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| Star Pine Tree, Santa Barbara |
The Santa Barbara Poem for the Death of my Father: A Rough Villanelle
The fog horn is sounding
morning, morning, a
star pine is calling
and white crest waves
ever mounding
The side-shift drift of palm tree debris
and the remnants of a
transient’s bed falling
frame a steel park
bench amid leafy comfrey
It was the low clouding
upon a cliffside of
ice plant petals recalling
and echoes of a
street-side electric guitar sounding
It was the distal pounding
tidal recall of sea
grains, sea-sawing;
my father’s heart
un-founding
once spired high, now
scree
cacophony, a murder
of magpies flee
but for the cry of
one magpie foundling
morning, morning, a
star pine is calling
The
fog horn is sounding.
Moonfire
in first hours,
embers before outright flames;
watery umber, like
bread crumbs they drop-
lets on a window
tints my accumulation,
Loch: a silicon cupola
of darkened
liquid shadow
once slid through my organs
my veins:
my toilet drinks their
ends.
People tell me this color
clashes with everything;
the mere sight of it could make a grown person
lose
pressure, their own
and at the rebirth of a cycle—
it looks as lovely to me as a drop of oil
rouge spreading
through the ivory blank
canvas.
—I can only upvote
with poetry or
a
flow unfettered by contraception
conduced
by
my
homosexual agenda.
filtered by my liver
warm-pressed by hyperkinesis
of my uterus; I seep
sanguine, I fruit seedless
Juice of
eons of shame, root
of that
witch is the least regarded:
Searing orange forest fires have better reputations
than soaked bleached rotten
cotton crammed
inside a flesh
crevice
than that hue of (a singular)
passion,
a lightning streak
of clay brick, of
wine;
a river too thick
to swash only swills,
descends thighs
thru water, I watch
it curlcrawl
dying everything in
its path,
Moonfire.