The Canyon Poems

Standing in the glitter of his death

2009-03-27T21:06:00.000-08:00

Just down the road from the peppertree
bus stop, at the blind of the curve,
gleanings from some old man's windshield glint
the road’s shoulder in the sun. Bone shards
of glass shimmer a memorial
to Jimmy Sawyer, grounded to dust
after three days of summer traffic.

I didn't know him. Four or five years
older, he said hi to me sometimes.
Light tan. Dark blonde hair. Warm eyes. Freckles.
We all kinda looked the same. We all
stood at the peppertree. When I'd see
him, I'd think of Finn and my first black friend.

They'd both been going too fast, you know.
The sun distracting and beautiful.
So many curves up Oak Drive. Jimmy.
The guy in the American-made.
So crashes happen every day. But.
He's the first person I sort of knew
who died. Who wasn't anything grand.

So I stand on the spot where his life
crashed away into an old man's lap
after popping up through the warm air.
And try to sense his spirit, like he'd
be waiting. I want him to tell me
he's okay so I can go tell his mom.

Sunday school

2009-03-27T20:33:00.000-08:00

A little white car slows and stops
in front of the old Foursquare Church.
Brother Fred and Sister Margot
unchain and unlock the front doors.

They welcome the sunshine, canyon
air, fresh and filled with earthy dust.
They shake must of neglect, disuse
from the warped, faded storybooks
of Noah and Moses. They hand us
brooms and rags, tell us where to clean,
that we will make this church our own.
In a couple of weeks, we do.

There are no parents, no Sunday
bonnets, and no polished church shoes.
Brother Fred, Sister Margot, us.

We read about the Burning Bush.
About the Flood. And when we ask
about the marine fossil bed,
they say, God put those there, sillies.
They explain water, wine, fish, bread.
His death. Tell us that we are sinners
and that we must repent because
We’re all born bad, little sister.
They ask us to tithe our candy
money, our sacrifice to God.

We draw the line right there. Tithe all
at Brooks’ Market. Play kick the can,
hide and seek in the Foursquare lot
every Sunday ‘til Brother Fred
and Sister Margot leave. And mom
retakes the portico with art
classes for kids bored with summer.

Trash can love

2009-03-01T17:33:00.001-09:00

Mother can’t.quite.grasp the Gallo rosé
hidden behind the Cheerios, plunges
buttfirst into the thirty-three gallon
trash can. She’s wedged up to her knees, half-way
down the barrel, her ass throned on empty
mac&cheese boxes, milk jugs, & egg shells.

Who wouldn’t fall on the floor laughing?

She screams at each of us for a jerk, cries,
bribes us with chips. The Rubbermaid turtle,
stranded in our kitchen, calls out to us:
Grab my hand, I’ll tell you that I love you.

We don't help her, don't want to hear garbage.

She's got to crawl out of this dump herself.

summer:winter creek

2009-03-01T17:23:00.000-09:00

July stream. Too low to coddle an oak leaf,
loose molecules falling into the dusty aquifer.

Backswimmers and pollywogs hike Miocene
granite and old breezes bubbling to the surface.

The coolness encircles fiddlehead shoots,
eddies at the roots of cattails and sedge.

This is the way our water lopes to the ocean.
Evaporates. Returns in a tsunami of winter rage.

Rampages chunks of road:mountain:home
over the post office bridge, sweeps round back

behind Joe’s market where creek-rats tent and grill
stolen meat. Dad slogs home through another storm.

Covered in mud up to his chest. Lugging a box of wet
food from the post office to our Hodgson Circle home.

Stunt Road fire

2009-03-01T17:17:00.000-09:00

Chaparral explodes like a sun vanishing
into a cold black hole. Exhilarating. Spooky.
Day turns eerie & snaps. Sycamores, oaks burst
into orange, spark into charcoal. Patty’s dad said,
I’d rather die than abandon my home to this blaze.

The fire jumps Stunt Road, the last ridge
between Malibu and the Old
Canyon Road. We’re ordered to leave.
Grab what we can. And get out. Now.

Mom leaves to pick up dad
from work at Joe Creek’s, leaves
me with my brothers, leaves me
to “grab the important stuff.”

How do you know what’s important?
We grab dirty laundry because
its easy to carry, dad’s scuba tanks,
mom’s canvases … snacks. From the sound

of her shriek, she meant something
different by “important stuff.”
We huddle at my grandpa’s house
where he tells us long, slow stories

of building New York skyscrapers
during the nineteen-thirties. How,
as an Indian, he walked steel
caked with ice. Because Indians

have good balance, even on ice.
How he broke legs, fingers
as the “treasurer” for the LGU.
Drinks scotch neat to smooth our stay.

Charcoal & ash & orange fire retardant
smolder the canyon rim. Oaks, sycamores lay
dead & dying. Some spark and live. All things smell
like burnt. And eerie becomes same old, same old.
People died. Houses burned. But not Patty’s dad’s.

Years later, I will run into you but

2009-03-01T17:13:00.000-09:00

I won’t recall if you said to me
I love you, though your warm breath strokes my

nape. And I am certain we never
kissed, though your April tongue grazes my

teeth, cheeks. Nor will I recollect your
rookie hands slipping around my hips

even though you swear that to prep you
for med school we explored each other’s

automatic reflexes and sweat
that summer afternoon behind

Joe Creek’s. Deep in the ferns.
Under your mom’s accidental glare.

My grandma, the pimp

2009-03-01T17:12:00.000-09:00

She shows up one day with a Liz Taylor
knock off. Synthetic Liz looks so much like
the original that she rarely pays
for gas, caviar, dinners at Chasen's.
But she does buy men. And she wants to buy
my dad. "You can pay rent and buy groceries,"
grandma tells my mother. Bastard Liz is
perfectly coifed. Her dyed black hair sexy,
messy, restrained by a gaudy white scarf.
She pretends she can't hear the shock and pain
in my mother's voice, strains for any sound
of yes from my dad. She glistens with large
fake rocks, fake gems, gold plate. Glass and metal
dangle from her ears, neck, wrists, and ankles.
Her eyes, painted with thick Egyptian lines,
are real, the color of guest room hand soap
carved into sea shells. Her gauzy kaftan
floats as she circles my dad, eyes him like
he’s a new handbag. She smirks, "I'll take him."

Peace, brother. I have always loved you.

2009-03-01T17:11:00.001-09:00

Scarlet fever can happen to anyone. To me.
It passes through the womb of our mother,
deep and pulsing. Nourishing. To you, born

with a fragmented heart that dropped you dead
and dead again as you danced the hokey pokey
in our living room (we learned to resuscitate you),

with a left eye that drifted across your first horizon
to nowhere, let itself go blind, and a brain impeded
from regurgitating the blitzkrieg of new experiences.

Love and peace and harmony break apart, emaciate,
drain away like the summer creek under the relentless
badgering of second and third graders’ name calling.

Some chase him, laugh at his drift and ineloquence,
because Kids will be kids, Linda, the principal insists
to his mother. Nuthin’ we can do about it.

Even in this counter cultural here, this anti-right now,
decade of peace love harmony, kids belittle different,
parents excuse their hatred as Elysian self-expression.

La Bocana, Baja California

2009-03-01T17:09:00.000-09:00

1.
Too many of us in a blue VW bus,
sticking to woven polyvinyl seats,
zinging flattened Ding Dongs&Twinkies
down the Transpeninsular Highway.
2. La Bocana is Topanga wild—if the sagebrush
were to break loose, the canyon crumble
into the evening tide where horses and night
herons wander the lagoon, falcons drift
the wake and stone cliffs above the marsh
filled with bright red, snapping crawdads.

3.
The parents dump the too damn many of us
at the cliffside casita of a fat abuela who speaks
no Inglés and teaches us to make flour tortillas.
“¿Una Coca, por favor?”… “¿Esta the toilet?”

4.
The crapper is an ancient outhouse. Perched
on a southern bluff over the green Pacific,
the sea and salt erode all the shit and planks
of the silver wood structure, all the wads
of poison oak my brother used for toilet paper,
though he didn’t intend to.

5. La Bufadora tips Punta Banda Peninsula, blow hole
of the Baja cave system. The too fucking many of us
crouch on the lizard covered rocks. Green snakes
mist themselves and slip into the soaring plume.

6.
We drive northbound, homeward, away
from the spouts and carnitas and herons.
We nurse crawdad bites and poison oak rashes.
We fling our flour tortillas and don’t care
that we’re piled on top one another
like dirty laundry. We’re going home.

How we take a stand

2009-03-01T17:07:00.000-09:00

I.
Summertime in downtown Los Angeles is no place
for kids whose lungs are pink, whose feet have adapted
to the brown earth and twigs, whose tans have acclimated
to arid breezes twisting through yarrow and tarragon.

And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?

We are carrying signs like we are carrying grenades,
throw our slogans at the cops, the cameras,
and the pretty Channel 7 Eyewitness news lady
who asks me to hold up my billboard and smile.

War is not healthy for children
and other living things.

II.
The girls of Mr. L’s sixth grade class congregate
in the bathroom after a game of Mary Worth,
decide it’s time to protest the old man’s hands
stroking their shoulders and backs and … ughhh.

A time of love, a time of hate,
a time of war, a time of peace.

We organize and march on the principal’s office,
link arms, and sit down in front of his desk. We shout
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Mr. L has got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
He thanks us for our visit, gives us late passes back to class.

Deep in my heart, I do believe,
that we shall overcome some day.

Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag, Country Joe & the Fish
We Shall Overcome, Charles Tindley
“War is not healthy …,” by Lorraine Schneider

How a woman makes her own wine

2009-03-01T17:04:00.000-09:00

What woman doesn’t want a vat of men
to herself? To burn her bra and skivvies
after another week in go-go boots
and paisley. Slather herself with red grapes

and penises during a three day bash
of skin and loud music—stomp grapes for wine
that won‘t be drunk. What woman doesn’t want
to bottle that piece of her untamed self?

Save it for an unexpected evening
with a childhood friend. Light up the memory
of that vat in the Birdsall’s yard under
the eucalyptus, oak, and some blonde guy.

What woman wouldn’t want to savor her
wild flavor, boastful and masculine, long
after wicked has become laughable,
abandon, the secret curl in her lip?

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2009

Group therapy with Bernice

2009-03-01T17:02:00.000-09:00

Preparatory therapy we didn’t need. Yet.
But mother had traded another painting

for group youth babble. And so they left us all:
Tui, Brian, Greg, Scott, Janine, Aloo, Chris, Chris.

Me. With the freaking shrink. Once a week.
Until we acquiesced and performed exercises.

Like silently glaring at each other in a circle.
Or passing around the handmade hand mirror,

each verbalizing the deeply reflected truth of ourselves.
The boys all barked when Bernice handed me the mirror.

Assholes.

Flood of '69

2009-03-01T17:00:00.000-09:00

I want to tell you boulder stories.
Explain the weightlessness of sandstone
balanced above a curving road, a home,

how its red and girth and beige—
but you know about distraction
and how rock stories

turn into stories about the rain.
How our mountain rain falls
in chunks of forty days and nights,

shoves itself down the withered throat
of the watershed, swirls across
speckled bedroom linoleum

and creeks through our kitchen windows,
torrents charcoaled sumac along the damp
remains of Chumash trails.

Our rain releases the boulders that crush
an old man against his white Frigidaire
just as he reaches for a bottle of Coke.

Our canyon rain swallows us, whole families
at a time, sleeping under the warm quilts
of our grandmothers and ferns and oak trees

while the mud overtakes us,
drags our Mary Janes and blue
Fiestaware into the raging divide.

Canyon rain is not the rain of Noah, rain
of rebirth. Our canyon rain strips the dirt
from the skin and bones of our world.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2009

Dad photographs mother

2009-03-01T16:57:00.000-09:00

She is naked. She sunbathes between
the shadows and corns of a tall red

pepper tree, its thin leafy bones lilt
and spin in the warm breezes. She sprawls

on her Tijuana blue blanket,
the weave pulled loose after the long drive

home. She has pale skin and black hair, she
is a naked Snow White out tanning.

From the sudden look on her face, he
snuck up on her, snapped a twig before

clicking his new Nikon SLR.
Her white cotton peasant blouse is clutched

between her breasts as she sits half turned
toward him on her haunches. I like to

believe that he loved her when he shot
her in this brief celluloid moment.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2008

Billie & Dennis

2009-03-01T16:56:00.000-09:00

Billie was my downhill neighbor. Got me
into Ebsen's School of Dancing, owned by
by Buddy's two old sisters. Billie knew
them from vaudeville where they song-and-danced.

The way she tells it, they were pretty good.
She tells me that Buddy played the Tin Man
until he developed an allergy
to his shiny tin skin. But when I ask

about Dorothy, she looks down and says,
"She was a good kid." Billie likes to share
her Benson & Hedges Gold “'cause smoking
ain't killed me yet," and Billie is up there.

Her house is filled with props that look like crap
needing constant dusting. And while it's hard
to keep a canyon house dirt-free, she does.
Because she loves all those silly top hats

and canes and pictures, the slim beaded dress
draped over an old satin screen. Billie’s
all there (though Dennis doesn’t think so). Loves
her reminders of lime lights and heat and

dancing under Dennis's glare from stage
left as he's dropping curtains, replacing
the city with the countryside. She takes
another drag, "I know he watches you."

Banjo Picker & Fiddle Contest

2009-03-01T16:54:00.000-09:00

They come from all over the place:
songs, fiddles, jugs, storytellers,
blankets, hippies, all that bluegrass,
to the canyon and Camp Wildwood
to compete for a t-shirt or

a joint. For a day, a weekend
they raise money for their cause—
NPR, because it plays folk,
is semi threatening to the Man.
People play ‘til their karma’s clean

and then sing to fill their empty
hats with homemade bread and weed or
two cold Buds and a lay under
the sycamore trees. All day long
stoned men stub loose dirt into clouds,

ladies clap and snap their fingers
like belly dancers, their naked
kids spinning in the mottled sun
with lizards and tree frogs under
the waterfall made from a hose.

Backyard theatre & Oz

2009-03-01T16:51:00.000-09:00

1.

Who doesn’t want to be Dorothy?
To be filled with angst. To find our
own way, on our own terms, to toss
out our parents’ fears for us, save
ourselves—not in running from, but
in returning someplace like home?

2.

One summer of hot, dry love. Endless
days of emerald sets, auditions,

Oz—we'd become them: me, my brothers,
pseudo sisters & brothers—enough

to populate an old Kansas farm.
Who of us would transform into which

loquacious personification
of our base desires: to be smart ...

to be brave ... to be loved ... to matter?
Who would dance the yellow cardboard road?

3.

The first two weeks of summer, we spoke
like tin, straw, Billie Burke and Judy.
We roared. And screeched like angry monkeys.

We tried out for the parts we wanted,
got the parts we didn't. Scrounged for red
gingham and fur. Collected feathers.

4.

I wanted an audience to quench
my angst. With applause. An ovation.
A bow. And thrown roses at my feet.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

It's the saccharine lilt of that first
fluttering line that's hardest to learn.
The tilt into concern not my own.

5.

We tornado our fears—of bad grades and
of silent dads and shrieking mothers and
of snakes in our beds and of friends who lie—
into Oz, balloon home after long days
where we feel safer, out of the spotlight.

6.

Who doesn't want to be a truly pissed
monkey from time to time? Soaring, spitting
rage at our audience from center stage
'til they stop us with a cup of water,
hold us tight until our wings disappear?

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literry & Arts Journal 2008

Topanga Corral

2009-02-10T19:50:00.000-09:00

August nights in the canyon sizzled
with crickets and weed. Bare-naked men
and chicks danced like mad, one crazy old

night when the Eagles, Neil, and Joni
played the roadhouse. Four bucks and a joint
and you rocked into California

cowboy angst. It was the kind of night
a kid could sneak into, score a high
just breathing. Still, to make sure, you swigged

a whole Coors. And recall a Fernwood
morning, a breakfast of cottage cheese,
Doritos, and wine with your mother

at Connie's. How you and Tui stood
in front of his house and wished he’d kiss
you like he did when you were seven,

chatting with Neil and Joni about flea bites
and the loudness of metal trash cans
being pulled to the side of the road

and their next albums in the flatness
of a clear summer day that brightens
the truth and longing of their lyrics.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2008

The day Gary Hinman died

2009-02-10T19:47:00.000-09:00

I cross the dwindling creek, walk the hush
and peace and arid swerves to Gary’s for piano.
His faded Volkswagon ovens in the sun.
Ground squirrels chatter and stop.
I knock, and wait on his gray stairs. Listen.
To the small, peccant voices behind his front door.
Passing cars drown the drying sound of oak leaves
curling in the shade. Gary plays piano and bag pipes.
Teaches—taught—Shawn and Holly brass and flute.
Gary would have taught me to play, too, except
Charlie hacked Gary’s left ear, slashed his face
while something small as a front door stood
between my lesson and the two stab wounds
that stopped Gary’s heart, left the tinge
of feeble blood browning on living room walls.

Fiji kind of love

2009-02-10T19:46:00.001-09:00

Brown and skinny. Stringy hair. Tui built fluttered rooms
in faded white. Sheets hinged to fences, posts in the front yard.
A castle billowing with crickets and June bugs. Just for us.

We could have been anywhere.

He kissed my palms. My neck. My cheek. My lashes.
I kissed his mouth, his Fiji & L.A. face. Under closed eyes
we swam the Pacific. 2 mermaids in search of an oasis.

Old Canyon Studio

2009-02-10T19:41:00.000-09:00

My mother's studio sits in an old niche
by the side of the road. The slow smell of oils
infuse the oaks and sage brush. Engrossed
in another cross, she paints. Oblivious.

I love her studio. It looks like pieces
of strange dreams, scattered hallucinations nailed
to the barn’s silver walls: the frog our dog barfed
up; old Mexican papier-mâché dragons
dangling by their broken tails; a Balinese
lion mask; a hundred Christs on a hundred
crosses; portraits of her children; pallets, thick
with sienna, cerulean, ochre, green,
bright colors that tumbled into her blackness;
antique Chinese embroideries; dead flowers,
starfish, sand dollars, her lucky cormorant;
a milk pink potato bug in the small space
between Adam’s fingertip and life; charcoal
hands tacked everywhere; small pieces of faces:
eye:nose:brow, mouth:jaw. Paintings lining the walls.

She scrubs the 4 x 5 foot homemade canvas
with a new sable brush, a camel hair clenched
between her teeth, her face and hands a Pollock,
adds an empty wine bottle to the old trunk.

Dad at 27

2009-02-10T19:38:00.000-09:00

Exhilaration. And speed. And curves. Gray
asphalt roads, older than any Sunday.

And dad’s dirt bike that came with its own scream
rising and falling with every gear change.

My brothers and I fought for the season's
first ride on that worn seat. In one quick move

dad kicked back, thrust the accelerator.
We hit the road, my arms slung around him

like no thing existed that could split us,
like there would never be a time when

saying I love you could feel awkward.
Love rises in me like a scream when I

think about the first ride on any warm
weekend, time disappearing with the heaves

in the road, the edgy years just ahead.
80 degrees and 80 miles per hour,

no helmet, no leather, sometimes no shoes,
the sky poured over us like a clear blue

waterfall. We, rushing wind on that old
road, the dirt bike shrieking between our knees.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2008

Mylar love

2009-02-10T19:34:00.000-09:00

Topanga. Summer. Night. Flat

rooftop above the coyotes and rattlesnakes,
Scott’s garage our perfect canyon campsite.

Night flickered like the inside of a mylar balloon,
smelled like oak, muérdago, and other dry green things.

We. On our backs. Arms wide open. Electric fingertips
Michaelangelo close on unzipped sleeping bags. Two

Christs laid out by the galaxy, raised up in want
of verging lips, raw skin, tentative hips.

(This poem actually won the Juneau Empire love poem contest in 2002)

Love-in, Easter Day, 1968

2009-02-10T19:32:00.000-09:00

We were not about to get naked,
my sort-of brothers, sisters, I. We
ran the open field of skin littered
with blankets and weed and guitars and

sex. We tried not to look, but a man
strolled by, black guitar thankfully placed,
strumming We Shall Overcome and Kiss
My Ass. A grandmother, freed from her

Lily St. Cyr’s, danced arms up, unshaved,
looking a little like Bonzo. We
ignored the speeches. Ignored music.
And tried not to look. Ugly bodies

and beautiful. Embarrassing. None
of us would need , you know, “that” talk. We
skimmed fleshy blankets with an orange
Wham-O Frisbee. And tripping

over many reshaping couples,
ducked past a group of—what in the hell
are they doing?—chasing the neon
disc into the skinless peonies.

Published: Tidal Echoes, UAS Literary & Arts Journal 2008

My mother sketches a nude for Marlene & Jack

2009-02-10T19:28:00.000-09:00

Colin and his old lady strip naked
(he laughs under his breath, she whispers),
light up a joint to ease their excitement,
tangle themselves on an old chaise.

My mother arranges her pastels on the pallet
to her left, clenches a charcoal pencil between
her teeth, and pins her hair on top her head
while Colin and his old lady try not to fuck.

She sets her easel and pulls a quick drag
and, while Colin and his old lady still
try not to do it, warms her oils on the bodies
in her head: muscular hands … curved bellies ….

My mother has drawn a thousand naked
Christs as though His pain were sexy,
but flinches at these two, stoned and giggling.
Colin trying hard to remain still. To relax.

Mother had invited Jack & Marlene to voyeur
from the barn door shadows her mastery
at scrubbing crayon lines into thin fleshy shapes
and not the swelling between Colin and his old lady.

These moments she forgets herself, has forgotten
Colin and his old lady in their own act of creation,
succumbing to the tension of their stillness,
moving the way naked lovers and artists move.