Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Signal Hill

• 3 Signal hill My father leaves us in the car and drinks beer in the Hilltop Bar. The red neon woman who wears only a ruffled apron and high heels carries a tray of drinks around and around the top of the hill to the giant robots that pump the fields. In her red light my baby brother and sister in the backseat of the car are contorted in screams Daddy doesn’t hear over the jukebox and high squeals of the barmaid I never see and wonder if she too wears no clothes. I hear her cry ah Babes! We come here every Friday when he gets paid but my brother and sister are still afraid of the creatures nodding in the dark we are parked between. The city spreads beneath us in a rainbow-spilled oil puddle. The harbor is lit with battleships that strain at their ropes toward bigger war across the sea. The dirty men keep driving up beside us. I sit in the mother’s seat and they say to me the things men say to mothers. I study her nipples that seem so gay and wonder if mine will get that way. Far below on the shore of the Pike • 4 a man sits on top of the neon needle for months just to break a record. One man says of him as he runs his middle finger across the dewy window of my face, Tough, not gettin’ any. When Daddy comes through the door beneath the spinning neon lady it is the only time I ever see him happy. Now we drive the cold side of Signal Hill, the backside of the city and sea so dark even in the middle of the twentieth century they hide the dying, the ones they still can’t cure, my mother in her sanitarium. We drive across the starry oil field to her window where she lies in the contagion ward we kids cannot go near. My father taps on her dark window and soon my mother lifts the pane and puts her porcelain hand out into the dark for him. He puts one of his on one of her large breasts that are not like the red neon woman’s and sometimes lays his head on her white arm that knows no sun and between the groans of the field letting go its oil I hear him sigh oh, honey, and sometimes jesus ...