Genius Loci

(Oakland) Make it the place it was then, so full it split vision to live there in winter so late & wet abundance toppled toward awful—birds of paradise a profusion the ripe colors of anodized metal; in gutters umbrellas smashed like pigeons, bent ribs bright among black slack fluttering; camellias’ pink imagoes dropping into water & rotting, sweet stink— & did not stop : the inundated eye, over- populous urban eye, the whole place, to look at it, was a footprint in January : everywhere cloudy water rising to fill in the outlines, & meanwhile indoors differed by degree alone : without love, loosed from God, there were lovers & touch rushing in to redraw your boundaries constantly because it was a tune you kept getting wrong, the refrain of what it meant to live alone, months of that and then . sudden summer, sheer release, streets all cigarettes & sashay, balls-out tube tops, low-riders & belly fat, the girls on the block all like Oh no she didn’t, and girl, she did, she was mad skills with press-ons & a cell phone telling him where to stick it, a kid on her hip, just like that, summer, sheer beauty & lip gloss that smelled like peaches, & you going to the store for whiskey & condoms like everyone else on a hot, long afternoon so long & hot it would just be sunburn to walk anywhere if it weren’t also a pleasure, thoughtless & shiftless & horny & drunk, just someone thinking summer wasn’t up to anything deep, & lo there he was, his punk ass pink as a Viking in a tight wifebeater & lingering by the public pool, drinking beer so sly it didn’t look illegal, & he wasn’t a good idea but did you have a light? & it seemed the whole summer went like that, taking fire out of your pocket & giving it away, a ditty you could whistle it was so cliché, like the numbers they gave you after & you never called, the number of swollen nodes of the kissing colds you got & later the number to call to get tested, the number of the bus to the clinic, the number they gave you when they asked you to wait, the number of questions asked, number of partners, number of risks, number of previous tests, the number of pricks —one—to draw the blood, the number of minutes you waited before results, & then you decided you had to get the tune right, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, to take a number & wait in the long line of the city’s bankrupt humanism like the bus that never comes no matter how long you wait, & the grocery bag breaking, & if you were going to sing that one, the one that sounds like all I got is bruised tomatoes, broken glass & dirty bread & no one waiting at home, would you . start with genius, as in, the spirit of a place?, &small, as in of the back, wet in heat & the urge to touch him there, skin just visible between his jeans & t-shirt, to see if he’s sweating, to see if he feels what you feel?, & if he does, is that all the spirit the place will give, a small thing shared, just a phrase, not a whole song, but something to build on?, & if it isn’t bread & if it sure ain’t tomatoes it isn’t empty, is it, like the signage you walk by that fronts the Lakeside Church of Practical Christianity, hawking a knowledge of God so modest it seems trivial?, & it isn’t ever, is it, the how to live it so it doesn’t kill you, the where to touch it, the when will genius sing your name so it sounds like a place you can live?