Things That Glow

The red light on our kitchen stove when one or more burners are on, or something is baking in the oven.

The sections of glass in the Tiffany lamp under which our cat sleeps: buttons of amber, a butterfly with red and black wings, green leaves and white morning glories with yellow stamens.

The moon.

The tiny green light flashing in the lawn of an apartment building one night that caught Roberta’s attention while we were walking home from Café Vita. We were mystified. I bent down to look more closely. It turned out to be a warning light for a small lawn sprinkler.

The band of light on the CD player in our ’94 Subaru that flashes “reading” or “untitled” whenever we slide a CD in for play.

The Hall of the Eye at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The colors in a dream.

Cephalopod luminescence.

Roof top cab signs.

The Christmas lights in the small glass jar covered with white lace that is currently situated beneath a large pine bookcase whose sides I carved in the front yard of a friend in the Santa Cruz mountains near Los Gatos and whose pattern I took from a book on Viking carving and consists of birds sitting amid foliage with berries in their beaks.

Traffic lights.

Motel signs, particularly the ones found way out in the desert, or great plains, in places like Kansas, or Missouri. The pop and ice dispensers at such motels. The silhouettes behind the curtains.

Streaks of orange and violet and gold at sunset.

The Nocturnal House at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo which housed fruit bats, a two-toed sloth and three-banded armadillo and had to close in 2010 due to budget constraints. I miss seeing the fruit bats hanging upside down, cocooned in their membranous wings, silent and still except for the occasional wriggle.

Bright yellow leaves constellating the sidewalk in late fall after it has freshly rained.

Coffee Foam

We entered the castle at dawn. The dim light feebly illumined an array of antiques and medieval weapons. Bats dangled from the high vaulted ceiling, enfolded in membranous wings. What were once chandeliers radiating light were encrusted with webs and the ancient wax of long dead candles. Our flashlights dazzled the walls. There were peacocks and angels, cherubs and robed women playing dulcimers. Reptiles skittered by. The strange predications of their skin displayed bright, iridescent colors and scales. A tall man in a black leather jacket, sunglasses, white cane, long shaggy hair and beard descended in a rickety elevator and introduced himself as Count von Zinzendorf, the legendary barista of Café Radis, who had long since retired and now spent his days reading old volumes in braille and feeding and stroking his reptiles. “How did you do it?” I asked. “How did you make those amazing coffee foam designs. Each one so unique, so spectacular, and you, a man who has been blind from birth.” “I feel a stirring in my blood,” he said in a voice so velvety it seemed itself to be the stuff of coffee foam. “I nimbly accept the toss of ocean waves. I feel the universe throbbing in my bones. I weigh the noise of my brain. As the world turns, I hear the calliope of our journey make its music in my wrists and fingers. My hands become birds, deft as the swallows that swoop the meadows of summer. And then the images come. I feel them as my hands trace their character and shape in the beverage. Would you like some coffee now?” He asked. I was breathless. “Yes, I would love some.” We entered the room where kept a number of espresso machines and samovars and jars full of tea. He produced two lattés and went to work, his hands quick as a magician’s making birds appear and disappear. “All my nerves shout summer when I do this,” he said. “I feel the glow of a thousand mornings and the deep peace of a Montana night, all simultaneously. Because this is the essence of coffee. It is morning and night in a single beverage.” When he finished, I looked at the images on the surfaces of the latté. In one was the face of a beautiful woman. In the other, was mine own face. Years later I married that woman whose face floated momentarily in that magnificent mug. Her name was Evelyn Lovelace, and she was a barista at the Café Mousse.

 

Green Tea Universe

A hover alters exaggerate. I drag a tricky orchid. Cloud at energize wallet. Palatable muse if oars twinkle.

The density clutches money. I see subtlety crack. Blister tray it compliments with sublimity. Rails walk shouting allegories of greed.

Paradigm wrinkles fiddle with language sticks. Biggest feather it hives is a locomotive. Evocation slips we alert the media. Nimble garments across breakfast yield color. Our sweetened robin turmoil. Our insoluble crackle. Our connectedness.

I smear stirring apples. Ultimately a teeming life attends an ablution.

Pin drink to jabber. Thumb phonograph we exult. Take adaptation to a door and open it. Chemistry makes us immediately Parisian.

Serious neck I buckle. The surface pullulates your chat. The taste beyond glide discharges frames. Bacteria thrash in the boat. The jackknife represents its squirts. The canoe extrudes cotton. Talk unfolds. We hurry to bewilder it with rags.

There is heft after the calliope ghost shows us death. Handsprings hunt the load. The tug is a form of configurational biology. Myriad predicaments hold my thesis. Triangles and fiddlesticks sizzle with value. The cloth ship has a pommel. The headland spins my bomb. I pounce on a quark and wedge it into a potato.

Rough appointment that a resilience beguiles. Butter your hope along. Throw the rumor. Reflect winter vertebrae. A linen is organic tea. Map skin with severity, as wrinkles house detail. A cloud they ponder in greeting is celebrated with machines. My bouillon cab is parked there. We strum our floats with raspberry wheels. Bend by pumpkin agreement. Tell branches we are discriminating. We collide. We carry chrome. We pack our grandeur with deformed bologna.

My feeling evolved from a Fauve palette. Scratch a gargantuan swallow and you will get a gargantuan transcendence. Muscle before flapping. Grow a caress. My shiver falls into milk. The play carries appearances of tickling. Chisel a lotus convulsion to go with the amusement of dirt. Urge wool. Suppose they pull a garish milieu and fly it into articulation. Suppose the stream accepts its own subversion. The blooms are busy selling ions. Age describes what I turn into. Peacocks are examples of eyes. Hills fulfill themselves in books.

Rattle the occurrence clean. They cut sawed cartilage here. I absorbed a pink scratch. Buffalo Bill emerged from the back room yearning for coffee. The office joined in a play. Toys consonant with power were strewn about the room sneezing sidewalk narratives.

My writing weighs noise. It is a dry argument I hold. The grammar literally aches.

Breakfast evolves vertically. Rattlesnake ganglions suspend the experience of thread. The Cézanne still life speaks to the stickiness of grip. Dirt accommodates sobbing. Faith accommodates necessity. The fantasy engorges with circles. Baltic amber stores the energy of an ancient blood.  Singing mimes insouciance in spectral bistros. Pulling blood will widen you. Expansion insists on elegance. We grow perturbed in our biology, creating a green tea universe.

A bikini eyeball shouts summer at a plume of steam. The gray sigh haunts a ganglion of sexual parenthesis.

Birds amid apples grow into Bohemia. Linger in a hectic parody. I perceive house paints. The library swims with architecture. Willow expands the potential of dirt. Reality shines among the rocks. The story burns into beards. A journey punches sails. We dream beside the nails remembering the construction of riddles during the time of the slow simulacrum.

Commonwealth

I hear a man with a hammer in the fog of the morning. Electricians with drills. The grind of the drill. The elation of an open garage filled with the obduracy of rags and paint cans and odd bits of machinery. Why elation? A convocation of things is always an elation.

The fabric of time is sewn with minutes and hills. It gets hot around experience. Sand demands the song of the shaping wind. Behavior calls for movies. Behavior is strange and we need to understand it. We need to see it on screens. Animal behavior. Human behavior. Humans acting like animals. Animals acting like humans. People in the underground rushing through turnstiles. The ocean regenerating itself with fish and fire.

The fathoms below are black as velvet and punctuated with the drift of luminous organisms. I am lost in thought. Rails walk into Mexico shouting sunlight and steel. What is inside of us is outside of us and what is outside of us is inside of us. Skin is not a barrier. It is a medium. It respects the vigorous air of winter and longs for the heat of summer. The smell of a potato dug from the earth. Shoveled up steaming and subterranean.

Here is a totem of whales and seals. Here is Jack Kerouac in an attic in Los Gatos unleashing a river of words. Here is a garish symptom of language declaring itself to be a hippopotamus.

I drive a taxi. It floats on butterfly wheels. I hover over the traffic. I pollinate traffic lights. They blossom into green. They blossom into red. They blossom into yellow and cause brief interludes of ambiguity.

My skin is mapped with experience. Not tattoos, wrinkles. Folds. Can you hold this theme a moment while I go put on a sweater?

Supposition is the art of sewing abstractions to water. I toss pronouns into the museum to hear them echo. I write on a black table in a coffeehouse at the bottom of the hill. A setter looks up at a man in a parka with a fur collar while a bald barista makes him a latté. A velvety voice issues from the speaker above my head: Nina Simone on piano accompanied by a cello. The candle is an arm of light reaching for the stars.

Depth juggles space. Consonants are toys. Vowels are power. Or is it the other way around? Space juggles depth. Vowels are toys. Consonants are power. Syllables brim with tinctures of dream. Nerves flourish with the sparkle of a bicycle. One can perceive perception and sew it together. Sew it together with words. Sew it together with hammers and flares. A battle. An itinerary. A commonwealth.                                                

 

An Alpaca Morning

When sensations are converted to words, they become iodine. They become cartilage and bone. They rattle. They dry into sidewalks. They extrude paradigms crackling with calliope ghosts.

Would you like a slice of sexual algebra? A piece of fruit? There is a Cézanne still life above the sideboard. It is full of fruit. Help yourself. Though you will have to eat it with your eyes.

Is there symmetry in space? I don’t know. How could there be symmetry in space? Space is not a thing. Space is a no thing. Or is it a thing indeed? Space is the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Harpsichord.  

Reflections on the surface of the water display the loom of the weather. The gray sky sighs with the dreams of birds. Picasso stirs a pot of beans. Autumn floats into winter. Winter is now ubiquitous. You cannot shoot winter with a shotgun. You can only endure it. Butter a hope with a long seclusion. Chisel a fiction out of the air if the air is willing and the chisel is real. And the winter is long and the days are short.  And all of your pronouns are harnessed to the syntax to a sparrow.

I admire the grandeur of the asterisk. Who cannot tremble at the sight of such a little star?

Structure defines. Chaos excites.

The bow of the violin apprehends the strings and seduces them into sound. It sings of beads of water on a black table. It sings of consonants pumped from a well of vowels. A wisp of incense unveiling a current of air. A blue van backing out of a 7-11 parking lot. The creak of an elevator in an old hotel. A tidepool loud with color. Buffalo on a voyage to the stars.

There is a charm in imperfection. Red hills perforated by a blue sky. A tug followed by the ghost of an atmosphere. Flaws in the ice of an alpine lake. A bit of blue plastic sticking out of a white drawer. The myriad predicaments of a gas station on Highway 99. Seeds. Pinochle. Topaz.

Palpitating secrets mark the beginning of indigo. The ocean washes over the wheel of the ship. There is a spectacle of blue at the end of this paragraph. No one knows what it is. It could be Hamburg. It could be headlights pinned to the night.

The bistro is imbued with rumination. Outside, rain percolates to the roots. Thin black branches silhouetted against a gray sky, tangled and complicated and delicate, like nerves.

Nerves are nervous according to the ways of the pumpkin. This is how art answers the enigma of sand. All those fine little ripples shaped by the wind. Mountains ablaze with an alpaca morning.