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