Sunday, August 16, 2020

Talking to myself

 


The setting sun’s golden shapes 

dart about the tiny fiefdom

of a parking lot


where I am talking 

to myself again when 

I should be listening 


to the blades that squeeze 

up through the cracks.


They may have 

important things 

to tell that I should know


like how to stake 

a claim to life 

in this forsaken world.


And though the night and I

just shrugged them off, 


look now how 

I remember them.



Friday, August 14, 2020

Clearing things out

When our kids grew up and left, 

one at a time, with each we

wonder the same things: 

what are they eating, 

what are they wearing. 

How do they spend their nights 

without us. 


The house more silent with each 

departure. When the last one drives away,  

all of California grows still.


We still have each other to talk to,

 my man likes to say, and then we talk 

about the kids, what they might be wearing, 

where they might be going.  


And he likes to say, Come, let's have dinner.  

We can still have dinner.  

And so we have dinner and talk 

about the old dinners, 

what they liked to eat and what not 

when we used to have family dinners.


And he also likes to say, Come let's take a walk. 

We can still take a stroll. 

And so we stroll past a meadow 

where kids play soccer, 

past a playground 

with kids on slides.


The day we clear out the last room, 

our son says, Keep the yearbooks, 

the trophies, the snowboards.


All that childhood flotsam now

stacked neatly in the dark. 


Never again

The boy next to me

 eats from a bag of fast food 

without looking up 

from his phone.


I who does not exist 

now am free 

to aim my camera 

at his long curls


My thoughts simple with wonder: 

When did he become this new thing?


A little man at age 14

now precisely wears those jeans.


For years the boy says, I love you 

every time he leaves the room, ever since


the parents dropped from sight 

while he crawled like a crab 

across the sand.


Last summer I saw the man coming when

his sentences ran shorter, words flew out  


I'd never heard,  he hummed along

to Lil this and Lil that


and his hair styles grew 

more interesting.


I was not awake that first time 

he crossed the border

without me to his new life.


The shorebirds call out 

from the Bay

--more beings I cannot understand--


And I  hear a small voice, 

a distant foghorn at dusk,

 I love you grandma.




If I don't raise my voice

 He gives me one eye, one ear

but only if I raise my voice.


I don't want to raise my voice

but if I don't, his mind drives off


into the backroads and hides.

At some point, I ask myself


should I let him be a gamer, fail

school, pay his dues? 


His cat would starve if 

I don't feed him. He says


let him hunt mice or just

return him to the SPCA.


Kids can only love so long.

Just ask the cat and me. 

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Tonight I pine for my former happiness

 

Tonight I pine for my former happiness.

I admit there was pain in all of it too 

but I scorn all those tears--they taught me 

what gladness is. 


There was that afternoon we drove along the coast, 

Bill Evans CD the perfect soundtrack, 

we are barely talking, so at ease

with the presence of the other. 


I don't know what thoughts waft 

through his mind but I see his calm, his 

contentment marks a faint smile on his face. 

All the signs of a man in love with life.  


We stop to stroll a path along the bluffs 

high above the sand and blue below.

his hands slack in both pockets

and eyes glisten with a deep joy. 


We return to the car and I want to make love 

right then and there 

but he would not risk such exposure, 

being a man who holds dignity dear


and so I merely place a finger on his cheek, 

on that amazing malar bone handed down

to him by Aztecs--his beauty cut

a wound in me that will not heal.  


If only

 

 

Suddenly we drive past fields and fields

of yellow giants--my eyes spinning

pinwheels and voice repeating,

look!  look! look!


But my boys do not look up 

from their bleeping phones because

it's just a bunch of flowers

spreading through the meadow 

by the thousands, faces to the sun

like flowers everywhere.  


No matter the giants stand in perfect rows

like China's Terracotta Army. 

They are too quiet to impress.


If only they were crowing

and butting, if only they were 

rushing toward us and exploding, 


the boys might want a better look

and lift their beeping phones to

maybe take a picture

or two.