6/28


This is cut and pasted from the current weather conditions
station nearest me. Temperature: 100 F (38 C). That's in
Elkhart, which is two minutes to my right basically. So it has
hit the century mark. Dew point is 70 degrees. The desert at
110 feels like a spring play day comparatively, since the moisture
in the air here creates a sort of WALL effect. When you open the
door and exit a building you HIT the air; you RUN INTO
it. Then you wade into the fire. In the desert, though you feel it--
it's hot--you sort of slip through it, and if you find some shade
it's all right (relatively speaking).

For some reason this heat has triggered a shitload
of turtle activity in that the surface of the bay is covered
with painted and map turltes, snapping turtles (big) and
softshell turltes (big) all floating around, sniffing the swirling
heaviness of the ozone that has dropped to the surface
of the water, I guess. The temp will go higher. 103 I'm
thinking?

mechanism


All the birds, the red-winged blackbirds, the cardinals, are
panting, sitting on various perches, looking around with
their beaks wide open. The earth, she a burneth up.

OUR BEAUTIFUL WEST COAST THING

          We are a coast people
          There is nothing but ocean out beyond us.
                                           —Jack Spicer

I sit here dreaming
long thoughts of California

at the end of a November day
below a cloudy twilight
     near the Pacific

listening to the Mamas and the Papas
      THEY’RE GREAT

singing a song about breaking
somebody’s heart and digging it!

I think I’ll get up
and dance around the room.

      Here I go!


                     — Richard Brautigan

THE COLDEST WINTER ON EARTH

The Coldest Winter On Earth is out. Right now please
buy it here, at SPD, which is where you should try to buy
most of your books (if possible). It's also for sale at the
Marick Press web page. The poems collected here were written
between 1998 and 2011. More info at SPD webpage. It should
make it to Amazon soon (I'm not sure what the hold up
there is). Here's a poem from the book, more recent. The fox
depicted herein is a regular visitor at this residence:

FLYING OVER IT


The fox, nine shades
of sandstone, was pierced
through the eye of

the doe, its memory streaming
behind her. Leather
is the pilot's thought-designs,

an instrument panel made of
windmills and goggles,
the snow draining pewter through the

resident's loose jaw, his large teeth, an
arrowhead grooved in each
thin hand; death is a body growing larger

but lighter, years flipping away
like flash paper,
the enormous sun breaking gravity

it is sunk so deep in the frozen lake
of the open eyes,
the legs now shining like petrified time . . .

POEM NOTE

"Recipe" is in The Nation (subscription required). Pics of coyotes
below.

coyote, the second

a coyote