The Horses: New & Selected Poems

Storing the Day

244 sToring The dAy The squirrel scampers start stop in the green plots where the sidewalk meets the street Its tail ripples above it like a dream it’s having Clear blue late fall day light wind I’m coming back from shopping at the Berkeley Bowl thinking as I often do about all the dead people I know Lee Sleazy Leesy my old theater buddy the countless auditions the handful of shows our pissing and parsing Gielgud vs, Brando Rorty vs. Plato Suzanne my former poetry student who became my friend who before her suicide seemed to be snubbing me becoming almost my enemy My mother who lived so hard My father who lived so softly I feel them down beneath my feet not so much underground as kinetically down flatlined simplified Overhead the sky mocks sublimely slow vast revolving door The squirrel cascades here between stiff little bucktoothed face salt and pepper merging to red almost a fox color on belly and tail sparky calculus of squirrelness And I’m making like Rilke saying “garden” saying “tree” “Bay Area” “curve of the Earth” Still as I walk through this flame-leafed day those stopped shadows pull at me Lee’s eyes depressed acid astonished braggadocio You fool, Lee They saved you that first time it burst put some weird wire mesh in your stomach But you went on eating smoking drinking until that aortic aneurysm burst again got its sloppy seconds Suzanne Can’t Can’t talk to you even in memory You’re walled You’ve severed yourself just as you meant to do 245 in the shock waves of that gunshot As if you felt hideous ungainly raw flesh nerve endings without a skin as if the skin became the beauty of your house and gardens flawlessness of the dinner parties Buddhism philanthropy therapy poetry But who could have imagined a bullet in the brain you whom violence so unstrung that you’d do it on the deck for Bud to find you A rage revenge? Or delivering yourself drilled baby to his arms? One time One time only says Rilke and so I drink at this brilliance bracketed between their deaths and my own edges and textures this long-legged girl on her bike perched rakishly as she leans into her motion these trees along the street so distinctly leaved colored so much themselves yet like breathing like smoke The squirrel has flowed up the stalk of a wilted sunflower stopped partway up All I can see are his feet gripping it bulk of his body eyes bulging at the sides of his head odd suddenly like a large bug When my mother and father died fourteen years apart they became death central My father whom I loved so tenderly towards the end reversed like my child Daddy who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t in his TV chair why he was in this white place of constant needles and disturbance My mother who’d become demented a wind wafting through her head but still my mother “The Boss” they called her at the home lost and invincible chattering in the dayroom Fathomless to store the beauty of this day against it rehearsing or working my counter-magic The big zeroing out So simple actually once you’ve seen it done not really strange like other dimensions strings and so forth 246 The squirrel’s tail is rippling It’s worked its way up to the drooping flower seems to have found some seeds It nibbles and moves short shifts super-quick Little dummy pumping at the center of its life ...