the persistence of memory

I
The letter from an old flame-
which must be rather vernal
and my use of old flame is
steeped in thievery- on my
cold lap and sit in a high up
steeped pitched library and
the ventricle walls quiet exhale
where the gray second dimension
of old dead women float
like contact paper- like photos
of the dead you can't help
but find beautiful- upsetting
lamps and books that no one
but the never-see-light-girls
pick up.
They say
her rage was enough to
upset entire foundations
brick into roots, bones,
fault lines that could not
upset entire foundations. A light
switched pinch on pinch off
in lonely rooms of shy
bathers and conetn, well
sexed college girls. That only
mean to say I am here
you are wronged, have wronged
an entire breathing system wronged
by (an umpteenth) upset of
men with all tools of
clay and resources to build
in skeletons and muscles and
flesh
and still forgot.
Lamp whispered once into
a tigh askew- letter tucked
into book, of course
there's the sign.
II
and there builders
who came second for we are
always expelling blood
thus it always in motion
thus it always in some
sense signifying life and
sign.
No ghosts angry spirits
leaking through sweaty copper
pipes.
No.
III
Still full of burrito and that
Saturday 11 a.m. optimism
that wind that hurls and chokes
all these wrong trees shaking down
onto the downy heads of bleating
girls.
She wrote that Sylvia Plath's
old room cannot be lived in
that her journals are revered
in the laurled oak prestigious
library but only the sad curious
writer girls (and those on dares)
reach their fingers to its
crackling pages and hope into
existence a jolt of that
madgirl running into them
landing the middle of the
ribcage.
The same is true here, I
will write back, and the rooms
of extinguished girls like
any other have driven future
residents into inexplicable
madness and stains of rust
never leave carpets and after
a while they are boarded and
mortared up and bleed in
everyone's line of sight and
no one sees it.
Personally, though, in good times
I don't care about that girl
trapped under the Bell Jar
and only when I'm peering out
next to her do I wish
I didn't love her.
IV
Fuck poets or be one
the professor tosses after I light her
cigarette and finishes on exhale
Doesn't matter who you are
fuck artists and musicians and poets
and their fine hands
clumsy tongues
or be one
from far off across the lawn
she hunches like the hat lady
terrfied on Telegraph Ave.
V
Mrs. Hughes, you told us
first and exploded into that
warm January cast iron cave
because all we know was
the vanished tiny footsteps
of Emily D. and Mr/Mrs. Eliot.
And for that I hate you
for fucking and birthing and
bleeding and exploding and not fading
out and all of us swallowing
you bit by bit, La Lazarita,
and looking up with wide
thick lashed eyes, Ted who?
Adieu, Zelda Vivienne Gertrude, Adieu.
VI
All lights on, ladies, lips locked
to each other and guzzling tea
and knotting sweaters and shielding tit
and ass and lip, hide away,
hide from those empty rooms
smelling faintly of Carbon Monoxide
and fool liquor and dry cunts
bitten lips bitten nails bitten hair
run, hide, carry your bricks fast
and lay them lay them, in front of
imaginary birds and loud throated
fathers and callous men and kind girls
and timid hands of mothers
Barricade against orphaned possible
children and frigid empty gray
flats
tongues and teeth absence arid lungs
salt cured livers
and the ghost writ pen all
over all your walls all your
lovers bodies all your friends
hands the walls, though, all the
walls and even though before
that stone you must fear slipping
through that almost finished walls
even though before that stone
that script only reeks of blood
no one will smell it, we all
know, and down it washes out
of sight.
No name for this, of course,
hysteria's already been taken-
and unlike this, there's no shame
in forcing out babies and houses and
jobs.
Still, no one can live in
those rooms all shied away from
if only to stop joinign in the
shifting noise
you are wrong you have wronged
I am here.
-Jan 7. 2007.

Hey hey! Prose.

Go with it.

-

When he stands in the fields, he knows it is unreal. There are endless stalks of grain, but no
fertile earth, sky, always sky, a constant wind that shifts just barely. He thinks that it is
always the same wind, restless, never very large. When he stands, the rest of it does not move
around him. Brick building, tin playground, road that leads to nowhere. He knows it leads
nowhere. No one comes down it. Even the wind will not go there.
Today he watches the boy's sister. He finds her in an autumn room, warm and full of sleep. She
is tiny, eight, sitting outside the door jamb. She peers at the clock. Inside sleeps the mother,
who always sleeps, especially now. The girl tips in and creeps forward. Her hand spreads over the
methodical body. The mother will sleep for hours and hours, until night falls.


He doesn't ask because no one knows. He tries to run down the road, only once, and goes nowhere.
He doesn't eat because he cannot feel hunger. He sleeps but it is the sleep of daysleepers and
his eyes could well be painted on his lids.
The Sister says something about a car, and a deer, the long winding road from the orchard, the
rainy night. She had said it was no one's fault, the deer was alive, the car could be fixed, his
parents were alive.
She tells him this while he sits on the hollow metal swings. The black bird of her body moves
up and disappears into sky and grain and quiet.


He saw his mother while she bathed. Ran hot water into a metal tub, stripped down, watched her skin turn pink. The color moved in regulated lines, from ankle to thigh to hip to breast. In this, he understands how she has hated her body. She hates the swollen hips that mean nothing now, the stretch marks, the loose sex. He can catch her reflection in the faucets, the whiteness of skin. How endless and without meaning it all is. From the edge she takes the scrubbing rock and begins to peel away. Only in water, from neck down, can she love her body. Only then. The skin comes off easily, floats in the water, new layers reddening, anklebones tearing. Still, he is too young. He stops looking.

that skipped

This is why you came to California
that stretch of night this piece
here punctured full of
movement and quiet beats
ruts in the roads swerves
in blindfold tire curves.

When I am not running
that quiet circle of breath
and that open whistle between
slot in the car roof bay
through our teeth.
I swear to you on the way down
Skyline dizzy tin can cityscape at
the bottom I closed these eyes on
red and exhaled it to green and
kept going.
There are too many words.
There are so many seconds.

april 23 oakland CA

Vows

I want
the unconditional.

sometimes I hold my breath
so tightly

(the dresses the shoes
the safety the booze
the hiss
the ye-es)

My forever great and eternal
loves of my life
in a heart on my chest
cigarettes tequila and the night.

tender is the night

They will say too much for
words of stone and all of it
what thick books deserve/ the
whorls on thin pads/ the best
supporting blanks.
They will say she was
no one's Zelda. Ate kids
cereal and fucked like
a Playboy prep school hunkie.
Wore six shooter boots
worn in the toe and graced
stoops from Wrigleyville to
Russian hill, trail of brown
bottles and matches behind
her. Drove fast, idolized many,
hung over the second balconies of
the Goodman and Auditorium and Civic
Opera House until her
chin went numb.
She wrote a good poem,
maybe, but she spat wide
arcs and loved a good car
and laughed loud and proud
and you knew she was gone
when all yr pens were left
pristine.

may 4 oakland CA

Gone for Good

Oakland at 7 am cracks the heart
or it could. If you rode the bus
in so much quiet
without the absence of a gray sky.
All the men call me honey
they don't want to jump me.
Honest. Mostly. I think.
I think my eyes and earrings
cast me as their sister
all the brown eyed stone clerks
are trying to get me to quit smoking.
This morning I packed my bag
pregant yard dog
dragged it out to the bus stop
and left.

Always are the hours in motion
the best part of travel.
I'd stay on the bus
the rest of my days.

march 22 oakland CA

night sickness

Radiator night madness shaking wet heat
to your skin on the bed jumping scaling
skin and saliva finger straining heart
coiled stomach night.

Hours where you'd drive your on arm
through the window and all the mirrors
(even though there's just one)
throwing madre mary candles
crashing across the tile.

Expanse of time
the phones may well be
sitting on sea floors.

Where all I want
is my grandmother's hands
and her spare bedroom
smelling of laundry
old news papers
arthritic hands
ag ecooling my mercury face
the entire great plains
between me and
all the world.

I'd never throw her sewing kit
or ancient radiator
they have their place.

march oakland CA

Beds

You can sleep with both
which is what they don't tell you.

She can hold you
with sistermothergirl arms
and it can be love
swallowing and fleshy
like the insides of turtles must sleep.

A man all lines and angles
that surrenders in slumber
all parts are made a whole
how the greeks intended the cosmos.

Still
sometimes it is the ocean
of sheets and cold cloth
that is best of all.

Dial Tone

The disconnect
moment of focus on oxygen in
out
shedding lungs
no more words or pens
no more scribnbles or papers
quiet cold night
ache of the radiator

Sleep in one action
back on the pulse of the
breathing of you and him and her
and all of it.

Smile Like You Mean It
a fable

But they were not young together and so could not say, forever. Not with certainty. Rose Red and Rose White whose hearts were sewn out of too little blue linen. Who could not need each other yet, because who's to say that picutre of the blurry wildeyed girls wasn't sketched into their brains later? Then there it was: the missing scrap and the shared knowledge of intricate ways to run hid and carve ways into the world The wild and the Still. The fierce and the quit. All the world we could possibly need.
         The ending is the same, even now. There is no bear. No prince No saint No angel. This is how it goes. One has to walk. 
         This is how all my stories go.

For CR

rose white, it has been years. like those pictures i've seen of wild eyed girls hand in hand. only your eyes are not so wild and have they ever been? like before i could remember anything, you were sewn into one half of me like a linen heart of blue but if i don't know/have to learn all your truths, how can i tell where the beginning starts and count the years? it is all different now. different because are we the smae and not the same. like i am young again and do not know hot to play these games. do not want to.

still, i know you are rose white, i know. sometimes it is hard to tell. you are wild outside, is what they think, but i think i know what is true. i know your stillness, sad as water, no word to describe it perfectly. you think i take care of you to much. but it is not true, no, it isn't. where is rose red and no rose white? when you are too far still and I am too far fast, how does it go again? i can't figure it out anymore. two girls who are sisters friends lovers and where do the lines blur?

i promse you i know the photographs. i'll bare my teeth and tug on your hand and pull you away. i was your i would've been your friend and you have to believe me, the world has been a lost place. it could have been more playgrounds for you and more lakes for me and i am making up for it now. rose white, nothing is simple anymore. nothing is simple ever. but what i know is what i know. the stories keep changing hand in hand girls how have to kick and run and carve through life with sad strange eyes. i know i will write it with you as we go. as we go, it cannot end one walking off.

nov 6 oakland CA

Note

Just to say
that I am not
or, no, can no longer be
compassionate.

The only woman on earth
who gives it up

There is no time anymore
no compassion
anymore
I am going to Mexico
to scale the faces
of the Olmecs
sit on their heads
high above
and breathe.

oct 11 oakland CA

2100 miles and five hours till dawn

Not like this
I don't like to smoke
not like this, late at night
when the whole block sleeps
not when I want to
scrub my teeth before sleep
not when I can still taste it
alone in bed
can't find the pen
and don't know what else to do
it's true

I don't like
many things.

Because I will Not Forget

One night
my father was drunk

one night my father
told me
my grandfather would do anything for me
would've

he didn't say
abuelo

Then
he said his mother
would've loved me like
no tomorrow

His eyes always up
mine too, because
they burned wet while
he finished his corona

My blood
is that beer
those stars he stared at
the song of Celia over the stereo

My blood
is my natural accent
my blood is my sun tea skin
good with tomatoes
loves a classic car
my blood is coffee hair
hospitality with nothing
rages is love
and wants to reach for that pistol

my blood rides horses
and likes to tell secrets
when drunk

She'd do anything for me
my blood wants everything to
give her the same.

When the light hits just right
coming through the trees
in Oakland
and it is only now
evening
I'm thirteen months
again.

Cheek pressed to the bed
afternoon darknesses
far better than any real nest
I could get.

Sprawled
stomach to quilt
while outside turns night

the best rest I could get in a lifetime.

sept 22 oakland CA

The problem is
with poets
and with me
is what we really
need to say
cannot be said

written in solitude
later

like no
when I say yes
and yes
when I mumble no

and I know
I don't
want to
say it.

and
i get it
i get it now
more than anything
i understand

and what this poem
really says
is i almost
slammed the phone down.
tore about the room
to throw myself
everywhere.

sept 22 oakland CA

How it used to go was
My father would dream/threaten
me off to Venezuela
with his family
so I'd learn something.

Right now
I wish I'd learn to curse
for real
Something fierce and burnt and worse
than anything in English

Want to ship you to those countries
with a few good words
and maybe we'd all learn
a little something about
that revolution.

Yelling and scabby ears glinting
because somehow I gained heritage
when I poked holes in my lobes.

Crazy confused blood
anger that is sadness welling up
and no words to express it

Hijo de puta Chingate y
that horse you rode in on
you son of a bitch

Pinche tu madre just doesn't cut it
besides,
I love your mother.

sept 18 oakland CA

-for my brother and ben gibbard0

So had Ben Gibbard fulfilled a magic career
not torn those Chopin posters from his walls
still dumb to the idea
his voice could drip the same Seattle brewed dissonance
as his fingers
where would he have gone?
Fact was

he was just a sad Seattle boy
celibate from too much rain
frustrated with too much ocean
not one lick of Slav in him
and he had never heard Alicia de la Rocha
(though I had)

My fingers were just too damn small.

Fact is
I do listen to him
the basic premise is the same.

Sad Ben Gibbard
with too much devotion to Dickinson
too little to Shostakovich
My brother either:
walks the other way down the hall
when he sings from my turntable.

Or then,
when we're in the car,
gives the grand rolling of eyes I raised him with:
We are not going to that damn wedding

which refers to the fantasy
explaining the planned marriage
of our mutual female friend
to love lorn Ben

We are not going
He'll cry and cry
and then I'll be drunk.

sept 1 oakland CA

Last night I understood why
my mother sleeps with a pillow
three pillows two behind
the ear then the one
which I understand
she curls against and holds
the ribbon of a nine
the cat round the ankles

She'd kick me out of bed
when my father left town
(I squirmed)
my father lying awake on the
other side of the world
Japan, Turkey, Taiwan, Korea
My mother wrapped around her pillow

Maybe it was a trick learned
during her stint in Pinochet's chile
A skinny blonde student
(who I hope was in love
with my father)
Hours awa,
pressing a malnourished body
murmuring with rice and eggs
to some musty down pillow.

Bad strain of salmonella
gave me the enviable photos
of the cold Pacific beaches.

She doesn't understand
the way girls swing and cling
these days
My father off in surAmerica
selling pearls to clams or oysters or rich men
is like trying to talk love to my mother
What was it like?

We went on dates, she says
Dates!
This is not unfathomable to me

Doesn't anyone date anymore?

Then
they ended up together somehow
or because of dates
He was older
though I don't know how many women
there were before
and like to think there have been none since.

Now
we're switched
she fits better here with
deflated pillows
which I could understand at age nine
and happily single
What I want to hear is
the way love goes
the way it was
when the rest of the family got hitched at 18.
The way love goes
stretched out over miles
and waiting on the otherside.
The way love goes
which I think she knows
how you grab the pillow
still in love
in yr sleep.

-sept 13 oakland CA

All of a sudden I don't think
I can be that literature major anymore
towards the middle of the Established United American Literatire course
which I take the mandatory for me pretend to piss
ponder a smoke
break (and what is this, the eighties?)
I don't know if I can do this
too much bright, too much clairty,
too many specific/ packed/ thoughts/

Columbus, if yu didn't know
represents this American literature
even in his role as bastard conquistador

Christine told me I could be a poet
with politics
that she liked it.
Instead of all the loudmouth English Lit majors
who yell (we can't all
name things like Columbus did)

You're gonna need poets
there'll be leaders and fighters and
speakers and healers
no one's saying I'm not handy with a baseball bat
Seamus may have larger hands
mine are just as flexible.
You're gonna need poets
especially those who can' tell you
Columbus fucked sheep,
you know?

sept 8, oakland CA