From the Lower Depths: for Dorothea Lange
A living room in the street beneath the freeway where a dog barks 24/7 tied to a clothes line a sawhorse corralled near a barbecue pit pallets and bedspreads rescued from last year’s construction site a chair missing one arm but still good enough to relax on a summer’s evening and listen to the sound […]
Keller Avenue Strip Mall
It’s a strip mall disguised as a plaza where I used to take my cats to the veterinarian on that one day when maintenance inspected apartments and no pets allowed, kept going back to the vet even after my place turned condo we could keep dogs, cats, lizards, whatever else we wanted. The pizza shop […]
The Ghost Ship
The Ghost Ship sailed into the Oakland harbor smelling of burning flesh. No one was left. That same day people marveled how hundreds of yellow marigolds, all sizes, grew beneath the ship’s bottom lifting its charred remains into the wind.
Forest in the Trees
Along Leona Canyon, it’s past time for dog walkers to crowd the trail, we head out, hills greener from rain, a private consult between me and my partner-in-crime from the thirteenth century, who’s startled by a collection of oak balls, withered and dead on arrival; he thinks maybe it’s a burial site, a mass castration; I shake my […]
Yizkor 2016: Kehilla Community Synagogue
Hear Lenore read “Yizkor.” White robes and prayer books automatically flip to the right page, and the cantor, voice of the synagogue, possessed by the spirit of the sanctuary, blesses us with a three-fold invocation, passed along through the centuries. Facing each other for the priestly blessing, shawls tented above our heads in stripes and fringes, I […]
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Never meant to return, which is not to say I didn’t have dreams about the redwoods with their fragrant pine needles or the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes you can appreciate a good thing and still have too much of it— Never considered that the whole affair would be a round trip ticket. Unblemished blue skies, a temperate Mediterranean climate […]
Just Like Fruitvale Bridge Park
1. Fruitvale Bridge Park where fresh water mixes with ocean tides, storm drains from Oakland empty into its mouth wide open rents are industrial and zoned cheap, homeless hold out for fish away from tent cities, the favelas that crowd source highway exits, Fruitvale where a Monarch butterfly sucks the life from a milkweed and […]
A Congress of Poets
Walk down the hill from the Historic Mayfair Hotel, the room is clean and the water hot, costs less than other places, forget about getting breakfast at the Convention Center, at least I can buy enough coffee to open up both eyes, but everything is closed on a Saturday morning. And this is LA. Descend […]
To Get a Dog, or Not
Down the stairs of my condominium and across Campus Drive I walk along Leona Canyon Open Space Preserve. In April and May, I canter past an expanse of wild radish and California golden poppies. Below there’s a culvert and a pond lined in cattails and home to a family of mallards whose ducklings hide behind […]
Benchmarks
Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers –William Faulkner Walk past wild radish and California golden poppies, beyond a pond lined in cattails and home to mallards, continue down a slope, an easy jog, a stretch of buckeye trees, the spring’s white candelabra, bay live oak and laurel undulate like dancers in a scrim of sunlight, journey […]