From Part Two:
Southern San Joaquin Valley Poet
1. self.
You ever feel unnecessarily distant to everything you love?
Caught in the city, I see the mountains, leaning, staring down.
I’m wary of the city sunlight outdoors.
I’m wary of the mountains.
I’m wary of my children not seeing me across the Mojave.
But do I pick up a phone?
I continue to stare as I often do and grow sleepy.
And as I stare I think of an area in the Valley of Fire.
Caught in the middle of a rainbow of sandstone, where washes
of sand
and endless sandstone are
whipped by the sun.
That’s where my epic poem is.
Yes. Within the Valley of Fire my spirit stands naked, not so
distant,
naked in a wash of sandstone carpeting the red earth,
in tan ledges and winded grooves,
in whipped fires of bright orange where my spirit can scream
words to the sun,
to the golden eye of everything, of our humanity, I stand naked
and let myself roam.
Through the sands, over the creosotes and washes,
even unto the sun, and out over the fudge-crumbled desert hills,
towards the red baked curves in the distance.
There may my words go on in an epic of self.
My spirit sits in the valley of fire alongside me and writes
about self.
And it is me that thinks, and I do think of driving to work,
down MLK, and Cheyenne Road,
past yellow bus lots and factories, Silver State dumps, dust
devils, and hills filled with the trash of the city.
What of all this as I grip the wheel of my car is here for me?
Or as I sit in the desert,
my spirit dwelling in a circle of sand. What is here for me?
For myself—the self? What is among all this color and
clay-holed petroglyph rock?
It’s what uplifts the epic of self. I tell myself this.
And I repeat: “it’s what uplifts the epic of self,”
to the sun over my spirit body.
Sonora 1996 there is a Tocomcari rise spitting above my desert,
uplifting me.
And Wonderstrand understood, when I climbed his mountain with
Jordan.
I washed Jordan’s hair laughing in self-glee as we stood
in cleansing desert showers.
It was for the self. Those 4 days in the desert under the burning
bush sun—uplifted me.
Living in the car in Central California scented citrus air,
Gautama understood,
sitting in his apartment,
where we could see smoking, burning eyes, in moving tapestries.
And so I uplift my self.
Like Poet in blood hemorrhage, lifted, pain, spirit, death,
sorrows soon forever gone in moments caught between starlight
as he passed.
And maybe I should say in self-uplifted moments,
words that could make mountains twist toward the heavens,
“Christlike, you are the burning bush—in godsent-fire.
Christlike, you parted the Red Sea and cast plagues upon your
own kind,
upon firstborn Aztecs and Algonquin, moundbuilders who dressed
their cemetery hills.”
Those hills still stand upon your babies, plague-filled, DNA
desperate.
In a molecular glimmer of selves.
Yet I’m uplifted.
Like your own mother’s soul-light stretched dim across
the desert
pooling in the shallow valley floor,
Another glimmer—hers—grand self in the desert expanse.
“I am not small,” I hear her say.
“I’ll drink water and steal from the desert!”
she screams.
I am not feeling small because I am more than the casinos,
more than the corporate golf games,
more than a glass of precious desert water.
Though I will stare at the sun-eye and thirst,
and have reverence. I am so much more than starlight,
more than the hot air made from circular winds starburnt into
currents.
More than every circular citrus star in canopies I can’t
stop imagining.
Oh self, ride your bike to shark tooth hills, in bluffs above
oil fields.
That’s a passing memory—oh uplifted self even though
I write like a romantic old poet,
like an old mormon crossing the desert on the blood of snakes,
an old muslim making his hajj way toward Mecca, inshallah,
or an old pope staring into a sea of desert verdure,
crying his wailing wall and scribbling for humanity,
wary of his critics but knowing 100 years from now, 10,000 years
from now,
humanity will simply uplift that something had poured from his
young Polish soul.
Even from Graham with crippled hands.
Oh spirit, why are you in the valley of fire? To cleanse the
self of this poem? Yes.
It’s the desert, El Paso coffeehouse, saguaros, lonely
desert drives, 1998
Naked cleansing in a vehicle.
In a bus across America in never-ending movement,
in Arizona, cleansing at a McDonald’s oasis carved above
the sand and dirt.
The greyhound comes to a stop.
“You’ve got ten minutes. This bus is leavin’
in ten minutes,” says the driver.
And we run in. We scatter coins for chicken nuggets.
And then we feel ourselves understanding the desert.
In a two-fisted Mexican fight that breaks out in the parking
lot,
bicycle riders ride in Wilmot showing tattoos and tanned skin,
square jaws,
bloodshot eyes, and laughing at each other, at us in the bus,
at everyone on board, afraid of the sunlight and heat, afraid
of the desert.
And so they fight.
There goes the Mexicans off their bikes, pushing each other,
beginning fisticuffs and kicks, smashing fists to chin to God
blessed smiles.
Who’s afraid of the desert self? And I wonder as I always
do “Am I Mexican?”
They fight then throw arms around each other, wipe the blood
from the other’s chin,
laugh at their mockery of the bus,
at their drunkenness, and no one loses except those afraid on
the bus, aghast at violence,
aghast while the Mexicans jump on their bicycles and ride away.
And yet again I think of my ‘self’ in the Valley
of Fire,
Rain wash hills—naked.
Glyph hills—dead.
Life in desert cracks, pours over the crumbles of itself.
Pouring more than the tourists do in their air conditioned cars.
I scream like the desert wind—into it.
Because I am alive, and a poet,
And because this poem burns:
an expanse of words dried out in the sun, blown,
grappled from starry citrus idea-lands and idea-trees, unripened,
taken,
and beaten into the form of ‘self’.
The ‘I’. It is the self, proclaimed.
I don’t write every night.
I don’t write everyday.
I don’t capture every moment.
And I don’t care about this moment,
Not like when I saw an old cowboy on Fremont Street,
carrying himself in a swagger towards the old California Hotel.
He wanted the ‘self’ to be worth the casino.
He seemed to walk and understand, as if enlightened by the very
thoughts of
self, money, and wilderness.
And so I think about him and money, youth, and money,
about his aged cowboy swagger, and money.
The people in cars staring at him,
He’s probably 80 years old, shirt unbuttoned—
youth not forgotten, not immortalized, but in his walk
he breathes towards heavenly casino desert self.
Water-sucked dry aged desert self. And so he makes me think:
I remember bus rides through the desert. Yucca moments.
Joshua towers, saguaros, and El Paso Mexicans walking through
a bus station,
seeing Germans in a coffeehouse, and out the window on the 2nd
floor:
Great statues and greyhounds, shivering and a shakin’
in the summer heat.
Driving down the Rio Grande—border patrol moments—stirring
madmen
from the bus in sleeping moments of travel and lust:
wanting America so badly they cry, drink beer, long for it,
and wander…
Last thoughts of self:
It was a solitary desert drive from Riverside to South Florida.
Perhaps, in death-thoughts such a drive is a catapult,
Fiery flung across the desert…
I am naked in the Valley of Fire and I scream and cry,
because to be mindful of our ‘self’ we look to the
souls of others:
I was with Marilyn in blissful final moments.
She lay in South Florida dying.
I was after her solitude.
—through desert moments in Texas,
driving her car through freeway crows’ feasts,
scattering birds—and she was there—
lifting the desert over my head in the morning light of dark
hills.
Texas rocks jutted into memories of travel and self,
And she stretched the desert like a rubber band all the way
to Florida,
until her soul self finally poured in a grey rain over Floridan
freeways,
from a cloud splitting resplendence of sad radio music and rainbows.
Her soul, raining onto the panhandle, rained a heavenly self,
a desert self. And as her heavenly raindrops scattered
from the wipers onto the slick wet freeway, I smiled. Herself
gone.
And myself in her car, driving on in the peace of being whole.
2. religion
Religion is the agri-valley smog bellowing in from the north.
Religion is the desert smuggling fruit and vegetables, cars
and water back and
forth along freeway lifelines.
Religion is the yucca moments of solitude you feel when out
the window:
the desert sky meets mountains, meets pink clouds, meets blue-bellied
lizards,
and the birds that eat them.
Religion is the moment of enlightenment, when the desert road
is a glistening surface
you skim upon.
Religion is the soft-skinned girls of downtown Bakersfield,
wild-haired punkers outside
of Jerry’s Pizza, and their dog that sits with them.
Religion is your soul when the downtown Las Vegas machinery
seems small.
Religion is the mad tangles of clothes I never wash, but that
I wear; and is the dirt of the desert and the citrus valley
soils in them.
Religion is the far off imaginary landscapes of Heaven and Hell,
of dimensions in cyber space that connectivity enlightens.
Religion is the self, in preparation for connectedness to the
unreachable.
Religion is the coffeehouses: yuppies, bohemians at Supreme
Being, ambulance drivers at Java Jazz, Lawyers and Thespians
at Starbucks, Downtown city workers at Java Detour, writers
at Dagny’s—20th and Eye, on ‘F’ and
18th, at coffeeshops on 24th, at Starbuck’s on MLK and
Craig, in casino towers of the mad city, in the Enigma suicide
coffeehouse, and White Cross Drugstore counter: synthesis, soul-life,
creating Howl-like, capturing the dead generation moments in
rural-downtown and big city madness.
Religion is where I write from: desert travels; parks; at my
temporary home in North Las Vegas; under the Vegas downtown
machinery; in my brother’s kids’ room in Bakersfield—full
of stuffed animals, toy guns, Pooh bears and spotted curtains,
hockey posters and Pokemon night light, toy drum sets, and Disney
imaginary trains, pictures and hats, all whimsical and waiting
to butterfly flit around the room in god-worship.
Religion mystifies in the desert, on Pacific ocean islands,
in swarms of seabirds—clouds above dolphin-lined currents,
in young minds dancing in red, in contests, in heaving moments
of confident-smiles and mad stepping, and rebellious behavior,
of mad communication of desert-borne dreams and shaman pictures,
in spiders dwelling in citrus hills, and love between imaginary
places.
Religion is Palestine rising.
Religion is the Vatican surrendering.
Religion is the siege-line outside of Ramallah, the UN lying,
telling the truth, lying again, and NATO bombs falling; and
Religion is a young Cuban boy who looks like my nephew snapping
Legos together.
Religion is Israel pulling triggers to shoot at young boys with
rocks,
and tumultuous minds pointing at America, the head of the snake.
And Religion is the friendships that are borne of conflict:
In Dubai waterways, Los Angeles smog-people-infested streets,
and Fijian reform-lands of queens and rebels.
And religion is the stories I tell, poetic and theme-driven.
Because at times there isn’t anything in my gut. I am
hungry and I cross the desert:
I pull in to every rest stop to piss and sleep. I dream of food
in the valley.
My eyes open. I have a starwealthy countenance, a face of moonbeams,
and I’m ashamed at how dirty and self-loathing I can be
in near slumber,
kicking at the floorboard, thrashing,
while countless truckers sleep so peacefully to their music,
in their rolling desert, in their herds at the rest stops,
and to their vibrating engine lullabies.
Their engines wake me.
Truckers stir in the darkness.
Some are up all night in the starlight, in the shadows.
Some are tucked away.
Others I wonder if they stalk innocent sleepers,
heads against dashboards, thoughts against dashboards,
eyes open to silent speedometers.
The desert is so full of its own religion,
is self-enlightened to its expanding self, it’s cosmos
of sand and clay stars, exploding, dying,
hurtled through its desert cosmos as new life transgresses.
“It’s only a desert,” you say.
And yet you haven’t read about its very essence, its decay,
its holiness trampled beneath freeways,
beneath lots in glittering mad cities,
machinery-churned life deadened under brick,
casinos bright-lit meccas to the material world,
holy to the black hole of the heart.
What is the desert heart hidden beneath?
Another religion:
Blackened—untold—dug from gravel pits
for those seeking heart rock and soul water,
and to brighten a city of transients.
The Apricot:
I walked from the sanctuary at Olive Church,
felt Joshuas standing in my head like desert demons.
I walked on the sidewalk that led between church buildings,
unaware that I headed to an apricot tree.
When I arrived it smelled of childhood youth among orchards.
There was a treehouse in a youth-yard memory.
Beneath lay pallets of drying apricots.
I would never try one.
I plucked one from the Olive Church tree.
It was green, not nearly ripe,
but it had a golden quality so I carried it fuzzy-soft in my
hand
until I met up with my kids as they walked out of the sanctuary.
I was there early to pick them up. That’s why I had walked.
But now I wondered and sat, and I smelled the religion in my
hand,
and the seed of it that I had carried into the desert,
into the glittering city, up red rock trails, to sightings of
holy lizards,
their tracks like paint on soft sand,
four-footed trails skittering into holy mountain creosote fiery
bush.
That, is an apricot.
More.
What a lazy afternoon when I step out of a car to walk in the
desert toward home.
Lone Mountain and Simmons I think of souls.
That is the religion of the moment.
It could be a series of prayers for all who are dying, and living.
At the time I felt the soft sand of lizardtown under my feet.
That’s what we called a certain dune, that junkyard dune
where owls and lizards lived.
There were tires and empty beds, the junk of our lives full
of scorpions at its sandy base.
Sand dune at Lone Mountain and Simmons.
Reminded me of Kit Fox dens and burrowing owl holes
near the University in Bakersfield.
Seems everywhere near home where there is family life,
a city creeps over it.
As I walked, lizard tracks pressed into the sand,
wanting to be remembered.
I won’t tell you about the solitude I felt on that walk.
And I won’t tell you about the tractors I saw the next
day.
Desert religion is more than the man and the lizard.
More than the yucca.
More than the city and ground water caves,
where water sits in deadness,
waiting to fill a last few toilets.
Imagination is greater than the sum of the city.
When you stand at the edge of desert neon-lit streets,
you can peer inward—you can feel it all:
Every mind, building, every movement and flinch.
You can imagine you are the city.
You feel alive that your sum is greater.
But then religion is greater than you.
You can only feel religion.
You aren’t it.
You can only be a part of the tide of it,
seeth in the mass of fervor, like a desert expanse,
star-crossed and starving for water.
Even more.
Of Middle Eastern thought.
Of Mosques.
Of lives and temptation.
Of Merton.
Of Solitude.
Of Wilderness, tranquil, heart in touch with greater feelings
of being.
Ha! You realize religion is Coca-Cola in the refrigerator,
red cans awaiting the masses.
Don’t worry the commercials say,
“there will be more to buy.”
Ha! You realize religion is Castro and his uniform,
his people march in the hundreds of thousands,
flags waving in the streets of Havana,
spreading a gospel of international defiance.
Ha! Castro in a baseball game. Humor fills hearts.
Yes! Religion is Yassar Arafat in his jet,
One man above revolution, without, and with control.
I realize it is not the mosque, not the heavenly rock of ascension,
because religion is not the relics.
Religion is the man who believes on the relics.
Religion is the man who controls the wish of the masses,
and not the masses themselves.
Ha! I do realize religion is freedom, is liberty, human rights,
and that can of Coke.
The relic can be waste, but it isn’t always, and yet,
Is a place where you can feel the presence of God.
Take the USS Cole, Yemeni ports, where young hearts exploded
into darkness.
Young women breathe a final farewell in a moment unlike any
other moment.
The ticking of a clock’s final steel memory.
Religion settles into the moment.
Clinton speaks of meaning. Gives lives meaning.
And there is the religious moment of memorial:
Sailors stand guard
Over our televisions,
Over fervor,
Over pain,
Over puritanical missions,
Over the grey-haired President murmuring religion to the planet.
He and a nothing-to-lose attitude. He and hateful minds together
for a moment of solitude.
For religious liberty fervor of the intolerance of hate.
Religion tries to grapple terrorism by its slippery throat,
perhaps knowing that the ‘terrible’ makes religion
stronger,
and takes pain and suffering,
and makes martyrs of men and women.
Of some rural religion
Take the thoughts in Haslam’s Straight White Male.
Stereotypes, and perhaps indicating that love is rural,
that religion is his rural youth,
that love and agriculture towns are eternal,
and that in his wanting to be a Steinbeck,
all I can gather is that the religious man becomes, and is,
the Okie.
Self aggrandizement—Okie heaven bullshit,
The world, ruralism, and Central California are bigger than
his thoughts.
Steinbeck was a writer.
Others are only what they may have tried to take from others,
from their lost youth,
Ahh, those with a conscience can sleep at night.
I can sleep when I’m not crossing a desert.
Ahh the Central Valley.
Blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Eritreans, Bohemians, Okies, citrus,
grapes.
More Latinos, African-Americans, Easterners, Middle Easterners,
Mid Westerners, Iowans, Ohioans, Lost, Basques, Chinese, Filipinos…
oil. dust. soil. water.
Haslam writing of straight white males, tules,
Towering clouds of birds,
Okie lust and love: the old times.
Remembering what he knew of a city in the late Fifties,
but writing a stereotype covering the entire valley.
Maybe he’s right.
Expressing the sentiment of some.
Though ignoring a multitude of languages and peoples.
His stereotypes of an intellectual Indian colleague,
and a fightin’ family.
He can go right ahead and be the acclaimed voice of
“Central California’s working class, its Okies and
oil-field roughnecks.”
It says that on the back of his book.
But if I were those people and read his novel, I would say,
“I can’t ‘spect me to have my children read
this trash.
It’s full of sex and lyin’!”
What kind of romantic-religious vision does Haslam uplift?
If his is a voice, it is a foul-mouthed voice of the people.
On the art of religion
Take the mechanical man and make him non-mechanical.
Molotov the churches.
Raise new beginnings of open-minded tolerance.
Tolerance of all men created equal.
Lose favor with the closed,
whose tolerance begs nothing,
humbles for nothing,
deifies fear.
The non-mechanics become religion
to those who understand—they are enlightened,
they feel empathy, suffer, heal, learn, cleanse,
accept, work, enjoy, and believe.
Those are the tools of religion.
Use them to paint with a God’s eye.
Most men can paint fear, devils, fire and brimstone death.
They don’t know non-mechanics.
They forget the desert and valley, freedom, and art,
And retain only humanness.
finality
I was wondering the other day if I’m religious.
I wonder today too:
Wilco on the radio.
Kids in the backseat.
Dog on the floorboard—carsick.
Baker 6 miles away.
Mountains and sand and shrub all round.
This is California, its emptiness, its wholeness.
I’m catapulted into the desert, through it,
Toward the November valley,
the San Joaquin, where leaves are turning to fire.
I take my hooded sweatshirt off in the warm car.
I feel feet—socked feet over my shoulder.
My young boy is relaxing.
Through Baker now I wonder further.
127 goes to Death Valley.
It’s 64 degrees on the big thermometer.
Who can gauge Hell? I wonder.
Or Heaven at that.
Up towards the mountains; up to Zzyzyx Road,
then 49 miles to Yermo.
Do you wonder about religion?
And why there is so much of it?
Why does such a word exist?
Why do I find it here?
In the common roadway of the people.
In the Baker livelihood, the Hispanics walking past the fire
station.
They work odd fast-food jobs,
fill gas for transients—filling, re-filling.
We come and go.
We all pass through—none of the transients want to stay.
But we need it.
We buy it.
I buy it. I have my reason.
I have to get my children back to California.
Dear God. The struts on this Corolla are going out.
The boys in the backseat are laughing noisily;
pulling hair, laying across each other, on a pillow,
while I’m sleepy about religion.
But it is here and there,
under the car speeding, god-speed blessed asphalt.
We pass by sand dunes near Basin Rd.
Landy says, “Look at that perfect one! That was so perfect!”
I could see ripples in the sand, and I imagined softness.
Jordy wants to play there.
He pretends to cry.
You see this desert religion?
We’re drawn to its empty beauty.
Peoples, peopled…
I yell at Jordan to stop bothering his brother.
He laughs. I’m cranky.
I yell again. I hate to raise my voice. But I do.
Blood boils.
They are just being kids.
I tell Jordy to work on his homework.
He stares into me eyes.
His begin to water.
Then he smiles.
We joke.
The method of religion.
I say, “Don’t put your backpack on the dog’s
head!”
He laughs.
We’re almost out of gas.
The indicator light comes on.
We should have stopped in Baker.
Where is the next desert gas?
Near the Marine Annex.
I end this poem and pray it comes fast,
While Jordan works diligently.
