from DAYGLO

Where the dark of rain a resilient sun
now meet, there glow the gears of day.
In gray, when the mind attributes color to an idea,
we offer a definite maybe for the sky’s big cover-up.
If we are kept warm in sort-of-winter
it is the warmth of the sea-spray-blue sea.
The freeway’s rush of hybrid cars and humming birds
should say something about nearness, and divergence,
but everything sloughs off.
Everything in the estuary, the alluvium
entering the ocean, a wet brown fan.
Great yellow dinosaurs of industry
remove any artifice from sculpture.
Mountains of earth rise from marshland
where we live background lives
with basketball hoops in the driveway.
A sporting chance for light to fill us.
Our digital children and their rapid-fire,
virtual dreams, I see them bug-eyed in backseats,
combat in every eye’s reflection.
The glare and gauzy, anesthetic brightness
changes us, I know, my head a cloud
refracting what gray light passes through.

Behind every gesture lies a shadow,
an idée fixe.
The impedance of radiant light.
The dark below a sailor
different than the dark
below myself: Melville’s etched sea.
How bars of light enter naptime,
horizontal and blinding, but we must push on.
There is a pattern of gulls to follow,
like the pattern on a scarf, on a woman’s nape,
“I don’t get emotional densities,” in the museum,
or the cubes on the concourse floor.
With such roundness of light, of scope,
how can any line be so hard but the streak of a train
as evening parades in exodus of squandered time.
So gradually progressing toward sea breeze, now
sandcastle, aubergine broadcast in the sky.
The way sun pushes into the horizon
and we are warmed by its flimsy bundle.
Look at the gaslamp now lit.
Look at the collapsing sky.
The shadows cast a cinematic shape
and so the people, redefined and shiny.

To not have an epiphany under partial sun
or fluorescence. No umbrella to manage the rain.
Not happiness in place of shimmer but happy
to have stepped on an oily puddle’s rainbow.
To not have these things when clouded
and admire the floodplain, some water making way.
A paper boat with paraffin wax on its hull.
A few surfers get wet in the water,
black buoys on a silk gray sea.
There is less contrast in the world when rain.
The bombs we see as droplets are harmless.
The bombs we don’t see are foreign and far off
as we try to keep dry.
Then the sun breaks through,
a little wink in the ether
so we wipe our dewy eyes, watch everything steam.
This is how mirage happens.
This is how to landscape with the Western Garden Book.
To not need water and to know how to preserve it
within a well within oneself, to never be thirsty.
Say, go to the beach. Get some sun in your blonde
like these things we grow to let others tend.

INTERTIDAL TISSUE

Connective tissue in concrete

mapping a kind of alien topography

To look down through the gold

like to determine the clarity of diamonds (sky)

Smoke and fog as emissions go

a lovely Rubine© sunset print

I told you to quit miming

the existential behavior of office work

Traffic is a fact of life

So are allergens

Things that move through the air

Red Knot, Brown Pelican, Cinnamon Teal

Anna’s Hummingbird

We maintain that movement is a private thing

UNTITLED VISTA

I was looking for blue on a blown surface
the ocean’s bifurcated horizon blue.

We advance on habitat with abandon.

I saw the business park impede the view
a wisp of cloud enough to say phantom dew.

Subtle chaparral where shipping centers are
I wanted a vision and got a wall.

Are we oscillations again, that sun machine?

To predict the survey (of land), I thought
she’s kinda beautiful when the wind and sun do that.

Like to excavate the canyons I said parking lots
here, listen to their hollow thump.

We bang the drum of progress as if to row.

Blue leaves, blue paperwork, blue a window
to the brown day with clouds toned so sepia.

I’ve repeatedly wanted to leave, to drive home
and not have to drive back.

Starling that died on my hood, I’m still sorry.

EUCALYPTOID

Leafy pendulum in a color-field, say
floating leaf, dancing light, an emblem
for depth evolving into question,
a question of space.
The way we inhabit space,
air in the space that carries us,
and us, our alveoli,
the quality of air within our lungs.

I speak in thoughts formed with air.
Where fog makes a window frown,
a little white sound to fill the gray area,
the tug and tumble of people speaking
like we are the natural world’s syncopation.
Diesel apparitions like branches
in the light of day’s whoosh
and white commotion, an utterance.

Who is anyone to say?
What is our endeavor?
The din continues until there is emptiness.
That this or that breath, unlike the registers of wind,
unlike the dissonant road, or flight, or sun
coming down on every machine
and living thing with equal force.
A tree doesn’t ask about its purpose.