The sadness was all in me.
Outside was its ordinary self,
oranges and mirrors, blueberries
and wolves, nothing special,
you know the song
and nowhere noon.

2.
Measure me
I whispered to the moon
but his mind,
that bad boys’ crony
was elsewhere, his eye
on different scandals,
just dark by me.
So Measure me
I whispered a little louder
to the tree (American basswood,
our own kind of linden, tilia)
and he smiled the way they do.
The way they almost always do.

3.
So you see how trapped
I must have felt
(the feeling is passing away
even as I speak, scent of patchouli
on a woman who walked past,
Benedict Canyon, so long ago,
so many trucks going by,
where was I?),
trapped
in who I thought I was,
thought, that somber jailer
of our grown-up days.
Desist from thinking.
Hop a ride to Yerba Buena
don’t bother coming back.

4.
Life means sleeping
in someone else’s bed
every night for all the years
and call it yours.
You know how to do it,
you read the books,
Rabelais and Gildersleeve,
you know that language
keeps its distance from the thing,
you know identity
is the least of our worries
until it falls away
and leaves me looking at the sky,
stiff-necked, waiting
for a meteor to come by
and assure me it is summer
and Perseus is casting darts
now that Andromeda
is sad from the sea,
and stands there in the moonlit meadow
smiling at me, saying
the moon is too bright to see.

5.
When sadness is going
or almost gone
what takes its place?
Fly on the window screen,
wasp on a paper plate.
O yes, it’s daylight again,
they do come back, the days,
the centurion with his baton
leads them one by one
out of the dark, not a word,
but have you ever seen
a blue rose? here, take
this one, it grew for thee alone.

6.
But sadness is a fact,
usually the shadow
of someone who has just
passed by on their way
to being someone else
from the one we need.
Smell of patchouli,
street map of the Mission,
a cigarette. The years
seem to be winning
but then the hero comes
and rescues us in sleep.

7.
Don’t doubt your dinner
says the wolven to her cub,
it’s the least we can do,
be nourished and be ready.
Grown up to prowl and howl—
the moon needs you, and all
those strange people need the moon.
The wolf cub is too young to wonder why.

8.
See, when cyclists roll by
your house they’re always talking,
talking as they wheel along,
loud clear voices and you wonder
would they talk so brightly
if they sat, just sad together
under a leafy linden tree
like the one out back with whom
I hold so many conversations.

9.
Sadness just a shimmer now,
breath a moment
on the mirror then
clear image of myself again.
A window works better,
shows the other Holy alterity,
breakfast in the stars.

10.
But grief too
is a relief,
sadness is a lazy town,
just lie back and frown
and nothing to do except
accept and wipe your eyes
and guess it had to be.
With some reluctance
I totter to my feet, walk
down to the station
and take the bus to Fresno
where there is no past.
But then I remember
that waitress in the TexMex dive
and know that all the past
is my personal tattoo.
Get off the bus before it is too late.
                                                          14 August 2020