SUMMER SQUASH IN A WINTER GARDEN

SUMMER SQUASH IN A WINTER GARDEN

The first sign of winter begins as a small vegetable mold on the leaves,
jagged five-veined hearts pointing away from the nest in radial asymmetry.
Fractal curve of young leaves guard embryonic clusters
caught too late in the season and yellow-orange squash blossoms
curl their five arms around the fruiting body to keep it warm.
From the velvet throat, the stamen, like a finger,
or brain coral, rises up from a phallic stock. Floral love.
Pale green veins end with small claws at the tip and base of each flower
like two hands—one holding up the sky,
the other holding up the sun, as if in victory.
The base root swelling through the boundaries of star
shaped fruit until it becomes a crenulated sundog on the horizon.

Beneath the leaf canopy, an acrid odor of beetles
or formalin gives way to the sweet sap of mute inverted bells.
Yellow fruit. Pure cadmium pigment from the tube, so intense
it pushes back the green air with small vibrations of light.
In the heat of summer you can almost hear them growing,
taut-skinned summer squash, ripening to bursting point,
scattering small blind eyes in the soil, waiting for the signal
to unzip the genetic ladder. Vegetable love.
This extravagance of life too soon ends.
The kitchen knife reveals their hidden star charts,
the marrow and vein of space. Tracks of seeds—
stars streaking in the direction of dawn.

I remember my grandmother picking the unpollinated flowers,
looking inside each one, saying, they'd never bear fruit.
I never knew how she could tell — sexing each squash blossom,
dredging them into egg and flour and frying them in butter
until they were dinosaur tracks of the sun
feeding me in late summer. Nutty sweetness
and the promise of something more.

And you, unseasonable bitter fruit, tough-skinned vessel,
why so yellow? A love token of the sun's fickle attention?
Undone by your own surgery, you try to cleave your broken halves,
heal the breach with your veneous dealings
but you can't fix the imperfect symmetry of your heart
severed from its circular discourse by the steel blade.
There is little comfort in remembering the corpse of our love,
or in knowing that you're a beetle-browed Sisyphus
condemned to dragging your sterile sex from woman to woman
like a victory torch in a perpetual race where
no one gets to be on top of the dung heap.

11/6/1988
rev. 9/91

1992 First Leaves

ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89

ECLIPSE OVER KIEV, 8/17/89 *

                                     Where the darkness of the silent caves
                                      Is lovelier than the royal halls.

Your tongue will lead you to Kiev, someone says.
The golden domes and crosses of Sofiski Sobor
have conversed with the stars for a millennia.
Gutted Uspensky Sobor, a reminder of faith and betrayal.
The tower sank then sprang out of the earth in a single night.
In Pecherskaya Lavra, beneath cobbled streets,
mummified monks sleep in the Near and Far Caves.
Candles in the dark. We carry the moon underground.
After a week of rain, the cornice of the main post office
gave up the fight with gravity and slipped off--
the way my grandmother did, talking of hedgehogs
loose in the living room again. A premonition of darkness
I don't understand. Eleven people killed. Withered roses
and gladioli strung up against the pale fence.
At the ruins of the Golden Gate, a crowd gathers
to remember the place where they died.

We run alongside the Kiev-Moscow train saying goodbye.
I send messages home, I'm staying on. Kopeks in my pocket.
Sasha and Jessica are in love. She is leaving with the other students.
This train weaves a thread across the green steppes to San Francisco.
Sasha and I hold hands and walk back to the waiting bus.
When he cries, I tell him this is how friendship begins
between our two countries, when people fall in love.
He says, I will be a statue of Buddha with candles in each hand,
will you take me back to the States with you, then?
I tell him, I will roll you up in a fine persian carpet.
Grisha wants to know how to spell courage. A capitalist at heart,
he dreams of becoming president of Chrysler Corporation.
He asks, what is a four letter word for people without courage?
I don't know. I hear the rain, common thief of the night.
Leaving Kiev under a red moon, the bus driver admonishes
it is unlucky to whistle indoors, it brings bad luck.

My friend makes me tea from the wild grasses of the Caucuses.
It's a Russian tradition to talk about life and politics
in the kitchen late at night, he says, we are victims of historyó
first to suffer before nations give up their borders. He says
I am a man who is dreamless. But I saw it beginning in his eyes.
I tell him he is my lips and ears, he makes no comment.
None is necessary. I'm not too sure where home is.
I find a bear's tooth buried in the river bank
the color of the eclipse moon in the dark pocket of night,
and cannot shake the fallen cornices of Kiev from my mind,
dreaming of home, a nameless disaster, white walls with oak borders.
I adjust two snakes around his neck, then pin on the crushed red rose.
The endless Ukraine. I am between worlds listening to languages
I don't understand. Even the ground is quaking.

* Written exactly two months before the San Francisco earthquake.

1992 First Leaves
1990 Poetry USA, fall issue

THE SAVAGE DREAM

THE SAVAGE DREAM

Gauguin imagines his own corpse devoured by ants.

He carries arsenic in a Peruvian olla up to the mountains.

When suicide fails, cursing God, he returns to painting

the myth of abundance, the golden tropics without a shadow

on the horizon. Te oviri rerioa. The savage dream.

He writes: your work can never be too luminous.

Let everything you do breathe. I'm hard at work.

I am entering into truth, into nature.

Civilization has fallen from me little by little.

I know the odor of the soil.

The concept wells up like a volcano blossoming

strong, hard and pungent, a tapestry of color.

Here, poetry emerges spontaneously.

There are no more refuges to flee to.

The imagination of a lonely man

has devoured his hope with dreams.

Strange white birds eat lizards—

the uselessness of this life.

2/14/89

CREAMERY CREEK

CREAMERY CREEK
   —for Albert Straus

Teddy Roosevelt fished here.

That is why this part of the creek, where it enters Tomales Bay

is called White House Bend. The flash and churn 

of silver salmon spawned in cowshitted green water—

a coinage of fiery fish, unturned stones and politics.

With a pitchfork, my uncle speared a salmon

fat with roe—escaped embers combusting downstream

where the given name changes again and again

but not the creek. Creamery, Lagunitas, Papermill.

The Miwok names are lost.

With rosemary from my grandmother's garden, we seasoned the salmon.

Nestled in the resin-green needles, a surprise of pale blooms 

like fragments of the sky against sunrisen flesh 

wrapped in a tinfoil night. We baked it in butter and garlic

but the flesh was like muddied water.

The cats fought over the feathered bones.

Each pool was named: Shafter's, China House, The Gravel Pit, Taylor. 

Beneath dank redwoods, rags from the City were pulped into paper

by big paddles when Papermill Creek was still untamed.

Near the Inkwells, so deep, everyone said they were bottomless,

we found obsidian and chert arrowheads, nameless iron, 

coins and wedding rings. Who we were. Where we came from.

In summer, my chestnut mare plunged through pools,

her hair, floating in verdent water like fire.

I slipped off her back, grabbed hold of her tail

and was towed to the opposite shore

not understanding the sense of loss.

Years later, my uncle said, I feel guilty

taking that salmon before she laid her eggs.

My uncle said, Before Kent dam was built

the Cataracts were alive with falls.

When the wind blew, dense stands 

of pine and redwood roared like fire.

Now, silt feeds the azaleas, stream orchids

and huckleberries. No coinage of fish.

The forests, the dairies—nearly all gone now.

Perhaps, forseeing the end of civilization,

this is why the Romans named the rosemary for remembrance.

Creamery/Lagunitas/Papermill Creek fed by all the tributaries:

Arroyo, and Barranca—where, in the small summer pools

I caught trapped fish bare-handed; a bagpipe skirling

Amazing Grace from some forgotten canyon at sunset.

Devil's Gulch, Crystal Springs. All the names—even Kit Carson left his mark.

At the headwaters of Creamery Creek—named after Jóse Revere's milking barn

where Alexander Graham Bell set up the first telephone system

in the San Geronimo Valley—did they shout through copper wires

at midnight, The Indians are coming! The Indians are coming!

to those recording the historic event in the kitchen of the main house?

We are already here on the last wild ride of the long night.

And what of the Miwok names?

6/4/88    Marshall/Pt. Reyes

1991 San Geronimo Valley Resource Guide

1989 First Leaves