Interior

I keep the compass round inside my hat.
I have a universe enclosed by skin
And skull and sinew, bounded by a thin
Frontier, a little line of flesh and fat.
  I function in this world bereft of sin
  And sickness, innocent as those who sat
  And sit with Jesus, those who gambled at
  The cross for clothing. When I lose, I win.
I need no kin nor kindness. I stand pat
With all my cards concealed, with nothing in
The pot I can’t afford to lose. I grin
Inside, outside my smile is cold and flat.
  Let others wonder how their days begin
  And end and separate their this from that,
  And order ill and worthy. Like a cat
  I hold all that I need within, within.

The Mind’s Eye

When the day is done, the deeds,
The dead are made to live, to leave
Their tracks and tracings and to give
The clues, the inklings that one needs
To solve whatever they have done.
Now see why I throw powder there
And lay a dust. I search for clear
And present prints where there were none.
And I, the private eye, will seek
Out secret residents, each gift.
I’ll note the name of who was left
And do it all by day or week.
I guarantee I’ll bring what’s brought.
I post all bonds, I lay my name
And honor out and if I seem
To lie, believe me, I do not.

The Oracle

I hung the chain-sawed mask on the side wall,
Cedar against redwood plank. My sister said
It looked just like me. Mustache, bardic beard,
Blunt Norse nose, furrowed forehead. An old grape
Vine and Chilean jasmine loop their green
Lassoes. Ruby-throated hummingbirds feed
From a green glass bottle. In the late fall
When I prune I can see its poor rough head,
Its cracks and creases. And what has appeared
Between the lips? It’s a hole, a round shape
Leading to a bunch of buzzing bees. Seen 
But mostly heard. It is just what I need.
Carpenter bees inside a wooden mask,
Answering questions nobody will ask.

The Photograph

Day of my dead. The diamond eyes
Stare from the window of the camera frame,
And all the cleaving where the future lies
Cannot convince or satisfy or name.
I see a hand whose fingers took apart
Another frame. I watch those fingers fed.
I seek the secrets of this handy heart
And soon I find my own. Day of my dead.
The light that wrote has fled. The shadows lie
Where no light falls, where no light ever lay.
I draw the shades to let my darkest eye
Discover where these dead ones have their day.

The Present

We live in the moment only when we're
Not foraging in fields of why and how,
Where memory lies, the things we've done or said,
An amusing museum. But when fear
Or sheer shock forces us into the now,
Nostalgia is out the window. Instead
Our present is delivered. We unwrap
It anyhow and sometimes find we don’t want 
Its gritty gifts of surprising sorrow
And guilt. And that’s why we must mind the gap
Gaping between us and the ghosts that haunt
Our passage from past times to tomorrow.

The present is where waits and wants are massed,
Balanced between the future and the past.

The Sea of Time

“The world is stretched out in time but we have... a view with the future missing.” 
–Dunne,  Experiments with Time

Time is a sea on which we float, too wide
For wit to compass. We must line up
Past, present, future so our coffee cup
Of consciousness has somewhere safe to hide.

Dreams are a vista opening the door,
Entangling our todays with yesterdays,
Seasoned with tomorrows, enlarging ways
We see the world by adding a bit more.

And déjà vu is bits of what will be
Combined with now and then. It twines and twists
Into a brief unveiling of the mists
That shroud the lines of what we think we see.

Our lives begin at birth, end in the grave.
We cannot see the ocean for the wave. 

Thrift Store

Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul,
Goodwill Industries. Emporia where
Discards, detritus, are scattered asprawl
Sheet metal shelving, where the very air
Breathes disillusion. But it cheers me up.
I find the duck puppet, bone-handled knives,
The brazen ape holding the candle cup.
Survivors, witnesses of other lives.

Shades of dissatisfied desire lie side
By side with memories of wasted weeks.
Here is a mute museum of things tried,
Later found wanting. Perhaps he who seeks
Novelty here or joy could better find
Them in the longer aisle, the deeper shelf,
The fuller line of merchandise, the kind
Of bargain bins, bizarre, inside himself.

Still on my mantel stand the brittle bits
I’ve salvaged from a multitude of pasts,
Backward glances to where my poor heart sits, 
Stunned with the certainty that nothing lasts.

Undercover Man

When I sleep I will dream.  I wake sometimes
Drunk on dreams. In dreams dogs bite my tender
Hands and I atone alone for unknown crimes
I alone remember. My dream blender
Chops my icy psyche and it mixes
Midnight margaritas. A liquid eye,
Caught in a collapsing circle, fixes
A pastime present that I open by
Closing lids and lashes, crawling in bed.
There, undercover man, I try spying
On myself, questioning sleep and my head.
An inquisition into my lying
Life until I dream I’m only seeming
To confess the truth where I lie dreaming.

Visiting the Dead

I call on Napoleon. The deep well holds
Remains of the First Empire, surrounded
By the splendid dead of the France they founded,
Marshalled under gold leaf and marble folds.
Outside it rains. Inside, the mystery
Of death becomes a page of history.

Karl der Grosse lies in Aachen. I feel
The fluted stone above his body,  stand
Before the triptych that once felt his hand,
See the silver that magnified his meal,
And try to understand how granite can
Contain the greatness that contained a man.

Deep in Vienna’s heart the Habsburgs sleep,
Cradled in caskets of cast iron and stone.
They slumber best who do not sleep alone
And cannot care whose company they keep.
I sit and sip melange until we meet
And marvel at the sunlight in the street.

Can we remember what must be buried?
I have seen Lenin lie like a wax doll
In a hushed chamber. Behind on the wall
Tablets mark the revolutionaried
Few whose bodies’ proletarian presence
Reassures the workers and the peasants.

I’ll have no such solemn end. I’ll molder
Incognito, my bones becoming earth
Anonymous, anonymous as birth.
My body will decide to grow no older,
And people in their living rooms will see
No more than they have ever seen of me.

What Happened

I know what lies I’ve lived. My life lies all
Open to my pen. Wizard of was, I
See things that never happened, refresh my
Memory with incidents I recall
From others’ lifetimes. Was I fed bread spread
With lard and sugar? Anyone else must
Dismiss such a dismal diet on trust.
Shall I trust what lies in my mind, my head?
Diet aside, there is poison in dreams,
Fancies that have shouldered and shoved their way
Into what was. I can’t believe I’d say
What I said. So I must believe what seems
To be what I imagined. And I see you
In that light sometimes, through a stranger’s eyes.
All of my memories parade in disguise,
Dressed in dreams, drunk on drama. When the true
Past has passed, my memory finds it pleasant
To wrap it in surmise, make it my present.

My Rhyme

Seems like my whole life has been a prelude
To a poem. Unconscious infancy. Brief
Spurts of self-awareness and bursts of joy
Spattered with sadness as I became a boy.
Then doubt delivered me beyond belief
And the world bloomed, blossomed into the crude
Years of adolescence. How soon I learned
The skill of silence and a mocking mask,
Character cast and easily congealed 
Around the things that mustn't be revealed.
Better to know what you should never ask,
Better to be obnoxious than be spurned.

I graduated to the Air Force. There
I learned how to look like you're working when
You're not, how to be a cynic. I read
A lot, studied what other people said.
I longed for understanding. Only then
Could I control my how and what and where.
Teaching, a stint at Berkeley, writing verse,
A fortunate marriage, two sturdy sons,
Being the person I would like to be,
To really look at what I always see.
Reading and teaching helped and making puns.
Language is liquid, gravity a curse.
Now I can laugh at what once made me groan.
Now I can look at life and how it ends.

I know I'll never have a better time
To make my meter, recognize my rhyme.
No one has had such good and faithful friends.
No introvert was ever less alone.

Morning Thoughts

Sometime it’s enough to sip the first cup
Of coffee, open my book and listen 
To the radio. I watch the glisten
Of dew on the rail. The sun comes up.

I think about the world outside my park.
I reminisce, deplore and fantasize.
I rediscover where my true life lies
And try to grow an ever thicker bark.

Decaying at its core, my life’s a tree
That’s waiting for a winter wind to blow
It down into its bitter bed below.

Not yet, my wine glass later says to me.
The brain still drives the hand that drives the pen
That brings the morning back to me again.

Memoir

I’ve hung four chapters of my life above
The stone-faced fountain. A hayhook forged by
My uncle in the thirties used for dry
Baled Montana alfalfa. Bells of love
From a 60s Volkswagen van that I
Drove in Berkeley and up the coast, so young,
So pleased that this thin jingling ringlet swung
Behind the bench seat as the miles went by.
In the seventies I needed a saw,
An old cross-cut misery whip used for
Cutting oak and madrone. The fire’s roar
Kept a family warm. And then a straw
Travel hat that I wear to ward the gold
Sun from my silvered forehead. This hat’s been
To Austria, to Crete, shadowing skin
Prone to melanoma. Now I’m too old
For much adventure but still smile to see
The tooth and tangle of what used to be.

Flight

As a boy I dreamed of high towers of light,
Gazed from cliffs at thinner air, a chasm
Of nothingness, fell then in a spasm,
Vivid vertigo, face frozen in fright,
Through fathoms of forever. As a man
After diving deep inside, I found I
Had that dread dream again. But as it ran
Its course, I understood its what and why.
    
    When I tumbled through that nightmare, the car
    Was balanced on a crumbling concrete edge.
    It teetered, swaying, open doors aflap.
    Fenders abloom, a Chevy sedan sold
    In 1938. I was too far
    Out of the door to grasp a handle, wedge
    Myself inside. All I could see a gap
    Of space through which I plunged, all uncontrolled.
    
    As certain as there is immortal earth
    We enter it by falling into birth
    To hurtle always to an endless goal,
    Burrowing deep into an empty whole
    To swim and soar and finally to fly,
    Spinning in infinities of sky.

When fall changed to flight, my brain and  breath
Joined the fraternity of life and death.

Examination

“The unexamined life isn’t worth living.” – Socrates

“You think of yourself too much,” my mother
Told me. And she was right. I did and do.
What’s the point of thinking of another
When understanding always starts with you?
The frantic drinking of my manic youth,
All the depressions, blackouts, the unplanned,
Were all a way to dig down into truth
And hold it tightly in my stubborn hand.
Later when the maelstrom had subsided
Were times of quiet reading, sipping wine.
Those were the dazzling days when I decided
That everything I thought and did was mine.
Stripping away want, stripping away need,
Stripping away what I was taught to feel,
I followed where I used to try to lead
Directly to the center of what’s real.

I found it just where it had always been,
Omniscient ink inside my ballpoint pen.

Closing the Bar

When I close the bar, I use a push broom
To move dirt here and there around the room.
I pull the plugs to everything, clean sinks
And toilets, wash glasses, dump the last drinks,
Turn off the barlights, lock both doors.  It’s two
In the AM. Usually what I do
Is walk home down silent streets, shower, read
A book till sleep comes.  Sometimes though I need
Some company. There’s a diner that stays
Open all night on University. Days,
It’s a normal greasy spoon. Nights, you find
All sorts of weirdos hanging out. The blind
Who lead the blind, pushers, pimps, and the guy
Who bartends at the Blind Lemon, me. I
Order fried eggs, corned-beef hash, orange juice, toast,
Doze over bitter coffee, see a ghost,
Pay my bill, tip 15%, drive back
Home. There I stare into the bedroom’s black
Blank wall. I separate the way things are
From how they should be when I close the bar.

On Blake Street

Here’s my small house in Berkeley where Herb kicked
The potted plant from the paintless porch, mad
Because the morning he and I had picked
For filming hadn’t worked. (I was gone, had
Other fish to fry.) He still made The Death
Of Alex Litzky which I watched today
In San Jose and had to hold my breath
When I saw myself, 27, play
A poet drunk on drama and on dreams,
Snagged in a snare of love and loss and lust,
Who struggled to the surface of strange streams
And searched for undercurrents he could trust.
I played myself, a lost and lonely man,
Tuned to the times. Bartending, wallowing
In my books, intent on a secret plan
To digest all that I’d been swallowing.

I’ll never be that young again but still
See in that film somehow someday I will.