The slow sacraments of hardboiled human biology
and the butchery ordained in velveteen waistcoats.
The stenchy, unnatural criminalities revealed daily.
If lives were water, we’d love gradual expansion
or develop something like crocodile halotolerance
for what might just function for us but hasn’t as yet.
And though lives aren’t water, who doesn’t crave
the vertical razzmatazz of extension and upsurge,
a madcap theatrics the planet endorses routinely.

Mother left Kentucky to marry and settle in Ohio
with a man from the same small town in Kentucky.
Wherever light pours in, our lives are rooms. Houses
with spring yards and kids with Christmas-toy shovels,
sweatered kids deepening hard earth with both hands.
She died on Good Friday. And forget the lie of Easter,
the dead being as lifeless as stones forever. Some lives
end quietly and without benefit of clergy. Some of us
walk on the Moon and plant flags. American flags.

This ghost-gray backseat is warm; with the top
down, I’m lying in sunlight. Troughs of shadow

slowly fill with that light. The car ride is a biscuit.
And now My Driver is reaching between the seats
to pat the furred crown of my head. A season ago,

I prized snowdrifts in denuded Iowa neighborhoods.
Worshipped the Yet to Come like gift-bites of steak.

These days My Driver sleeps downstairs on a couch
so he can find shoes and shepherd me into the dim.
His dawn-voice is a dish of ice cream all my own.

Lowering myself onto grass to water it yet again
is a sweep of misery I’m used to. This morning,

I couldn’t stand. Forelegs were willing but unable
then not even willing. The stuffed bear is with me.
I smell him, the bear. A blanket I was lifted from.

In the car like this, air is a bruising tenderness.
Regardless, I’m my animal body. I’m what fails

after trying. Now I’m cradled. Placed on a table.
Around me, eyes are stones then stones that weep.
For a little while I was in the grief-long moment—

big-pawed, a tongue papery with thirst, squinting
to see who was keeping me so long in the world

Those nights on Ocean Beach,
in The City by the Bay,
reminded me that there are other places
where one can see the wonders
of the night sky better,
places without as much light pollution as now,
and now with space debris.

Steinbeck who chronicled
the night skies over the Mohave
for the trip the Joads took in The Grapes of Wrath,
probably enjoyed looking at the stars, like George,
and others, like me, he might have been transfixed
by the moon and stars, and commented also
about the soils of Mars in a letter.

He also thought they were called Lunatics for a reason,
i.e. the moon had an effect on people.
The moon also had an effect on the muse, on women
with three songs he knew with “moon” in the title.
He must have also been amazed by those
wondrous skies in the farm fields of the night,
away from the street lights.

The stars were too far away, and he could
hear the suffering of those nearby,
on Spaceship Earth.

On off nights, he and Ed,
he and one of his wives, must have
looked out at the vast universe.
One could have imagined
that they laughed together, after the party,
after drinks,
wondering about the UFO
they might have seen
over the night ocean.

At times, was Steinbeck not also trying to say that
we were all from the same place,
in a mystery that probably could wait?

How does one describe a look that resolute?
The left hand on a wall. The shoulder holster
and the black-handled .38 suspended in midair.
Maybe that unseen right hand holds the weapon
we have failed to notice like certain small facts
about furniture in the room the morning we die.
The best of us are equal parts enthralling and sad.
Some are one or two truths rendered more enduring
by a collision between Accident and Good Looks.
But the expression on his face is roughly the same
in any quadrangle of sunlight he’s asked to stand in
in a walk-up loud with San Francisco street traffic
and freighter horns warning small boats in the bay.
And he leans this same swaggering way each take.
Why? Because the King of Cool was a foundling.
An orphan knows the worst about us. And standing
like this, staring off into some unfaltering distance
in a turtleneck and slacks, wearing close-cropped hair,
he suspects he is relinquishing those parts of himself
he is likely never to get back. The best of a generation
model a look like his as one consequence of rebellion
and turning in the sheets at night in cold water flats.
A look that says Tell me how you want me to stand
and Show me that again. And, Go fuck yourself.

1.  Kareem and Magic

I barely knew a Laker from a Cavalier
the winter Mike Nern and Jim Wallace
dragged me to Gund Arena, crisscrossing
eastern Ohio in a December snowstorm.
Cleveland played LA close for three quarters
then the Lakers pulled away like a fast car
if you depress and hold the accelerator.
I’m almost sure that the Cavs never led.

It was Jabbar’s last or next-to-last season.
A bald spot bloomed at the back of his afro.
Magic Johnson fed his skyhook all night.
At the buzzer, applause.  Then it got quiet
and some asshole shouted the word nigger.
Once, loud, like that was the real score.
What did Kareem do?  Grabbed a towel
from a table by a bench and kept walking.

2.  The Year I Shouted Myself Hoarse Every Saturday

I’d bellow Get the ball, Scott! and Take the shot, Scott!
and Play defense! and Hustle! until I pissed him off.
He was 8, his small body fueled on Happy Meals.
He ran the wood-facsimile gym floor at the Y
ecstatically. His grandmother played high school
women’s basketball in Kentucky in the 1950s,
a standout, so he had the bloodlines. But where
does a boy get the heart to devour the world?
I’d be on my feet the whole time, screaming.

It was thrilling in ways I couldn’t bear.
I wanted his team to win. Which they did.
For the rest of us who’d never go undefeated.
For his grandmother who’d have gotten a scholarship,
if they had offered them to women in those days.
And, all right, for a silly father with a bizarre lay-up
and a few poems to carry him. But mostly because
nothing else in this stinking life he was entering
would ever again be so entirely his, and sweet.

Fun partly now
to walk through those
dry golden and green California hills.

Sublime, profound,
to remember the past
to imagine oneself
in part of that past.
In those stories:

George and Lennie
walked through these hills
down roads towards an uncertain future.
The Joads saw those
parched places.
They were battled over.
Contested.
Farmed.

Nice to not really be
a part of these hard tales.
Glad they are remembered
though.

Easier, safer
to be part
of something else,
some other tales;
alone in this country,
in those wondrous evocative hills
which remind us
that we can make
decisions.

I walked past your house
but there was no one there.
The blinds on the windows, the curtains in the hall,
those things, and things like that,
they looked the same,
but there was no one there.
The trees have grown,
but the one behind the house,
the hickory tree, it’s gone,
and the limbs of the elms along the curb
reach over to make a ceiling: a crown of green
suppressing sound.

Those things, and things like that,
they look the same,
but there was no one there.

Those years were golden, and I remember
them, those other days, a summer breeze
within the leaves, the sound of cicadas
in the afternoon. I hear them still,
the call of the birds, the barking of a dog,
and the cheers and shouts
from a baseball game in the park nearby.
I hear them, and I remember,
those lemonade afternoons,
the swing on the porch,
the lyrical squeak of the old screen door,
and the smells from the bakery
that filled the humid air.

Those things, and things like that,
they were the same,
but there was no one there.

l walked past your house, and in the receding light
the glow of fireflies played in the grass,
and with those scents and sounds and thoughts of you,
I saw the swallows and I heard an owl.
A bus at the corner stopped and opened its doors,
but no one got off.

The perfumes of honeysuckle and mint
roiled in the air, and I heard the tolling of a far-off bell.
In the fading light, I smelled tarts in the oven
and coffee being made at the stove. I smelled
closets scented with moth balls and cedar,
and I thought there should have been fallen leaves
burning in piles at the curb.
But there was no glow anywhere, and no light within,
for the house was empty
and there was no one there.

Turning away, I walked across town
and found you there. The gates were still open,
and in the failing light I searched for the stone
that had your name. And there,
in the shadows that hid you,
a single rose beckoned:
a rose from your garden,
a yellow rose in a vase of glass.

But oh, how does it contain you, that space in the grass?
It’s surely too narrow, surely too short,
surely too small for someone
who once lived in that house.

Fireflies begin to knit a path in the darkness over your head,
and my heart cries. I walked past your house,
but you weren’t there.
I want to take you home,

but I can’t.

In the 20th Century my father loved his government job:
maintaining the well-calibrated heart of the nuclear arsenal.
He said, We can put one of those babies through a window
in the Kremlin after a 6000-mile flight. We made that here.
And, come Memorial Day, at the open house at the air base,
he’d show me his workbench in the cleanroom where dust
held its breath. Later, he might have almost nothing to say.
Maybe: Keep it down. I’m watching fucking 60 Minutes.

How he grew to love Minuteman missiles, the stockpile
whose reliable lethality he’d chosen to take ownership of.
Meaning, he thought about the consequences of the work.
Maybe he had the moral compass of a death camp guard,
but I loved that he sharpened the blade for the American
guillotine. That he visualized ICBMs unzipping the sky.
The hum and verdict of oscilloscopes was in his voice
when he said, You’re thinking about this too much.

It was on a long so long past her midnight night,
under a scheming sky of milkbowl light and nightkissed stars,
on a night wrapped in the silver and silk of self and moon,
wrapped in a night of dream and hope,
a night of soft quiet filled
with the stippled and glazed glimmering
sight
of the polished eucalyptus leaves
that flashed
and flushed on the naked limbs
under the moon-scarred diamonds
of an outcast and far off
forgotten heaven.
From the shores of the ripple-splashed and cold
black bottomless bay sounded the noise of the windbuoys,
came the sound of the sea, came the music addressed to unseen ships
as the sightless gray of the wind’s morning hands reached
softly down
and rattled them,
mournful,
like the call of a thousands cows that pained alone
in all the frost-filled prairies and pastures and plains of the world.

Calm night, cool wind, and out there too,
hidden
in all the deep-dark valleys of the bay,
buried beneath the shadows of splashing waves and tireless rocks,
the noise of the sea lions
moaning and barking and rolling their heads, a lonely dog’s bark
that pierces the black guts of the night, their calls into the high skies
that mean, to them, perhaps passion, maybe pain;
while somewhere in the dark
the throbs and the strokes, the sounds of the motors of the early-hour boats, fishing men
aiming their restless bows over and through the waves,
while in them the Italian, the Grecian, the lonely and the sad, the
new, the ancient mariners
trod worn decks, drop mended nets
down into the depths to find pieces of their prayers
answered
in the cool bellies of their netted fish.

Under the quiet moon I walked,
and under the sweeping arms of the black-shadowed trees I walked,
and under the stars and the limbs of the eucalyptus and pine I walked
in that early-soft morning moment of dawn
beneath a blanket of cathedral stars
in that sweet-scented moment of time
when the slightest movement of tomorrow’s winds begin to fall quietly down to earth
like soft kittens,
and in that sheltered moment of good
and greatness
and everything,
when even the stink of the earth and the sound of the water and the smell of the pines spells wonderment, I felt
my moving heart shake,
crossing over wheat-waving fields of grass,
over weed-filled meadows giving up the sounds of crickets,
and below me and below God and below the moon
and man and his sleeping world,
there, between the hills and the sea,
I looked down and saw a Monterey morning
sprinkled upon the surface of the earth like dim fireflies
in a shifting fog.

Behind me, the crickets, and in the weeds, the wind. While before me, the sea, the seals, and the sounds of the fishing boats.
Below me in repose, the town in its sound and soundless sleep, and
in a single moment of gladness,
alone in that world of mist and myth,
I found myself overcome with a feeling of grace, and I was suddenly a priest, was suddenly a monk,
was suddenly a saint,
was suddenly someone neither good nor bad. I was
everything and nothing, both whole and unwhole: a leftover piece
of some onetime great and fallen god
that had its home in the tossing grass,
that shared all of the space from here
to the darkest corner of the starlight skies.
And with my feet spreading wings over the dew-wet grass,
through the mattress of needles in the thick pine forests, the soles of my feet pounding hard upon the earth,
feeling a part of some gigantic and tremendous ancient thing, feeling part of a universe that was as close to me as the simplest stone
or as far from me as the farthest star,
I turned
and made my way home.