Physics 101
Here is the boy
kicking a worn hackeysack
in a field,
his shirt off
to feel the sun on his skin,
to show the world
his chest and
narrow waist, his legs
and back still feeling
strong,
when
physics happened,
as suddenly as a torn
cartilage.
His quest to understand
how two bodies
might come together, how
one life might discover
its inner gravity,
was ignited the way a sun
is born, with radiant heat
and light,
propelling him up
and away from his small world
into a dark and complicated
universe.
Ashes
The clouds had been there
for months. Even our faces
were gray with the storm of it,
the wind tugging our jackets
as we huddled on the pier,
invisible rain pricking our hands.
I don’t know how it happened
that I ended up with the remains
of my father in my arms,
the weight of a musk melon
in a double-sealed box.
My brother and four sisters
each held a white rose,
while my mother, so small,
leaning unsteadily as if the wind
would tumble her into the river,
held two red roses, unwilling
to cast them onto the waves.
How could I have known that I
would be the one to tear open
the box that day, to let the ashes of
so many years be carried
away from us? If it wasn’t
a sign that in that moment
a rainbow appeared across
the vast river, then it is still
the simple truth of what happened,
its terrible beauty.
The Biker down the Street
He waits until dark to fire it up -- suddenly,
like a big dog snarling awake at an intruder --
then sits at the end of his cement drive,
idling the engine and smoking a cigarette
down to its filter. He acts like an ex con. Lawn
withered, shades closed. Sometimes a woman
with bleached hair parks a rusted sedan out
front and rushes to his door, knocking urgently.
On the rare days when I spot him, shirtless
by his mailbox in the sun, me passing the row
of houses on our street, he stands tall, giving me
his prison stare, showing the full-breasted tattoo
on his arm -- arrogant, aggressive, but silent.
At night is when he lets us all know
what he thinks of us and our children.
He rolls his black and chrome machine
out to the street's edge, its metal chest
rumbling like the barely controlled dog
he wants it to be, and when his shaking
rage finally roars against every window
of every home in our neighborhood
until even the far hills can hear him,
he unleashes it -- part Rottweiler,
part iron satellite -- gleaming with oil and
crank-case shine, rolling beneath the pulse
of streetlights, flashing and glittering,
blasting a wake of burnt metal air for us
and our sleeping children to breathe,
until his one fire-red eye rises up the hill
and into the mute sky.
Bird Bath
Once new
with fresh water
and fluttering
gray birds,
it stands
at the garden's
edge, stained
with old bird
droppings, dried
bowl stuck
with brown leaves
brittle as parchment.
What else
would we expect
now that the
gardener has died?
Leo Cabrillo Beach
The rocks emerge from the fog,
shouldered giants slumped
in the surf. Gray waves
smother them, foam
and seethe at their ears,
as if winter and the pestering sea
was their lost war, roiling
across their eternally buried knees.
Casual Hero
The light would be so blinding
he wouldn't remember the drive,
the insistent veering of traffic
like spawning salmon,
he wouldn't remember the lunch
he had packed or the warm tea
in his stomach, he wouldn't remember
the dark house he had left,
its ticking living room clock,
its sleeping, beautiful breaths,
he wouldn't remember the years
in his seat like layers of silt
that had crusted to old bone
and tasted now of antacids --
he would remember nothing
but the piercing light, the rising
shadow of a mountain,
the near silent wake of his car
as it swept the dawn's air
into a perfect mirror of night.
Girl Becoming Stone
so delicate
in her cotton dress
standing in the sun
the light so bright
you see through her
to the thin bones in her arms
hair moving in the wind,
dress pulling away
from her transparent life
this little body turning
slow as ice forming on a lake
so sad how firm she has already become
so cold
her eyes crystal blue
the muted light of a glacier
The Divide
after Donald HallDeep in a ravine in western Oregon
the old Caterpillar lodges between two firs
thick as ancient pillars. In nineteen eighty-eight
the solitary logger – a one-man crew –
steered it here, muscles clenched for the descent.
In the cab, the yellow hardhat tilts forward over the face
as if the young man were sleeping, only the teeth
and brown bone of his jaw exposed, his heavy gray
shirt and black pants deflated. The arms hang,
fingers like dried reeds pointing to the earth.
Or say the ridge hadn’t buckled beneath me.
I rounded the cutback and rumbled down
the long fire road to my truck, drove the eight miles home
and graduated from college that next spring.
Every morning now I curve along the Pacific Coast Highway,
the rocky cliff falling to ocean only a few feet away,
my black polo and gray slacks loose, and I slouch, tired,
for the long drive to my office, one pale hand on the wheel,
the other on my knee, harness holding me for dear life
to this seat in a car on a road over an endless faultline.
Knee-Deep in the Pacific
Twenty years ago
my father described a picture
he’d taken in Korea, the forests burning,
the crackling of gunfire
like branches popping in the wind.
He did not want to forget
the day so many friends had died.
But he had forgotten
the film, left it to burn
in the pocket of his uniform
in a fire meant to kill lice and disease.
Now he sees things he can’t describe,
no picture to show, or explain.
Thirty years after Korea,
he liked to split wood for days alone,
and he would try to answer
questions of a ten year-old son, wanting to give
something I could hold onto when he was gone.
Now I return this Christmas
from years away,
and he is old
and thinks he will take me clamming once.
He describes clams as big as my forearm
as we drive onto the sand
and as we wade out into the ocean.
But my father has forgotten the lantern,
and the sun has just set, the roiling water
calm for a moment, the sand
darkening like a blackened highway.
Our jackets flap in the wind,
our knees bend against the drawing surf.
He purses his lips and shakes his head,
saying without words for the hundredth time:
he has forgotten.
So when we can no longer see our truck
or our feet beneath us,
we still stand in the ocean.
A city of lights scatters along the surf-break,
men, families, all waiting
for the surf to recede
so they can begin searching this darkness
for life.
At the Santa Barbara Zoo
Today it took an hour
just to get inside the gates.
A sunny day in April, crowded.
We herd along -- my wife and son,
me, passing the pink flamingoes,
the elephant chewing hay,
the lemurs. My son, just two,
is more interested in the wires
of the fences, or the fountain.
We inch along the walkway
to the gorilla exhibit, stopping
to let mothers and children by.
I am holding him, my arm tired.
A spot clears, and we reach
the railing. Twenty feet below
the black gorilla sits in the grass.
My son leans on the railing
and peers down. I look around
for other gorillas -- mates, his young--
but he is alone. My son turns back,
says, "I think he's looking at me."
I glance down. It's true. A look
like a stern father, eyes narrowed,
glaring right up at my son.
For a moment, I wonder
if the fence is tall enough.
I've seen this guy's fangs.
I look back for my wife,
still lost in the crowd, to see
if it's time to go home.
"Daddy," my son says.
"I think he's looking at me.
I think he's really looking at me."
