When you are nineteen. (A memoir)

The Line

It’s when you cross the line

Jerk back over, a near miss, pull

Off the highway O my god O my

God O my god in a citrus grove

Turn off your engine, say sorry

So sorry, caught up in talking

Under the mountains, the moon

Illumines every leaf, and then,

Catching your breath, your eyes

Wide at the re-engaging crickets

When you kiss with the emergency

Brake gouging into your thigh

Her hair soft and blond and punk

(Like it’s not even there) Yours

Is wet, boastful, curly and long

Your name is Awkwa this summer

Sneaking Dining Hall cheesecakes

Immersing the body in the stream

Guitaring songs into the woods

To warn the bear it will be shot

Tree sap chocolate dust

Go backpacking alone above

Treeline. Forget parents’ visit

Another girl, Naomi, waitress

At the Main Camp dining room

Hair straight black and long

Will write you 12 page letters

For seven years until you walk

The streets of Santa Barbara

Forlorn she's gained since

Kissing her on the steps over-

Looking folds of the valley

Hold yourself down lengthwise

In the current. Cry for the bear

Cramp-up swimming to the middle

Of pond, half drown at 19

Alive with envy, ego, repression

Recognizing none of it, running

Across needles strewn under

Outstretched arms of sugar pine

Strange as it may seem

Each girl is better than

The last, less shallow

Exponentially more sexy

Young and lean and wild,

Like the bear, adolescent

Chasing it uphill with stones

And screams to stay away

In the wilderness, but it

Will cross that line

A history of the United States, from a book published in 1847

A History of the United States

In my arms, like a baby, an old book

Her spine is leather, cracked yet supple

From Keen, Jr. & Brother, Bookvendors

No. 146 Lake Street, Chicago

A History of the United States

Between pages 314 and 315 a flower

Is pressed, and “an awful silence”

Prevails among the spectators

And girls line the road with garlands

To sing an ode for the troops

In the Appendix, weapons, ships, officers

Headquarters of the General-in-Chief, Washington

Those of the Western Department are at Memphis

Fifty-one sea going vessels, an Army of 7,168

With a militia of 1,311,569

Engraved campaigns, captures, evacuations

Jackson ordered to reduce Seminoles, page 395

Gracing our twenties, hair like a flag, since 1928

When the Dow blew while reservations slept

In corners of smoke and dust and still

In the Appendix, charts of Indians, 1836

Removed:  31,357.   To be removed:  72,181

Between the Mississippi and the Rockies: 150,341

Says the Secretary of War, “…the Indians are totally

Ignorant of their own relative strength…”

The book, for sale while at War with Mexico

The one Thoreau refused to pay for

Polk’s, Buena Vista, Taylor, Santa Ana

But the book ends, page 435.  We will  

Storm Chapultepec.  Gain California

When Fremont raises a grizzly bear flag

At Monterey. Then the Gold Rush & Chinese

Ishi the last Yahi, and I will be born

There a hundred twenty years later

During Vietnam

In the Appendix, populations in columns

1830: 102,994 slaves reside in Maryland

In the back of a Baltimore police van

The spinal column of Freddie Gray is severed

One hundred and eighty-five years later

What is our country’s history without murder

Land, gold and little wars?--page eighty-eight

Built by the pious sweat of pioneers

On a generous earth, with faith in our arms

Cradling God in our books

iHop, Rainer Maria Rilke and work

Es Muss Sein

                “To work is to live without dying”

                                   -Rainer Maria Rilke

Late at work again.  Up early 

Thinking about it on the weekend

I’d rather be Madison’s Nazi Poet

Than a workaholic.  Then again,

                es muss sein

If only Rainer Maria Rilke and I

Could sit across an orange iHop table

With Jimi Hendrix and Supertramp

After the dinner rush and be off

To wonder upon the photo of the fried

Appetizer Sampler Plate, how each

Onion ring, cheese stick, chicken strip

Could not be fathomed by Empires lost

When the forested realms held spinning

Looms and hunger while God was afloat

In paintings and iHop was an egg waiting

Deep in the womb of want

The line to stand up straight is clock

The quota boss bangs his fist for more

Work, an indispensable grief.  Chop wood

Carry Chains, Backache, Pus, et cetera

Aprons swish and sweep the floor 

We are off, digging fried finger foods

Rilke has no idea I have read his poems

On a screen like a high-gloss menu

He gawks with a starved animal gaze

As the waitress serves and bends, her

Apron soiled and tight around her trunk

As old world as any woman at any time

I do not bother to explain the Rolling

Stones to Rainer or black on black crime

Or why his words about the waitress’ body

Were meant for another century

To work is to live without dying

That condition by which we know ourselves

Sages whisper in each ear, but they

Have always been unemployed