give me a daisy

San Francisco poems (1974)

last days

Smoke dreams,
the days went in a haze
of musky air;
green and gold and lavender
love-spangled hours,
sun-dappled minutes;
fleeting glimpse
of someone
here or there.
Yellow.
Red.
In dreams conceived and born,
short-lived,
to dust return:
finely colored ash,
dissolved and lost.

ocean beach 

I.
Splash!
and a riot of foam:
the waves
roll in,
swallowing
the beach meticulously,
inch by inch,
sucking in
pebbles and shells
and footsteps
of bathers—
unwrinkling the shoreline
and retreating.

II.
A small bird
tracks
delicately
across
the newly varnished
surface
of the sand.

55.

lady,
inking a path
thru the night;
new words,
old words—
desires
translated into safety.

sleep
with a dream
or a pen
always breaks
in the coming of the dawn,
whose grey reality will
tear the page and
rip the fabric
of the night.

the infinity of possibilities
ends here
in the clarity of morning:
I don’t touch you,
not even with my words;
and the dreams are only
dances
on the far edge
of the lush and tender forests
we could know.

56.

Sometimes a goldfish,
I swim thru
the city’s nightwater
lit brightly from the top.
Neon and stars
indiscriminately
weld their light together:
a gold fishnet
of infinite capacity.

In the damp Pacific air
all the city is an ocean,
full of frogs,
and fish like me,
and seaweed
that tangles in my hair
and ties me
to the concrete ocean floor.