Walking Theory #42
In memoriam, Steve Lacy
Go trembling up into elegy this day’s
Sad calling: no one ever said the roll
Would stop rolling that who ever it is
Wander this planet, this love, this green thing
An itch on the foot continuous to celebrate
Loss is no mean thing: I’ve charmed you,
Left you, embraced, the continuum, the
Line fragmented, tortured or an ecstatic
Release rushes the heart woelessly, yet
Who, what, one circles in & out over &
Over again: we strange ones, so familiar.
Walking Theory #43
He carries the printer across his hip
She carries the plug and cord:
Young couple on the street,
Children, so far, not ready yet.
*
At sunset an exhausted runner, her mouth
Tilted slightly up - a crooked, glazed lip
On a pitcher’s open spout:
In “prayer” or “penance”, impossible to say:
God forgive her.
*
There are holes one does not want to go
All the way down. Maybe a peek.
One sees them in Italy, in France;
They’re everywhere in Germany,
Ones that I know barely a peek:
Some say California is a deep hole,
San Francisco the deepest one of all,
Yet one goes, as one must, into the scariness:
*
Don’t ask me why you would want your mother back:
“The Darkest Moon” is a shop on Market Street
I walk these streets a certain vanity disclosing:
*
Wed the water
Wire the fire
Hug the mud
Put wind in her whistle
Music in your buns.
Walking Theory #44
for Fairfield Porter
Put a double mirror in each of your paintings
The glass unfolds a green towel, another a blue
A man in middle age, a rose pink robe
An island briefly off the eastern coast
A poet as his guest, the pigment applied
Thick, proportionate & radiant, a City face
Puzzled, relieved at the border trees, summer shrubs:
The lemonade at noon, perhaps a touch of something else,
There is a certain kind of history that is vacuous,
Nothing adamant coming or going, the bare tuck,
a gentle breeze on the starboard cheek:
One man’s loneliness is another to paint
One lives on gratuities, angels in the tender brush.
Walking Theory #45
Jackhammer the sky
In belief what do you want
Pale strawberries, blue cucumbers
Come on, get, as one used to say,
“Real,” admit nothing, something
or that you exactly know little
or nothing that what may or may
Not be wanted, a dormant strength
Awoken, a river at full wash
The grim grains, the dead bushes
Burnt out, the chokeberries
Asunder: admit it, what does
Not take the heart takes two feet
Pressing hard, this pen, a
Signature organization which
is to say…
Walking Theory #46
“The whisper is the portal
The voice has the power to manifest
The sound is the energy that goes to
The object we need to reach out to
Voices incarnate from other
Dimensions
How we make
Our voices to heal
Voices access other information
Knowledge from other forms of reality
Intention has a frequency
A readjustment
Is being made
Re-enchantment:
The need to sing.”
Anonymous, KPFA Radio, June 2004
Walking Theory #47
In the distance down hill into the Mission, China Basin
The marshland no one can ever see
The deep fill (cobblestone, bricks, ships & garbage)
The acrimony among developers
The militant greed to build, to extend over
The fragile, building upon building, loft
Upon loft, demographic joy, more people
Upon people, the way in which migrants
Equal profit, equal optimism: the way
Geology – packed with faults – inevitably
Interferes – yet the equally inevitable
Impulse to build – to swamp nature
Re-appears:
Only with great patience does one ever
Imagine to build a partnership:
Marshes back among our loves, our greed.
Walking Theory #48
White, chipped, the light across
The City –
beige, cinnamon, grey, blue
green, white –
the vertical rectangles, the
occasional dome, the local
pitched roof:
The horizon environ
Strangely “high” on buildings
The clatter of northern light
High is the wall
Low is paradise
When we cry without knowing why
When the light rips the inside sleeve
Add wind, add water
Join a mountain in the distance:
Wing wonder.