Metaphor/Simile

My youth was cardinals
red as Renoir kerchiefs afloat on the snow
sea of home. I moved to be the red-winged
blackbird, flashing in flight like Reno
through Tahoe, the lake night a pigeon neck
purple-grey. Adolescence landed light like cockatiel
screech, so I made myself thousand-mile Pacific.
I still write towards toucans’ beaks like peaches,
today I’m the ocean pant, looking up
never as still silver as the pendant, its oneline gull.

Birthday

White petals falling from trees, showering knees grassed green in the playground.  Nicholas, reflecting on his childhood, his knees, never recalling a time where they were made wet or stained by fresh grass.  He remembers his feet though, tightly tied in hard shoes that clattered against hard cement, books in hand, uniform tucked in and buttoned tight.  

He came here for Rebecca, Matthew's Mother.

He looks at the children, and can hardly relate to young Matthew.  It's Matthew's birthday today, his fourth, and Nicholas showed up with a present, a toy truck.  He wrapped it carefully at the toy store after he made the purchase.  A man in a suit waited behind him as he taped the red wrapping paper around the box.  Nicholas speculated that this man was a father buying a gift for his son after a days work.  Maybe it was his son's birthday.

Strange, disembarking from the metro onto the gray concrete of the suburb outside of Helsinki, where he used to live with his Mother.  Bad memories of gray days made ominous by their repetitiveness, not a clear sun for months on end.  His Mother was a beautiful woman made ugly by her own addictions.  Birds don't sing on this street.  Nicholas sees the balcony of his Mother's apartment, the open door.  He tucks his head down and embraces the shadow made by the lid of his black cap.  Birds don't sing on this street, only alcoholics.

One of Matthew's friends has a tantrum.  The mother slaps the child on the hand, an echo in the courtyard.  Nicholas doesn't flinch.

Nicholas sits with Rebecca, both in foldout chairs.  She waits for Matthew's Father to arrive.  Nicholas can relate to Matthew on this point alone.  A father appearing and disappearing, as if in a recurring dream.  Sometimes a nightmare, other times just a dream.  

Matthew has already unwrapped the presents and has made everyone aware of his favorites by holding the boxes of the gifts liked best the longest.  Nicholas' toy truck was one of those gifts.  The educational toys were collected in one location against a rock.  These toys faced the rock, as if the toys themselves felt underappreciated and decided to shun the crowd.  

Matthew's Father arrives at the end of the party, when most have already gone.  Nicholas watches Matthew's Father lift up Matthew.  He showed up in workout gear; a gray hooded sweatshirt and gray jogging pants.  He looks strong and forceful but has a calm disposition that reminds Nicholas of his own Father, and the truth behind the mask of calmness.  

Matthew's Father towers over Rebecca.  Her blank face and her attempt at unfeeling eyes are also a mask.  She stills loves him.  Nicholas wonders if he had ever hoped for his own Mother and Father to be together again when he was younger.  

Fallen white petals fill the chip bowls, the soup bowls, the red cups with drinks unfinished.  Nicholas helps Rebecca carrying all the containers back to her apartment kitchen, up three flights of stairs.  During each trip up to the apartment, he has to turn the hallway light back on.  The light is on a timer.  He says goodbye to her in the hallway.  They look at each other, and the light goes off again.  In the dark, she tells Nicholas to wait for a minute.  She's going to tuck Matthew in for bed.  

Nicholas waits outside among the white petals and the growing dusk.  He waits but she never shows.  She might be asleep with her son, he decides.  He remembers how she fell asleep so easily that one night after they made love.  The only time they made love.  He couldn't fall asleep that night.  He listened for cars in the desolate streets outside his apartment.  He listened for rain and wind.  He heard nothing.

He walks back to the metro and on his way to the station, he looks up one last time at his Mother's balcony.  Her balcony door is still open, the drapes flowing inwards by a soft breeze.  He doesn't want to see her tonight.  

He waits for a couple minutes at the metro station and boards a train back to Helsinki.  He feels a sense of relief as his seat begins to jitter and the train lunges forward.  

Hammer

sometimes i make the light shake

the ambient fixture flickering

sometimes i make the light shake

outdoors corner of everyone's eye

they know behind is my lightning

even a sun day they know.

my old robot truck is ruststruck

and mine with lightning.

i go out in cloudbreak

warm in lobo fur and first love

where raspberry canes scrape

under my youngagain transmission
mustard colored body named romance

the lightning bed of it forever

a rumbling nerve. lay down.

101 near King City

On the 101 heading north eighteen miles from King City

another splatter of bug cements on the windshield.

Easing along the low incline two lane highway

hunched hills on the left with grassed hair blown ochre by the high sun.

She sits next to me, her summer dress mint green and patterned arabesque sinks away as we rise on the road towards the sky blasted cerulean.

I switch the AC dial off and with the same hand warm her left thigh.

We turn away from what lies ahead and her eyes luminesce like two pools of rich gold brown, the warm midday light falling on her face.  

I stare through the mosaic of mosquito spread and can't sight the horizon.

The sun has begun its descent and I watch a black bird sweep down and away.

I turn to her one last time and wait until her smile begins to fade before I face the road and prepare with the land from the fleeing sky.  

Summer Day, Greenlake

I leave with the sun in the same place
On the horizon of my mini-blinds

I walk north, no time for the rose garden
only the briefest moment with the animal smells

I rush the water.
I keep the lake at my left shoulder
and watch the sun and then the moon

I watch women burn down the path
and call me a misogynist but I still
think they look best in pink or white tank tops

But it’s surprising hard to draft after
a particularly nice ass so I drop back—
I walk pretty fast though

Walk, see people pass, leaving my headphones on high
Don’t want to hear any sirens
The pop is Swedish
I’m dancing I’m invisible

I cross the Scots tennis team once, then again—
at the center of the phalanx a girl’s mouth makes
the shape of “Then she said—”

A golden retriever getting hit in the head with a plastic bag
of its own shit every second step

I’m not yet the guy with grey armpit hair
staring down the women keeping a hula hoop
afloat on her waist while walking

I’m not yet the man rollerblading with the aid
of modified ski poles

The backstretch of the lake is getting dark
my sweat cools my back tightens
I scroll back to older beats

At the point where I started
children skitter across the shore
They’re laughing they’re gamboling
They involve themselves in foam footballs and Canadian geese

It’s dusky and getting uphill and I don’t want any water
I want “Billie Jean” I’m putting one foot more directly in front of the other
I’m rolling my shoulders I’m missing beats
Someone in the woods might hear one or two “woo!”s

Fuck it I’m almost home and I hear my heartbeat
in my ears and “Smooth Criminal.”
A block off the main road I give it a sideways slide

I go inside to make my hierarchy and look back and all I see
is an exuberant Boston Terrier leaping off the twilit edge
of the path at a cloud of gnats—its owner
looks, understands and lets the leash go—

Suturist Rosenquist