Exercise #7
Memories tend to be remains, not of past sensations but past VERBALIZATIONS.
Contempt we felt as children for any other who was forced to have his/her mother present, just to cross the street.
Animal crackers. Anything I do, anything I say. Leaves of lettuce, formless, left in a bowl of salad oil.
Look mama, no overt parade of greens.
On bikes and in pick-ups, cruising my mother’s streets at night, looking for ghosts.
Always across the bay there was Oakland.
We stood on sat on the deck, breaking oranges into s l i c e, watching the prison ship cross the bay.
A tramp seaman pulls into view. 400 soft focus photos of seaweed.
Variety of helicopters fills the skies.
The sky reduced to corridors.
There are bees hovering over the clouds.
The bandage is too tight.
My childhood passed in the contemplation of Ichabad Crane.
Swarms of carpenters within the burnt out house.
Yellow beach, pink sky, pink beach, tallow sky.
Would play a piano on the beach.
Older music, the net, the fog, two alphabets.
Mouthful of crab meat.
People are starving. Anchovy.
Old Town, sobered by the evident despair.
Political because it must be, but at what level?
Cohn’s loans. The heir is nostril or ear.
Gradually debts increase. Transfer points.
Saxophone mocks a goose.
I stare at the paper, awaiting instructions.
The fly pauses to watch me write.
I hate collage.
Endless possibilities, drifting from Campus to Campus, hanging out.
The eyes forced to Focus. The main Library was a grey weight in a white rain.
The library from out of space has no fourth floor, thereby contributing further.
Time to move. Meanwhile I confront you. The gallery was a labyrinth of white rooms with skylight.
The ice cream truck and the rooster, the many cats, the young man in the next yard who speaks no English and is dying of cancer.
Chorus of the Garbage collectors beneath the bedroom window.
Who do you do. The beautiful dump truck.
Stream pours from alley sewers, corridor of five escapes, loading docks, dumpsters.
Waking in the dark now, more so each day, the year’s slide.
The last hope was to wed the daughter of the landlord.
Earliest imaginings of the married life.
A white bow of split pea soup is sat upon the table. Thursday noon. It’s cold.
An old lawn caught in the weeds.
Fleas.
Postcard to ex-wife.
Riding Buses on the weekend. At home amid engineers, on a patio with children and gin and tonic.
We held Sparklers on the porch or along the back yard.
This indulgence.
Never fear, chandelier.
Let’s read the Sunday Times instead at the café, sipping Cappuccino.
The playground north of the coffee plant roils with soccer, tires, sunbathes.
On why this is a poem.
If words were bells. Copyright is theft.
Here the computer starts to sing.
One’s age is best seen in the back of one’s hand. What I want is the gray-blue grain of western summer.
Dressed only in hiking boots and Kilt. Clogging a huge brick backpack, head shoved.
Lone runner along canyon path.
A 50 years old j i g s a w remains incomplete.
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