Güd wrtr

It’s been decades since I lusted
after a particular pool. My sister and I,
young synchronized swimmers,

fell hard for the Neptune pool
on our first visit to Hearst Castle,
and dreamed of doing ballet legs

in that aqua water surrounded
by a pseudo-Greek temple. How
glorious, we imagined, to swim

in that ginormous pool with its
classic, black-patterned bottom and
Art Deco sculptures on the rim.

Now my heart longs for a much
smaller pool, mid-mod like me,
shaped like a champagne cork

at a 1950s hotel-turned-condo
in the desert. For five winter days—
all oddly cool for these parts—

I’ve had the pool all to myself.
And on my last swim down
the middle of what has

become the pool of future
wet dreams—the one with
the just-right temperature

and the just-right fluffy
clouds overhead—I was
pleased at the way

the old body memory
breast stroked and sculled me
up and down, up and down,

alive and well, if heavier
and not nearly as lithe
as those long-ago summers,

but oh, to pause, to float and float
held in all that blue beneath,
in the endless heavens above.

(at the Ocotillo Lodge, Palm Springs, California)

Here, they negotiate the wicked thorns
to perch in earth-toned camouflage

on the spears arrowing out of the ground
at the corner of our building.

One moment I catch the zip of a tiny
winged being, and my slow eyes

try to follow it to its landing place.
It takes a bit, but there it is in profile,

the hummer’s long beak coming
to a perfect point, its eye spying

mine through the protection of
wicked thorns. I can’t help myself:

I talk to it softly, as I do around wild
things, trying to reassure them that

I’m only looking, that I mean no harm.
And this little bird sits, seemingly

calm, though I’ve read that its resting
heart beats 250 times a minute.

So, I figure, its little engine runs
about four times faster than mine

in the 60ish seconds we study
each other, creature to creature,

we marvels of engineering, before
each of us wings off to wherever

our adventurous hearts take us.

Indian Canyons, Palm Springs, California

•••

The shaggy elders in this oasis
bring to mind winterized buffalo
on the Great Plains, their snow-coated
hides bulked up against the cold.

But, more appropriately in this warm
climate, the dead fronds feathering
their lower regions look to us
like thick hula skirts

adorning the desert canyon’s 3,000
fan palms, an impressive assembly
of dancers that, as we walk
among them, might—

should the wind pick up
and birdsong migrate into
gentle guitar fingerpicking—
start to sway,

the ancestral spirits coming
alive, perhaps accompanied
by drumming and singing
of the original peoples,

after we visitors quietly
depart, returning this ancient
rocky cathedral to their
sacred care.

•••

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians has called the Palm Springs
area home for eons. Indian Canyon is part of their ancestral tribal lands,
and Palm Canyon is the world’s largest oasis of California fan palms
(Washingtonia filifera). Though the trail can go much farther,
you can take an easy walk about a mile through the palms along
a seasonal creek.

They used to say about informing on
someone, about ratting someone out,
the ten-cent piece being the cost
to make a call on a pay phone.

Only now, only here, in this tram station
on a craggy mountain, it’s two quarters,
which puzzles the young lad staring at
the long rectangular box on the wall,
asking his bemused parents, “¿Para qué?”

He holds the receiver to his ear as one
of them says something about “teléfono,”
which befuddles the boy even more,
now listening intently to, as we used
to say, dead air.

Nothing like any phone he’s ever seen.
Standing nearby watching, I smile,
ask if I can take his photo, and he grins,
his parents nod, as I try to remember
at what age I first confronted a pay phone,

who taught me to drop the dime in the slot
at the top and wait for the (do they call it
this anymore?) dial tone. Are there operators
still standing by when you dial—oops, tap—0?
Is there still a 0 on the phone in my pocket?

And this, again, is one more way that my status
as a relic in the making smacks me upside the head,
another arcane piece of knowledge that is more
historical than useful—

like a newspaper delivered at home every day.
Or cursive handwriting. Or film. Typewriters,
manual and electric. My Rolodex filled with
little cards on which I’d typed precious
phone numbers that, if I was out and about
working for that old-fashioned newspaper,
I might dial into a pay phone.

Similar to the one with numbers inscribed
on silvery buttons that this boy pushes.
None of these are needed now, except
as artifacts of entertainment,

which—I have to admit looking into
the boy’s merry eyes—is not
a bad use of such an antique.
Even if it does cost 50 cents.

Even if the only number I can still dial
by heart is no longer imprinted on
an olive green phone affixed to
a kitchen wall.

Even if the voices of the ones
who used to pick up
fade away a little more
every day.

less than 100 feet north
from the center of the walkway
leading to the art museum
to a nearby grove of palms

where her white skirt
famously flares high over
the heads of thousands
who come to see her

in a desert town where
people have for years
protested her gigantic
presence as sexist, tacky,

not art. But goofy tourists
come by the tens of thousands
to look at the undercarriage
of the 26-foot-tall Marilyn—

seen by some as a perversity,
by others as a fond tribute
to a mid-century feminist
icon or abused sex symbol.

Or both. She’s kitschy in
her immensity, far prettier
in photos. But still, she soars,
her blonde head visible

to birds in flight and planes
taking off, her chin up,
forever smiling more than
six decades after this

“small girl in a big world”
left it, as she said,
“trying to find someone
to love.”

•••

“Forever Marilyn,” the Marilyn Monroe statue in Palm Springs, stands 26 feet tall and weighs 15 tons. It was created in 2011 by Seward Johnson and temporarily installed in Palm Springs from 2012–2014, where it became a popular landmark. It was reintroduced in 2021 but was controversial for many reasons, not least that it blocked direct access to the Palm Springs Art Museum. It was moved in February 2025 to its nearby location in Downtown Park.

Back in the pool shaped like
a champagne cork

at the beginning of a new year
in a place that’s usually summer-like

in winter, though this year cool
and rainy, the old souse of a desert

imbibing the liquid candy, doing
its best to soothe its parched self.

No matter. The pool is deserted,
the water warm under the gray

overhang far more welcoming
than the drenching storms we fled

500 miles north. After dark, I step
into friendly turquoise, my mother’s

favorite shade, later to sleep beside
a cone-shaped 1950s-style lamp

like the little lights she set on
each of her girls’ dressers.

I think of the ways her colors,
her mid-century era, live on here,

as I find her breast stroking
alongside me, both of us

at home in the old motions—
breathe, pull, kick, glide—

all the way to the deep end
and back.

(in memory of Captain Robert J. Schweitzer, U.S. Navy pilot,
who served from 1950–1974)

I did something today I haven’t done in years:
I stood, as requested by a speaker at an event,
and recited the pledge of allegiance

(trying to remember which hand crossed
my chest and where my heart is) at an
aircraft museum in the California desert.

I sat in the front row between my sweetheart
and a good friend who’d invited us,
waiting to see if they stood, hesitant to rise.

Like so many of my fellow Americans, part of
me feels that the flag of my country is no
longer mine, given that I and others like me

are considered enemies of the state, as
the current president refers to those of my ilk—
a progressive feminist Democratic poet

retired college journalism professor who
champions free speech and sees no reason
to ever ban a book or insist that women

must carry every fetus, intended or accidental,
into the world. In the end, I rose, too, feeling
the same get-with-it pressure I did as a kid

in sixth grade, compelled to recite the pledge
every morning before any education could
take place. Today the words choked out of me

along with tears for reasons I could not
have articulated in the moment. And later,
my eyes filled after my sweetheart,

himself a veteran, located the photo on the wall
paying tribute to American POWs—the husband
of my mother’s dear friend, a man we hadn’t met

but whose name we wore on metal bracelets,
my sister and I not quite understanding why,
who was released in 1973 after 1,896 days

in the infamous prison in Hanoi. A man who,
once home, lived nine months with his family
before dying behind the wheel of a car.

For him, I thought—and my father drafted and
sent to fight in Korea, along with so many others—
I stood and recited the long-buried words

that they must have said thousands of times
for their country.
And mine.

•••

We were moved to see this tribute to Robert J. Schweitzer
(one of 591 American prisoners of war repatriated in 1973)
on the wall honoring POWs at the Palm Springs Air Museum.

You can learn more about Captain Schweitzer’s career here.

(Palm Springs, California)

Descending the steps into the big hot pool
at the mid-mod condo in the winter-chilly desert,

I remember the baptism of these healing waters
two years ago, entering fevered and shivering,

only to have all symptoms of the Big Bad Bug
quelled at the end of that topsy-turvy time.

And tonight—having driven 500 miles south over
two days, hoping to bask under perennial sun,

instead meeting I-5 to splash over the Grapevine
to the 210 east to the 57 to the I-10 to the 111—

we feared that we wouldn’t land in time to collect
the key to our unit before closing, then discovered

that the key didn’t work in the gate and neither
did the four-digit code, only to be let in by a kind

but reluctant resident who balked at revealing
the correct code (“security breach, you know”)

till I wheedled it out of him. After all that, to eat
a simple, coffee-shop dinner across the street,

then hit the grocery store for milk and blueberries,
and—correct code seared into our shaky short-term

memories—retreating to our temporary abode
where we donned our suits, threw towels around

our necks, padding down the cactus-lined walkway,
and gently unlatched the (unlocked) gate to behold

the six-petaled turquoise pool, its steaming bubbles
beckoning under a night-before-full moon

meandering upward through a tall palm or three,
reminding us that all frustrations and aches

melt away in frothy water heated just right,
making every mile, every downpour worth it.

(driving south on Highway 99, New Year’s Day 2026)

I’m at the wheel, he’s riding shotgun,
shooting through the windshield
at the unfolding skyshow—

from swift-moving gray clouds
raining tiny pearl-sized drops
with tails wiggling up the glass

like overeager tadpoles,
then, swithin a couple of miles,
breaking into wide open blue,

the likes of which we’ve rarely
seen for months in our corner
of this vast central valley,

marshmallow fluffy cumulus
loping lazily overhead, sun so
bright we reach for our shades,

lower the visors, bless the
California climate for staging
such a variety show on a

New Year’s Day that earlier
soaked a Rose Parade for
the first time in 20 years

but leaves us natives agog
at the wonder of weather
marching by in perfect

formation, each floating
marvel worthy of our
most heartfelt applause.

•••

With thanks to the guy riding shotgun (aka Dick Schmidt)
for the photos and the title that prompted this poem.

Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.
—John O’Donohue

It’s an invitation, an opening,
like so many that have been offered,
a portal into, yes, the uncharted,

but when has there ever been a beginning
that did not require a wee bit of daring?
Whether your heart is ready or not,

here it comes—the surprises, the possibiles,
no matter how much you resist them.
So dear one, listen:

Breathe deeply, exhale slowly,
and, with your whole, courageous,
far-from-small self,

take one shaky, trusting step
into the unknown,
and begin again.