George Mattingly

Ex Libris

waves
in waves

all memory
chemical

remembering
electrical

event horizon driven
by word

beyond name

nothing

*

at noon a bat without sonar's
lost out over the ocean

as one without feeling
sees nothing

in waves

 

Homeward Angel

Up at 4   before my brain
in cold dark Berkeley brown shingle

not even hip-hop on the street      ( that late )

Red Volvo colorless this early     blurs       on freeway

park     lock     hoist     hoof
to anxious fluorescent international airport,
jumpy with smell of deferred dreams and after-shave,
pale people porting to map-points

to say hello goodbye     Bon Voyage    to fellow people.

Beyond gravity or common sense, United heavy
powers over my family asleep in bed
over golfcourse-ringed volcano (dead),
flooded islands (dead)     levee tops like fringing reefs
around sunken cash-crop atolls (all dead).

Ridiculous flying box of humans in armchairs (not yet dead)
cruises over gridded green
of former inland sea
now inland demo of holy power of water
to grow edible life in crumbled anything
on which it falls.

Free refills of bad Americanoid coffee
eight miles high power
High altitude blues:     sun     in air     in space

Sliding below:   ancient Tahoe   Mono   Sonny Bono
Playa Blanca   Playa Negro   Playa del Roy
Alluvial fans   fossil politics   Jokers Wild
highways direct as frontier talk,
canals on Mars.

"The drone of flying engines scrambles
time and seasons"

over rocks on Trail Ridge Road (so old they don't talk)

over 1046 Grant Street, Longmont     brightly lit
by Lani and Keith Abbott   formerly of Albany, Oakland,
Berkeley, Davis, Monterey, Church Stretton, Paris,
the Haight, Bellingham, Tacoma,

we all are every where
in this jet age

and I'm in Iowa where
I've not lived
in twenty-seven years

though when I land
I never left
am twenty-one

too young to think I'll ever suffer
any habit     good or bad

too young to think I have a future
or might ever die.

 

So Real
for Darrell Gray

Silent nuclear fire
of Alpha Centauri
Pale in the distance
Behind Flight 481 to Las Vegas.

Countless soft electrified hairs
on my teenage lover's pulsing arms
left this decades-old electro-chemical charge
partly erased by each switch of ignition,
each phone call, each look up, drive down
strange streets, change of lights.

But deeper than light-years, this
mystery song of delirious meat:

"Goodbye goodbye

It seemed

So real."