W. S. Di Piero

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost knowing she’s close, me not getting younger or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate I’m broad awake: her witchy presence waits for me to jump into her arms, but then she’s just an incoherent ache in sleep’s freaked scenes. I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists vaporing nooses around my head and feet and genitals, conjuring my drab hair into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks. She makes me nervous, but what would I do without her? So long as I can’t have her, I want her and this alarming manic frequency. Then again, who wants to wake to change, its pulped, smelly suit of meat, drawing flies? My night-watch hot girl, moon-maiden, mom, let me get just one night’s sleep without regret, released from your foxy ticklish fondlings, your latest smell of windblown fresh-cut grass.

My aunts mentioned her just once, calling her my aunt, their sister, though she wasn’t. They mentioned the vinyl recliner in the kitchen, the “I Like Ike” poster, the Sacred Heart, cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame. Before jolted by the gift that called through but never really for her, she became unpleasantly calm. Moments later, after she said “I don’t want this please,” God’s love raced down the pulse into her look. It was as if her things spoke back: a table leg scraped the floor, a fork wobbled in a drawer, knickknacks fell. She nearly died each time it happened. They said her mind just wasn’t there, or she wasn’t in it anymore. She sat helpless afterward, papery when they lifted her from vision seat to bed. The might to move what her eye fell upon is the image of her I keep, her iridescent readiness.

a thing that's called radar love, the whole hog calling, and here's unhoused Ginger, distracted wind-beaten beauty separating from park bench and Frigidaire carton, flying Halloween colors, tie-dye skirt, Orangesicle socks, where will she sleep tonight, where lay those tulle angel wings slashed through her overcoat, who pulses anarchist patchouli and minty hair draughts and cigarette spirits that scuff our fragile air while we hope for some pick-me-up before we pass.

Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland The mallet strikes but something's off, and so he hits again, curling that lower lip, purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe, were speech the vibes might understand, so when he lifts bluish lids as if wakened to the desired tone that rings now, it seems, it sounds, under wraps, a water-ly quaver, through the club crowd's silence, as it floats above us like an aerosol trying to find a new way to escape, passes through the wall's mortared pores to reverb in the cool night air of an unpeopled sidewalk, droning toward tracks where a passing peopled train sucks up and winds his finally found, wowed tone around its wheels, held there by steel heat one hundred miles, until it reaches the sea, where wheels and whistle overreach surging surf the good vibration feels such desire for, and leaves its tedium of the round and round, lofting to a sea that comes and goes but finally simply goes, as one night, this night, the cool vibes' air (struck finally in the changed groove of sax and ecstatic kit) is free, finally free, to go where we won't hear from it again.

The silence of night hours is never really silent. You hear the air, even when it doesn’t stir. It’s a memory of the day. Nothing stirs. Memory lags. No traffic hushing up and down tricky hills among the camphor trees. No foghorns, no streetcars’ shrilling phantoms before they emerge from tunnels. These absences keep us alert. No rain or street voices, nobody calling to someone else, Hannah, you walk the dog tonight yet or what?

The poetry’s arrested in his scene, which can’t be trusted, because I saw it through painkillers that softened my head, after I’d asked him what Keats really meant: “Was it a vision or a waking dream?” —You think that really mattered much to him? In my waking vision dream, there’s no glory, no prize committee or dew-drip Paradise. He’s in an attic nook, or dim garage, or the cellar where he actually writes, the space a sheeted granulated matter, his silenced countenance and de-boned body scabby with caked ash about to crust and crack, poems piled at his feet like shoeshine rags. A grave purpled fraughtness colors him. What damaged him to this silence? He still writes and still isn’t heard, as if not being heard is the whole point of it, and who are these children, these waving Halloween windsocks who won’t talk to him? Beyond my busybody vision, he staggers through divorce, stooped, bereft, still writing. Spiky and singing, he out-writes them all, the cheered, spotless others—he howls at their after-dinner-speaker poetry, the monsignors, the suburbans, the woo-woo wisdom merchants weeping to the bank. Poetry’s a weather that doesn’t need a specific place: it’s a storm outside a cellar, sunshine at a bedroom window. Too much schoolroom poisons the idiom. Too much reverence stinks up the joint. The sorrow hanging in the dreamy air seems to confuse him, he can’t understand how his heart came to hurt him like this, confuses it with leaves blurted out by storms, leaves that keep falling fast in the cellar, in poems he writes, the base desires and rage, he says the gods designed the set, stage-manage things, scripted them, the hilarity that hurts us is that none of it really matters, that poetry’s griefs are intimates we don’t choose. They come to us, for us. They cling to body and soul.

From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge, walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded, in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders, simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money, in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water, held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura, souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements, then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses. So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant? The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory? Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance, she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her. A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds. She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election, I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself or the green undeveloped space she occupied, welded into her grid by traffic noise.Okay! A word for me? A go-ahead?Okay! Smeared by the wind and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place. She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money, running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake. The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl, blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child, staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves. Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet, his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money. The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.

Hobos wail a garbage can against the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree droops its scaly tails above our heads as she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos, humping happy in their cages close to chimps ripping off each other’s ears. And in the cloud reposing on the sky, cut by an

rumdumb from last night’s shrubbery tryst exhales soot, fernseed, shoots and vines, brings his hot breath from the city park’s wood, saying a song we don’t understand through the briar and bay leaves of his beard. And in Philadelphia, 1954, out of late autumn’s darkening he came, a junkman lugging a Penn Fruit cart, straw bristling his face, crying a name. Or from manholes in other cities, his holographic ectoplasm greets us when traffic lights turn green. Uncover and there he is, membranous Caliban alone with sewer rats, or stumblebum Puck, unnameable solids crusting nails and toes, bringing us his dark. Or our neighborhood’s soused John-John, cobra down-at-heel boots skidding at my feet among the maddening jasmine, when I grab too late to save him growls: “I can save you darling pigs. Behold, behold, and maybe I’ll help.”

He put the spirit essence the light pip not only in each eye’s albumen concentrate of starlight but must have been taught how to do that by first finding it in the pearl he posed then corrected in dusty studio light that pounced on the window behind which sits the cheeky girl pear- and apple-blossom cheeks a fake description naturally of their plain fleshiness drably golden and her lips from Haight Street’s darlings nose studs jacket studs girls with that kind of eye one by the atm machine casual juicy and so fair a Netherlandish type panhandling strangers pomegranate seed ball bearings agleam in her nose pearls not sea-harvested but imagined seen put there by a certain need and fancy because love says it’s so picture that picture this.