HR blogwrite

spectrum

2010-06-15T01:34:00.000-07:00

I wish I could draw its beauty, waves of wild sweet peas in shadow, a cull de sac.

Champion, river boat, rope-a-dope, beehive, swirl stacks like spaghetti, round and round, purple flowers like baby ear lobes or female flags, genital and decorative.

The top half of the horizon glows neon with lime green dawn. Pure the bright potential. Complex the future, color hidden, planets invisible, mercury, spectrum of light displayed. Electric Miss America, the top of my head tingles, conduit, foxy Lady.

The crows make a distant dribble running at the mouth, like an early cock crowing half hearted, x rated. No bravado, no malice, just canyon airplay. Musical din of soft tweeting, rhythmic, cooing, like a grand jewelry box engine. The sky becomes powder blue.

the eye of Claret

2010-05-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

me on my birthday

2010-05-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

Carmel beach, quiet

2010-05-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

Carmel tree

2010-05-23T14:00:00.001-07:00

statue at Carmel mission

2010-05-23T13:58:00.000-07:00

tops of trees in Carmel

2010-05-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

beach and trees

2010-05-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

mission sign

2010-05-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

Carmel Mission

2010-05-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

beach bird

2010-05-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

early dawn Monterey

2010-05-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

dog and Carmel sea

2010-05-23T13:47:00.000-07:00

carmel hill

2010-05-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

woman sitting on bench, beach and trees

2010-05-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

carmel tree blue sky

2010-05-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

the office

2010-03-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

The office is a light mustard color. Beyond the front desk, all the wood doors open against each other, but no one can be seen. Office decoration is a stark afterthought. The air is stagnant. It hangs hotly, oppressive. We wait facing the secretary. Every thought, movement and word is under his scrutiny. On the back wall, there is a faded print from the 1980’s of Lilly pads. Maybe something the doctor got in college? The living orchid underneath, on the table however, is modernizing and expected. There are magazines about neurology and neurological diseases, celebrities with neurological diseases, and so on. There is a constant motorized buzz in the room.

And we must keep our voices very quiet and low, as though it were a hospice. So quiet. Makes us want to laugh. All these doors opening, people slipping discreetly behind them. No office music, just slight electrical buzzing.

gospel record

2010-03-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

The bath salts have made me clean. I am reborn, naked. A church fly buzzes in my ear faraway praising from a speaker somewhere. Must be a gospel record. I stand up and all the water falls. I am a great, heavy animal, bovine with paws and tail. My fur breasts drag heavily, swinging with the weight of the water.
I stand by the bathroom counter and the audio fly persists. I can’t place it. Must be a gospel record.

over

2010-03-06T15:46:00.001-08:00

winter is over.

goldness

2009-12-08T12:56:00.000-08:00

Gold filter scene heaven perfection flame burning bush torch of sun held behind dying branches rays sift through gold all I see symphony of gold little delicate notes of light amongst the wood lattice works flame of brilliance left over season living gold oak leaves full on the branches illuminated candelabra behind the empty wood the dead winter skeleton finger parts of the tree a full head of youthful hair on fire screaming next to the dying the aged the finished the empty together they sparkle glow fit interlock the sun pours through the sleeping plum silver trees lighting all the yellow leaves barely attached they too are golden lit by the sun the empty branches are a mass of tangles a whir and light filters through them the top of the tall pine is drenched in morning sun cold air juxtaposes and three tiny clouds hang in the sky above shaped like crescent moons and triangles.

breath

2009-12-06T14:14:00.001-08:00

The divine breathes you. You do not breathe. This is where breath comes from, the living god, always active, always the feeding source that gives, the place of plenty. You are like a human bellows blown into, sown, kept alive by the living nourisher, the direct breast milk artery, the engine source, the place where life springs from, within, without, all around, the activator. The great mother heart pulses you, reaches into your vision, your hearing, your touch, your pain and pleasure. What you are is only that, never separate.

the dead of winter

2009-12-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

The winter morning reflects uniform disquiet, uniform death. The dark of dreams project outward in every qualitative measure, cold, frozen air without life, bare, stripped fear mind throughout the winter scene, in the uniform molecules, dead, grey, dream stagnant, hazy. The branches are naked except for a few gold leaves, hopeless, forgotten remnants. The sky opens above. It is otherworldly, unnatural, as if something horribly wrong, apocalyptic. The clouds are aglow like radioactive neon. No one is around, no birds, no animals. This is the dead of winter.

winter light

2009-12-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

Crisp, pseudo-summer seaweed, fog rolls in from the coast, chill in the evening air. The forest runs into a white sand beach over the hill. The sand is deep and soft, good for bare feet, smell of salt, ocean.

Fertile, invisible packets of life explode with all the essential elements. The crows call for justice in the tall pines. The black birds band together like a network of roving reporters, always announcing, brutish. The oaks and baby redwoods glisten a glorious, supernatural light, like a chiaroscuro agriculture portrait, with paint still wet. Each leaf on the oak shines sensually, reflecting a thousand individualized suns, full of high sheen and gloss.

Tiny tweeting birds fill up a chorus of background sound like an aural net, a first layer surrounding, an audible parenthesis, a light context, a tightly woven fabric of song.

wood grain alphabet

2009-11-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Stick:
First branch is first stanza
cut off long ago by storms,
been on the ground for a while.

Second branch nub is second stanza,
like an amputee, short.
At first there is no blood,
then it comes.

shiva tree

2009-11-11T10:10:00.001-08:00

The plum tree is
a Shiva sheet of music,
expressing arms
in all directions.

The leaves are golden
fall fire burnt
sparse and winter fresh,
tiny notes I play
just by seeing.

born and unborn

2009-11-10T13:15:00.000-08:00

There she is, pre-nascent,
nature unborn.

Glossy lips
and fawn legs,

into the dawn
she rises.

the beat down

2009-10-26T14:40:00.001-07:00

The preacher said humiliation,
or, as the kids like to say
the beat down.

Take by force
all those
unwanted tendencies.

And yet,
it is the just
who are tested.

vital

2009-10-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

A flock of black birds passes overhead, pill bottles rattle. Pain shoots up nerve toward brain. Waves crash far away, fog horn and sea lion, the smell of salt and seaweed.

Pink glow cloud cover dawn, I feel poetry again. The whole sky, an apocalyptic blaze, pink and bursting, a fire show orb display, something you could twirl in your hands, circus-style. More hot at the core where the silhouette shadow oaks puppet negative space their way into existence like lattice networks, tiny million leaf moth x-rays and long, arthritic knees and fingers. The canyon rises with the dawn, as birds awake in stereo. All of the morning is vital, dangerous, sensual, real, alchemical.

like mercury

2009-10-17T15:29:00.000-07:00

Gradations of light, pathways to the heart, mini swaths shed bright patches of dawn sun over the garden, over the oak and pine, a metallic golden honey in broken bits, like mercury. Above, the clouds are opal, pearl, milky floating white stuff. In the canyon, the pines are supernatural, frozen in a kind of noble slow motion, inviting, mysterious, home.

message

2009-10-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Fragment code message

Paramour to the present:

Cut out your heart,
and a flash light comes.

alive in the branches

2009-10-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Full moon clouds
light and dark
roam fall
below.

I spread like
wild fast ice
sensate, aware.

Tree trunk, bra strap
alive in the branches.

pretty words

2009-09-19T11:43:00.000-07:00

pretty words,
your father would say,
seep stain rise

like pin prick blood stains
up through the top sheet
of motels.

new slide show shots

2009-08-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

It's half country and half city

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hallieruth/show/

Monterey paintings

2009-06-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

Good Morning

Good morning Self, open mouth self; out come the molecules of morning, round, voluptuous. Out come the sounds of a new tongue, lips teeth tonsil parade vowel verb rainbow noun. Dove wing beats like horse hoof, a gentle canter. Blue jays screech, cackle and laugh at each other in rapid fire greetings. We all unfold aurally together. I unwrap my natural heart beat discovered and the doves coo-flutter like thin, thread pulse, something warm you might find in the forest and press against; a tree, a wrist. Tiny assorted birds wake with the dawn and their sound is like Christmas bells, their sound makes the smell of tea. They percolate. The volcano mouth of morning erupts continuously now as a gigantic plane flies invisibly above, loud, like tectonics, shifting layers of sky planet, evolution in motion. And the dainty hummingbird concurs, fluttering. The yellow brick road; teeth stained by coffee and cigarettes, leads to the wizard who lives inside.

In Transit

Sit on the sidewalk long enough and you get a feel of the place, a rhythm of the neighborhood, the pulse, the timing, who comes and goes, what happens. For instance, there's a guy wearing long shorts that come past his knees, who paces back and forth outside the smoke shop. Only you wouldn't recognize it as pacing at first. When he walks in one direction, he gets up with a jolt, like he's running for the phone, urgent, in a hurry, towards something invisible. He has a busy, methamphetamine feel. He walks towards nothing with direction. He wears a short sleeved, cotton plaid shirt and a baseball cap. I can see several necklaces under his shirt. Eventually, he walks the opposite way, past me, back up the street. Then he sits down in a hurry next to me, like he's late and I've been waiting for him. He's too close and he says nothing. He just vibrates excess energy. I put my cigarette out and get up. If there's anywhere a person can smoke, it's in front of this place. The meth pacer smokes too.

Across the street is the bus stop, the Monterey Transit Center. Older men, reddened by the sun, slump on the benches in dirty t-shirts and wait for the bus. We stare over traffic at each other. There's a boy of about twenty dressed in black with long hair. He listens to music on headphones. We acknowledge each other over the street in silence. We have an understanding of style and ego fixation, a familiarity. I laugh without laughing. The bus for disabled people stops and he gets on. An elderly blind woman gets off the small bus. She walks hunched with a cane, her eyes are glazed white. There is a stop and go rhythm to the block. I make my move from the smoke shop to the transit center.

The Monterey Transit Center attracts the disabled, the poor, the insane, the homeless, the drunk, the tourists, the working class and the teenage parents. It is like a concentrated Disneyworld of strangeness, a carnival of odd behavior, out of step with the rest of the ritzy town. You see jerky physical gestures, weird clothing, people frozen in time, in old reeking tweeds and Members Only jackets. It's like the gathering of guilty downtown Monterey's id, without the sex.

I get on bus 5 to Carmel and notice the same characters, universal bus characters, occupy every bus ride. There is a tense little man decorated by buttons of political affiliation, who is clearly on edge about politics. His physical size is compacted, condensed, by his tension, his uneasiness. He speaks fervently to another man across the aisle, a man of fifty-something, wearing dark sunglasses and a European style, gray wool suit with a matching vest. The listener looks Italian. He never speaks a word. The tense American man tells the silent Italian about John McCain and about McCain's choice for running mate. He sounds very worried. He explains the current state of affairs politically. He updates the Italian. He wrings his hands. The Italian makes no movement, no gesture, gives nothing in the way of response.

Stream

Crooked elbow turning point bent corner off ramp roadway forest flow tall trees on her knees significant heard not authored turn pike symbol symptom the gas flame makes a constant hiss a constant breathing sound sometimes the wind will flicker it minstrel crown reference nostalgia rain systematic continue conflagration separate dilate fortune the beauty that sleeps attune saint Paul country music on the car radio listen to the one that matters clean the debris that blocks the message follow through elephants clamor light dances across the material world like an anthropomorphic entity over the water crowds of people robust round right receive bird song a whistle through the memory of time through dimensions that unify past present and future car engine diesel rumble like gravel in the lungs like automobile pneumonia reminder of civilization Nicola Tesla dharma bell remember that coughing unwell society be grateful for their support be loving be sharing but all this do gooding is done not from the outside-in rather from the inside-out and realize this no separation first then all the acts will be natural now each sound has a direct intent into the one cause receive the intent the support of the intent the one voice only one thing on its mind; awaken, awaken, awaken, awaken.

World

Haggard, ragged, suspended, prehistoric, wooly mammoth moss and Oak. Pines hang thick like primordial swamp fauna in the early morning dawn, barely emerging as separate shapes from the low lying fog that surrounds. As it recedes the world is revealed. Homes, rooftops, potted plants, statues of Buddha, delineations and markings. The personal, the claimed, the manifestations, the neighbors, the belongings of yards, the garden particulars, specifics, the bird feeders, the guest homes and back porches, the fountains, tables and patios, the barbecues and parked cars, the endless variations. All that the void of night has drowned comes rising to the surface again

Early Morning December

Undefined blurry clouds look like brain. I hear a sprinkler start. It sprays fine mist. The sound is visual. To the east, gold striations of thin light line the horizon behind the dark silhouettes of trees. The rising sun sheds a diffuse, filtered forest fire glow, almost eerie. The canyon is still. Above, the congested, early morning sky is ever so slightly pink. Not a bird in sight.

sensual trill

Sensual is the trill of spring in nature’s throat.

Sunrise

The moon is a hazy teardrop light, a swayback stone, a
mystery, a crescent shaped signal flare partially obscured by fog. It doubles
upon reflection, the half made whole, a yellow gold outpost that moves the
tide, hanging in the early dawn sky like a muted jewel, curved and hidden. The
dark blue early morning sky is royal, fertile, ominous, like a backdrop
painting, pregnant, rich. Half way between night and day, the silhouettes begin
to take shape against the shifting sky. The spring flowers below wait for the
March sun to shine, they wait to open and bloom.

.. ..

**

.. ..

Clouds like white marble origami, cranes, dragon tails in
rapid motion, blurred, beaten egg whites, etches of lost sentences, dance,
discovery, swirled motion, reveal the roundness of our globe, white swans,
strings, wisps of white fire, flame made of air, made of cloud parts, rising up
beyond. Sunrise is here.

Pleading Yes

Tires over the bumpy road sound like coughing.

Sea gulls cry.

The tone pleads yes, it reaches for its own mournful resolve.

The answer and the question.

Rush Hour

Over the hill in the distance, fog like marshmallow, pure and white, covers the pine horizon. The far away trees look like tiny gray skeletons.

In the canyon, there are sounds of jungle life all around. Early in the morning, at sunrise, there is a rush hour of bird conversation. The birds come out with the day, waking, alerting, announcing, conversing, singing. Some provide the high, twinkle notes, while others donate the low guttural squawks, and there are alto and staccato notes. It is a symphony of early morning chaos, the symphony of sunrise bird sounds.

There is an alarm clock crow who calls out to nothing in particular. He sits on the middle branch of the pine tree and opens his beak. He lets out four consecutive squawks- demands, announcements, invitations, mantras, alerts, warnings. He does it with force and aggression.

The doves, unseen, are somewhere in the background. They coo a muted, gentle, pulse, like a heartbeat.

Photosensitive

Bright, cloudless blue sky, unilateral in color and experience, shining like a scathing, over polished jewel, painfully garish, impossibly eternal, a big naked open sky that stings like raw skin, a burning blue desert, nihilistic in its monotony of singular landscape. Dooming, despairing, like driving through days and days of cornfields or endless flatlands as far as the eye can see, like nothing but pure deep ocean, where the dead endless view sinks down and the dread begins to rise.

Variety Show

Powder blue sky, air wet with summer, smell of soil, morning goes on forever. Sunday is slow, languorous, cat sprawled on the outside couch, each hour like a fairy tale.

Last night, alone in the backyard, I smoked six cigarettes and watched the full moon rise.

Ghost birds echo throughout the canyon. They sound like apes and chickens. The doves are amplified on invisible microphones, as they call the devoted out to pray. Little bug birds make tweet audience noises in comparison. The crows join in and a chorus rises in the key of G. Hummingbirds have hot little heartbeats that flutter in the chest. They take away the breath and buzz loudly.

Plane Ride

At the Monterey Airport, a busy, short woman with a loud voice and two blond children gets out of a white, GMC Yukon. She pays the valet to park her car. Before they pull up, there is only silence. There is only me smoking and the half-dead baggage attendant who slumps next to the sliding glass doors. He looks like an old sheriff on a slow day in a one-horse town, a one terminal town. But then the GMC pulls up and her voice pierces the air like a firecracker. While she unloads her bag, her two children wander into the street, towards the terminal. Meanwhile, she spills her guts to the valet. Because why not? A valet is not unlike a bartender really. So she says loudly into the crisp, forest, morning air that, my life truly began when I got my divorce. And she says that, divorce is not easy. Her voice can be heard for hundreds of feet. I tell people that it would have been a lot easier if he had just died. The valet listens politely, takes the keys and drives away. The woman, who is also a blond, puts on her sunglasses and takes her two children inside.

This is a very quiet, very small airport. I believe somewhere on the publicity posters, it uses the word relaxing to describe the airport. There are maybe six or seven airlines represented behind the counter, but only one woman working it. She is extremely casual with me. She basically says nothing and hands me the ticket. I offer her my id, she doesn't ask for it. She assumes I know the drill. I get little information.

At the gate, the passengers wait in their quarters. They are mostly in their late fifties, businessmen, ladies together, grandparents. Not many kids. They all look gray. They lack luster. The worker woman who gave me the ticket is now the woman behind the boarding counter. She wears an unusually high ponytail that bounces up and down on her head when she walks around. Her hair is brown and long. She is about fifty and she wears large, plastic reading glasses. Her voice is coarse. She seems like a drinker, a smoker. Maybe she likes to hang with the guys after work. She's trying to get one of her airport co-workers on a flight, stand by style. His name is Don. Don talks on his cell phone the entire time. He tells the person on the other end that he's going to, try and make it. His skin is tan and rough. He's tall and his teeth are yellow. He ends up on the flight, on the little propeller plane flight to San Francisco, in the seat next to me. There isn't much room. He spreads his long, blue polyester legs wide open, so that I have to make a point of moving my legs away. I can feel him make silent, sexual suggestions. He vibrates testosterone. I turn to the window and close my eyes.

Sunday Morning

Clouds from an air pressured can topple and stack on each other to the south. They are thinning out, melting. The northern sky is polka dot blue and white, hopeful, bright, full of glowing light. I stand on this planet Earth, looking up, and here is the strange, beautiful atmosphere. Crows caw inelegant, incessantly. Little tweet birds make delicate wispy noises like jewelry. The morning sun lights the whole southern hill, full of oaks and pines, telephone poles and little, exposed bits of covered home fronts. The sky is Easter egg blue.

The doves repeat themselves over and over. All the birds fall into a repetitive rhythm that drones melodically, rolls like a sonic wheel, with high beats, low beats, coo sounds coming in at just the right time, trill accents, monkey like screeches, percussive instruments, whistles, caws. It’s a symphony that moves along, that works in unity effortlessly, every high hat, every flute, every keyboard. Sometimes a car will start or pass by and it only adds to the great band. The birds far outnumber the humans. The animals display the synchronicity of god, the euphony, the effortless, perfect rhythm of nature.

Surreal

The murky noon sky pours up towards an invisible drain, upside down. All the senses are mixed together. There is a buzzing, stinging sound to the gray as it radiates and hovers. The bright overcast creates afterimage dark auras around the trees and multiple parallel lines like window blinds made of faint light. These strange images project upon the white glare sky screen, a backdrop that plays tricks with the eyes. The mood is purgatory, transition.

Far away the city makes the sound of smoke, a rumbling haze in the air. Cars accelerate and pass in the distance. Large and low, they rumble and crack like icebergs breaking, moving cold and deep. There is a constant steady hum of lonely, industrial surrealism. Traffic makes the sound of moaning factories.

The mid summer canyon flora and fauna grows fat and lush, tall, expanding. Alive, rogue branches reach toward the house, overgrown, always suggesting their subtle authority over the man made. Summer is full of bird tweets and frantic dog barks in all directions. Bugs fly into the bedroom. The birds dive madly from the trees. The season threatens to keep breeding and growing endlessly, overtaking.

Fog

Fog is the nighttime of daytime, silver, encasing, mystical, alive, soothing to the hot brain, floating, a standstill, a stopping of the world outside. Tall trees rise up like swamp high rises several stories high, mythic. Everything is possible in suspended reality, slow, without the usual determining factors. Sudden neutrality imposed, a geography outside time, blue light haze home. Summer in San Francisco, the coldest winter he ever spent, light bits of water mist on the face, all background, all context recedes, disappears and the immediate blooms, comes to life.

Banquet

It’s dawn in Monterey. I hear a lone dove elongating its syllables, blurring
its coo lines. Sounds like the sea, sounds like bleeding notes, like a seashell
echo. And here comes the timber of tinker bell birds everywhere, tiny treble scatterings
as the dove becomes a loon. Trucks in the far distance clang and back up. Crows
are impolite, guttural, jarring. They flap their heavy, black ink wings and the
air makes a menacing sound. They bark across the canyon at each other like
angry women. The layers of the morning never cease, never stagnate. Swaths of
ruby-gold light cover the oaks. All the trees are fat now and bursting with
shades of green. Spring is almost obscene, like a gorgeous banquet, the
shameless fertility, overflowing, so lush.

My Email

2009-03-26T16:14:00.001-07:00

hallieruth@gmail.com

My MySpace Page

2009-03-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/hrthewriter

short pieces and poems

2008-12-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

Short Pieces and Poems
by H.R. McGonigal

hallieruth@gmail.com

Common Flow

As we drive down Alberta, all the summer colors are out. All the stick figures in action, the standing human markers pose like pieces on the giant city board. They do all the things that citizens should, active summer citizens of the city, bright bees in the hive. In their loud life colors, so hot in the sun, teeming, brimming with natural brilliance, an effulgence of the marketplace, their sweat glistens, with brown skin, their babies in strollers, clothes of orange and red. Their actions are just the same as player pieces all across the world today, jogging, shopping, walking. From far away, they look like tiny moving parts devoid of personality, devoid of history, devoid of past, devoid of individuality, empty except for the common flow of life that fills them, animated by a single force. Only when they get close up does the illusion of separation take shape. They are bright today and toy-like, in the game of Candyland and lollipops, colorful like packaged, edible treats, living dolls, organisms of life in various stances of action like cells about their duty of multiplying.

On the corner of Martin Luther King and Alberta, a thin, thirty-something African American woman in neon life walks out of a beauty supply store wearing black pants and a black T-shirt. On her shirt is a rough, garish drawing of a woman who looks exactly like her. Her hair is fancy and long and she wears sunglasses. She comes in strange costume. She leaves the store, her hair hanging in her face, and she walks out on to the street. An African American man who is obviously mentally ill, about forty-five years old, stands so upright, so erect, he might bend over backwards. He stares out above traffic. He is completely stopped in the moment. While all the rat race revolves around him. All the sweating colors whir by. He stands on the edge of the sidewalk. His mouth is open. His tan, polyester pants are pulled high up by his chest. He wears a plaid, cotton, brown and white shirt tucked into the pants. He is intently watching whatever the voices in his head are telling him to. Something no one else sees. Something fixed in space. The moment is frozen still. I share it with him for the second that I drive by. Life is hot and bright. We scramble around like insects with the big, burning daylight switched on.

In the evening, driving by the downtown rose skyline, the city smolders from a distance. All the inhabitants of Earth today swarm happily, unhappily, like ants, electrons, bouncing off each other, all the same thing of life firing, racing around, lightening flashing, thunder crashing, full of heat, sound and fury.

**

Two Sentences

Their words come to me from afar,
long and sinuous
like a bullet train of sound,
beating
my breast
like a drum.

The babbling brook mind takes a hit at the back of the bus, sparking light in the dark, American night, making masterpiece with madness.

**

Freeform

You remind me of the freedom I had while riding the Greyhound while listening to Ryan Adams I was free in that particular context I was free I was free I was alone and I felt good I felt all the possibilities like now I feel all the possibilities I feel the words coming off me I feel the words falling off me pouring off me I felt like I was pretty like a pretty girl like being pretty mattered for a while and I was free and beautiful and right out my window was words and glory and bus rides and America and stops where greasy men in greasy jeans stared my way and Missing signs and pinball machines and the great American landscape of possibility and words and words and words and all that joy on the way to somewhere that's what you remind me of.

**

**

Post Office Freeform

Out in the town today I observe life as we know it as we collectively know it as we cumulatively know it I focus on the men in the post office in their freshly clean laundered shirts and corduroy pants fresh like only beach town people know it fresh like salt water and sun and a short haircut and a tan fresh like weekends at the beach all your life all your small town life and the smell of the clothes and the laundry you wear is fresh fresh fresh but the woman behind me in line is a stain is a scourge is a blight is not one of you she keeps barging through the silence with her terror she talks post office trivialities a Quasimodo short and hunched like a witch like a post office witch she mumbles to herself, Oh that's a mighty big package and Oh that's a mighty excited little youngster and she stands so close she is my Quasimodo shadow so close that her purse swings and hits and caresses the back of my knee and I wonder what odd spirit is this amongst all this white freshness all this superb freshness and the song on the radio says, What a wonderful world this would be, what a glorious time to be free and that makes a lot of sense to me those words sure do that makes a lot of sense to me.

**

**

Each Noise

Each noise opens a vein to the vastness.
I am no longer separate amongst the sound.

**

Note to Self

We are gods
of water and light-

****

In the human bee hive called city, there is a port for air travel. ..…

Like something out of Blade Runner, the Portland airport is cold, an android creation, the metal structure of the roof, exposed. I step out of P's tiny, blue car and into some militaristic zone of the future, only the future is now.

The entrance to the airport looks like the skeletal remains of a spaceship. The top of the towering glass structure is held upright by a hundred, giant, silver beams, like oversized toothpicks, that crisscross and shape into triangles, squares and rectangles. The design offers a dizzying, modern architectural stability, balancing the fortification and dependability of classic geometry with the weightlessness and wonder of flight.

The sloping roof mimics a giant, metal hatch left wide open, frozen in time, huge and other worldly, like the carcass of a dinosaur or whale. Inside, the commuting humans crawl like maggots throughout the corpse.

The passenger door to P's car is busted, which means he has to get out and open the door for me. He does. I get out. We hug goodbye.

I sit now at gate C7 with my goods and writing journal. The sound of foreign languages fills the air. The sky is bright with a white winter haze. Vague, loose clouds connect to one another, making a giant, celestial ice berg of light shaded in spots by gradations of dark lining.

This is the sky I will fly into.

**

In the Land of DIY

In the land of DIY, scenes explode like weed blossoms prospering underneath the rain, the gloom, the indoor culture, the diversity, the independence, the autonomy, the avant garde, the socially aware, the barren, the subversive, the poor, the blocks of small trailer homes, the countless blocks where the gray sky hangs still like purgatory, like depression itself, while phone lines curve and dangle, mocking the day with their ugliness, telephone poles lean off center, bending into the little roads that cut through the prefabricated neighborhoods, liquor stores are never far off-equipped with pay phones, bars on the window, and the smell of over sized French fries in little white bags and chicken strips. Cigarette advertisements abound. Trash collects around the bus stops. Trimet rolls onward miserably, each bus ride experience like a Sartre play. We sit behind disgruntled drivers, rotating Charons who navigate the rivers of urban hell.

**

Laundry Hustle

Yesterday was hot and hard to carry:
Very few trees on the Northeast side of town, little shade. The sun beats down unimpeded. We load up the bikes with laundry bags and make our way down the necessary twelve blocks to the Laundromat. Put the clothes, soap and quarters in. No problem. It's muggy in there. No windows, only the one front door. We go two blocks up, while the clothes wash, to get a couple of iced coffees. I see spots and get the beginning of another migraine. We go back to the Laundromat. That's where we get the unexpected hustle.

Stage two: Clothes go into dryers. More waiting. I walk outside to sit down in the shade. There is a lot full of empty parking spaces and I sit on one of the dividers, migraine in full force. There happens to be a guy, African-American, late twenties, white t-shirt, drinking an orange soda, sitting on the divider to my left. I keep to myself and pay no attention. We are quietly friendly. J. comes out, sits next to me and rolls a cigarette. The orange soda guy gets up and walks over to the trash can, dumps his soda and sits on the parking divider next to J.

"How are you doin' today?....I'm not doin' laundry. I'm just hanging out." He mumbles low, almost incoherently, speaking furtively to J.
Then, for a minute or so, he prefaces his next question with an inordinate amount of "uhs" and "so" and "well" and "see, what I'm sayin'."
He asks so sheepishly, so secretively, barely pronouncing his words, that I think he must be high and wants to know where to get more high. But he uses code words I don't recognize.
He says, "Uh, you know.... uh, where a person could maybe,... you know, uh, ...I'm talkin' about, getting a hold of, ...you know, some, ....fat girls?"
J says cluelessly, "Well, good luck with that."
Hustle guy says, "You know, Teenage Dreams?...See, I've got some of these...and they look real good, and….uh..."
Hustle guy pulls out a couple of very faded twenties.
J. says, "You mean Counterfeit?"
Hustle guy says, "sssssssshhhhhh!"
J. says, "Oh man, I wish I could help you. I don't know anything about that. I just know at Walgreens they've been checking all the big bills to make sure they're legit."
Hustle guy says he's got fives and twenties. He shows us.

J. is good with crazy people, people on the edge of psychotic breaks. It's what he does for a living.
Hustle guy goes inside and checks all the machines for coins and talks to himself while doing this. He shows J. the fake bills again, tries to exchange them for real bills. He checks the trash and pulls out a green bra and matching panties. He is excited by this find saying, "Oh man, these are brand new, with the tags and everything." But he ends up leaving them. Being on the hustle is hard. He had a sensitive face, his brain tweaked high, in a desperate state. Later, we would use that bra to strap the laundry bag to the bike when the bungee cord snapped in two. Bras, it turns out, are pretty strong.

**

Trip

At the San Jose airport, my mother has left me. I stand in front of the terminal and wave goodbye. The signs morbidly read "terminal departure." My belongings are cramped and packed tightly to maximum capacity.

As we made our way up from Monterey to San Jose, my eye naturally moved to the brown California hills, the occasional dilapidated farm house, the tin shed by the side of the highway, the collapsing wood water tower, the ruined, graffitied buildings that stand sideways, crooked, falling, out of nowhere, painted in muted greens and blues, the wood speckled and chipped. They stand like found art, countryside monuments, dinosaurs, American ruins, frozen in their decay, indicating the forgotten, like rotten teeth, they are part of the natural scenery.

In smog filled, apocalyptic San Jose, there are cranes and dump trucks and garbage trucks which move in a graceful monster dance. The small bits of color, of red and blue, shine through the otherwise grey canvas of the industrial machines. Dirty like the sky.

In Portland, land of the rugged- As the plane is lowering through the clouds, descending, landing, a migraine comes on. I can't get to my meds as they are in the overhead compartment. I have to wait until we land and all the eager, hurried passengers file out.

In the airport, children scream and run around. They are messy, without order, their overweight, slow-moving mothers do not seem to care that they run wild. It's as though they've given up.In the magazine shop, there is a tiny, weathered, sixty-something Filipina woman working behind the counter. Her head sits behind rows of gum and gossip magazines. As I walk in, she says, "Hi honey." She is easy, funny. I buy a Vanity Fair with Demi Moore on the cover who is now more famous for being older, hot and married to someone young. The easy, funny, tiny lady says Demi Moore, "must be a vegetarian," cause she looks so good. She must "exercise a lot." I add. She nods and repeats this in affirmation. Yes, "she must exercise a lot." She is entirely without tension, she is fluid. She launches right into her open observations about Demi Moore without a hint of self consciousness or restraint. Her face is worn and her features are pressed close together like a primitive doll. Her skin is a dark, dark brown with a hint of gray. She is comforting. She lets me go with my .50 change, with a lingering air of uncertainty and a hint at potential future inquiry about Demi Moore and just exactly how she does it, how she looks so good, like our conversation could pick up at a later time. Oh, the marvel, the wonder, the shared American culture of it all. It's as real an interaction as it gets, without beginning or end, just the middle section, just the jump on in and then the jump on out.

I find a cubby hole with a desk to write while I wait out the migraine and for my flight to Medford. There is a football player in the cubby hole opposite me who keeps standing up and talking loudly about good players and points.I wait two and a half grueling hours in the Portland airport, in the rinkiest, dinkiest section of the airport where the gates are small and the seats few, where you must travel down long hospital like corridors with low ceilings, passing by tiny, hopeless rooms like torture chambers where open mouthed, miserable, comatose people wait to board propeller airplanes to the middle of Washington and Oregon state, to small rural airports. It is the mental ward terminal for the small town small plane people, small gates with overly colloquial airline employee counter women who chew gum and make jokes with the sad, sagging, families, farmers, grandparents and the like who fester underneath their wait.

On the plane to Medford, I sit in the last back aisle seat. It is the last seat at the back corner of a small prop passenger plane. I am in seat 9A and they don't go any higher. They give us complimentary beer, Northwest style, in a small, plastic cup with a bag of chips. I watch snow covered mountain tops and drink that beer down. I close my eyes and welcome everything in.

**

Resurrection

Resurrection-

once ruined,
now readied
for the real.

**

City Carnival

Here we are amongst the desert dregs the landscapes of barbed wire and boulders of dry hard land of men in perpetual combat of rainy streets covered in electric lines we make poetry out of poverty here amongst the rags and ruin in the unfeeling streets in the hopelessness of repetition and daily ritual here in our scenes of city carnival a room by room orgy of ego and display in our flowering puffing peacock cruelty a saint vitas dance of artistic transcendence amongst the shabbiness the tattered the tattooed the sick the mutant varieties we float down gravel alleys past saloons strip joints and liquor stores in gothic wild west towns this so called Portland.

**

We Two Are One

The city is alive, an animal with roads for veins and traffic for rushing blood that runs through the night, runs through the hillside, its lights like a giant snake, like one long twinkling machine, pulsating against the west hills. I pour myself into those lights. I feel my mind empty into those roads, those flickering, tiny lights. The thoughts just bleed out into that living mechanism, the animal of civilization upon the hill, beating there silently, that thing of human life and electricity, coursing as one giant, stellar mass. I feel the guts of me light up. I feel the hugeness and the beauty, the horror and the shock at the size of this moving, breathing light show of city. And my veins are its veins, my thoughts are its thoughts, my heart, its heart, we two are one.

**

Alive With Sound

I hear the rhythm of a cement truck, the rhythm of a garbage truck, off in the distance. Rain pours down around me. Lights streak the grey sky, my field of vision, my limited perspective, like a comet piercing reality with a long, silver line, from left to right, indicating, announcing in my own special, neurological language that a migraine is coming. I get ready.
The truck rhythm is like womb noise. It is the sound of artificial womb noise. While traffic lays on the horns, high and low, near and far, in perfect symphonic balance. The womb noise churns, round and round, providing percussion. The rain, light and delicate as it hits the leaves, grass, garden and pathway. It crinkles.
The cement truck is the sound of outer space, in utero, deep sleep, the sound of a life support system. Car wheels on the wet road sizzle. The morning is alive with sound.

**

You Live In Me Like A Dream

You live in me like a dream, the void, the darkness, the deep. Focused, poised, pressured, and hunted, on haunches, tight. I release this when I breathe. My lips move you out. You circulate. You dwell in me like a pack of wild animals, rustling in the nighttime brush. I hear you but I see only the dark. In the warm water I disintegrate into you, into bits of euphoric ruin that rain down weightlessly in sheets of building crescendo like pipe bombs, like head rushes, evaporation, like running, over flowing, bleeding out. I melt. I sink. I open up my veins and turn into wings.

**

Cool Magic

It is a
cool magic,
channeling-

picking points
from
the heart beat
of what lies
beneath.

**

Train Ride

.
We have here the sound of America killing time. Against the rhythm of train wheels on track, Click-a-clack, click-a-clack, click-a-clack, there are game players, gum smackers, cell phone talkers, ....click-a-clack... page turners, seat adjusters, music listeners, movie watchers, idle chatters. Their voices tangle in the air and turn to static above me. Their activity veils the waiting.

I take the train from Portland, Oregon to Salinas, California and the trip takes twenty two hours. We are getting ready to leave when the conductor in the Portland Amtrak station announces,

"Grandma Myra, your family is looking for you."

Silence....

"I've got worried family members down here on the platform.....Grandma Myra?....Grandma Myra?"

*

I smoke my last, treasured cigarette on the platform when another female smoker migrates towards me. Her name is Cathy and she lives in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Her hair is the first thing I notice, loose, wild, free, messy, like post-coitus hair, like she just got up from picnic sex. Her curls have turned to frizz. Her perm is burned out. She has a rough and easy way about her, an open feel, yet potentially combustive. When she speaks, her eyes widen slightly in excitement, like a child's. She tells me it will be five hours until the next smoke break. Her tone is conspiratorial. She says,

"Last time I took the train, I smoked one in the bathroom and the whole train could smell my cigarettes!"

She laughs heartily at this recollection. There is no talk about getting in trouble.

*

We roll slowly out of Portland under metal bridges, by water, across from downtown. Everything sparkles in the sun. Freeway overpasses criss-cross above, creating more bridges. The train snakes below unnoticed.

We drive past Oregon City, with so much pastoral green, with red barns and rusted roofs. I hear the conversations of Oregonians around me. Their quiet, secretive voices come from deep within, muffled, like the sound of hibernating animals. These closet outlaws, they speak with a brainy shyness. They talk about the history of the land and their flat voices sound not fully incarnated, half way here, painfully exposed, tender, stuck somewhere in the throat, the birth canal, warbled and muted, reserved and predictable. They like community radio stations and farmers markets. They like the independent, the Do It Yourself, bulk food, bicycles, assisted suicide, punk rock, beards and books.

I see hawks, noble, graceful and tiny from far away, soaring high above the empty forest. They circle and do their business of nature. We pass a billboard for New Life Church that reads,

"A place to Belong, a place to Believe, a place to Become."

*

In Salem, there is poverty. Clothes lines on the tops of buildings, up against their back walls, behind buildings, and wherever there is any room. There are suburban backyard tents, women lounging on towels on lawns while reading, churches, factories, tennis courts, the overdressed homeless on benches by the tracks, all the elements of small town life. The train passes office buildings and I can see directly into the second floor. I see the family photographs and flowers on empty office desks.

The pedestrians notice us in wonder, like we're just the technological marvel they've been waiting for. Some of them run alongside the train and look up.

We pass a Zinc Plating and Galvanizing business. Rusty car graveyards, doors leading to windowless warehouses, stacks of curled rubber hoses in all colors, unusable tractor parts, piles of neatly stacked wood blocks. Then Salem gives way to green again, rivers, fields, tall, young Eucalyptus trees by the river. We pass a massive car junkyard in the middle of nowhere full of wondrous greens, reds, blues, trashed, smashed, rusted junk cars, a heaven of dilapidated color and accidental art.

*

Into oblivion we ride. The minutes blur. Dream state dominates. Look at America out the window. There she is: long, lean and plenty – from lush green to factory silver.

*

Mother's Milk:

The woman behind me is drunk. She speaks very loudly and announces at 5pm that Scott, the train lounge car attendant, has "cut her off." Things are pretty bad when you're getting cut off in the afternoon by the Amtrak train lounge car attendant. She attempts to tend to her two young children, a boy and a girl both under a year old, who are beginning to cry. A man walks by my seat wearing a t-shirt that says, "Got Jesus?"

The drunk mother gets up and I can see more of her now. She is freckled, obese, her brown eyes are crazed, frantic. Her shoulder length, brown hair is in a ponytail. Her shirt says, "Ask Me If I Care."

*

The female announcer voice tells us about dinner reservations repeatedly. There is a series of announcements to test the system, to see if they can hear each other, from one car to the next. "Can you hear me now?" "Yes, we can hear you now." "What about now? Can you hear me now?" Their voices are so loud I have to stick my fingers in my ears.

*

The Drunk Lady mother suffocates her children when they cry. I hear the wailing begin and then the muffling sound of cloth against voice. Drunk Lady sticks her arm in their mouths. She is desperate. The children respond. They temporarily stop crying.

D.L. speaks with another female friend passenger about "loser guys." She says, "I supported a broke guy for five whole years." Her voice is naturally the loudest thing in the car. She has a built-in bullhorn. When the children start their crying again, when they pester her with their existence and needs, she tells them firmly to, "Shut up!"

Like ice statues in the sun, her babies begin to melt down. First, the male child bites the female child on the arm. This brings more crying, which brings more mouth muffling.

The female friend tries to extract herself from the big, loud, talking, dominating machine that is D.L. But D.L. stops her with a couple of jokes. She asks,

"So, wait...What's the difference between an alcoholic and a drunk?"

The friend of D.L. doesn't know.

"An alcoholic gets help."

That's a joke? Then she says,

"If a blond and a brunette jump off a building, who lands first?"

Nobody knows...

"The brunette....The blond has to stop and ask for directions."

*
D.L.'s daughter is named Angelina Marie.

D.L. and Angelina Marie come back from dinner, back from the dining car, after we have all enjoyed a long bout of silence. A.M. begins to wail. And D.L. freaks out like I have never seen a mother freak before. She loses all control. She erupts into verbal, emotional madness like she's having a seizure, about to get violent, combust. She defines loose cannon. She yells to her crying children, and I mean yells,

"Shut up! I can't fucking take this anymore!"

D.L. begins to weep loudly. She cries over her children's crying. Her crying turns to tearful pleading. Like a car wreck, we are trapped, we are morbidly curious, we stop to be shocked. D.L. whimpers, pleads to the god of crying children. The scene is horrific.

"Stop!....Stop!....Stop!....Stop!"

Angelina Marie still cries. They cry together.

D.L: "I can't do this. I can't do this. Please don't cry anymore...Stop. Stop. Please stop...Stop it man!."

We note that she refers to the crying baby as "man."

The car sits in stunned silence. Like something unnatural is happening. It makes us feel weird, wrong, betrayed. When a baby's mother gives up in public, what does the public do? It must take a village. One of our women takes pity and picks up the crying baby. Takes it to her seat and rocks the poor thing.

I make a silent prayer of gratitude for my mother. Then I see the most beautiful, complete rainbow in vibrant colors out my window. The sky is almost totally dark, and there, in the middle of the forest, beginning at the faint horizon, exploding out of charcoal clouds, comes this rainbow in magenta, blue and bright green. A strip of fluorescent light lines the sky. The source spot of color on the horizon gradually fades into the coming night.

*

Angelina Marie is crying again. D.L. muffles her mouth and the baby coughs from the sleeve in its mouth. When the baby continues to cry, D.L. says, "Come on man!"

The dark silhouettes of Douglas Fir and Evergreen trees stand like fancy, Indonesian puppets on sticks against the dark blue twilight.

D.L. is smothering her babies' mouths and pleading with the universe out loud,

"Oh my God....Stop!...Oh my God.....Oh my God, man"

D.L. says "Goddammit!" and continues the muffling. She tells us, her captive audience, that she spent all her money on bottled water. She used up her four dollars. She says it over and over, "Now I'm broke." Loud, so that maybe someone will offer her money. This is her Jerry Springer moment. This is how she brings the house down.

*

In Klamath Falls, home of Cathy the fiery smoker, I walk alone, up and down the platform and watch massive flashes of lightening streak the sky.

*
Sunrise over Chico, California: 5:27 a.m.
Burnt orange above the black silhouette of mountain: California hills are golden.
The sky looks smooth. Birds fly in flocks of three. The stunning lights of dawn are reflected on the water, on the small farm lakes, so still and glass-like. The black hills, these mystery guests in disguise, hooded by early dawn, their true identity is not yet visible. The hills make the horizon that much higher. The fields are flooded in places from rain. A single pick up truck drives down the middle of wide open acres, away from us. Lonely. Here comes the big, bursting sun...

*

Like a ghetto note to self, graffiti is written under bridges in spray paint where the lowest of the low look at art. Accidental, accessible, natural, urban art decays and rusts, by trash bins and tractors. This is the message board of the street. We pass by and stare.

I have two cigarettes in Sacramento after going twelve hours without one. I catch quite a buzz. The sun rises up higher in the sky above the fields and newly planted seedlings.

9:30 a.m. "Emeryville – San Francisco connection"

I speak with Scott, the lounge car attendant. He's a talker. He's short and stocky, with tan skin, brown eyes, brown hair, brown everything, yet still he is Caucasian. He looks like an angry deer in the headlights, his open eyes are fixated in space and he resents ringing up the food purchases. He stares into my eyes and offers information about his work duties. Every so often, he makes announcements about when he's going to take his next break. He has a sense of the absurd, a sense of humor that almost makes him laugh when he has to say, "This is Scott, the lounge car attendant. I'll be taking my break here in about fifteen minutes at 10 a.m." There is a slight chuckle in his voice.

He tells me about the railway workers' union and their retirement fund. He takes out his three ring binder from behind the counter and shows me his work schedule. He resents having to pay union dues. He doesn't like that he is forced to join the railway union, yet I can tell he has respect for them. He is impressed that, "even the federal government respects the union."

He gets to work at 5:30 a.m. and leaves at midnight. He is tired. He wears a wedding ring but makes no mention of his wife. His station down here in the lounge car is a solitary one. He shows me in the binder the hours he works during the week. He shows me his side work, his inventory. He tells me what he likes to do on his days off.

*

In Oakland, I walk into the train to use the bathroom and hear a woman's hysterical crying, the sounds of a panic attack. There is an innocent, old woman, short and frail, in her 70's, who is hovering worriedly with great concern by the locked bathroom door. The mystery hysteric is trapped because the main entry doors to the train are opened up against the bathroom, preventing the bathroom door from opening. The hysteric uses this as an opportunity to freak out. I happen to be there so I talk the hysteric down. I tell her that all will be well, that the problem will soon be solved. We will get an attendant to open the door. Her whimpering subsides.

I walk to the open doorway of the train and look outside. The hysteric begins to sob loudly again. She says that she is "claustrophobic." The old lady and I believe her. I stick my head outside the train and look down to the right. I spot the female attendant and motion her towards us. She looks reluctant. I wonder to myself why. She seems to know from far away that there is impending drama.

The female attendant unlocks the big metal doors and lets the hysteric out of the bathroom. Drunk Lady is our mystery hysteric. She is so large, she barely fits in the tiny bathroom. D.L. is mock hyper-ventilating. I hear her mumble about spending four dollars on water and she says she's getting a migraine.

*

We fly past junky areas of car lots and the usual industrial stuff. Wreckage. The wreckage of formality. The wreckage of formal building materials. The wreckage of the useful, of blue wood crates, old chipped structures, the aesthetic of natural decay.

I go out for a smoke in San Jose. I sit with a woman wearing a tank top that reveals her back, her shoulders and arms, seventy-five percent of her breasts and a couple of tattoos on her scapula. Her skin is dark tan and burned red in places. Her hair is frizzy and comes to her shoulders. She is a good foot shorter than I. Two strangers together, we hurry out to the platform, bonding in the joys of nicotine addiction, and she tells me what she's been doing up in the Northwest.

Her father's kidneys are failing. All of his organs, the whole system, is failing. And she got a phone call that she "better come say goodbye." Right when she is leaving to see her dying father, she gets a call from her 17 year old daughter who has been in a car accident and is now hospitalized. There isn't anyone to take care of the daughter's infant son.

*

Golden California hills, golden California fields, yellow mustard, brown and black cows, blue sky and white, wispy clouds, farm sprinklers, water shoots in every direction. Drunk Lady is talking about her jail time, her drug time, her experience with judges, with babies. I see fields of poison oak. The hills round so softly, smoothly. Their curves glide silently by. They beckon me home.

**

Dawn Short

Like a giant body of water, a slow moving tide, the early dawn sky is covered with bright pink clouds. It moves steadily, patiently, with unsentimental purpose. In the distance, I hear the rumble of a jet engine. It roars close to the house. Then it fades.

**

Spring Notes

Warm sunny day of spring
Words: alacrity, ineffable...
A holy warmth like salt, like sun, like summer, like lifting off-opening, jumping, the fluidity of pouring unhindered-

Bright colors jump like food freshly picked, shadows are sharply defined. I smell ocean in the air though ocean is miles away. The day is possibility rolling. The early light of joy is just beginning. It streams through unimpeded. The risk and energy of summer is here, playful.

The strange, standing sun fills the day with its luminous presence, a light eerie and hopeful, empty and relieving. A stage set.

When they turn the lights on in your nightmare, the horror mutates and adapts to light, darkness no longer the only setting for danger.

Summer girls just waiting to be plucked, cherry trees just made to be painted, weaving brown stems leading to purple petals light as air, pink blossoms like candy.Brighter than your dreams, than crisp, whole timelessness, brighter than sky, than falling free, naked, with arms spread wide, flying, soul, like steam, escapes from body, merges into being, recognized as being, unencumbered. Brighter than your lidless eyeballs, than fearless confrontation, brighter than living poetry, than traffic, trucks, combustion, the guy on the corner playing trumpet, all the lights of sun blaring, all the switches on.

**

Valley View Poem

I see like still water over the valley-
The city below tugs
like children at my leg.

**

Drive by City

The train coughs up a lonely howl in the distance of the early morning. It stutters than blasts a series of long moans that make a woodwind kind of whistle, reedy, sounding all through the night, sending out a ghostly code of SOS. Portland is a town of telephone wires crisscrossing above intersections of liquor stores, coffee shops and blue-green street signs.

In those blue, steel, night lights of the city that twinkle, we pass by them like a camera mounted to the freeway. We silently document all the feeling of the night, the feel of the city beating in its cool, silver sparkle. Flashing red, white and blue, with its car parts, hospitals, and windows like a thousand tiny eyes, its signs and streets electrified, they flicker in glorious slow motion. We are under its spell. The city is a raw flower. The natural art of humanity appears here. It blossoms even in the dirtiest of places, even in slums. Natural art cannot hide itself and we marvel at its urban form in the twinkling streets from our freeway drive by.

**

The Core

She comes in like the sky, easy
like dawn
a sheet of solidity
like mother
silence
like night
muscled, matted heart cracked open-

**

Car Wave Highway Shore

In the distance, a lone car wave laps on to the highway shore. The sizzle of the rubber on road is a gentle crackle, a small town, three a.m. watercrash on sand. The backyard is overflowing with growth ever since the rain. The calla lilies have their own miniature forest underneath the oak and Japanese plum. The lily leaves are succulent, green, with a smooth coolness, like outstretched hands full of moisture. They wait collectively for the white flowers to emerge. Above the wildflower garden, the big oak drip-hangs scraggly, grey green moss like multiple beards, or blurry strokes from an impressionist painting, surreal, romantic, ancient.

**

Bingo Clock

The night is so somber, so final, so lonely, but so comforting to finally see from a distance. The bus was over fifteen minutes late and I was mentally reviewing my options. Last bus of the night. Sunday schedule. 11:45pm.

I stand on the corner of NE Alberta and NE 20th. It doesn't look good. Almost midnight and no bus in sight. Just babysat at the mansion and this bus was my big shot home. It's dark, dark, dark. Alberta has closed down. Only the drunkards and the homeless wander the street. And there's a young, blond couple looking to score some weed. They stick out like a sore thumb.

I've been staring down the road, down the avenue of blackness where I keep hoping to see bus lights emerge. I end up staring at late night traffic, bright lights and men who slow down as they pass me, cruising by in muscle cars, every kind of late night car except the bus. Like a watch pot that never boils, I begin to think I won't make it home.

Directly across from my bus stop, is the Alberta Veterans Hall where they advertise bingo night and weekend yard sales. Tonight, they are partying hard. I rarely see inside the hall. Tonight it is alive with bar sounds, rock music and sloppy, loud, conversation. It is a modest, white box of a building. Inside, young couples drink beer and gossip. The front door is wide open.
Journey, the rock group, is playing on the jukebox. It's been four straight songs from them. My bus stop wait has a soundtrack. Steve Perry is singing about being on the road and how that's no place to start a family. I walk across the street to ask a very important question. I need to know the time.
I have to enter the hall through a plastic door, like the kind you might find in a meat cooler. The plastic is cut into long, vertical strips, hanging down to the ground. I ask a group of men at the first table what time it is. The lot of them, the women and the men, look at me without a smile, like a potential problem, like an enemy. One of the guys, white, bearded, dark hair, coldly, slowly, his eyelids blinking at an alcoholic rate, looks at me blankly. I look around at the ladies. I smile and ask my question about the time. They respond without inflection, without color, without personality.

I can hear the lonely, late-night train, its early morning cry, like a whale call, deep and muffled underwater, loud and rumbling, a signal flare of sound, a sonic lighthouse for the lost at sea. The road is empty and echoing with drunken, happy laughter. Another Journey song plays. It’s "Separate Ways."
The bearded bingo man tells me it’s 11:45pm. I cross the street to my stop. About five minutes later, the bus pulls up. I see its lights from afar. I breathe a sigh of relief.

**

**

Morning and Space

The morning is a beautiful mackerel sky, big, glassy, sprawling. The white clouds ripple across the blue in an overall effect that mesmerizes, hypnotizes. The red, A-frame roofs stand in sharp contrast underneath its canvas. I can hear the sound of water spraying from a garden hose, coming out in bursts against cement. These are the sounds of weekend morning. Dogs bark. Alarms in upstairs rooms sound every ten minutes. Wind blows through leaves and it sizzles like sand pouring onto paper. Wind chimes clink. Cars accelerate down Alberta Street, just a block away. Silence hangs in the core.

**

Monologue

The vibration runs through me. The river, running like the up and down of an electric wave, shaking loose, integrating, the life graph, from subject-verb-object to simple verb, simple happening. All of this is God’s dream, God’s conversation, God’s happiness, his harmony, his holy creation, his interplay, his myriad forms of manifestation, his multiple methods of ongoing discussion with himself, his consummate monologue perfected.

**

Awareness Machine

I am an awareness machine.
I was born to seek
the building materials
that made me.

**

The Response Is the Fulfillment

Like open nerves, sutured, sealed. In the mourning, the blues, the implied longing of the melody, comes the answer, comes the great, sacred listener, the healer. He ties up the loose ends of sorrow. He fills the chest cavity with an invisible glow, a holy applause, the love response. He holds up the other end with absolute perfection, completing and filling in the cracks where minor sounds once implied naked, shaking loneliness and pain. He fills up the role of great audience, receiver. He plays the home-coming resolve to each of your reaching notes.

**

**

Oak Moth Detail

I sit outside on a dusty porch, on the lower level of our house, on the ground, listening to wind chimes ring out in low tones on the porch above me. I can hear cars driving around the corner, up Mar Vista Drive, coming down the street. Their rubber tires stick and roll down the asphalt. I hear the leaves, berries and plums fall to the ground in clumps when the wind picks up. It blows gently every minute or so, in a relaxing, afternoon rhythm, a gentle rhythm, a sway. On the ground, I see the shadows of birds diving from one tree to the next, stopping sometimes to pick up fallen fruit. They fly like bombers, tucking in their wings to aim, singing, squawking. I hear them flap their wings against the air.
Oak moths flutter like millions of tiny fairies, delicate, in a holding pattern, over every bush, tree and plant. The entire canyon has a hovering layer of flying insects above it, like suspended white lights.

**

Isness

Snow Words

Like salt, like a star shower, comes the snow like millions of unconnected words raining from the mouth of God into the vast background of still space awaiting them, reflecting them, holding them, remaining empty as the tiny white word flakes come one after the other. Here, an adjective, there, a verb. Here, the history of Germany, there, the story of America. Here come the judgment words. Where are the happy words, and the somber, solemn words? The whiteness beauty like each one of my free floating descriptives, each one of my associations coming from the same source, raining down essentially unattached and stand alone pure. The snow words drift against the morning, like free conversation. The relative falls from the sky mouth of absolute.

Sure Fire Sign

The first sure fire signs are here. After this, the flood of winter. Baby leaves on the sidewalk, morning and night are now half in the shade.Cool fall opens with a blue light, a headlight in the fading day. Night comes down like a fog all around and the car light peeks through the Northwest air like a watering eye casting a spray of submerged superficial sun upon the coolness of the city, on the metal, the concrete, the bursting muted blues of police cars and red stoplights, on the shiny blue silver of rainy streets.

**

END

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2007-01-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

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