Thicket

Dickicht - Thicket 20 x 20 cm gouache/ink/spray paint on paper

BINIARAIX

It is beautiful here in this

unpronounceable place. Have you 

ever wanted to make love to a landscape?

Smoke rising from the orchards  

as shapely and transparent as a negligee

made of sheerest muslin, untouchable,

covering it all but just barely. I want to get hold

of the sunlight that drips off the palm trees here  

and smear it all over your body. How would

you respond? Have me arrested?

Involve me in a fight with your boyfriend? I’ll tell

you my name first, then give you some biographical details….

(Later, in the village tavern) hey, hombre,

I ask the guy sitting next to me at the bar

how do you get that smell around here that is 

so evocative of lemon peel all wrapped up in itself, cloves, cinna-

mon, olive oil, a dab of honey rubbed deeply  

into the succulent flesh of an organic

free-range chicken stuffed with garlic toes

roasting in its own juices?

Usually it comes evenings when the mountain’s

dissolved in shadows, and the crickets swell and roar

and the dogs are barking at other dogs barking

and the cock lies down with the hen.

Can I live here forever, I beg, totally losing it,

can I die here on this beer-stained, saw-dusty spot?

Fortunately he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.

The Dude Abides in a Globalized World

Verstrickt - Entangled 22 x 32 cm - watercolor on Yupo

THE DUDE ABIDES IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

The heat’s rising appareled in odors

of fabric softener, hamburger smoke, stagnant creek

water wafting up to us through the leaves   

as we pass the bong and sip White Russians    

all day long. Thus without benefit of lucid transition   

we’re curled up near a dovecote on a Greek island

or leaning against the Tower of Pisa. You see, Dude,

we could be anywhere and still think we’re somewhere else,

Globalization not merely a “chaotic drift of technologies”  

but a series of artifacts and flavors meeting up

in one distinctly otherish location, each object 

   roughly positioned in its own

immaculate strangeness. There’s a corn dog stand

nearby, and twenty yards away a van

   from which Tex-Mex is dispensed

to Swedish tourists. It’s jazz made in Algeria,

Dude, a Wagner festival in Seattle. I’ve been working on this poem,

gentle reader, since landfall and have no idea if it’s good enough

for you nor am I sure what it “means” half the time

thoughts like seedlings  

scattered over white paper, struggling to take root

and go crazy, yet we’re happy here, the Dude and I, including

a modest contingent of groupies down on the beach,

partly because it smells like jasmine and warm nutmeg

   and partly because there’s a bowling alley adjacent to

a shattered amphitheater its broken statue

   of Marlon Brando wearing sunglasses.