Güd wrtr

(for the artist known as Ememem of Lyon, France)

He heals asphalt fractures—
potholes, cracks in sidewalk
and asphalt—

the anonymous French
street artist who calls himself
the pavement surgeon,

using all manner of tile to
mosaic everything from delicate
fissures to deep crevices,

stealthily ornamenting
crater-sized gashes that most
pedestrians otherwise ignore.

This sidewalk poet employs
bits of thrown-away ceramics,
scraps to most, weaving

custom bandages that erase
the ugly with high-fashion
restoration. He turns scruffy

streets into sidewalk jewelry,
He polishes the unsightly
into ingenious attractions

that stop the feet of passers-by,
riveting them to the most
ordinary spots for just

a moment to marvel over
over wounds so randomly
inflicted, so prettily healed.

•••

You can see more of Ememem’s work here.

A lousy thing to have every
fourth of July, this silly sensitivity
to loud, unexpected noise,

especially fireworks/crackers/
ridiculously booming boom-booms
or the simple sound of a popping

balloon, and yes, earplugs can
help a bit, but they don’t stop
the heartleap and the startled

jump. Like the dogs, I prefer
to shelter inside as folks
celebrate independence,

though I will venture out
the morning of the fourth
being with us to take up

the long hose with power
nozzle to wet down the wilted.
And even if a piccolo pete

screams in the too-early
part of the day, I will remind
myself to breathe, tell my

galloping heart that it’s safe,
it can slow down, everything’s
gonna be OK, and Ooo! Cool

water on the flip-flopped feet!
Roses and gardenias basking
happily in the turned-up oven

of this valley summer, like me,
a July baby relishing the fact
that, after a long winter,

my toes are truly warm,
wiggling under hose-shower,
and oh, look! winking pink toes,

which make the old heart
smile, ease up a tad and
issue a teeny yahoo!

for our red, white and blue.

Now it’s truly summer,
12 days after the solstice
as the dome descends

like a cone of silence
quieting the neighborhood,
driving most everyone

indoors but the cats,
more lizard than feline
this time of year—

especially my big dumb
boy cat who prefers
outside despite the scary

orange swaths on the
weather map predicting
111 today, over the century

mark for the next week.
Which makes it as perfect
water weather as it was

for long-ago little girls in
1960s one-pieces and zoris
flip-flopping down the path

to the lake across the un-
sidewalked rural road at
our new house for our

first swims in cobalt water,
nothing like the Southern
California swimming pools

we’d known. Nothing like
the heat either, with Mother
grateful for any kind of relief,

even though we were as dry
as we started walking back
up the hot path, turning us

into lizards luxuriating under
blazing sun, our noses pinkening,
blonde hair then as white

as mine is now. As I take
my old self to the pool for
a tepid nighttime swim,

as, yes, the thermometer
climbs ever higher in
this new century,

Ah, but give it time.
It will fall again.
It will fall.

(for the mothers)

•••

On the dusty back window
of a car looking as if it has
undertaken a long journey,
someone has fingered the words
Wander Woman.

Following it down the road
to my mother’s house,
I creep closer, realizing that
it says Wonder Woman—
perhaps a tribute to one
at the wheel.

I want to get close enough
to extend an index finger
and amend the sentiment,
change a letter, add a comma—

Wander, Woman—

because we women tread
in our mothers’ footsteps,
make our way through
the dusty, dirty world,
tidying it here and there,
picking up a little of this
and that along the way,

coming into our wonderfulness
as we wander hither, yon
and ever forward—

on the way to self,
on the way to the place
we call home.

Sure, it’s just a quick ride
through a car wash,

but dang, if the process isn’t
a metaphor for every passage

through the dark, your vision
obscured by soapsuds,

black strips flaying your
exterior as you are somehow

pulley’d through a wet tunnel.
You admire the cobalt light that

turns purple toward the end,
the gush of waterfall drenching

every trace of dirt or sin or lie,
bestowing a chance to start

over, coming into the light
with relief and gratitude,

as if you’ve never seen
the world quite like this,

which, in a way,
you haven’t.

Two minutes, lying down,
index fingers pressing the corners
of each eye after you maneuver
a single drop in.

You add the lying down part
to the prescription, along with
the timer on the iPad and its
serene bell, the same one that
once reverberated around your
late poet friend’s living room,
she a slight and graceful presence
with a bunch of poets reviewing
their drafty drafts, 10 minutes
apiece, the gentle sound signaling
time to move on!

And each time you hear it now,
the twice-a-day tintinnabulation,
lying on your bed, finger pressure
preventing the drops from sliding
down your nasal passages, you
wonder if she heard such a chime
near her end, nudging her on.

Today, though it is noon,
you hear the hooooo, hoo-hoo
of mourning dove (which for years
you spelled morning) outside your
window, and you smile, eyes
closed, stinging a bit as they do,

and when the chime bongs its
soft bong, you lie there for a bit,
listening to it diminish, knowing
that it will not sound again
until it’s completely drifted
away.

So you wait for it,
like the dove, like her smile,
to circle round again,
not wanting in the least
to move on.

•••

(in memory of Marie Reynolds)

What if this is all we get of heaven?
—James Crews

As she lived her dying, my friend Julie
told me that she thought everyone
got the heaven they imagined.

Hers would be slathered in pink,
her favorite color, enjoy the just-right
temperature between warm and cool,
where she’d happily receive her
adored ones popping in for visits.

Heaven, I ventured, sounded
much like her earthly life.

Well, of course, honey, she said.

So if this is all we get of heaven,
my here and now works for me.
Though the greater world roils, I
find myself near the end of the day
writing inside my century-old house
with so much summer evening outside
that two men work in tandem to
dismantle a great length of backyard
fence, planting new redwood posts
into fresh concrete just before dark.

I walk outside to behold the
wide-angle view into the yard
next door, the embracing space
all the way to the alley—one man
spiraling an auger into the earth,
the other smoothing postholes
rimmed with fluffy dirt.

Isn’t this honest, sweaty effort
expended on my behalf surely
a divine gift, too?

Such caretaking by gentle men—
like my current beloved, as well as
my late father and long-gone
husband—who each performed
a thousand tasks, often unseen,
too often unappreciated—
on my behalf,

still working from their heavens
to make sure I have everything
I need—and so much more.

The old fence needs to come down,
which means this summer’s
over-the-top crop of morning glories,

literally spilling over the fence,
must meet an untimely death, which
kills a bit of something in me.

All day—not just in the morning—
light gleams down the throat
of each purple blossom,

generously sized and so happy
I cannot help but smile at them.
I have caused their early demise,

and I mourn them, wondering
how long it will take for them
to grow to such a mass that

they’ll overtake the new fence.
Years, I imagine, though if I long
for such purple majesty,

I need only to look across the yard
at the opposite fence where
the cousins of the departed

smother that surface, drip onto
the out-of-their-minds leggy ferns
that, with no help from me,

bend as gracefully as ballerinas
toward the grass. Their days
are numbered, too, of course,

as yours are, and mine, and those
of ones we don’t want to disappear.
But even in that trampled earth

where the new fence is rising,
glory lives and will make itself
known again. Just wait.

(for Kat Fleming, massage master)

You know how you feel yourself
levitating off the table a bit,

your body barely kept from
ballooning up to the ceiling

by her hands doing that thing
she does, her strong fingers

holding up the back of your
head along the occipital ridge,

so that whatever schmutz
you’re carrying drains like

fine sand onto the table—it
feels that way anyway—

and when it’s over, when you
have to somehow unstick

the melted you from the table,
reassemble all your parts into

the bony structure of you,
your satin self still drifting

somewhere near the ceiling?
That. That’s what her hands

do, somehow allowing you
escape the body that serves

as the garage for your soul
while planting you firmly

into the rich soil of yourself,
and you are so wobbly-grateful

afterward that the word
massage hardly covers it,

the bliss of being. Just that,
which is everything.

(for Marilyn Reynolds, above with Shelley Burns)

For the last time on your lawn
Shelley led us in Tuesday
morning exercise—

and though you weren’t there,
you were, because, though it’s
actually not your lawn

anymore, and you’re in new
digs across town, it’s still
your place to us.

You say goodbye,
and I say hello.

We wouldn’t be twisting
to the Beatles without a little
help from you, our friend,

who gathered us all together,
who invited us to your lawn
to exercise and lighten our hearts

during the worst of the worst
isolation most of us have known.
Today, Shelley at one point

urged us to tighten our
“feminine details,” which,
of course, made us laugh,

which, of course, made it
impossible to tighten our
girl parts for a bit.

I imagine that I was not
the only one thinking,
Feminine details!

Marilyn would love that.
And Shelley said to me,
You might need to use that.

And I said, echoing another
Beatles favorite, I will.
And I am, because honestly,

I do this Tuesday exercise
because of a little help
from all of you, my friends.

Here comes the sun,
and I say it’s all right.
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.