When the levee breaks

Zerstörung der Pilzfabrik - Destruction of the Mushroom Factory 20 x 30 cm

SAN ANDREAS FAULT*

A great turbulence runs up and down the body,

fakes right, turns left, then skips past the exit.

We are told by white-coated lab rats

that all this fuss and uproar and poetry is nothing more  

than a carnival of biological fact. Still, music is more

poignant now, metaphors spring up like mushrooms,

a warm wind, rising to the occasion, is like

a hot damp whisper in my ear

conveying all kinds of interesting information.

It’s Botticelli time. The lawn scattered with new flowers.   

I step outside in order to see what the trees are up to, extract

from their arbitrary free-style maneuvers some sense of structure

as if the dry foothills, platinum-colored, rolling down to the Pacific,

as if the heat-thickened odors of crushed sage and eucalyptus leaf

were following a script, a cosmic blue-print, which I don’t buy for a second.

                                                                                               Sweat drying on my back  

and shoulders feels like a second skin, one size too small, too tight:

                                                                                                                   there’s a clamor

of bird song, a rustle in the undergrowth: then the animals stop breathing.

*When the “Fault”(an underground trench that runs the length of California) goes into its ultimate full-tilt boogey mode, anyone who finds himself near that particular epicenter is in for an exciting time indeed. It’s not exactly like falling in love, but it will rock your world.   

Led Zeppelin - When the levee breaks 

Strange people

Blood Reign 50 x 23 cm

AEGEAN BLUE

A tallish girl hair lifting as she spreads olive oil

on a mosquito bite in this hurricane of light

the branches of an oleander bush in front of some bungalows

hung with bikini bottoms—no sign of tops anywhere—

one of the actual bottoms they barely conceal  

under the shower inside and the girl of course she’s  

singing and the thin-voiced cicada is singing right back.

The Big Baby Blue, a vast yacht mounted by a helicopter,

is tied up in the harbor, a woman moving around on deck  

and decked-out in a turquoise bathrobe is

playing the role of prophetic concubine. Drastically

hung-over will she hang herself after making a 

vatic statement? Or maybe she’ll reveal her new

boob-job and we, sipping our coffee, might even have

the courtesy to say, “fascinating, darling,” and softly applaud.

Life is good, it even permits one to walk around in a bathrobe

before people like us, jaded, postmodern tourists, who watch her    

the way intellectuals schlep through a suburban shopping mall    

when they should be reading Proust or Hegel, or at least Hemingway—

pretty much, in other words, with zero degree of commitment —

building word bridges to Erehwon and actually being paid to do so. 

Led Zeppelin - The Rover 

California Dreaming

Palm 40 x 50 cm

WHY I’M NOT A REGIONAL POET

There are at least three climate zones here. As the fog

   cools espresso

scented mornings in Tiburon, in eucalyptus-rich Berkeley,

everything grayish and sweet, a few miles away in Contra Costa

County a freshly washed pair of jeans dries in just thirty minutes

   of unhindered sunshine. About thirty-miles more inland,

in even hotter Livermore Valley, where physicians and shrinks maintain

   tax shelter “farms,”

the zinfandel grape—known as “Primitivo”

   in the Abruzzi and Puglia—flourishes, while the slower

   growth of pinot noir and chardonnay

is managed in cooler, foggier Napa-Sonoma. In winter

chains of bright green hills look like Ireland and Wales though by July

   as bleached and dry platinum and incendiary

as any plain in Cervantes. We swim in pools of chlorinated water

   usually a neighbor’s because only neighbors have swimming pools

the ocean too cold up here in the North for sustained immersion.

In what we call winter—okay, stop laughing—we soak in redwood hot tubs

   talking about what ever

passes through our badly singed synapses. Many of us, even the natives—

   a fatigued sunburned lot who meet

   once a year in Oxnard for chipped beef on toast—

have trouble remembering the state flower, bird, motto, lapses that

   may have more to do with chronic herbal abuse than indifference.

Maybe I’m a regional poet after all, though I detest the genre: aren’t we so great,

   it seems to say, aren’t we so lovely posing in our provincial pig sties,

that warm stupid feeling a child has just after wetting the bed.

Still, it’s not easy getting entirely away from where it all began, poet

   of a dream state. A state of dreams

that really does believe it resides in paradise but only sometimes:

   when there isn’t a serial killer

making the rounds, adding body parts to his collection, when

the earth is steady as she goes, no hillside stranger in my lap,

   no half a school on my roof,

when the governor doesn’t wear cowboy boots at a press conference….

I would prefer not to say anything more about it.

   It might run away then, this state of mind,

to a space where the sun is less ambitious, where regional identity

 is not an issue of wine & cheese,

the nebulous Zen message or the nose job

but of God, guns, abstinence and unwanted pregnancies.

 The Mamas and the Papas - California Dreamin'

Roots

Verwurzelt - Rooted 23 x 30,5 cm

AMERICA’S DREAMING

One day it must have been the other

day I was talking to a guy in a bar

harsh daylight outside, inside as dark

as a mine shaft with neon beer logos 

lighting the way to alcoholic oblivion

and I was trying to remember Ingmar Bergman’s

camera man, his name, not the grace

and intelligence of his artistry, only his name,

when I by the way asked this guy what he did for a living.

Just passing through, he answered, just drifting by.

Well, right-on to that, I said, and we bumped fists softly.

Sven something, I said, slapping the bar.

He’s the camera guy.

The Swedes have contributed

mightily to this country, the man whose

name I didn’t know said. Let’s not

forget the Irish, I countered, gentle but firm,

their unerring sense of music and unprecedented mastery

of what is essentially the language of their oppressors.

A strangely aborted wet sound filled the air as the barman

tried to soak up some spilt beer with a dry sponge.

So much of what we say, the man said, is inconsequential.

That’s why people everywhere prefer to dream.

Just outside the Pottery

Barn in Vermont, or the Cheese factory

in Wisconsin, or the Edible Complex in Oakland, they’re all dreaming.

On a flight between LAX and Houston two manic-talking

bloated business dudes, each taking a breath, pausing  

to observe the finely articulated bottom and hips of a passing stewardess,

are dreaming too, even when they’re wide awake at 30,000 feet up.  

 3rd movement, New World Sypmphony by Antonin Dvorak

conducted by Herbert von Karajan