so I won't have to look at this anymore

A Few Poems about Berkeley, CA

I

From a certain height you can see the bay

roiling with fog,

the Golden Gate a kestrel flown too high,

smudged by descending

drift in slow rags.

Peers of bronze leak from hills amazed

with condensation,

the city off-dirty like rain-edged glass

and smelling of asphalt.

Carillons ring smoky—

the campanile flutes its coil of sitting cloud,

obelisk errata.

II

Men who wheeled their bikes

hitched with trash bags

here sift bins for recyclables,

crunches of accordioned

aluminum underfoot,

and clinking bottles.

Faces sober and pinched after the day's cull

sit curbside towards the intersection,

washing in wind its sleight perfumes

passed

and passing in drunk spirits,

and caws, and clouds

fuming blistered over the harbor

barely within sight.

A bike, a shopping cart, whatever's burdensome

or half-journeyed on the descent-facing hill:

impenetrable,

if by face only, stares forward.

III

John Berryman lived here in the ‘60s.

The heavy poet light-footing up Durant

with the bay on his back and books

in hand, a forehead sweaty

from drinking and ravened talks,

a tongue cotton-squeezed from ripostes

done-in acutely against the dishonest,

bitterly if need be;

Berkeley is undisciplined like that.

I would’ve liked to have met him before,

to have caught his dull frenzied annoyance

at the distance between him and his Schubert,

and maybe to have traded my “Good Evening”

for his thick high mumble back

just before the click as his cell

closed for the night. If he rumbled through here,

what else consolation can we afford?

IV

You can take stock in some not very well-

done work, work barely understood—

and now that sits apart, leery, curling

at the edges where your hands left moisture.

But out there it was already night

and someone yelps in sex, which always spikes

the heart a little, a lone

invisible hot voice

seizing on being body not body alone,

a crude sort of witness that flicks away

as quickly as it came.

So what do you do with these lonely irruptions?

Bury sleep in their sharpened folds.

V

“Our actions coalesce,”

you said, curling your legs around his hips,

“I liked the movie”: night-pinched,

dreams squint off at distant signs of light,

immiscible and left vaguely wanting,

but never fully gone,

preferring to linger instead

freaked, to bicker with the other memory-

not-memories pooled together

like black water in a shiver's cool skin

first coming into contact with morning

where warm leaves swarm like flies,

and how real its strides: how fast it foxes

other yearnings forward.

VI

It’s hard to defend cold and unfeeling things:

these, groping for a certain distance

unreproachable,

like collecting rocks at their wet glossy prime

palmed by water and bedded in scalloped

sand where even their dark oily

undersides shine, damp where moisture

has sucked away to deeper rocks.

Wait a few days.

What are those bones on the dresser?

I do not care, or remember.

VII

He worked in the years of his family

and lived as a butcher (I think), retiring

eventually into the city’s hutong’s

crouched under escorsed monuments

immortal of nothing:

iron and age and recited histories

of error, carved notoriously

into its raceless, steadfast statues.

There were years he returned home only once,

and that’s the memory passing on—

of distance indifferent.

When he had his stroke, words interceded

from another country, from foreign tongues.

Here was where he sat, tightened

and wiry off the bed’s edge, a view

of tenements sloughing into narrow

avenues and a sky antlered by stray branches.

You said that you didn’t like it here,

that “There was no love.” But there was,

just in shapes unfamiliar to us.

He died a few days ago, back at home.

She took him North and there they waited his passing

as they did his last decade, in gruff, scolding

care. She won’t say much, treading slowly

on squinting off for steady measure.

VIII

Undergrowths are strangled with muddy silt and loose

sheddings that bed the soil like hoarfrost, unseen layers

propping up grass-blades and lazy suspensions of dew.

It is only now beginning to be winter, late November

climbing into its usual heft: the sky makes thick cloud

covers and we breathe condensation into its cold gaps.

The leaves had drained from green to purple to ferrous red

before I had remembered to admire their

twisting, so there is instead a carpet of leaves to tatter

and truncate into dark cement its unremarkable sog.

Yet a freshness rends the air like the luminate greens of rain,

accentuating the contours of a face—

the way debris gathers in the furrows and the neck and rings

the eyes like starving raccoons.

In this season it is hard to hide anything.

On Telegraph, on Durant, beggars shake their sparse-coined cups

the dead season’s charitous salvo to the passing crowd.

IX

Extravagant glosses of weather

bring you from nowhere

and suspend you

like lightning

truculently

twisted down

to illuminate scapes

of spindle and wire,

momentary blindings,

then again darkness

and its persistent rot.

X

Reading a poorly-typed copy of The Triumph of Love.

Its rhythms thump off and on, working out

the process of grace in the tongue of history

and haemony, supposedly curing;

so why does it weigh like lead? Think

basically: God present in all things—

the abundance of cloudy scrolls enshadows

the approaching solstice, gimlet

eyes through crevices actually canyons of piercing light,

clouds accented by lumen undergrowths, its gloom

only ominous by allowance. The rain’s approach

flitters through brush, and it’s this register,

not the limning, that calls forth. I realize

I’ve swallowed a foreign voice but let’s write that off

into the corpus mysticum. On the other side

Tamalpais girds the waters unobstructed.