School Street

A day of deep grayness and stillness in the leafless trees and a sky pouring out of itself a dull somber light, casting the entire hushed landscape of bark and cattails and scrap lumber into Trappist photographs.

A very interior kind of day, all the earth and sky drawn into a deepening meditation as if to say, “this, this, of 1000 years.”

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

Across the Brooklyn Bridge

Walking the crest this rich warm Manhattan midnight, 

the world's wavering mirage is seen—

Plates of moonlight froth on the East River below,

Greengold lights of the intrepid steel Gotham awaiting,

  rat tat tat

the pneumatic hammers of the red vest union Jack’s

Astride the moving link

Of headlights on the drone roadway beneath—

All of the temporal plane with its movable Orange traffic cones

Hazard flash of public work trucks

Lined on the rail

How far the Verrazano cable glints on the Jersey shore,

Roar of motorcycle unseen,

Flip-flop chip clop

padding the big city bridge

Autumn on Pasquale

The autumn wind has given the great volume of fat yellow madrone leaves one destiny.

With great insouciance they brightly careen and tumble down Pasquale Road

until the gust subsides and they fall limp & passive across the shaded pavement.

Then a crosswind arrives & it's up and away to new destinations....

Stovewood Scavenging

9.16

The Madrone groves at the far end of the Pasqule road, have become a refuge for me from the rancor and tumult of fan agitated overwrought world… here I am resolved into a sheltering canopy of green madrone leaves where scattered ribbons of sunlight fall, where a slight wind only deepens the stillness. My errand here is wholly transparent: one man, one truck, one pair of gloves tugging at the discarded red branches, retrieving them out of thickets of deerbrush and kitkitdizze– What the county crews left from road clearing. Scraps I come now to fetch for my winter's hearth. But just as much, and even more perhaps, I come to immerse myself in the deep serenity of these words, thankful such elemental labor still avails itself in this mechanized world.

The Hopkins Job

This is what fate has doled out for me: 

Snaking under Hopkins’ house amid batts of falling R-19 in the dog days of August

To braze the three-quarter-inch copper hot water tank

Pressure Relief tubing elbow

-as per county regulations- 
in order to discharge under the deck,

Keeping a wary eye on the snarling toothsome black lab

drooling at the far end of the crawlspace

Who has it in for me

Summer on Alta street

Lucia tells us eating pasta she heard the big jet roar last Sunday low over Grass Valley

“some people thought it was the end of the world”

Thea says pass the peas

Jason pulls the rim springs assembling the backyard trampoline

Slips out of his hand

Voooosh! strikes Megan across the neck

She breaks into tears

The neighbor lady’s drunk wearing a loose Budweiser tank top

Sunburned after a day on Englebright

“in the 50s,” says Avila, 

 “the neighbors used to have moving dinners course by course at     

 each house, then they end up here in the garage to dance”

Bats careen over the ping-pong table

Sun streams golden on burnished floors

At 7 PM in late July

Dead skunk on Ridge Road driving home

 in the late wide warm summer darkness 

my skull

My curved hollow skull is a conch shell

I listen for crows or dolphins

There seem to be oceans 

In every direction