Poetry

As the scroll unrolls, scales
Ripple by the glass like fishes
Flashing gaseous tails,

Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth,
That wide wet kisser we
Smacked on to justify a pipe.

I am a field.
I am a blade of grass
Within the field.

The corridor, a New Jersey of the West, its stucco newness.
What king was it that built this highway?

It’s a routine we’ve worked out
to pass the winter.
I saw myself in two, in three,
into a puzzle,

How I hate you tonight!
I tick off
the bumps on your back,
your hangnails, the acid

I watch the point of the twirling stick
Where you are sleeping, where you will come again.

Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach,
That shabby, squat nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let’s aim for the summer of ’71,
When all of our friends were young and immortal.

Heavy blue veins streak across my mother’s legs,
Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles.

What was the heart of her story,
tired, on their bicycles, night

coming on while they tried to reach
Lago di Balseno, the farmer,