Lost in SF

Sometimes she wonders if movie titles
are societal forecasts, the eight theater
marquee a partial text. Why is everyone
so impersonal? She derives the collective
movie maker's symbiotic nature. Pays no
attention to the actual movie content,
just the huge three-dimensional words--
a competitive paragraph that changes
according to box office. Should she
quit the teaching job? Reads the words
like a horoscope, as she sits in the dawn
jam with her coffee, the radio reporting
about how the road looks from above.

About the Communal Graves of Potters Field, New York
A Found Poem

- Excerpts taken from a New Yorker article, July 19, 1993 -

Usually they're not even lost.
Could be a man meets a woman
and leaves his wife.

Maybe one out of ten turns up dead.
You know, a body found
in a plastic bag in a lot.
A charred hand clasping a gun.

What's strange and what's not,
it's a matter of perspective.

Twelve years.

When there are no fingerprints and no face,
that's where I come in.
The next thing is, is it human?

Usually I have the mortuary assistant
handle that. Then I try to determine sex,
age, race, stature.

Pathology and anomalies --
A writer -- the hand and right-arm bones
would be longer, and there would be
pronounced muscle markings.

Personal identification is last.
There are cases where, much as I hate
to say it, I don't even try.

Air & Metal

When it's three here, you're eating
cornflakes back east. Cornflakes
getting soggy while I can't

sleep. Crickets chorus. Jets come
and go like sliding doors,
the rubbing sound of air

and metal. TV mimes the effect,
yet it's not necessary. We could be
sharing something simple like the stars.

Imagine

When my sister turned twelve,
she had a Safeway sheetcake with

Crisco-white frosting, Fab Four
heads moulded in sparkling sugar,

surrealistic air-brushed guitars
and quarter notes. Notes,

not music, nonessential script,
elegant as words, sweet and true.

When Imagine came out,
my sister was driving. We stayed

in the car and listened in silence
until his mystical sounds wore off.

Dreamers of John - New York John
and us the California girls.