the dust you wrote
your name in before the dust rag came along and wiped it out.
5/ MARBLES
“Elephant stomp” meant you stomped your marble
with your heel until it was buried level with the earth.
If you felt brave enough you played for “keepsies,”
if you doubted your concentration you called
“quitsies” and if you wanted to come close
or get away you called “giant steps.” Contingency
dictated “bombsies” when you stood up straight
and from the level of your eye looking right down
to your target you called out “bombs away.”
No one liked to lose a “clearie” or a “steelie”
and nothing teachers said about fair play
reduced the sting and shame and anger:
your bag’s size waxed and waned, adrenaline
pumped all recess, you were acquisitive,
sharp-eyed, pitting vision against gain and loss.
6/ SHOOTER
“Upsy elbows and straights” meant you had to keep
your arm straight and with your shooting hand
snug against the inside of your elbow you’d cock
your thumb, shooter gritty with dirt, and take aim
at your opponent’s marble. Calculations went on
that made time and space purely malleable,
sudden vectors of intention taking over
from the sun so you were seeing it as if
foreknown, though the sharp little click glass on glass
put to the test Zeno’s paradox: in the just
before not quite yet never to be realized
consummation, you grew a long white beard,
you outlived the earth and all the stars and never
would you die as long as you kept measuring
the space between the cat’s eye and your eye.
The Craze
What could I say, a laborer, to the overseas geniuses?
That my father fought their war against the Japanese?
That the leisure class I served I aspired to, so I could join
the high G of the cello floating off, slowly vanishing
in a pianissimo fermata? Then nothing more,
silence and night? But this was California,
and soon the heat pump and water filter
would strain the water to such a blueness and temperature
that acid-washed LA would go swimming night and day,
the blue havens built by alambristas, union bricklayers, unskilled juvies
teaching me the Faustian accounting
of my employer, Bob “Just Call Me a Genius” Harrington:
Screw ’em out of this, screw ’em out of that ,
but sweep up your mess and you’ll get
away with murder . Sucking up the slurry of cement
and sand, the hose pulsed in the pit
of the parvenu, the ingenue, the Hollywood producers
and Van Nuys GM bosses whose assembly-line crews
riveted my beat-up Firebird’s body, Wolfman Jack’s XERB
taking another little piece of my heart now, baby ,
as I sprayed gunite on rebar ribs and the air compressor
pounded like the other Firebird: Stravinsky taking his temperature
in West Hollywood, Schoenberg watering his lawn in Brentwood,
Mann perched above the waves in Pacific Palisades
had also perused catalogs weighing concrete vs. vinyl
as blast caps detonated in holes the demmies drilled
and ash sifted down over my face and shoulders
to post-war twelve tone assaulting my ears.
But while I and my transistor radio worked ten hour days,
my father dreamt our own little South Seas grotto:
every weekend we rose to the promise of chlorination
as he and “us boys” dug trenches for our water lines,
hacked away the hillside to make our ice plant grow,
and rented the monster backhoe
digging out the pool pit to rim it with lava stone
against the mud. My father waved the baton
of his shovel to light the fuse to the chord
of dynamited stone: the cloud of our need
went up all over California
and rang in overtones all through me.
Detectives
The two detectives prowling at the edges of my dream are late—as usual. Already I’m being pushed toward the cliff edge, driven not by a gunman or a maniac, but by wanting to escape my betrayal of a friend—a serious betrayal, worth thirty pieces of silver. On all the talk shows, they talk about how I lie, about my need for attention and how no
your name in before the dust rag came along and wiped it out.
5/ MARBLES
“Elephant stomp” meant you stomped your marble
with your heel until it was buried level with the earth.
If you felt brave enough you played for “keepsies,”
if you doubted your concentration you called
“quitsies” and if you wanted to come close
or get away you called “giant steps.” Contingency
dictated “bombsies” when you stood up straight
and from the level of your eye looking right down
to your target you called out “bombs away.”
No one liked to lose a “clearie” or a “steelie”
and nothing teachers said about fair play
reduced the sting and shame and anger:
your bag’s size waxed and waned, adrenaline
pumped all recess, you were acquisitive,
sharp-eyed, pitting vision against gain and loss.
6/ SHOOTER
“Upsy elbows and straights” meant you had to keep
your arm straight and with your shooting hand
snug against the inside of your elbow you’d cock
your thumb, shooter gritty with dirt, and take aim
at your opponent’s marble. Calculations went on
that made time and space purely malleable,
sudden vectors of intention taking over
from the sun so you were seeing it as if
foreknown, though the sharp little click glass on glass
put to the test Zeno’s paradox: in the just
before not quite yet never to be realized
consummation, you grew a long white beard,
you outlived the earth and all the stars and never
would you die as long as you kept measuring
the space between the cat’s eye and your eye.
The Craze
What could I say, a laborer, to the overseas geniuses?
That my father fought their war against the Japanese?
That the leisure class I served I aspired to, so I could join
the high G of the cello floating off, slowly vanishing
in a pianissimo fermata? Then nothing more,
silence and night? But this was California,
and soon the heat pump and water filter
would strain the water to such a blueness and temperature
that acid-washed LA would go swimming night and day,
the blue havens built by alambristas, union bricklayers, unskilled juvies
teaching me the Faustian accounting
of my employer, Bob “Just Call Me a Genius” Harrington:
Screw ’em out of this, screw ’em out of that ,
but sweep up your mess and you’ll get
away with murder . Sucking up the slurry of cement
and sand, the hose pulsed in the pit
of the parvenu, the ingenue, the Hollywood producers
and Van Nuys GM bosses whose assembly-line crews
riveted my beat-up Firebird’s body, Wolfman Jack’s XERB
taking another little piece of my heart now, baby ,
as I sprayed gunite on rebar ribs and the air compressor
pounded like the other Firebird: Stravinsky taking his temperature
in West Hollywood, Schoenberg watering his lawn in Brentwood,
Mann perched above the waves in Pacific Palisades
had also perused catalogs weighing concrete vs. vinyl
as blast caps detonated in holes the demmies drilled
and ash sifted down over my face and shoulders
to post-war twelve tone assaulting my ears.
But while I and my transistor radio worked ten hour days,
my father dreamt our own little South Seas grotto:
every weekend we rose to the promise of chlorination
as he and “us boys” dug trenches for our water lines,
hacked away the hillside to make our ice plant grow,
and rented the monster backhoe
digging out the pool pit to rim it with lava stone
against the mud. My father waved the baton
of his shovel to light the fuse to the chord
of dynamited stone: the cloud of our need
went up all over California
and rang in overtones all through me.
Detectives
The two detectives prowling at the edges of my dream are late—as usual. Already I’m being pushed toward the cliff edge, driven not by a gunman or a maniac, but by wanting to escape my betrayal of a friend—a serious betrayal, worth thirty pieces of silver. On all the talk shows, they talk about how I lie, about my need for attention and how no
Similar Books
