again. Endlessly.

It doesn’t hurt.

The numbers, zero to nine,

the size of doughnuts,

are made of foam rubber

and move so slowly

they’re easy to evade.

The woman sits in the chair in the center of the room

and lets them hit her.

She has settled in long past tears,

begging, laughter, or prayer,

a condition she has absorbed

into a powerful resignation

beyond any possibility we might imagine.

She sits there.

No visible exit.

No discernible keeper.

No name.

Reason to Live

I was 22 years old the summer of ’67, house-sitting my brother’s place on G Street in Arcata, caught up seriously for the first time in the flush and struggle of writing poetry, so poor I couldn’t afford a dirt sandwich. But that day the landlord had hired my idle hands to help him unload a U-Haul full of his recently deceased aunt’s belongings, paid me ten bucks, and I was crossing G Street to the Safeway where Wildberries is now, money hot in hand–enough, tightly rationed, for a week of spaghetti–and I remember I was laughing that a week of pasta sure beat my buddy Funt’s infamous Starving Poet Tacos (a slice of bologna on a cold tortilla, roll it up and munch), laughing and snapping the ten-spot, goofing on Funt, just crossing the parking lot when I found Julie, naked in the forest, singing in a language I’d never heard–Julie with the twisted cross she’d tattooed between her navel and auburn pubic hair with a dull safety pin and India ink in a curtained bath at the Girls Reformatory: it had taken her two hours but the nuns, she said, wouldn’t stop her because they were afraid to see her naked, and to tell the truth, so was I, but I didn’t let fear stop me, and I’m glad, because 30 years later my lips still burn where I kissed that cross after we shared the spaghetti I made, and I’ll remember that night forever as the time I figured out that money and food and poetry were ways to live, not reasons.

Scratch

Whipping a stolen ’81 T-Bird convertible across the desert

on a star-flung summer night,

top down, tunes cranked up to blast–

Stones, Dylan, Van the Man–

a half-pound of trainwreck weed on the seat

between you and a laughing strawberry blond

with legs from here to Heaven

who you picked up hitching out of Barstow

leaving a dipshit husband behind

along with a lot of a young girl’s dreams–

though she understands

there’s an innocence we never lose,

and if you’re going her way,

she’s always wanted

to walk out on a third-story balcony naked

in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras

just to feel the night on her body–

and sure, none of this is even close to love,

but sometimes you’ve just got to scratch to get by.

Salvage