plus I send an ambulance,

and I better send another fire truck,

and Fireman Bob rescues the little dinosaurs

and rushes them to the hospital with the siren on–

and how about you’re the doctor

but you’ve never operated on baby dinosaurs before

so I have to show you how

and I fix up their spinal cords and their little hearts

and they’re OK now; they’re gonna be fine…

Until I want to yell

HOLD IT! STOP!

How about

if I’m Lothario the Magnificent,

an alchemist magician,

and I can focus my wild imagination so powerfully

I’m able to condense all the women I’ve ever loved into one?

And how about I can imagine with such passionate

clarity

that she is real, right here and now, completely,

and how about if

you’re just a little kid, fast asleep,

dreaming of the starship Enterprise

gliding deeper into deepest space

toward who knows what unimaginable adventures

and illuminated moments of being–

so fast asleep not even a Klingon laser strike

could wake you–

and she smiles and whispers,

“You and me, sweetheart–

how about it?”

Necessary Angels

1952

When I was seven years old

I whispered into my belt buckle,

A secret radio:

“Dragon 4 Starcruiser calling Base,

Dragon 4 Starcruiser calling Base…”

And I remember that splurge of joy

When a voice on the other end

Responded rich and clear,

“Come in, Captain Jimmy, come in…”

1990

“Return to Base, Captain Jimmy.

Do you read me?

You’re about to leave the screen.

Come back, Captain Jimmy!

Return to Base!

Oh, Captain Jimmy,

You dumb shit.”

Prayer Bones

Bone is just a sound you make in your throat,

a shaped breath, a word,

till you touch

the smooth massive skull of a feral boar

or balance a pelican’s

almost weightless wing bone

across the palm of your hand.

The blood and roots

that bind us to a place

remain sheer romance,

a grand abstraction,

till you slip the quivering heart from a deer

and fry it for breakfast.

Till you pick chanterelles,

or munch baby carrots

as you thin the rows.

We kill to nourish ourselves

on the light released in death,

for we only know what enters us

through these diaphanous membranes

we call our bodies, these whirls

of wind, rain, mineral, and light.

My mind was an idea about itself

till I found the skull of our mule, Red,

beside a fern-shrouded spring

deep in a tan oak thicket

where he had fallen or laid down to die

almost two years earlier.

The constant rush of spring water

has stripped his skull to a dazzling white,

startling among all that green,

the clear water swirling in the brain cavity,

pouring through the sinuses and eye sockets.

After a meandering sluice down the long ravine

the spring water joins the Wheatfield Fork of the Gualala,

then the main stem at the end of the ridge,

and finally slides into the Pacific.