Localities
Snow in the Valley
We couldn’t bring ourselves to admit
that we waited for it to happen
outside the theater, in the café,
huddled in our coats to the apartment.
On the way, our friend clowned an act
of ignorance, walking around
a sculpture set in a depression
across the street from the Golden Man
shining atop the capitol building.
We were all for us, and our laughter
rose to buzzing streetlights, the smoke
of ironic offerings.
I wanted to be
excited that it was coming.
I listened to its whispers
solidify like tiny fibrous bugs
freezing on the single-pane window
above the couch where I lay,
staring at the dark, trying to sleep.
On New Year’s Day, it had happened.
The window was a voyeur
peaking at innocence turning gray
with each passing car.
We drove to the Abbey at Mount Angel,
and the air was laden with heavy pines
and red brick buildings.
Silence stalked me like a confessor.
Inside the cathedral,
I kneeled in the aisle, me
a proud protestant boy,
and felt the shape of prayer,
what God must see or not see,
if he looks at that sort of thing.
Beneath us,
the valley was a quilt of white
stitched with barren trees
and tossed over the unsteady dreams
of a willful child.
~
Austin, Nevada
We wound into mountains crowned dark.
Fat drops clicked off the windshield,
then thunderheads stuck our insolence.
Caught in the same veil as those peaks,
snow fled our faces until
we caught the fast collapse
to the valley the storm had passed,
the valley smooth and curved
like the lower third of a pipe.
As rain evaporated, we crystallized.
As the road turned dun,
we begged color from the tape deck.
Nevada,
Highway 50 east to Breckenridge,
thirty-one years ago.
We climbed Austin’s long drag and stopped.
Another storm passed while we ate,
and dad said he wanted to move here.
Wind buffeted the windows
like a slipstream slowly forgetting
the vehicle that called it into motion.
When we left the diner, sun shone
its most brilliant reflection,
the arc of time on the ribbon of passage
glowing thin and taut
under the bruised back of retreating cloud.
For a moment, everything slowed.
Colorado could hang itself,
and Mom stared down into the valley
they call lonely.
~
Parnassus Becomes Judah
Parnassus becomes Judah
where San Francisco turns pale
and wide, determined for the end.
I miss this city where I never lived.
It has always been sea-locked gold
at the bottom of a steel rainbow.
I can’t be philosophical about this.
I want to know my own eyes.
I want to see what I know.
Who gave the parking garage
circles of anticipation? Whose child am I
in awe of urban squalor?
Who told claustrophobic houses
that I belonged to their sidewalks?
It’s not as if I know you.
But Parnassus becomes Judah,
and the oblique exchange
bears the commerce of my soul.
Mine eyes hath seen Apollo,
but my feet turn after Christ
where San Francisco turns pale,
and the way is the end
but my way in it
is always impossible.
Who beckoned the bus to clatter passed?
I see a woman at the stop,
all in black, tapping her cell phone.
My name lies within her lips,
just as she is an abrasion
on white buildings softened by mist.
Fog crouches offshore,
a bed to smoother the sun in.
Then its chill will tell us what we need.
And my name lies within her lips,
heard but unspoken.
She needs only look up and call out.
I’ll accept mistaken identity.
But I am an irreducible truth
swallowed off the curve of a foreign tongue.
~