Poetry

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.

Nobody knows what anything
means anymore.
Sea-turtles run inland
at birth.

In every sale a list of ways your home 
could be destroyed: flood, poison, earthquake, fire. 

This early, the small birds’ trudging notes;
Six storeys high, a crane looms
As in graceful blessing…

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,