Two Poems

 At The Van Gogh Exhibit

His portrait is an earth-encrusted shoe

with a screech of crows

in his gauzed ear

and a cyclonic sky for eyes.

The gnarled tree could be his body.

For six rooms you are impastoed,

washed in an ocean of wheat,

then herded into the seventh

where the spell is severed

by displays of mugs and magnets

and wheat is mere wheat again.

As if scorched by the yellow awning

or the madness of potatoes

you are returned to the safe and familiar

with all the quiet acts of desecration we allow. 

_____________________________________

Urban Bucolic

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits.

Urban bucolic, I am thinking                                     

as we share a submarine

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd

where saber-toothed cats are caught 

in snarl and claw

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

pre-history in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the accidents it took to get us here.

How it has all come to this:

a paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of hung dreams and silenced howls.