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3 Poems
by Douglas Cole The Father My father dreams the red spider dream in his lonely hotel room far from home. The phone is ringing but he won't answer it, knowing it will only open to the drunken flood of his wife's voice complaining about the sewer and her migraines, the renters who won't pay, a new glitch in the treadmill. He looks out on a city, somewhere (he can't remember which one), at the cranes, the stock yards, the industrial river and perpetual night. Another drink, another lidded streetlight comes on like the sloppy women in the lounge, with their jet talk and smiles, to him another part of all the meetings, the deals and the precious contracts he mules across the time zones. When at last he sleeps that final sleep, the rooms around him alive with the fury of the end of the world parties and the television drone, he throws the universe into silence absolute, everything now eclipsed like a flame snuffed out by a fist. N.E. 130th If only this were a snapshot, but it's real, here and now, full light and the homes smoking in the trees, fog seducing me into seeing that great wall of gray, the West, collapsing. The mad woman in her moose coat and mukluks sneers the buses into passing her stop. The son hasn't been by with her medications, so she's off picking gum from the concrete, needling the crows with her eyes. Up the street, that kid who wanders around most of the time to stay away from home, sits alone on a stump in the cold yard smoking. I'm sure he hates us all, looking out through burning eyes, just as he hates the foster mother at his back who screams at him, because he's got a black girlfriend, her voice penetrating for a block: "You nigger-lover!" He's sure to kill somebody, someday. That wall of gray keeps coming closer. Blind Mary canes her way through the fingers of rain. The birds are still and watching. And sad child of the family across the street, thirty by years but locked by syndrome in the mind at four, bursts naked through her door, her wild hands flying as she conducts the annihilating wind. Arch Street Childhood ended between the Siskyous and Yreka as my mother, sister and I drove south in our old Volkswagen loaded with all our crap falling off along the freeway. We lost things I can’t even remember as we moved in perpetual reduction of space through Berkeley student housing meagerly furnished with broken-down beds and desks carved in by years of migratory seminary students. Friends I made were outlaw children, and we broke into every building, especially Barrington Hall with its high windows looking down and out on the flatlands and the fiery bay and the Transamerica Pyramid. We absorbed World At War and played our own games of war, rock fights in construction sites that always came to a bloody end with curses and spoils of proud scars we bore as noble decorations. Exploding fluorescent lights became the universal destruction of delight. Yet we had our great epics, too, like the story of John-John flying through the plate-glass window, high and cut and crazy laughing, blood-soaked as he walked away. And every day the sky went dark, the schoolyard flooding with smoke that rose from the city incinerator as children screamed in unison to the sound of the air-raid siren. Through the maze of Cal Campus, thieves denned in Eucalyptus groves, darkness crowned Strawberry Creek as I walked beneath the buzzing street lamps up Seismograph Hill, making my way by perfecting the mask of invisibility or threat to pass safely through the quadrangle and the alleyways, as moonlight slid like blood down our duplex door. |
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