Poetry

The corridor, a New Jersey of the West, its stucco newness.
What king was it that built this highway?

It’s a routine we’ve worked out
to pass the winter.
I saw myself in two, in three,
into a puzzle,

How I hate you tonight!
I tick off
the bumps on your back,
your hangnails, the acid

I watch the point of the twirling stick
Where you are sleeping, where you will come again.

Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach,
That shabby, squat nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let’s aim for the summer of ’71,
When all of our friends were young and immortal.

Heavy blue veins streak across my mother’s legs,
Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles.

What was the heart of her story,
tired, on their bicycles, night

coming on while they tried to reach
Lago di Balseno, the farmer,

They left their dog and a record playing,
the boy and girl next door. Last night

they argued to music, like they do;

I wallowed in a needle-spawned world,
addicted to dope and the crazy life,
and yet there I was—in Berkeley
for my first poetry reading.

They are not
imaginary but
accessible only
intermittently.