Back to the Garden

Der Garten - The Garden 39 x 25 cm Acryl/Pastel on wood

ADAM AND EVE IN BERKELEY

Climbing under the blanket

on the back lawn, more or less

in our underwear, was not

a gesture of defiance designed to

annoy alarm or disgust

the neighborhood zombies—

I prefer to label it

maturity put on layaway. For a long time.

It’s still there, I think, feathered in dust, moldering

on a rusty shelf with microwaves and crystal balls.

Then there was Animush, meaning either

“peace pipe” or “war path” in Apache,

German shepherd

mixed with some other breed

manic with celebration, dancing around

the Incredible Moving Blanket while a mega spider

its puffy partially collapsed beer belly

the color of a soiled cotton ball

loomed weirdly in its broken web—a noticeably decadent

monster, like a character in top hat out of Huysman or Proust

                  cruising the Moulin Rouge

feasting on young girls from the provinces

just as we feasted on tomatoes & cucumbers

fresh from Denny’s garden and coated in

oil of sassafras, Italian vinegar, or lemon juice.

I think I was reading an introduction

to the Eros of Art or was it the Art of Eros

and you were reading the Palm of God,

sighing all the way through, astonished by its size,

its deep crevice of solitude.

 

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Woodstock

Swamped

California on my Mind I 35 x 33 cm

BAYOU

You can’t imagine how long it took me

to find out that life is not a French movie  

in which the characters are precisely elliptical

in that Gaullic fashion we once thought

so witty and admirable, everywhere reeking

of cigarette smoke and of easy-

going sex and good strong coffee, it’s never

that frivolous, a difficult or dangerous situation

might surface that requires grace under pressure,

calm, focus, stealth, and even

cunning if that’s what fits,

even a kind of Machiavellian

twist to the plot—a move like that of Michael’s

in the “Godfather,” or Peter O’Toole’s King Henry

in the “Lion In Winter.” I’ve seen too many movies

because most of the time life is more 

like a documentary on PBS

about the unfortunates who live in a trailer park

lost down some ignoble rural route  

in the deep-fried South, and where it occurs

to a stand-up philosopher one Sunday evening

at a roadhouse adjacent a stinking swamp

that our freedom is nothing but an illusion,

is some other guy’s story in the end, an amiable

asshole, surely, but one with a lot more re-     

sources and pull than we will ever have, in fact   

he’s doing the Machiavellian twist

right now with the lap dancer we’d hoped—

stupidly, expensively— to spend the night with.

Meanwhile management is washing its

hands of us, and we find ourselves    

lodged between a pair of moo-moos in house-slippers

who in a certain light resemble the bloated remnants

of Thelma and Louise. Floral and huge

as a twin-set of rain soaked sofas 

on some sagging back porch in Baton Rouge

they dream of day-time soaps and the cunning smiles of evening anchors. 

Born on the Bayou

California on my Mind

California on my Mind No. II 35 x 33 cm

WAITING IN LINE  

We’re having baby potatoes sprinkled with rosemary

 and thickened with cheese,

   broad beans and a kebab

invention, minus skewers, which are thought hazardous

   in our violent household.

That’s not true. We’re having beef burgers from Jolly’s

   they’re only fifteen-cents each

on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is how the poor survive in America,

   a nose for the good deal,

a taste for bad food, solid stoic pioneer staying power

   making it less difficult to stand in line

   an hour for the pleasure of ordering ten beef four regular

fries one onion rings strawberry shake three cokes to go. You made friends

   in those lines, talked Giants Dodgers 49ers

   Buster Mathis beating the crap

   out of George Chuvalo on TV last night. Nureyev

   guest-dancing at the Frisco Ballet

wasn’t brought up by anyone, out of ignorance,

   out of indifference.

   Politics? No good news there, and yet

how I long for the year of Watergate. At least there was something

   interesting on TV. I’d cut school just to watch senator

Sam Erwin grill H.R. Haldeman, also known as “Bob”

   who’d let his crew-cut grow out

so he looked gentle and sleepy-eyed, and so soft-spoken you’d

never have known he’d once been King Richard’s Sturmführer 

and was not a nice guy in an apron most days, broom in hand,

   proud proprietor of the general store on Main Street

squint-eying your fifteen year old daughter semi-dressed in short-shorts

and then after him was Bob’s colleague big John Erlichman, which in German  

   means “honest man,” an irony almost

gross in its obviousness, or the preternaturally

tedious John Dean

with his overwhelming fear of being raped in prison

and whose wife’s hairdo was a masterpiece of sculpted platinum.

   She looked like a very sad Athena.

   What would a reunion be like? Bob

Haldeman, the two Johns, the Hairdo, and even Dick and Pat and Trish and

   the totally unmemorable  

David Eisenhauer(Trish’s squeeze), all of us lined up at Jolly’s, waiting our turn,

trying to think of something to say the others might understand.

   A few of us (ill-bred,

indiscreet, semi-rural suburbanites) might even ask those—those who

   qualified—what it was like being dead.

Romeo and Juliet, ballet by Kenneth McMillan

with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev

Music Sergej Prokofiev

Paradise Revisited

untitled trees 38,5 x 28,5 cm oil sticks and oil pastels

Und ich experimentiere weiter mit meinen Ölfarben. Ich finde es wirklich gut, dass die Ölfarben und die Ölpastelle kompatibel sind - wenn man die Geduld hat zu warten bis das Öl einigermaßen trocken ist.

I keep experimenting with my oil colors. It is great that the oil sticks and the oil pastels are compatible - if you find the patience to wait for a while until the oil is more or less dry.

A "paradise" that was once our home - San Francisco c/o Karin Goeppert

Our most recent "paradise": Berlin-Kreuzberg c/o Karin Goeppert

HOTEL PARADISE

From a window in paradise you see an elegant girl

running into the courtyard. Three elephants and their

white garbed handler soon follow. There is no sense of danger

but it is crowded. Ignoring the others—the bowlers, the fat

lady about to sing—she walks over to the marble well and

putting face into hands starts to cry. You feel it must be

the mediocrity of life—obtuse, tacky, badly lit

day time TV life—that’s making her sad. But then what is  

the upside? A cantata sung in Leipzig perhaps. A Tuscan landscape.

How about crème brulet served by a bewitching angel? For some people    

uncomplicated couplings in culs-de-sac do the trick. Just look upwards,

amigo, this season the girls are very tall indeed. Angelic witches. They look

right through you. No wonder you are under water half the time, 

scrubbing obsessively, trying to get that smell of need off your skin.

 Hotel California - The Eagles