Rowan Ricardo Phillips

He never saw a violin. But he saw a lifetime of violence. This is not to presume That if he had simply seen A violin he would have seen Less violence. Or that living among Violins, as though they were Boulangeries or toppling stacks Of other glazed goods like young adult Fiction, would have made the violence Less crack and more cocaine, Less of course and more why god oh why. More of one thing Doesn’t rhyme with one thing. A swill of stars doesn’t rhyme With star. A posse of poets doesn’t rhyme With poet. We are all in prison. This is the brutal lesson of the 21st century, Swilled like a sour stone Through the vein of the beast Who watches you while you eat; Our eternal host, the chummed fiddler, The better tomorrow, MMXVI.

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles Over a groove. The other slushes chords. Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair. They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass Doesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel Old oil and spit from deep down the empty Pit of a note or none or few? So don’t Give up on it yet: the scenario. You know that it’s just as tired of you As you are of it. Still, there’s much more to it Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong.

i Walking across the PCH, we looked Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen, Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted. I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite- Anapestic song of sea and air — The raw and sudden crick of crickets — The cars, suddenly silent as cows — And blue Malibu blackening like a bee. ii A poem is a view of the Pacific And the Pacific, and the Pacific Taking in its view of the Pacific, And the Pacific as the Pacific (Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific) Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean, Closing. It or she or he is merely, Which means it or she or he is a mar. But a mar made up of  temperament and Tempo — the red weather in the heart. iii I’m about to get this all wrong, I know: Santa Monica behind me, the ocean To my left, Jupiter high above me, And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills Like the tricolor of a country made Of  beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog. Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing; Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here. iv Along the thin pedestrian passage Beside the PCH, just off Sunset, Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends And lies and facts — Jews and Blacks being Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy Like bruschetta. He storms at the police Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt Like a toga. He schools them his toga Wisdom from toga times. He offers them His toga. They offer him a ride — . v Arun’s car carried us like metaphor In a poem or painting; moving meaning; Moving the current; being the current; The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour; Still, even as we speed on the 110, The music in my head, the Jupiter Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean As it unfurls in the vapor trail of Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents, Like a nocturnal flower calling you. vi Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surged Up, like marginalia on a newly Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions, Fiery accusations of its own Brilliance that descend into indifference. We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes. Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero. But I should know better, if just because You can smell the injustice in the air. vii The Pacific encircles me. Slowly. As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better Said, I only understand it this way: By feeling like a stranger at its blue Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay As though some Cathay exists and be glad. No, the differences we have should be felt And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack; A power to take in what you can’t take back. viii The old hocus of this ocean’s focus On pulling its waves over the soft surf Like a skin pulled down tight over the top Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus. We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’s Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells No chunk of haiku could think to charter. It was like the eighth day of creation In the eighth line of a poem — she sang, She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.