It's wonderful to be here in Tucson.
I want to thank the festival organizers for inviting me.
My voice is a little hoarse, I've been traveling.
But I will do my best.
This poem is called California Poppy.
Shuddering back to this coastline, craggy old goat
rock, or the sweep of dune where Judah meets squid ink Pacific.
No more the nomad, for now, or stubbornly everywhere,
as each exotic dancer filling the cracks, the cracked
sidewalks of North Beach.
As the indigent, waving his tattered placard on the island,
what we call this meridian near Church and Dolores
where the fronds of palm trees are
stippled with shrill, green or yellow lorikeets saying,
come to my island, live cast off cargo on this desolate reef.
As the transmissible fruit fly larvae, ravaging local oranges,
as a fragile head upon a thinning stalk that somehow
manages to clasp hands at evening
and send up its muttering entreaty, so small
you might not notice.
So ubiquitous, you see so many ugly little flapping faces
parking city car lots, the freeway on ramps,
the piss scented flower pots.
The unclaimed and untended plots, so few, and yet they
are dense with the wispy strands of hair
and the folds of sallow tents, that you've your right
to ignore them, to ignore the grasping fingers
and bloated waxy face of the wildly surviving thing that
once was somebody's boutonniere, somebody flash of light.
Trail of phosphorescent street lamps
punctuating the homeless night.