5/1

Dream Scenes:

I

I skateboard up the hill past families slowly walking up in the twilight from the Van’s market car-less parking lot where two ghost, one tall and one small, stand faintly glowing.

A thin, brown faced woman with curled black hair calls to me, speaking rapidly in Spanish.

“No puedo entender mucho en Espanol, solo poco,” I reply.

She smiles luminously and gently speaks a little more then turns away with the rest.

II

“The participle is your friend,” I said discussing conversational Spanish. “You just conjugate the verb to be and plug in the participle like a noun.”

I am working on a sit com soap opera about people making a sit com soap opera. There is a lot of red and black merchandise connected with the show around the our office.

I am not sure if I am an actor or a writer on the show. It doesn’t seem to matter.

5/2

There never has existed a housewife, a plumber or a taxi driver. These are labels for a set of actions and activities, mother’s and father’s, relationships all the same. You see a woman fixing a toilet or a man driving a cab. They stop and pick up an infant and yet the person that existed before they learned these tasks is just as true and persistent.

5/3

All this happened before At least once. I lay dozing on the back deck bench under the eaves. The shadows of clouds pass over me. Everything is still. The air changes pressure, presses down forcing my ears closed. The stillness a coil tightening ready to snap, I enter the house. My mother and sisters glow Flowing through dancing in white linen drapery Unaware of the pressure ready to burst.

Poem

We Put Handles on Everything

II

We drop them all the time,

Pointing to each counting down the line

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe

Everyone knows how that one goes

We find the very best one

 just like my mother says.

II

Driving through desert dark,

The road falls away stomach drops

Never been this way before

Shadow poles of boulders stacked among spiny trees

Middle of somewhere nobody is,

Crawling with nightly life burned to dust in the sun.

III

Edging toes up to the brink

Plunging to soft sand slide

Roll down, again! Again!

Peggerts and primpknots, palindrome potstop

We named them all, adults we never will be

Except on days when sad traps claim us.

IV

No blame, cause the world wears children out

no way to rest in those arms when the day goes out

night comes to hurry us into too much care.

Some never rest, born into the thorns

rise bloodied from the underbrush

I was cradled in smooth boughs but lept away.

5/12                                     

Restless

Up early Saturday taking Rowan to the train. Walking with Mary and the dog, then out for breakfast. On the trail next to the boiler works, a metal flake sports car gleaming the color of new leaves opened strange memories of future stories about me working on wall sized canvas, or out to the horizon then back to Mary and the dog gasping on the end of his lead to get to a new scent.