Some Poems 2

Here is a tip:

“Just make enough money, and you’ll be okay.”

To which I replied, or wish I had, in the words of Alan Dugan:

“The cut rhododendron branches flowered in our sunless flat.”

And the better part: “Freedom is as mortal as tyranny,”

which I have never stopped thinking about, even if its meaning is simple.

A prescription for money is like the imperative to vote.

Yes, sometimes we must give in,

because we are tired of watching our loved ones die;

because, after all, it was hard to get out of bed this morning.

I love Dugan, and the dryness of his words. I have tried to emulate it in my own writing.

I have tried to love banality, all the things better left forgotten,

like old IBM computers in the Pacific Ocean.

I have tried to calculate how much it takes to live as a mediocre artist.

When I evoke Dugan, it is an evocation to a god of amateurism,

so I can ask him how much is enough,

so we can get on with things,

and make ends meet,

and make ourselves not free, not happy, but something approximate,

lying dormant, or not lying, sleeping, or waiting at all,

but somehow there,

nonetheless,

though we’ve already given so much

to looking.

To asking questions:

“Will I arrive before the guests at my funeral?”

“Who will be there?”

“When will we sell the house?”

“How much do the men holding baskets, asking for money at church, make?”

I too have caught myself looking in mirrors, like Parmigianino,

and I too have thought of Narcissus and

convection,

and gender and sexuality.

To grieving lost causes.

To living on a top floor apartment,

decorating it with faux Herman Miller furniture

and the works of amateur artists.

To passing the day reading

and then drinking beer and watching T.V.

To good company, or

a commitment to good intellectuals and intellectualism,

a something like that,

like a being towards others,

like an indifference to oneself that is

only understandable, circumscribable,

discernable in difference itself.

To just have enough to raise these questions.

To just raise a glass and say, “Thank you,

I’ve had enough now.”

“I’d like to move on with things.”

There is a train and I’d like to get on it every now and then.  

…

We were just people

and this was just some

injustice, and we were

arguing and getting ahead

of ourselves; we were

just looking for what

got lost in the refraction,

for what we gave in

exchange for all that

we got and that we

didn’t get. It made a

lot of sense when we

weren’t milk sober, but

now that we are looking

at ourselves in the daylight

we look anemic, lacking.

We are strange to our

selves and others; the

obverse of our quotidian

certainty that we are who

we say we are. The gratitude

that we receive in exchange

for pleasantries is enough

only to make us keep going,

to get what we need,

until we have to stop.

…

I’ve never been to Los Angeles;

I’ve never been to Santa Monica pier;

never saw you undress discretely under a towel

and slide your bathing suit bottoms up your legs,

over your hips, and then run into the water,

even though it’s March and only 65 degrees.

I’ve never been to Griffith Park;

never climbed the steep, sandy trail,

past hipsters and families and rattlesnakes,

to the observatory, to the striking views

that make you halt because the expanse is too much to take;

you’re like Foucault’s Pendulum.

I’ve never been to South L.A.;

paying too much for rent and gentrification,

for neo-segregation and the University police;

never walked past a dark figure and felt my

heartbeat quicken; to have nothing happen

and realize later what I’ve always known.

I’ve never been to the Valley;

truly, I don’t even know what it is or

how one gets there. I’ve never wondered

what was happening in suburban houses

behind closed doors, curtains drawn back;

never thought about sexuality and closed doors.

I’ve never wondered what the spaceship-looking

thing at LAX was for or used to be for.

Never thought about the passages of refugees,

or the indistinguishability of peoples at an airport;

never thought I could see the early embers of a wildfire

from the back seat of a car on the expressway,

the sun casting rays that make cement look like celluloid.  

…

I am looking at John Ashbery

looking at Francesco Parmigianino,

who is looking at himself.

This was an interesting

threesome

I think

later.