Dolores Park

by Randall Mann

The palms
are psalms.

The nail salons,
manicured lawns.

This is some phase.
The park has been razed.

I miss the hip,
hours at a clip,

their dopey glazed
Dolores haze

(sorry).
I worry

about basic stuff:
my graying scruff,

Ambien addiction.
Eviction ...

— But there’s another story:
this site was once a cemetery.

In 1888,
the late

were stirred,
disinterred,

carted somewhere calm, a
nothing place called Colma.

By then the dead
prohibited

in city light.
They thought this was all right:

the dead have nothing to lose;
the dead were Jews.

Hills of Eternity, Home of Peace:
the dead were put in their place.

How Wonderful

by Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood,
to just sit here while some kind person
relieves you of the awful burden
of having to explain yourself, of having
to find other words to say what you meant,
or what you think you thought you meant,
and of the worse burden of finding no words,
of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person
has found just the right words for you—and you
have only to sit here and be grateful
for words so quiet so discerning they seem
not words but literate light, in which
your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.
How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is
not to be understood, not at all, to, well,
just sit here while someone not unkindly
is saying those impossibly wrong things,
or quite possibly they’re the right things
if you are, which you’re not, that someone
—a difference, finally, so indifferent
it would be conceit not to let it pass,
unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.
And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage
of those high murmurings over your head,
having found, after all, you are grateful
—and you understand this, how wonderful!—
that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,
like a root growing wise in darkness
under the light litter, the falling words.

Irving Feldman, “How Wonderful” from Collected Poems: 1954-2004, published by Schocken Books. Copyright © 2004 by Irving Feldman. 

No Title

by Ben Estes

That this mountainside looks like a face is accidental,
which is a shame, for I dearly love to laugh.
The touch-smoothed redwood cross-section, in its rings
of growth and brightness,
seems like a sun seen from underwater,
wobbly as jelly, mocking my
inability to find a job, my food stamps,
and saddens me to see
the teens tagging themselves in nearby places
to earn a virtual friend's respect, or boasting
other symptoms of youth while leaving
their greasy fingerprints on the thick lenses of my glasses,
mocking my desire for artwork
to remain packed in straw, and in music
for sleepers halfway awake to grow wild in.

It all gives me faith in arranging, I guess,
when there is nothing else I seem much good at but fuss
and copy and paste, with a head full of so many other worries.
Got a check today. Bought a book I can't read
without it putting me to sleep
with its out-of-date luxuriousness.

So instead of reading it,
I stayed up and listened to Harry Partch's song
And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma,
dedicating it to the memory of Ramon Novarro,
hoping it would arch electrically above him
with all the characteristics of fire
all night,
all day,
and soak his early spring colors in a late autumn
sun as pale as silver and fern-green skies

to draw light
through midnight

and steer instead his valley's vista
toward my own simple neighborhood loneliness
with nothing better to do than lie back and lecture
those cultured Internet boys
on their own death's primitive and permanent cartoons,
to walk carefully and not step on any snails,
the poor,
the rough skin bundles,
or shiny boners poking out from satin robes.
This light, is dark.
And on the seventh day petals fell on Petaluma,
forgiving those who hurried past before
stuffed with poo and feathers underneath the hot yellow heat
that I wish would ignite all the unopened envelopes
piling up on the table by my front door,
(and burn up all of the time I've spent
on all of the things I can't
put my finger toward).

I went for a walk this evening
and found a speckled turkey egg
where the river settled
into the mud of the salt flats.
I looked at the burnished iris
of the eye of a trout.
A gleaming Atlantic coin.
Thinking even the wind tonight could speak,
blowing in seeds not yet caught
on the coat of the dog. Still, life.
And all the needs in this world.

Ben Estes, "No Title" from Illustrated Games of Patience. Copyright © 2015 by Ben Estes.

My Mother Goes To Vote

by Judith Harris

We walked five blocks
to the elementary school,
my mother’s high heels
crunching through playground gravel.
We entered through a side door.

Down the long corridor,
decorated with Halloween masks,
health department safety posters—
we followed the arrows
to the third grade classroom.

My mother stepped alone
into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her.
I could see only the backs of her
calves in crinkled nylons.

A partial vanishing, then reappearing
pocketbook crooked on her elbow,
our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel.
Even then I could see—to choose
is to follow what has already
been decided.

We marched back out
finding a new way back down streets
named for flowers
and accomplished men.
I said their names out loud, as we found

our way home, to the cramped house,
the devoted porch light left on,
the customary meatloaf.
I remember, in the classroom converted
into a voting place—
there were two mothers, conversing,
squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

Poem copyright ©2012 by Judith Harris.