I hold my head still and run faster
thinking of nothing but movement
and my eyes defocus and everything is
blurred around me but the river jetty
a mile in the distance, my breathing
getting louder and louder
and night coming, night coming.

Indian Winter

Lovey walks ahead of me,
he is following the tire tracks
of a jeep that's driven in the sand,
beyond the track, he reminds me,
is lava; we cannot step there.

We follow the tracks across
the beach to a blue tower,
I put down our bag and
we walk out towards the water,
running after receding waves,
retreating as they approach,
we draw a line in the wet compacted
sand where we think the water will advance to,
people lay on surfboards in the water,
play volleyball in the sand,
we take our shirts off and the sun feels
good on our skin,

The wind gusts and blows grains of sand
up into us, we turn away from the wind,
closing our eyes,
it is the middle of January,
this cannot last.

Perigee

I smoke outside under
silver light that casts shadows
through the barren branches of
my fig tree, I exhale and watch
the smoke wisp upwards at the moon,
almost directly overhead, as large
as it will be this year, and
I begin to realize that this
is as close as we will get
to one another.

When Your Phone's Not Ringing, It's Me Not Calling

I stood in the front doorway
as a full moon began rising in late
afternoon light, the wind blowing
cold and dry out of the east,
the fig tree almost bare now,
its leaves strewn across my yard

Yellow, brown, these leaves that once were
alive, connected, attached to something
larger and alive, now alone, dead, disconnected

The last leaf goes in a Santa Ana gust,
the moon up now over a purple sky,
the tree's been blown clean,
stripped of everything that breathed air,
absorbed light, the tree's alone and dormant
and the cold wind still blows.