Dango

Five Minutes in the House Alone

Going off to the pool
She recalls the first time she wore the swimsuit
it was a terribly hot summer afternoon
and she ran to her room afterwards, sobbing
the boys had made a cruel joke about it in the pool
it was the first and last time she wore it, her hands
touch the edges of the fading picture

A trip to Grand Canyon, laughing the whole way
from Bakersfield, making it in the hot dry summer
and setting up the tent with
a hundred other one-off campers
their neighbors peeling price stickers
from their newly bought sleeping bags and pads,
making faces as the shutter clicked
over the open chasm front and center

Quicker now, birthdays, graduations in succession
days at the beach and faces lost in the crowd,
time flying past until pictures came fewer
and finally no faces at all around
Anne Mullinax, quiet, retired
turns and wheels back to the kitchen
and puts the water to boil
for the second cup this hour
hears the crash of the junk mail through the door slot
and the tick of the the clock, quiet and dependable
pours a little water out into the pot with the
houseplant that curves safe and still
as the cats stretch in the sun on the wooded floor
and one meows softly and scatches to be let out.

(this was written for the `phonebook challenge` in which you pick a random name from the phonebook and write about him or her. Yet I couldn`t help writing about a real person and place.)

a window

its amazing that we who have created
warmth and music and comfy old houses
have also created slums, noise, confusion
all of us, even the most twisted trying to get
back to some state of grace, to find family
though dismissed and brushed away,
and I could swear that even the family warmth
we feel as small children is

something that may in years now dimly defined
lead us back to tracks forgotten, to climb inside
a window which never closed completely
just got somehow stuck, scratched and gummy
until someone we could really handle
face to face stood on the other side, and smiled
and we knew we would move heaven and stone
to get there

saving my guitar

I was in the old house, on the woody hill
in Montclair, where so many dreams begin
my guitar, the Norman I bought last summer
had developed a serious case of the bends,
it was buckling and coming apart in so many places
the wood crumbling like beef jerky,
and there in his little workshop a bearded man
a luthier I think, expert
accoustic craftsman made grave diagnosis
with a twinkle in his eye
that led me to believe there might be some hope
he could salvage

we went to work, he and I, taking the damn thing apart
as the house turned into a commuter train
he the conductor, following the jagged
contours of the japanese coastline as we worked on this
thing fitting pieces like a jigsaw puzzle

suddenly emerging from the forested, hilly coast
straight ahead skimming the bay, and winding up at
a nature theme park, I got out with my ticket
asking directions back to Tokyo
in a language no one could understand, maybe english

the train had taken off
my guitar puzzling hero with it
still fighting to save the life of an acoustic
while I wandered around in my usual daze

the long stairs

Im going down the long stairs, from the green and sequestered hills that lead to the grey of Oakland flats, heading to the bus top that is a ticket to the conivial college funkiness of Telegraph, where there are a thousand records to leaf through, rare Hendrix and the street stalls of semi-reformed hippies who have resigned themselves to the realities of streetside performance vending

Im going to lose myself in the dark basement of Laval`s thick slice pizza, one dollar a slice, a perfect counterpart to the dark sweetness of root beer and 25 cent arcade games, going to spend long afternoons leafing the racks of shiny comics, Batman, Mr. Monster and Mage, feeling the wood smelling dankness of the Berkeley summer sun, staying well clear of People`s Park, relic of the days of student activism, now given to bums and dealers

Going to walk the musty staircase of Moes, leafing used books on subjects near and abtruse, get a feeling finally that I should be on the bus perusing my new comics, looking forward to the old lp I bought for $6.50, a rare treasure of `70 death-premonition Hendrix. Going to walk the long stairs to a world of trees, deer, racoons and exploding yuppy neighbors.

an opening

Almost a year into Japan I took a bicycle ride
along the Hanamigawa to enlarge perimeters
and discover what would ultimately become home.

My original flat was situated among old and old seeming
houses and small apartments along what had been the Tokyo Bay coast, and is now the number 14 Narita-Tokyo expressway.

I passed many weekends riding the faintly deliniated boundary between old and new which runs all the way
to Tokyo, a hint of a hill, old fishing houses and larger
wood walled family enclosures interspersed with condos
and cheaply built apartments. On the other side of the imaginary coast a flat grey wasteland of taller apartment buildings, wide roads, graffiti.

It took me months to discover that the little canal which I crossed on my way to the all-you-can-eat yaki nikku place
was in fact the mouth of a larger and rather well respected river, a place where fishermen and local residents took weekend walks or bicycle rides.

Now my days had color, a zipper opened and revealed a hidden world of farms and trees under the urban jacket, and the further I went the more luxuriant the colors and sounds, at one point around a bend upstream there was no sight but forest, no sound but birds and my mind played tricks that I was in a Japan that had not changed in 150 years. Rounding the bend I came to another suburb.

Yet persistently, crossing this new and smaller suburb, the land yielded a wider flat of rice field, and higher wooded hills, in which nestled inumerable shrines and small farm houses, the people one passed by the river now not so much weekenders but sun darkened farmers or fishermen working and chatting in earthy accents.

Though I ventured far I had not biked so far as the place I took a train ride to, that clear May afternoon, connected, as I later found out by the same umbilical cord river to the Tokyo Bay.

This was the Japan of my dreams, a quiet leafy suburb that petered out 10 minutes from the station into an expansive marsh, connected via cycling course to a larger marsh and finally to the Tono river.

As I walked along the lake side path, amid spaces much greater than I had experienced in Japan, I felt the stress pack of urban life dissipate, enfolded in a landscape not so different from California. Somewhere in short I could call home.

Snug

In the tightly packed city suburbs of Tokyo
everything tidy and narrow, quiet windy
streets thrust you one direction
then another, designed to throw you
from any intended destination.

Trees and hedges carefully clipped as if to deny
a climate that crawls in kudzu vines and acacia
in the american South, spills over into
exuberant gardens of melons, squash and persimmons.

Here the scalpel is taken to nature,
the careful clipping and denuding,
trees shaped into soft pillows
framed by raw concrete walls--

Yet there`s a coziness, for some in Japan a womb
quiet, efficient, packed-in sameness,
a comfort in uniformity and the sharp angles of
two-story houses and apartments.

The small white minivans pulled in tight to
houses just-big-enough, smells of grilled fish
permeating the evening air, the soft red glow
of the paper lantern teriyaki shop

A slight cricket chirp as if to say that everything is fine
not bad, not bad enough to change and
if you did want something different
well, what exactly would it be?