Not For Me To Know

I inherited from my ancestors
a burning desire to learn
from all places.
My father read James Joyce
and allowed a television in the house
so we could watch tennis
and movies of cowboys and detectives.

One night in the distant future,
in the course of my ongoing investigations,
I walked to the corner of Anza and 48th
and encountered the Other,
the city which was not me, not us,
not anything I had ever encountered.
I saw the sigil of its otherness
and transferred it
from the cold stone where it rested
to the warmth of my flesh.
Words and letters without meaning 
and yet their beauty was easy to read.
My father had taught me well.
Maybe things he didn't know himself.

In that same future, I constantly read and wrote.
I was single with no kids.
With every day that passed
I became more like my parents.

One afternoon in Sutro park
I sat next to an old man
who couldn’t have been more genial or incomprehensible.
We looked at the stars and the clouds together.
"There is only one path and it has already been chosen," he said.
He told me what to look for in the sky
but I couldn't see it,
I couldn't follow his deductions,
I couldn't understand his implications,
I couldn't see our fate written in the dark.
The light was easy to spot and wish upon,
but I found no reason to do so.

In the past, I had struggled with a novel.
As I wrote, my heart had moved like a winged silver bird,
shining with the magic of pure golden light.
That novel taught me
that the end and the beginning are the same,
and yet there are many novels
many ends
and many starts
all intertwined
all impossible to separate.

Looking back at this past,
I came to understand
I had moved through this life without thought,
without any overt or implied intent. 
Fate was not for me to understand,
not for me to know.
I learned to accept this past,
I learned to accept that future.

After the future was over
I prepared for the voyage.
I brought the book.
I removed the past like an old jacket.
I was ready to learn some more.

What Is Seen

Friends and parents were warned to stay inside
by the whispering in the walls.
Those without wooden structures were left to read the clouds
and the dust that began to swirl
and looked like pale dragons preparing for flight.

I knew the day would be thick with smoke,
and the rain would be hidden away
and locked in a room behind our five suns.

In interviews the men in hooded robes
spoke of the ancient fires,
the smoking coals,
the chalices of semen.
Most did not understand. 

We could see them entering our space,
passionately delivering their address
as we munched on tubers and meat
and felt the suns across our shoulders burning spots and rings
and tales we could spread across the darkness of time.

I was surprised by the reports,
the newspapers are rarely so emphatic
and I realized it was as it had been
during the coup of ‘062.

I remember we left the midnight concert early
to watch the fireworks as promised. 
The lawn had been cool
and full of balloons and starlight promises,
but from high on the cliff overlooking the city,
I could feel the ocean and the sister planets
already aglow with a steady stream of taxies
and bordellos.

We stung our feet
and munched the stale popcorn nearly forgotten in Mr. J’s leather bag.
He pointed to the darkened space between Roxinata 5 and Obitatha. 
He had seen the Red sun and spoke of the signals,
the whispers, the refugees entering orbit.
Our orbit. 

He said the wolves howled for months,
Then sung no more.
Is it the same as then?
There was a touch of ceremony,
and a few words to tamper the fear
but no answer.

Charles

The bright orange, red and yellow of crushed leaves on the gray concrete just outside the open door. Charles’s pale blue irises highlighted by red streaks crossing the whites and the puffy crimson rims of his eyelids.
A dog looks in the window at me, just the brown muzzle and the floppy ears of a canine, peering in through the lower left hand corner of the window. Men are laughing out in the street where I cannot see. Another yellow leaf drops and blows wildly in the wake of a passing car. More cars with their anxiety making noise passing close to the open door. When they pass on the other side of the street the noise is soft and pleasant like the crashing of distant waves. Even on this side of the street some cars manage to create a gentle whoosh while others gurgle, grunt, growl and roar.
The cars are small bursts of motion and color streaking past the glass like fish in an aquarium. The trucks are slow, crawling monsters of loud carbon emitting wrath. I see a bicycle leaning against the meter that serves the whole street.
A man passes by and looks in. His nose is a cruel shape, his mouth is agape slightly as if he were breathing through it, incapable of smiling with it. The eyes of a zombie, hard like marbles, uncaring. But he is young and women who like tall lean bitter young men will find him attractive. I shudder.
Charles is soft and friendly and mumbles. His flesh looks pale and soft. There is enough of it that if you squeezed him it would be like squeezing a marshmallow. Because of the way the red made the blue of his eyes look, because I was looking in his eyes and he was looking in mine for just a moment as we spoke, I contemplate what that squeezing would feel like.
That way that he talks quietly with his back turned as he moves and I’m not sure if he is speaking to me or to himself, at first it reminded me of a dream in which you can’t quiet understand what is being said. It made me feel confused and uneasy. I wanted clear bright communication.
Today it furthers his aura of softness. His mumbling fills the air around us like clouds of cotton, cushioning us within this space of hard floors and polished mahogany.
When we first met he seemed accusing, threatening, alien. He is still alien but I like being in the room with him. I wish he would not go, not now that I suspect that what disconcerted me before was only softness.
Another leaf, this one orange like brass, summersaults down behind the back of a black man in a navy blue sports jacket who is feeding the meter.
I wish Charles would not go, but he is already gone, and I am here so that he need not be. I am left wondering over the only curiously human things we said, the few words that we exchanged that weren’t about change and cream and bags and glass cleaner.
I said: “You look tired.”
The counter was between us.
He answered: “I do? Naw. I only got up at five this morning.”
At this point he is drifting away from the counter towards the door, moving backwards as if rewinding in slow motion. “I only got to sleep for like two hours the other day.”
“Geez.” I say trying to express sympathy.
“Naw.” he says, and actually what he says sounds more like ‘No Ah‘, “I figure it’s good practice, you know, for having kids.” And then he’s out the door drifting away down the strip of gray concrete with the leaves and the cars and the others.
I compile a list of data. What do I know about Charles? He is in school because he mentioned exams when he asked me to take his shift last week. He sometimes sleeps in his car. He bakes bread and manages this store. This is precious little information. His curious remark about practice for having children, does it mean he is about to be a father? Does he have a wife? A girlfriend? Is he a bachelor who actually thinks of a future in which he has children with so much hope that he takes today’s trials as preparation?
There are not enough clues for me to come to a conclusion, not enough for me to form a working picture of what Charles’s life is like.
A fire engine screams by, a big red rectangle with flashing red yellow and white headdress rushing for disaster.
I try to imagine what it would be like to be the girlfriend of Charles. I find it difficult to imagine a conversation with him. If we got together in a different setting for coffee, what could we say to each other?
It is a challenge to imagine him saying anything deeply philosophical. This after all is the man who came out of the restroom half an hour ago and didn’t wash his hands, not even for show.
Nor can I imagine myself being a convincingly interesting person to speak to without the conversation getting philosophical. Politics is a challenge for me, and anyway I can’t picture him being passionate in that regard. Books? He can read, he is in school, but does he like to? I move on assuming that we have schlepped our way through the small talk with lots of eye contact.
I can imagine a kiss, a hug, soft warm embraces. That part is easy. He is a man and I am a woman. These two simple facts are often enough to bridge the distance between two human beings. It is enough to allow for at least brief moments of bliss.
I try to imagine him as an older man, as a husband, as a respectable member of society. I can picture him in a sweater vest.
As if to illustrate my inner musings, a man in a bright yellow dress shirt and sweater vest tromps by the window. A paper bag holding lunch swings in his hands. There he goes, my dear Charles, on his way to the office.
This is as far as I will bother my imagination to take me. The plot is already stretched thin by the fact that I could not be myself in even those earliest conversations. A life time of hiding myself is the lifetime I have already rejected. And honestly, if you were Charles and you read this, wouldn’t you find it at least mildly disturbing ?
More bodies pass by the window, a few faces turn in to see me. Many manage kinder noses and inoffensive mouths, but their eyes are those same inexpressive marbles. Cold eyes that deny entry to the soul. Leaves tremble on the sidewalk under the caress of a breeze, but never quite lift off. A man across the street turns the corner, his reflection accompanies him in the mirrored glass of the tall building he passes. A harp sings incessantly from the speakers behind my head. An older man limps by with the help of his cane.
Charles alone after I am dead and gone… Lives in motion before my eyes, lives imagined in the eyes of soft spoken strangers.
A young couple strolls by arm in arm, her red sweater against his cobalt blue coat sleeve. Just outside the open door the high heels of her black boots crush the bright orange, red, and yellow of winter leaves into confetti upon the concrete.

Past and Future Memories

So beautiful I could cry.
Friendship is a mysterious ephemeral thing. We all do know from experience that no one gives us anything for nothing. Everything has its price. And yet sometimes, rarely, once or twice in a lifetime, someone looks at us and their heart is so brimming with compassion that it spills out through their eyes and they offer us something that no one should ever offer; something so good one usually keeps it all to one’s self. True love, pure love, friendship, compassion.
One and the same, these many words, these many unhinged words.

I have lately made very good friends with a big green reptile with razor sharp teeth and a hefty appetite. What he hungers mostly for is watermelon, and purple cabbage, and green grapes, but now and again he pretends to want to eat from my hand just so that he can get a taste of my fingers to determine whether or not he’d be better off just eating me and foregoing all social niceties. Here in this special place, he looks at me from behind alloyed bars and nods to his empty food dish while I try to press all of the stray voices out of my head. He has no need for words. He only knows hunger and pleasure.

My life again. Wondering about the story of my life, how it will read, what it will awaken in the reader. Will my life bring others to life? Or will it go out like a light, extinguished with a clap so that only empty darkness will remain? What has been done to us? Have we really done this to ourselves? Have we betrayed ourselves so that we are no longer free? No longer free to live.

I lived in Lake Elsinore for years but I didn’t really know where it was that I lived, I didn’t know that these streets meant, what the lake itself meant, what memories were buried under the burning asphalt of its wide streets. So I made it my job to find out.
Now I look at a dead ship and I feel that it looks back at me, I feel that it is in me, in a different incarnation.
The Lake Elsinore princess was imported from Long Beach to be made a spectacle of in a mud hole imbued with mystical powers. From its glass bottom, the denizens of this fair town enjoy looking down past their sandals at the murky green water fed by over 300 hidden springs and the San Jacinto river. The great lake eventually degenerated to the rank of a puddle lost at the center of a pestilent pit of mud laden with decaying fish, their eyes eaten out by the very gnats that they themselves had once eaten. The cattle got stuck in the muck in search of water, and there they mooed mournfully until the heat did them in. Then the gnats could start on them too, joined by the turkey vultures and crows, who cleaned away the carcass until only the bones gleamed white under the glaring sun, before returning to their post in the big blue sky, circling and waiting for the next bovine to expire. At the heart of the puddle a small geyser erupted and a fountain of sulfurous water the color of blood gushed wretchedly, flaunting itself before the thirsty herds.
It is by this mud hole that I lived my early years, it is here that I learned what the world looked like, what it should be, what it meant and how it worked.

No longer free to live. More unhinged words. Free. Live. They have all come undone. Words and more words. They all mean nothing because they refer to experiences that we have never had, experiences that our parents have never had, I certainly never caught a glimpse of them from the edge of my drying lake.
Someone did have these experiences, once upon a time, someone must have. Bursting with the heavy burden of newfound knowledge, he endeavored to explain, to share by virtue of oral communication, spilling pearls out onto the grimy sidewalk before pig faced orphans that grabbed them all up and snuffled them and rubbed them in sweaty hands and passed them on to a new generation of piglets.
There are still a few fools rattling around out there, a few who have had the experience and then watered at the eyes realizing that they had said compassion, they had said love, they had said discipline, responsibility, freedom, but had never experienced any of them until this moment. Now in this unique and eternal moment the words meant something, for the first time ever.

There in an empty overwhelming darkness that clings to us on all sides. This one life, this one moment, perhaps infinitely more complex than we realize, like the insides of a pomegranate.
Can it be lit like a fuse? Make it bright, dazzling for a moment so that we can see the delicate tendrils that connect so much to so much else?
I will do it with pictures, with stories.

I imagine that eventually the world will be covered in ash and all that I have known will be forgotten. By then there will be no one left but roving bands of mutant cannibals with eyeballs blinking from their shoulders, the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Their ancestors will have drifted to the bottom of the pot and wallowed in the darkness of underground shelters and they will have eaten glowing green roots to sustain themselves and they will have died by age 12 of cancer but not before producing some deformed offspring to ensure the survival of the species.
By the time those marauding bands of cannibals traipse over this desert that was once a lake, they will not have an inkling that the world was ever otherwise. They will never even dream that anything secret lies buried beneath their feet, any more than you now suspect some lost civilization might be buried deep beneath your laundry room or the local mall. Like you, they will not spend much time imagining the strange life forms that they may have evolved from, they will do this no more than you fantasize about your beginning as a humble single celled amoebae drifting aimlessly through the hot seas.

Enough time passes and the slate is wiped clean.
All things are forgotten in time.

Small crimes disappear, larger infractions get smudged, blurred like a poorly developed photograph until no one can remember what happened clearly. Those on one side of the event will have a vague feeling of displeasure that signifies that some overly intense feeling of rage or sorrow or jealousy has been buried under the sands of the hour glass.
Those on the other side may forget entirely. Eventually both parties will be sent to lay six feet below the green grass, under the timid wild flowers that are considered by trained gardeners to be weeds. Their flesh will rot and peel away from their bones and it will be consumed by worms, some of whom will suffer some slight indigestion due to the overly spicy emotion that had boiled down into sleepy forgetfulness like a film on top of hot soup whilst the most potent component separated and drifted to the bottom of the pot, the innermost chamber of the heart accessible only by the aorta.

The slate gets wiped clean, and whoever is has always been and will always be, until the slate gets wiped clean again, and again, and again, so that ages of strange dreams are layered one on top of the next like the steppes of an enormous wedding cake or the steps of one of those pyramids that once stood in the wet jungles beneath the equator with blood flowing down their grandiose stairs. Those that are now, they walk over the ghosts of those that were, and beneath them, the ghosts of what will be, completely unsuspecting of the fact that they may be under the influence of these worlds imperceptible to them.

They used to cart people down here to this lake in wheelchairs to dip them in the water. The hot sulfur ran from the tap in every house in the valley until the 1960’s, turning the children’s teeth yellow. At the bathhouse built in 1884 they built a swimming pool in the 1920’s. A little boy drowned in it though and after that they filled it up.

Dogs, no doubt, do not think of what they don’t know. Like you and I, what they are seems to them worthy of perpetuation into infinity, so they hump in the streets and dig in garbage bins and evade the dog catcher with as much zest for life as you or I.
The confines of the animal mind are so safe and self assured, why ever would we dare to dream that something lies beyond the border of our own encapsulated consciousness. That would only lead to a headache of enormous proportions, to the splitting of one’s self into pieces so that the insides flow out like melting Jell-O to rejoin the primordial jell of the universe that lies beyond animal confines.
There is something outside of our perception, distilling at the bottom of the cauldron while we bubble dreamily at the surface before bursting into oblivion.

We will not remain, not as we have come to know ourselves. We will be forgotten. Terribly and mercilessly forgotten.
Meanwhile, some thing rattles down in the bottom of the kettle informing the next set of bubbles on the surface of the particular shapes it might take based on where they stand in the pyramid’s construction. We are churned from the cream skimmed off of the top.
All things are forgotten in time

Look at the woman sitting on the flat trailer bed in her red and white striped dress, singing, while the man drives the tractor round in circles. What does it tell you?
The buildings are stretched squares making them rectangular and they are frosted with white stucco and pale blue stucco and the pigeons stand around kissing on top as though they were the adornment of a dirty wedding cake. The thick black power lines hang crossing and re-crossing over the streets, making the sky into a piece of modern art when viewed through the eyes of the round boy in his stained white shirt and black pants looking up as the flock of pigeons flies from one frosted rooftop to the other, basketball gripped under his arm. There are iron bars on the windows and gates in the garages and front entry ways so that small brown girls stand behind them looking out like prisoners before retreating to ride pink plastic tricycles in the gloom. At the end of the street the chain link fence stands between the apartments and rows of head stones besieged by mustard yellow lichen, keeping company with decaying bouquets of both organic and synthetic flowers. A fence to protect the dead from the living, and a wide green lawn punctured by words, where memories go to slowly fade away.
A mysterious, ephemeral thing.
So beautiful I could cry.

Going For A Walk

It was quiet in the way that it can be quiet even as cars drive by you, because there’s not that many cars, and the cars that there are, they’re not that noisy, and you’ve heard them so much, that their sound just sounds like silence and in the distance there may be a bus crossing an intersection and further away there may be more cars and maybe even some music in the distance but it all adds up to a kind of silence that is full and empty at once, and it slides through the edges of the afternoon like a breeze that has no direction and comes from everywhere at once. In this pool of quietness, his boys were the ones making waves, as they ran after each other, up and down the sidewalk, as far away as they could get, and then a little further, testing the limits, checking to see when he would call to them and say “Boys! Come back! That’s too far!” and they knew that their mother would say it sooner, the mother who was now in his arms, who walked up the sidewalk next to him, pressing up against the side of his chest, but when she said they could run a little more, they would turn to look at him, because they knew that then he would say yes or no, and if he said no, then and only then, would they have to turn back. And so they ran laughing and screaming, and they ran hard and intensely, both small and blonde and thin, both full of raw energy that had to be expended one way or another, and he looked at them with a relish that swam on top of the waves of warmth that he felt coming from her, warmth that trickled up through his chest, up through his throat, to his head and his eyes and his nose, and even to the tip of his short brown hair and he could tell that she could feel it too, and when a particularly strong wave would hit her, she would press closer to him and right then the boys were running all the way to the corner and he had to call to them again, “Boys! That’s too far! Come back!” and one of the little blond boys said to the other, “I won! I won! You lost! I won!” and the other boy didn’t bother to acknowledge what his brother was saying but simply ran back to the edge of their racing field, which started wherever their father stood at the moment and ended when he called to them to turn back, and the boy that had won called to his father and said: “Dad! I won that one! I won! Did you see it?” and he nodded and smiled at him “I did see it. Good! Now come back!” and the boy did and they both lined up again ready to run some more. Her body was thick and full and warm and it vibrated against his arm and his chest with a constant rhythm and his left hand trailed down her back and all the way to the edge of her blue jeans and pushed past the boundary of her waistline and came to rest at the place where her buttocks met each other, and when she felt his hand there, in the little crease of her ass, she let out a small sigh and turned to look at him and he turned to look at her, and her eyes were soft and seemed to be ready to spill their content all over her cheeks and his eyes were soft and warm and content and his fingers dug a bit deeper under her pants, under the tight jeans, feeling the slightly sweaty flesh of her big buttocks and then the boys had run all the way to the corner once again and she smiled as he called out to them, “Boys! That’s far enough! Come back!” and the two boys were even at that point so they simply turned around, knowing that neither of them had won, and they walked back to the two people that stood together at the edge of their racing field who were their parents who were really not people at all but pillars that moved slowly up and down the sidewalk, and both boys knew they would be there forever and whenever they ran too far they could always just run back and find them standing there, waiting for them, but he knew that her warmth would vanish someday and she knew that his gentle hand some day would not caress her under her waistline, and they both felt that knowledge like a little wave of cold air on a gentle warm afternoon and it just made them walk a bit more slowly, and it made them smile a little more because the day was so quiet and still and it would soon come to an end.