I must go back to Lamont

Take the 184 south

Past the dust bowl dead

And street names like Halleluia

Where boarded up storefronts

Look blindly on the refinery

(Nobody can say what it makes so fine)

And the dusk heralds mountain breezes

Blowing cow smell one day, chemical smell the next.

There’s a boy who lives in a trailer behind his granny’s house

Another boy who dresses all in black and stays in his room

Girls with hair trailing down their backs walk along the road

Carrying Mexican sweets and cell phones

Their parents purchased from their work in the fields

When I go back again

I will search out a place

The library, perhaps—or maybe the park—

Someplace where I can sit undisturbed and out of the way

And let it all wash over me: dead and living.

My child is leaving me

It is a slow departure

Years in length, really.

And people will say to me

“It starts on the day they are born.”

It's not true. They tell me that to assuage their own pain.

I can’t say to you with certitude the day she started to go.

I only know that I sit here at this moment

Feeling nothing

Not even sadness

An amnesiac waking up

And wonders where the last 17 years have gone

Wonders what was done

Accomplished

And rising from bed

Goes outside

Light blinding

Vaguely remembers how to get to the bus stop

And hopes she still has change.

Found and Lost

In those moments when light and dark are indistinguishable

—Meaning, of course,
That they have been so thoroughly removed from context and
Not that you are unable to truly tell the difference
between dawn and dusk;
Especially here, where the dusk still has the Great Valley
Stink of petroleum-based products
and old air carried down from the San Francisco delta;
But the dawn
That wonderful dawn, people-quiet and earth-vibrant
When mountains burst naked pink
And the dog isn’t barking next door
And if it’s Monday, maybe there’s a low rumble
Of the green waste truck two blocks down
And the scrape/roll of plastic on cement
As someone hurries his can down to the street’s edge
And shapes are just sharper and so are smells
But only in a good way
A cut-grass, dew-on-plant way
The way taste is after you finally stop smoking.
Just like that—

Those moments when I first wake from a nap, for instance,
And not immediately able to tell exactly
Whether it’s only dinnertime
or if I was able to sleep through the night
It’s in those moments when I have lost my sense of time
and I am still with you
Still naked pink bursting, still low rumble hoping
Still sharp and good.
And I ask myself, “Is this before we died?”
And every path is still before us.
Nothing has been chosen, set aside, thrown away, forgotten.
But again and again, the smell of delta air filters through
It’s dinnertime. I get up, stiff-limbed,
Work clothes post-mortem wrinkled.

California City. Population: 13,000-ish.

I show my daughter the sign. "What exactly IS a whoremonger, mom?"

"Well, it's someone really into whores."

"Like, a pimp?"

"Actually, I think it's more like a john."

"I dunno. I think it's more like a pimp. You know. A monger." She makes a gathering-in gesture with her arms.

I look "whoremonger" up in the dictionary. "Hey. It means either a pimp or a john."

Mongers give and receive, evidently.

Ghost

In the family photos
I am the one
Standing transparent between
Former siblings,
Former in-laws and nephews and nieces.
I don’t block anyone’s view, or make anyone laugh with my bad puns.

I am captured on film
A poltergeist looking straight into the camera unsmiling
The harbinger of a wrong-doing
“committed years ago, you know,
very sad, actually”
buried outside the churchyard
morphing from flesh to bone to legend to less than legend to ghost.

And later, a former something-or-other will
Hold the portrait close, examine that space in between and say
“isn’t that…”
Your dinner guest will ask—as is only appropriate—
“There was someone before?”
I’ll watch from the photo as you answer
“Not really…”
And blow her a cold kiss.

We stand in front of the flat screen TV waiting to pay for our lunch, watching Barak Obama as he is guided through the Pyramids with a highly regarded (I would think) Egyptologist. The sound is off, there's at least five people in front of me, so I scrutinize the images more than I might have. The scholar sports crumpled denim and an Indiana Jones hat, I note. In contrast, the President looks quite GQ in an unbuttoned black polo shirt and light khaki trousers...

But wait! What is that I see? Is he... No... No way...

Oh. My. God.

He is.

The President is chewing gum. Not just chewing. Smacking. With what might have been considered a rolling bovine movement, if it weren't for the focus and intensity. In the case of Barack, I'm watching a 1940s sports announcer calling the final moments of the Big Game.

Okay, yes, I know: our culture has gone soft in its attention to formality. We don't dress up to board a plane. Or wear jeans just on the weekends. Or use flip flops just for the grotty shower at a camp site. People chew gum everywhere. At funerals. At symphonic concerts. At city council meetings. I was at a school play waiting for the lights to go down, looked around the auditorium and thought, "Holy shit. We've become a community of cows."

But the Head of State?

I told my daughter about the news cast. "It just looked so tacky. I think he needs to be modeling appropriate behavior. Good manners. He's the President, for god's sake."

"You don't know the circumstances, Mom," she said. She's in love with Barack. "Maybe he had an upset stomach and needed some mint and the only mint immediately available was in the form of a Chiclets. Maybe he was self-conscious about his breath. Maybe he was jet lagged and trying to stay alert. Maybe he was trying not to smoke. Maybe an Egyptian diplomat gave him the gum and it would have been culturally inappropriate not to have chewed it. You don't know, Mom. Quit assuming the worse about people. God."

All right. For now, I'll give the President the benefit of the doubt. It's way more than I would have done for Bush.

The Poem Farmer

There was a woman I knew once. A poem farmer. Each morning she would go out into her field and pick fresh verse from the vine. Sometimes, when I came by to visit, she would watch me eat it from a large bowl. Other times, she would join me and we would sit together on the porch eating fresh verse mixed with whatever berries I would find growing wild on the side of the road between my house and hers. The berries changed with the season. Her verse ripened year-round.

"You're getting plump on verse," she told me. "It becomes you."

At some point, she decided it was most appropriate to disappear from the world. "I'm too distracted," she explained.

I stood at the door to her farmhouse and watched, Alice-like, as she disengaged, limb by limb.

"You make me nervous," she told me, and shut the door. "But don't go."

I stood there a long time. For days. Weeks. I shifted from one foot to the other. Practiced sleeping with my left eye open. Grew accomplished at peeing into a cup and pouring it discreetly off the porch into the hydrangea, which seemed to appreciate the extra nitrogen.

She narrated nightly: "I lost a hand at twighlight. I made a fist and the more I squeezed, the more translucent it became. Eventually I could see through it entirely to where my house slippers would have been, had my feet not disappeared at noon. It makes doing chores in the kitchen a bit more complex, but never mind. It's what I desire, were I to desire anything. Which I do not."

After seventeen months, her lips spoke, which I presumed at that point were all she had left -- not being permitted to see, you understand. I recalled their fullness and their beauty, and how they came together, rounded, separated, pressed, released. How I had hoped someday to kiss them, in a friendly, see-you-later sort of way, commiting their fullness to memory.

After twenty-seven months, all that was left were her words, which continued at first to come forth in the shapings of her lips, conveniently uttered in paragraph form.

But language is a social construct, requiring context, requiring people. Without any physical connection left in the world, the talk became stranger and stranger, swimming in on itself, her words running into each other, stacking on top of each other, the weight of those on the top drowning those on the bottom, more and more stricken words sinking into the non-place where her body presumably resided. Again, I don't know for sure. But I had time on the porch to speculate.

What have you become? I asked her. I had to shout, because she had no ears.

I heard a wisp of tone, a breathless texture. I stepped closer to the door and pressed my ear against it. Her words permeated the wood. I turned to watch. As the words hit the sun, they thickened. Became dense. Tar-like. I rubbed them onto my hands and with difficulty pulled my palms apart. I looked into them.

I have dissolved, I read. Disassociated. I have dismantled. I am nothingness.

I stepped closer to the door.

Is this what you still desire? I asked her, loudly.

"No need to shout," she said without saying it. "In fact, I wish you would not speak at all. It's very irritating."

You asked me not to go, I reminded her, careful not to speak.

"Did I? I don't recall."

I turned away from the door and finally stepped off the porch. The sun had left the sky hours earlier. In its place, the moon hung full and remorseless. The poem farmer would have found it wonderfully ironic. I found it irritating. The farm was cast in blue silver shadow, distorting, re-assembling. I walked to the field where the verse vine grew, thinking to steal a cutting. But the vine had grown thick and tangled, and without sunlight, it was impossible to identify a proper joint that might be cut without causing the vine to die.

I left empty-handed. I filled them with berries on my walk home.