Recycle


On a table, on the deck
of a nondescript house
I pass on my walk,
someone left bottles,
glasses, cups,
a pitcher, plates
with crumbs and rinds.
Now it’s afternoon
the following day.  If they
sit out any more,
life will bear off
the crumbs, and time
like plaster fill
the empty bottles.  So I’ll
redeem them.  We drank,
ate, and talked.  I was brilliant –
so were the others.
In love with each other’s
brilliance and fame.  Our faces
seemed to multiply
as dusk erased
features.  Or else
our candle drew
qualified others
from the neighborhood, where no
car passed, no light
was as brilliant
as ours.  How lucky we are,
someone said, to have
each other, not having to
explain our learned
jokes and allusions
and be rewarded
with doubtful looks.
Night concealed
our disdain, fostered
grand mysterious
plans, and encouraged
confessions.  One woman
described how, after
brief and dispiriting
sex with a narcissist, she
herself drew his sleeping
arm around her.



Course of Years


I drove by night
for various reasons, and over
a course of years, from San Diego
to LA, Redwood City and
points north, or east across
the desert.  Once in a leaky
Chevy Vega without highbeams,
once with no radio.  On
the hundred-mile-straight
stretch of 5, sleep played with me
like a truck.  The smell
of the cattle-yard
midway on that route
roused me.  Hills between highways,
silhouetted by the moon, seemed
another world, silently crashing
into ours.  At the gas islands, diners,
7/11s, I often stopped
just for light, non-radio voices,
the instantaneous failed
speculation of a big
woman behind a counter
that I might save her.  There were things
in those hills: coyote/dog hybrids
in developments, failed
and dark decades before
the Downturn.  And along 101,
the sea, lit by the moon,
distant towns, or the San Onofre
Nuclear Plant on its coastal fault.
Looking back, brittle-boned,
needing sleep, reluctant to move,
I see that, quite apart from where
or why I was driving, death was there
always, the oncoming headlights
so slightly angled.  And am faced
with a choice: to cower
in retrospective terror – I have
so much of that; or to think,
*It’s superb what you did – all that driving –
quite apart from why
or where.*  It’s like one
of those unscenic desert crossroads.