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."