Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys Read online

  The farmers dumped their milk into the sewers,

  and burned acres of corn, rather

  than provide for upstart laborers.

  4

  Old man Nakagawa, divested of his property in 1942,

  returned to Marysville following the war

  and opened a small grocery.

  5

  While then-governor Ronald Reagan

  stood in the capitol’s rose garden,

  members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

  entered the senate chambers,

  armed to protect their community

  from the abuse of power exhibited by Oakland police.

  6

  When the Islamic mosque on Tierra Buena Road

  was set ablaze by arsonists,

  the neighboring Sikhs opened up their temple

  as a place of worship

  for their historic enemies.

  7

  The rains still bring the rivers to a crest.

  [Here’s where you imagine the rest.]

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF INTERNMENT

  Hence the wild daikon.

  We’ve made the landscape mean here.

  And then we put down roots.

  THE BATHERS

  What a reprieve from all this stultifying heat.

  And all the threats implicit in that heat:

  the sweep and snare of blackberry,

  razor barb of concertina wire.

  The bluish teasel nearly chafed you

  with its bracts.

  You’ve made it through some muck

  with your absolute body

  still intact. So far,

  the Camp Far West lakewater is barely blue.

  That might make two of you.

  Who is the other whom you seek?

  They found a body in this lake; it wasn’t his;

  it wasn’t yours. And so the shore

  persists in summoning you.

  He may be waiting.

  His body hasn’t lost any allure.

  & nor has yours.

  But sorry is the heart

  that knows

  what’s round the bend.

  LITTLE BOY BLUE

  He finds himself inside the Sunrise Mall,

  but not at Waldenbooks. He seeks no solitude.

  His second great awakening has started,

  subdued interstices between kiosks and stores;

  the proximity of skimming eyes, or studious eyes

  that read him like a copy of Leaves of Grass.

  He has come in his holey, worn-out jeans.

  He has come there in his flimsy little thongs.

  And there’s those hankering eyes that seem

  to sample him like Orange Julius eggwhite froth

  or bits of free salami cubed upon a paper plate

  & stabbed by frill-picks.

  Don’t meet those eyes.

  The arcade’s packed with Pac-Man players in a jiff.

  Gobble the cherries. Gobble that consecrated ghost.

  DYING IN THE DEVELOPMENT

  Sometimes the odd half acre with a precipitous grade

  can be remedied with a dry-laid retaining wall

  instead of having to backhoe cut and fill.

  Finding ways to stop erosion should be easy

  before partition, before the open slope’s divided.

  Such is the innocuous nature of topography,

  before the Whatzits move in with their impudent kid,

  the Doughboy pool depreciates the terrace’s integrity

  or, down the street, a Taco Bell and KFC

  merge as one fantastical beast with crispy wings.

  We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.

  I think the awful family’s name was actually White.

  I did the sleepover there: burn-outs in black tees,

  their bodies beginning to prosper, pelotage whorled out

  into dark cowlicks, mildly offensive-smelling flowers

  bunched in the night, then untucking as we rose

  to the morning’s listless mother, the fest of sausages

  and toaster waffles, milk moustaches,

  “the carton says homo,” “homo? sick,” and belching.

  Just don’t serve me no Tang, I thought.

  I hated the taste of Tang.

  Unsurprising what gets blocked out, reapportioned.

  I say it was a rustic place, but in transition.

  I say the land was sculpted,

  but it was simply held back. “Held back,”

  said of the White boy. Denied promotion to the tenth.

  And as the grade remained the same, he worsened.

  Continuation school. Vocational Ed. Juvenile detention.

  The property values rose slightly; then depreciated.

  The retaining walls declined in their integrity.

  Not the fault of anyone, really. It was a lean half acre.

  It was a mean development, no outlet,

  no opportunity, except the kind that came tooling

  up the street in a Vega, playing Ecstasy Passion & Pain.

  I realize this might read solely as an allegory:

  the peregrines that hovered there,

  the Mormons and recruiters and the suck-ass school,

  Vice-Principal Pervy who would paddle young behinds.

  But that’s not only striped resurfacing.

  It’s the entire slipshod construction: a site where

  everything happened gradually;

  it was so gradual, it was practically overnight.

  CHICKEN

  The metallic taste I got from being served upon a tray

  in the Sac County Jail, or bumped against

  the dented cans at the Dented Can Warehouse.

  The stale scent, the elbow scrapes: I was a billiard ball

  for those who cared to knock me in the pockets

  on the table in The Wreck Room afterhours.

  It wasn’t only Amtrak pulling trains each night.

  Each man who lost his stake in me had lost

  his gamecock, his bathhouse boychick,

  the pullet at the pumphouse, the tipsy one, free-living.

  The cues were often skewed. When simple coxcombs

  preened, I wasn’t squeamish on their knees

  as, without means, I groomed their inch-long wattles.

  I’m getting on in years. I’m past my freshness date.

  If I have balked at play, it’s that this chicken

  tastes no more like table fowl. I blame the microwaves.

  You blame the chemicals and drugs. Yes, I’m a little overdone,

  I’ll warrant you. You want a little cut. Get in here, then,

  pull back the skin and crisp it,

  before the insatiate drunks come round with greasy fingers,

  distribute me between the bars, and pinch my biscuits.

  BOJANGLES

  You’ve gone and gotten cozy with the doorman;

  he’s so smitten, he’s ready to lose his job.

  How did you get here, he wants to know.

  You go all kitten in his lap. You’re almost genuine.

  Once you’re in, who cares if you’ve blown your cover.

  You’ve got to put on the outfit that says:

  I don’t want to fuck you. I just want to dance.

  But also: meet me in the parking lot with some blow.

  To the outskirts of Tooterville you go—

  (nobody holds a gun to your head.

  Nobody beats you with a length of hose.

  You’re cute when you’re young and cute.

  Now wipe those lips. Now wipe that runny nose.)

  —with a little white slut.

  DYING IN A TURKISH BATH

  Remind me to tell you about the sculpted figures

  an eye can devour, the imperfect laws of gravity

  and the imperfect ceiling, the hot stone floors.

  Someone’s pressing against
me in the steam, again.

  I want to make sure it’s you who’s ravishing

  in the lead-white pools, the salty declivities.

  I expect we’ll both harden like old bread. I expect

  we’ll have seen each hoodlum and attendant

  to the point we’ll naturally shrink away. We will

  have had so many good figs and the green grapes.

  So much soap, we’ll have stung our tender openings.

  Bearing against one another, in the opaque spray.

  END OF DAYS

  I have seen a hawk owl’s shadow across the street.

  That doesn’t mean that I have seen a hawk owl.

  He could join with me in the perfect guise of a bird.

  Wild forms are with us always, though fleeting.

  There are no particular things to make me love anyone,

  least of all, not you.

  On the wings of that great speckled bird.

  THAT’S WHERE THEY HIDE THE SILOS

  Did the vast slope bear flax

  and cheat all summer?

  Fill me in. I haven’t the heart

  to make myself a study in the grass.

  Unlikely to climb the broad stone fences.

  Unlikely to improve. Fodder easily gained

  might not provide for—us, ungainly quail.

  Proceed toward the blinds.

  You’ll hear the report, later.

  You’ll think, just take your limit

  this time, you’ll think

  the failsafe dawn breaks

  soon enough

  and treacherous is the road.

  PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO

  Bless the tourists in their “Alcatraz Rocks!” parkas

  on the upper deck of a double-decker

  in any given February bluster.

  They could have sworn it would be warm here,

  just because the cryometer says it isn’t cold.

  Who the hell would look at a cryometer?

  People from arctic regions, I suppose.

  People who must have flown in over the map’s flat face;

  who must have seen the latest developments;

  the delta’s brackish mouth; windmills

  waving white banderoles against the crisping brown hills.

  Spring looks a lot like summer looks a lot

  like drought. What would anyone expect

  if they knew the way planarity invites the opportunist.

  Aren’t the dispatches the same, reaching them

  in Chehalis, Waterloo and Asbury Park. Even

  if folks don’t watch what passes now for news,

  I assume they go to cocktail parties.

  Or they Twitter.

  They don’t all have snug jammies and Ovaltine,

  though they seem to get snugger by the minute.

  What kind of help could they get if they could get help?

  Help them make this dull show seem like art.

  Help the supporting cast appear

  in the end, summoned from the cities of the plain,

  and appear to end and end again

  as in a wide shot of the Battle of the Marne.

  Be tolerant of those you cannot seem to understand.

  And other such advice.

  It’s the quiet part of the morning service,

  while I’m writing this down:

  Thank God for the quiet part.

  And thank God for the one who held me to my wickedness;

  who asked me to revel in it,

  even though it cost us both a little dignity.

  It’s easy for me to look back at what’s destroyed.

  I knew it would be destroyed, like a wicked town.

  I never thought “that town is where the heart is.”

  I simply thought “that town is where the town is.”

  Usually someplace inhospitable, and filled with

  handsome men. The kind who kill you

  with their handsomeness, or their acute cordage.

  Hell is the most miraculous invention of love,

  no matter how the love turns out.

  Hell is the place from whence the music of longing—

  which accounts for most of what we call music—

  gets written.

  I’m tired of this idea of hell, no matter how functional.

  Sure, I’ve had my petty doubts.

  Like the extra pills I’ve stashed in my Eva Braun box,

  waiting for the bomb to hit Bakersfield,

  or some other place in the near distance

  (this plan only works if there’s some kind of distance)

  the sign that it’s time to pull up stakes,

  head for those durable hills with my pemmican,

  my Port-o-pot, my jerry cans,

  and yes, I too would have Ovaltine.

  Though I guess it would be made with water

  instead of milk.

  Such would be the dark days

  if we think the dark days really must come.

  But I have lived through perilous times,

  and I do not love them.

  I cannot pretend I’m smart about such things.

  I mean: look at the sloppy slew I’ve been.

  And you were there. And you.

  You’ve seen me rumple down the sidewalk like a moocher.

  Lord knows, you’ve seen me hit that sidewalk on my keister.

  “Scandalous,” the tourists said,

  and flashed.

  And when the worst of the drama came,

  they clucked their tongues and threw their change.

  Something inside each one of us is cocked

  like the ear of a hound,

  and half the time we hunt, and half the time we rescue,

  because we’re never really sure

  if the humans will beat us or feed us.

  If we are our better selves, it’s just a wonder.

  And if we’re not.

  Even in our legends, angels come.

  They try their best. But we’re such shits.

  And it’s not because we want to screw them.

  We screw everything. We’re mankind. It’s what we do.

  I’ve probably sullied a few white wings myself.

  That’s not the problem.

  So much has passed between us, we’re practically cousins.

  The problem is, we’re so bent on an ending,

  we’ll sunder the entire valley,

  with conviction. With an invented coda of immunity.

  Nobody in this picture is granted immunity.

  If it were available, I’d have gotten it for myself.

  Enough with the apocalypse, already.

  Think of all the history you’ve read. It started somewhere.

  It started at absolute zero, is what you thought.

  Just because you couldn’t know what came before.

  But imagine: something did.

  LANDSCAPE WITH TEMPLE, MOSQUE AND LITTLE CROSSES

  How, even if you broke an oath—slandered your god

  in the long summer months, when friends were generous

  and a winking man in a linen shirt bought breakfast—

  you, taking what you could from one man’s ice chest,

  another’s burgeoning walnut groves, a lady’s purse

  left open on her chair (she’d gone to check her lips)—

  how you’d be welcomed into unexpected corridors:

  manifold, the curves and dimples in the service road,

  which—if you waited—had this way of evening out.

  Take nothing with you now. Distrust that atlas.

  You tried to be all things to others, too. It didn’t work.

  The byways narrowed. Soft shoulders caved. You can’t

  expect a rescue from such an ingress all the time.

  Emergency service ends. You cross the county line.

  LANDSCAPE WITH COMBINE

  My father’s fields are far from here.<
br />
  I shot my share of blackbirds there.

  Drove a harvester in summer.

  Gathered plums.

  Gathered chums.

  The tractor-trailer rigs would come.

  The pickers, singularly or in vans.

  And in summer the canneries began.

  If I was asked to ride the John Deere then.

  To reap, I’d reap; to thresh, I’d thresh. Men,

  I’d winnow you. I’d winnow a few.

  I’d take you, dear John, or whoever is you.

  Love is easier to achieve than you might think. Sooner

  or later the combine gives out. & sooner.

  QUARANTINE

  Sounds like a miner’s melody. Or a gemstone set in platinum.

  A set of blonde and imbricated petals. The perplexing swish

  of botany’s haste. A season originates, then gratifies and ends.

  Sounds like so many things that happen as beyond.

  Now entering. Solve all arboreal problems that you can.

  Then what to do when boxelder bugs aren’t rampant:

  that’s a different set of worries. Play worry in different keys.

  C is where you always start and end. Or so my teacher said.

  For he was taken by the logic of the dominating swarm,

  the way it left the punctured globes upon the boughs.

  We played a spray of ditties in his wake. They sounded like

  most pickers (those in tempo; those articulating their misfortunes).

  Or at least that’s what I imagined going on. Black dots spread,

  black spots. Pretty soon the world is one great gall. Then what?

  Then we hide in the meadow. Oh, how it hums, this meadow.

  RELEASE THE STERILE MOTHS

  The flutter, apple brown, invites

  a certain scientific approach

  we just ain’t nailed down yet.

  We bamboozle these little peacherinos

  by dispersing infertile mates, some

  of whom in turn will flimflam the dickens

  out of prospective progenitors.

  Every unpleasant bug deserves his day

  with the bunco artist rendition

  of himself. Why shouldn’t it end there?

  The barbarous insect ultimately

  brought down with federal grants