West
A Poem for Every Now*
Unending exhaling.
Countless summers spent in a lifetime
making friends with the promise of the sun.
Life-giving dreams in a dim, warm pudding of days.
Suffocating in the hour of ecstasy under my fruit tree,
swallowing the time in magnificent hunger, for feasting and forgetting,
falling into the sky, a glittering sea of lemmings
chasing after the dancing minstrel.
Reminds me of deep, hidden forest memories that were lived,
but perhaps I never breathed in them to remind them of life or instance.
In the moment of a blink, entire diaries of imagined earth flash in the eye.
Maybe they are a stolen painting.
Maybe they are books about America
and the impossible immaculate lined up on a shelf.
This is the toxification of a generation — remember the day,
and the color of mood, and the shape of the language falling,
and the angle of your foot,
and the music playing in the background.
This is summer heat and breezes wagging branches,
and yawning light virtually squeaking with delight.
This is a new day, and lost poetry recovered
under glistening glare of evening stifle.
Summer night like it always was, another careless buzz.
Lone gruesome soul rapt in enigmatic glow and flowering
hundreds of hidden-down burdens. Sky black as white blanket.
Man playing a guitar on a lazy couch,
the withering of night, with a recent full moon vanished
and crickets in season, ants on the banister, crawlies and warm things, gravel crunching to the twinkle of crackling tree and motoring people,
light motoring laughing things.
Air thick as moods, action falling in the sullen rapture of stillness,
a song lingering on the lips of a rejected lover, dejected love
and the unblessed forgiving the blessed.
Cloud moaning across the sky to a muffled gasp of breath,
as another generation notices death.
– Fullerton, California, summer 1996
(New Orleans, summer 2024)
*I have lately been looking back, as we sometimes do, at the things I was writing in my younger years, both formal compositions and journal scribblings, from different times and places that stand as vivid markers for a given moment in my life. All of them unpublished and many unheard or even unseen by anyone, there are a few of them that seem to reflect forward to my present moment in a kind of epiphanic foreshadowing of my current voice, thoughts and life.
