easter sunday at the switch

giant white square aglow
dripping day glo triangles

a solemn man marches
beside a melting bowl of sun

arms crossed beneath her mask
i remember where the warmth pressed

today was a fat black stripe of loneliness
black oil comet crossing out the sky

a pickup truck growls at what it must heed
such strange vacancy, everything blinking

sunlight seeps slowly through the gathering silver coin
i spent the day pillowed on and kissing carpet

blood silhouettes a pointing finger’s fist
peel your words off slow as if clutching glass

i’m gonna talk to the river but i won’t jump in
what no one will say unless they despise you

the blonde baby elf girl discovers dancing on the sidewalk
train trumpets from the tracks, making them a band

what if civilization ended now and everyone
around was who you had to survive with?

kicking your footprints ahead of you
until you never see, until you never know

dusty gold swapped for gorgeous deep blue
emeralds & sapphires strung across the street

meditation on the awareness of death

TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language   -William Cullen Bryant

in between
bouts of pillow pair of windows 
burgundy drapes bludgeon the sooty light staggers in through 
lids of lids you arise and descend slender lime wedge stairs 
exhaled from brick into monday evening's quelled 
street still feels like late afternoon playing games with time 
again your clock double-crossed as your always black 
clad neighbor quite nice in spite of the attire sits on some 
steps nearby talking on his cellphone while he takes his smoking 
outside the coroner sky has pulled the sheet over us today not 
cold nor cool but not quite warm either you wear a burgundy 
sweater beneath your black rain jacket the numbers ascending 
as you begin you begin 
to notice fresh stumps where all the tree limbs were 
amputated away from our wires and now you recall 
waking up to that saw as you wonder if trees scream 
and every amputated limb is an amber moon that makes you 
wince beneath the clouds strangled in the sky 
as you walk beneath them 
and then you come to the cemetery you did not come to 
visit any buried bodies or repair a grave with flowers  
you are only here to exploit its calm 
quiet the graveyard get away that blanket does not 
warm but quell and you 
do not inspect the grave markers nor read the tombstones 
though you long to peer inside that tiny old church 
grieving in the cemetery's middle as you gaze up 
sucked into the hush of elderly trees like grandparents 
who do not speak much but whose presence slows you 
down teaches you another speed  
odd this burying of bodies when they are deceased 
but you have never stayed in one place long enough to belong 
so how could you know what it's like to 
die in the place you belonged to and so you walk among them 
breathing deeper as if the air were blessed 
water waiting for your lungs to accept the sign 
and then just before you have completed 
tracing the contours of the cemetery's square 
you notice a bird perched high in one of the old trees 
you do not see very well but somehow you always notice 
the birds as if attuned to their presence even though 
this one has not called or sung 
it watches as you approach peering through the web of still 
skeletal branches as if you could identify but 
you can tell that the feathers of its head are lighter 
as if the bird were wearing a pale hood over 
the rest of its darker body as it flutters to 
a different branch and you continue to circle the tree 
you find a dead squirrel lying on the ground near a grave 
as another scrambles up the bark and you look up 
at the bird still watching and decide to leave not wanting 
to interrupt anymore than you have wondering if 
anyone has ever died while visiting a cemetery 
as you walk back home to sit on your pillow again.

the most disgusting dollar

he threw a dollar down as if placing a contemptuous bet, his face a rigged game, gaunt & pale like a gray cloud cast out & climbing the west hills' fence. “do i know you” he asked, poking me from across the aisle where he sat slumping as if he didn't have a spine, but his eyes had a strange blue intensity that reminded me of when i was a kid, playing with electricity, teasing arcs of blue from their caves. “i don’t know where this dollar came from” he said to his female friend slumped beside him in a gray sweatshirt, pale & gaunt too, his dark cloud accomplice, together hugging the concrete like a fog the sun didn't bother to burn through. they may not have been as old as they looked. a wooden cane rested against his inner thigh as he loudly slurred numbers into his meekly cradled phone. hands like an old web trembling from catching too large a prize, each number popping balloons inside the bus as the rest of us grimly stare from within our cones of silence, cubed in ice. his friend said she found the dollar on the corner. wasn’t theirs he said & flung it in the aisle like nose blown tissue, crumpled & thrown away. “let’s see who grabs it” he says & the ice around us thickened. next to me a young guy, dressed in denim, strokes his electronic device. oblivious, his skinny legs splayed too wide beside me, his too warm thigh pressing against mine. halfway to work and i’m already trapped, freaking inside the can, plotting an escape, but then a wheelchair gets on at the next stop & there isn't another seat, so i flip through a magazine from my backpack, searching for something, anything that could transport me, but the river is the only poem today that can take me and on the bus it's just too brief. i strain my head to peek through a thicket of rain jacketed torsos as we pass above its indifferent reclining body. downtown, once we are finished with our bridge, they get off at the first stop. but then he almost forgets his fred meyer recycled bag stuffed beneath the seat and so returns, stumble slithering down the aisle, gripping his cane in one hand while crooking his phone against his ear. “hey, his friend asks, what about that dollar?” and he says leave it, it was never theirs, as an unheard sigh is released and the bus expands again like some sort of psychic accordion and the ice begins to thaw. next stop, a couple of blocks before i get off, a gaunt grizzled man tented in a huge winter green parka, pencil head buried in a green bay packers knit hat, plops down across from me, and then suddenly springs out of his box & pounces on the dollar near my feet, holding it up to my face and asking, “is this your dollar?” “no, i say with a deep sigh, that's not my dollar.”

to remember is to embrace once again

crossing the street on my way home one sunday afternoon i saw something furry laying beside the curb. peering as if over a ledge i saw a large white cat lying there stiff & terribly still, some of its fur frosted pink but not like spilling wine in the snow. i stood there frozen, stabbed in the solar plexus thinking, "oh no kitty!" and then a middle-aged woman wearing a bicycle helmet crossed the street and i felt relieved as middle-aged women who wear bicycle helmets usually know how to handle such matters. i say, "excuse me do you recognize this cat?" and she says that she's often seen it wandering around her block and thinks it was homeless but she doesn't know and she doesn't what else to do and so we turn and go our separate ways. there's probably someone to call but i don't know who. i love cats but i don't have one because i live alone in a studio apartment and i would feel bad leaving an animal alone in my apartment all day and i go out a lot but then i remember the cat picture i took one morning walking to my favorite cafe. i met a sweet white cat along the way as i walked past the funky house with the plastic dinosaurs in the apocalyptic front yard. the cat emerged from its rubble purring and eager to be pet, so sweet i took its picture, which i saved in my phone. upstairs, alone in my studio, i take a moment to scroll through the memories i have recorded, finding the picture that neatly ties this sad package. 

pulling words from no empty quarter

Mexican men tip irrigation hoses into each adjacent hole to be filled, spade tipped to save their backs for when the land will demand they bend again. fields arrayed in trays, scraped with rows and placed upon dirty counters to lamp beneath the incessant sun. monotonous swathes of khaki. middle-aged Mexican women pack sysco boxes with plastic peanuts to Styrofoam the journey of something that was pulled. apprehensive cows stare at what enters through the gate pointing exotic equipment at their faces, numbered tags dangling from their ears. an angry wind hurls its abuses at the grass again & again. its rage ripping what it can, down in the dirt feeling for anything that could be thrown, tossing topsoil in an epic tantrum.  wild grass, nearly as dry as bone, knits the earth down. around here what won’t stay down gets flung. at the end of the end you can hear the sky at the end of the dirt road where the clouds are ground to dust, knuckled beneath the horizon is scissored along this longest hem, in this insistently demarcated land, as far as eye will allow light to bend, this eye far, this sky scaped equal to and competing with the land that runs alongside like a herding dog that won’t give an inch. you can hear the sky at the end of the dirt road is a scar where the chest of nowhere was pried open & probed. dirt scar parts the dry itchy wave of grass, wind beaten & abused until you are lost and tenacious inside its toil crusted heart. the tedium hills that don’t draw a straight line or do the draw them as wavy as a drunk man traces the evolution of his machinery, evolving toward what would save his back. the growl plant parses the hydration, its moving parts synchronized to chant its oiled liturgy, surrounded by mute meadow, scorned beneath sky.  miniature cowboys lead their horses to rehearsal. boot heels grinding the affectionless dirt of this unkissed land, this stone rubbed industry of dirt & dust that only barely tolerates a human life. wind the sky’s machinery, they shall wind the sky until its tight enough growl too, machine the predator’s tool to exert a precisely calculated force over its victim land, in its victim land. daughters are assistants who rehearse the folding in the latino laundry. their little boy unleashes his play upon them for now but he will work soon enough. jeans & hats grip the rails beside the next man preparing to be sacrificed in the theater of horse vengeance. men splayed on the ground forcing boots into the deepest stirrup they can, hoping to delay the inevitably violent evacuation from wild they allowed to remain. from here a far off curtain of rain sweeps casually toward birdsong. a body of water laps the tumbled baby teeth that lines its shore. a small family pushes a stroller down the sidewalk past a painted mural of syllabic togetherness, its pictures thumbnail a story so much smaller than the land their lives are pulled from. a rooster crows behind the scrolling sign, both of them announcing what’s on sale to no one. clouds tower behind the stacked hay hangar, effortlessly mocking the work of men. a river slithers in the canyon it carved for obsessive eons, pinnacles of stoic stone, once submerged, point mercilessly at the indifferent sky god. save your money and barge your wheat to Portland the farmer says. solemn men pacing their dusk dusted land cradle their deadly sleeping babies like rifles as their dog sniffs ahead, eager for trouble. teenagers toss rotating bags of onions like luggage just arriving on a red eye from the fields, tractor tilled and spewing chaff. and the hills have nothing to say still. a dam is a canvas where we paint a still life of the river’s near death. the ancient Japanese-Americans who were shunted into the barbed corner of this, their home, bow before their shrines. spy the river through the trees, eavesdrop on its murmuring secrets as it twists through a parched belly. slanting shadows zigzagging across the postal exterior. in this corner of the state, all towns are small & humble before the land, as if hoping to be forgiven their existence. forklift constructed stacks beside smokeless columns beside their tin sheds of silence which is redundant here. friday night football field carves a rectangle of light from the dark desert night. beserk young men prepare for whatever war might use them. and the utter dark around them, barely kept away, hovers both soon and near. and ghosted hands pat the dough into shape for the man fed oven. snippeting rhythmic bursts of palm patter. this place is a hole, deepened to extract its metal, a deeper grave dug to excruciating the loss. the gum of nothingness excavated for a pulled tooth of metal to sell. abandoned land left awaiting bodies to fill. and each one defined by function, each type of pull. the land where they have coned its aluminum hum. truck dumped load while the forklift lingers at the lip of the hole. and whole hayfields ingested row by orderly row, suctioned and spit into parallel trucks driving alongside until they separate wide, leaving the eaten wheat heart bleeding beneath a jagged tooth hill.

http://www.emptyquarterfilm.org/