The next poem is a prose poem and two words are--
or three words are mentioned quite a bit, I guess.
Pavilion is where people go for a drink at Balboa Island, which
is in Newport.
I also mentioned a bridge that looks something like what
the bridge is in Central Park.
It also looks a little bit like a bridge you'd
find in Venice, Los Angeles.
And then cod fishing--
I'm not quite sure I know what that is,
but those people used to stay at my place.
Well, it's too cold for cod fishing,
so it must have meant something.
Must have been cold, I don't know,
maybe they wanted to stay, I don't know.
Anyway.
Probably it's the latter.
"Balboa Island."
"Leaning against a post in the dark where anything can happen,
I watch a man part the white skirt
of a lamp and wonder where he is going with the Moon
in fragments, the land cooling off,
everywhere the green chime of leaves.
In the space between us, he has the shoulders of my father.
Crossing the street, he heads for the pavilion.
Too cold for cod fishing, he will sit in the bar
by the window above the running lights of boats
and think how his girlfriend left him.
Pulling out of the garage without looking back,
how tonight an empty fireplace edged him out.
The tide in, high winds 15 miles out, the bartender
will tell him that just across the channel
there is a bridge, a canal which reminds me of Central Park,
nor that just now I've turned to go,
trying to remember his face, how it changed in the night
like a sail, a hand moving in candlelight."