Two Old Poems

Rectangles and Howls

 

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits

Urban bucolic, I’m thinking

as we share a submarine sandwich

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd.

where saber-toothed felines

are caught in claw and snarl

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

of prehistory in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the happy accidents it took to survive.

How it has all come to this:

A paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of museums, hung dreams and howls.
__________________________________

Out of Suburbia

 

I have come from abandoned streets

and serious lawns, from rooms of deep pile

thinking perpendiculars.

In the mall, a collusion of displays,

among the well-fed hungry.

The palm tree brought to live under skylight

hasn’t enough arms for me.

The orange grove is paved over

by on-ramps and off-ramps.

 

I return to search the manicured wreckage

for the man who sleeps in my body.

Listen, a sound beats beneath cut roots.

Nests grow in the metal tree on each roof

and a controversy of birds stirs the air.