Oedipus, blinded,
the original mother-fucker,
finally learns his name means
Swollen Foot.
"Okay," he muses,
brooches still stuck,
"that would'a helped."
*
Category: Poetry in the Moment
These are the prettiest sounds
These are the prettiest sounds:
a puppy dreaming on your chest
a new car door closing
the "uuugh" of a man losing control
"We're beginning our descent"
in that order.
*
Power
Montecito. Atascadero. Paso Robles.
Monterey. Santa Cruz. Your smile.
Places more magical than real,
more past than present,
traveled through.
They live in my memory.
I write them because I miss them.
And I was told naming something
gives you power over it,
fixes it in place.
Well, then:
money wealth recognition words
anonymity hands night sky
ocean breeze sage and iceplant
arches
Redondo
quick intake
you.
*
I went looking
I went looking for a feeling today,
that one special feeling I once caught
somewhere, maybe a river in Wyoming
slipping by wild grass or a night when,
still studying philosophy, I looked up
from my book and noticed the soft-light
of my little dorm lamp and loved it.
I hunt this feeling, trap it with
Grandma's plastic tablecloth that was
padded so no waterglass could be placed
on it without almost toppling over
and her tossing a tennis ball to a dog
in the backyard, the distant sound
of a train rolling down dark tracks
as I slept.
I surround it and demand its name.
It smiles at me and slips through the
gaps and the hunt is on again for that
feeling I'm looking for today,
maybe walking down a dusty road in
Sacramento and seeing a lizard dart
off into the bush and then my shoes
seemed quiet under the hot-white sky and
for a moment I forgot where I was going.
*
Down Deep
Down deep
it is dark
and kind
if kind means silence
and peace so thick
only the strangest skulls
survive.
Up top, oh that’s the place to be —
party that never ends — and
prettiness from nowhere
to end collapsed and still
until — turbulence and dance
and spray —
spring into spacious sky
before falling
deep into peace
so beautifully thick —
somewhere begins to dance.
*
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This this
This this is me not mine,
not mine to keep or even borrow
for this this is you not yours either,
not yours to lend or swallow.
All this is this
in every way that matters
as body belongs to earth
but keeps getting bothered
like a grandmother sitting
on a toilet, sighing.
I used to think this was easier
to find because you stayed put
for ninety-six years.
I got confused.
This this doesn’t leave
and is my brother now
sitting on a toilet
thinking he is alone.
*
I’ve been busy. Details soon.
At the Library
This is where I met Babar and Gus and Charlotte who was friends with a pig and taught us both Life Goes On even through tears. I watched my mom carry her weight in books to the librarian-lady paid to look mean but she was actually nice as she took pictures of punchcards and told me I would have such fun where I was going. We were poor though I didn’t know it as I poured over a Big Book of Ships and I listened to Drums that I hated hated hated but I loved the way my grandma read so I pretended (I think she knew). Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally) building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden. There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown and found a book called The Battle of Midway that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W. Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well, and is that what I look like inside? Where the Red Fern Grows because, you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better I picked up The Red Pony. Mistake. Except tears and truth often go together. Steinbeck became my god before I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions until I found out why a caged bird sings and that wars are going on always, sometimes in the bedroom, sometimes far from streets. Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way: war is going on always, always, but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting. Never. Stop. Fighting. Still later I met Monette and found his half-life beautiful — maybe mine would be, too. I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before I finally breached its first great wave and then thought: was Hawthorne his Moby Dick? Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank but damn if his letters weren't good. Woolf my Patron Saint showed me her room so that I could want mine. Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” — it wasn’t easy, not easy at all. She loved those books. All this and more in a library, from my little corner one (when LA had only one area code) to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage. Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until, later, I was pushing her chair to the books. All these people, all these ghosts dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves, waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter. Life buoyed by imagination, imagination buoyed by life. Freedom. Adventure. Suffering. America. So of course: Arizona Georgia Illinois Louisiana Mississippi Missouri Montana Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Texas Wyoming let's close the libraries. We wouldn’t want anybody learnin' nothin' new…
*
“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”
— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
Wagons
You and I pretend to keep the extra heartbeats and moods that follow — wagons loaded full of words to pull against the bright sky empty because we cannot fly.
*
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Ruah
Word in the wind is wind in the wind shaped not changed, noise to crude-drum ears, then still. Send yours again across skin that is kin to touch and moves to tremble, limbs hot under breath that holds earth-deep fire then cool to rest as I birth grope listen hope a man immersed then drowned.
*
Bureaucracy
The way they tell it: BE CAREFUL! — a spell is so much more than words said out loud. You need a protection circle three pounds of salt sage to cleanse the air; no personal gain no love incantations absolutely no commerce with evil spirits or demons or anyone misunderstood. “Only do what you’d will be done to you.” Yeah. A labyrinth of requirements while want weaves itself into this scented man that free woman heat and smile and yes, sweet feeling skin, all good and bad and eager to be taken outside the safe circle past the strange bureaucracy that once belonged to the church and still stops magic in its tracks.
*
G Beckman 