Saturday Morning

the kids next door
are singing
Joni Mitchell songs,
their voices high and clear
as birds;
behind them,
someone picks out melodies
on a piano, and
the trees between
our houses
rustle
in the wind

I feel a temporary
sense of contentment,
nothing to do and
nowhere to go,
so I walk
from room to room
trying to find you,
until I remember
that you’re not
here

Vertigo

in San Francisco this morning
the airshaft outside my hotel
window grays as if a fog has
settled in red brick wall façade
of windows angle of the street in
the near distance six storeys
below a city that still feels like
home to me except that I am
alone in a small room tidy as a
ship’s cabin unfamiliar and
familiar Picasso nude print on
the wall not unlike the one I had
in college when I met my friend
who died last weekend my
friend who is not my friend any
longer is not breathing is not
dreaming is not with her
children with her desolated
husband is not aware or caring
that I did not visit when she was
in the hospital in a room not
unlike (I imagine) this one in a
city where she does not live
anymore what we have is the
ground beneath our feet Gary
Snyder cautioned in a
documentary I just saw but my
friend is dead and I did not say
goodbye now I stare through the
window like Jimmy Stewart in a
Hitchcock film wondering how
I find the ground beneath my
feet when all I see is blurred

Porch

early-mid July,
late on a Sunday,
avenue
so empty I
can imagine, almost,
I
am somewhere
else.
Then, a burst
of fireworks, and a
jet descending
into LAX —

I am on the porch
riding out
this heat wave,
not waiting
for my daughter,
although I know
that’s what she’s thinking
when she returns
home early
from dinner
with friends.
It is the last
summer
before she goes to
college, and since
graduation I
have watched as
she has molted,
shedding us
as if we were
old skin —

these milestones, they
mark us, just as
the years do, they
are what
render us
distinct.
This summer
I will
pay attention, not
allow these moments to
slip away from me,
refuse to let them
slide —

and yet who knows,
really,
what will happen?
Here I am,
perhaps a beer
or two
beyond my limit,
sitting in the
quiet,
porch lit low —

my son, he installed
these lights,
not last year but the one
before that,
after he moved back in
the first time;
now he is living here again,
for summer only,
or at least that’s what
we’ve agreed.
He is at work now,
will be home by
2, or 3, or
whenever the club
closes, although
the last few nights I
haven’t heard him,
which makes me wonder
what attention means —

is it vigilance, or
relaxation?
Is it a holding on, or
a letting go?
Instead of deciding,
I remain outside,
feet propped
on the wrought iron
of the garden rail,
while in the distance,
the city
emits its low
and ambient buzzing,
like a rumble in the chest of the earth.
To the south,
another run of fireworks,
although the holiday
is past us;
a car creeps up
the avenue but
no one can see me,
a siren echoes in some
other corner of
the night —

but after?
silence
stillness,
although the city,
it is not quite
sleeping, it is
inhaling,
catching its breath
as a breeze stirs,
first one in days,
through all this searing swelter,
and above my head,
the leaves of
sycamore and
elder rustle:
reminder that
in the morning
(or even now)
the world will wake,
will start
to move
again —