"We find our poems in similar ways, I suspect. But I'm confident we all feel at times like a group of strangers staring up incredulously at the saucer-shaped light hovering above our rooftops. We feel compelled to tell our story, even though we anticipate the sting of embarrassment and mockery it may invoke. Other communities will have their stories, however odd, which (having felt hurt by our own stories) we may listen to more attentively. So maybe it won't be the silver saucers that change our lives. Maybe it will be how we learn to exchange stories. Or how we learn to listen."
- Bob Bradshaw
Bob Bradshaws poetry was also featured on page 9116 of the 1999 edition and page 8114 of the 1998 edition of the Central California Poetry Journal.
Always there has been fog
along the coasts, hugging
the coastlines like stockings
embracing Greta Garbo's
legs. Foghorns flare
their warnings and go
out. But we remember
the sound of fog horns as fondly as we do
nursery songs. Odd, isn't it?
Strangers dissolve
into the fog. North America
disappears.
But the night air is like the darkened
room of a séance, where
contact beckons. Moonlight
shimmers in the fog,
and you think of the light from projectors
in old movie theatres.
When
exhausted, and ready to believe
that all is as common and as
predictable as summer heat in the Delta,
there is fog.
Maybe that's why lovers
are compelled to seek the privacy
of fog.
Think of North Beach and its jazz,
with signatures as distinct
as a fog horn's, flaring
from basement night
clubs.
Where you know no one maybe
but the lover
who leans against your shoulder.
Where at 3 a.m.
you walk up the steps
from a night club,
clutching each other,
the fog like a blind chaperone
as you and your lover
steer toward the harbor
of a darkened
apt.
Catfish came up in the pockets of drowned boots.
Ok, ok so my youth
you aren't holding this against me,
Why should I trust
Are you sure you're talking to the right guy?
You're not gonna freak out
You see how we are different?
No, I'd rather watch a man kick
Your family sips wine and takes hot air balloon trips
Are you getting this?
you're stubborn.
The surfaces of lakes rippled as if
in an afternoon shower; herds of bass
grazed in the green waters.
Knotholes in fences were views
into yards where minor league baseball players
played on grass as green as Augusta's.
With a glove rubbed down in Vaseline
or spit, I snagged fuzzy fly balls
in the dusk with both hands,
and never imagined living anywhere else.
The high school girls were as mysterious
as Chicago, the Pacific, San Francisco,
and jazz.
wasn't so innocent.
You knew all along, didn't you?
You were waiting to see how far
I'd go with this line, weren't you?
Ok, here's how it was. I was like most guys;
my heart was like an open heart
in an operating room, vulnerable
to the slightest filth. Beneath my mattress
was a library of sleazy books:
books by Lawrence, Henry Miller, Kerouac,
Burroughs, de Sade. All-Stars on anyone's
TheyOughtaBeCensored List.
But
are you? My life has been like a stone
in a long line of stones in a cemetery.
Why should you care to step forward,
to search my stone out among
so many stones?
Why?
you? You say it is my kindness,
perhaps, that draws you to me.
But kindness is as common as journal entries in a ledger.
Why would you spend time researching
such an entry? That's what I am, you know,
an expense. I have only a small savings,
a shy, self-effacing humor,
and a career path that fortune tellers
turn sadly away
from.
I'm not romantic. I pick my nose.
I watch old NFL clips.
And boring? I enjoy Saturday afternoons
at the laundromat.
My ideas
are as common as dirty underwear. My socks can never
find their mates;
definitely a bad
omen.
when you see hair in my nose?
Or when I scratch my crotch at the plate
in the company's annual softball game?
Or when I fail to see the merits
of a woman rooted on stage
singing at deafening decibels to her lover
who's only a foot
away?
I would rather spend the day cleaning
toilet bowls
than suffering through Opera,
and dancing swans
are too absurd to contemplate.
a bloated pigskin between two sticks
and yell like a fiend
on Sundays, and Mondays, and Thursdays,
and, well, you see?
Different! No, not different.
More like you're probably related
to the Stanfords or Hearsts.
My family comes from a long line
of animals that never grasped
the idea of using
tools.
over the vineyards of Napa.
We grunt and scratch ourselves.
That's how we entertain our guests.
I'm a whiner.
Excited, I whine and flail my arms as if trying to hail down
a cab in an afternoon shower.
The cab inevitably flies by, waves of dirty water
flying over me as if it had been a speedboat
I'd tried to flag down.
Is this the guy you want to introduce
to your mom and dad? A man with no career
and a face as plain as a sea
cow's?
You know, you do have one bad
trait:
My mother was too cheerful.
Our beds had looked like discount clothes bins
Inevitably Dad moved out.
And now there were more photos
We moved back and forth
She was like a zookeeper,
forgiving of her inmates' behavior.
She used to scold us, snapping at us
like a lion tamer's whip. We kept to our seats
until excused, if that's what she wanted.
Now she was annoyingly upbeat.
If Dad raised his voice at us,
her stare would push him backwards
like a cop's stiff arm pushing a degenerate
up against a wall.
What was going
on?
Then she'd smile at me and Sis.
She couldn't do enough
for us.
Did we want to go to the mall?
Could she drive us to the skate rink?
Leave us alone, we wanted to shout.
And what was with Dad?
He had become as polite as a butler.
at the Salvation Army. Now
Dad paroled the house picking up
discarded clothing,
slowly hanging them in the appropriate
closets. He was home more often.
Overtime had disappeared.
His language stiffened, too.
Shall I take out the garbage, honey?
Shall I?
Sometimes Mom ignored him.
Other times it was a cheerful
Thank you. But the cheerful voice
was fraudulent, like a panhandler's
"have a nice day!"
when you pass him, ignoring his
outstretched and dirty
hands. Why were Dad's hands
so dirty?
When we visited his Berkeley apt.
he hugged us too hard.
He, too, had become irritably cheerful.
He bought us games, dolls, and there
were the inevitable zoo
trips. I wanted to know why
he wanted to live away from us.
Why was he living in a small apartment?
Why didn't he come home?
But I didn't ask. I was afraid the answers
would hurt. But I refused
to be cheerful.
The more cheerful they became
the angrier I
got.
To be taken. I didn't smile.
It was as if they wanted to preserve us,
the way a safari
can be captured in photographs.
I could sense that my sister and I
were being turned over
to gaming wardens.
Smile, Dad said. Smile, Mom pleaded.
But my smile had receded
deep inside me,
like a cat backing deeper
into the tall
grass.
to Dad
like animals being boarded for weekends.
Mom would retrieve us,
waiting impatiently at the curb
like a taxi driver waiting for a train's gate
to go up. We would speed
away, Dad standing in the yard
like a man at a train platform,
his wave too enthusiastic.
And Mom responding
to any good news about Dad
with "Well, that's
great!"
The road inches closer to the cliff
till it stops and looks over the edge,
like a man with vertigo
too paralyzed to climb
any farther.
We look out through our fogged windshield;
our hood ornament points towards the Pacific
like a ship's bow.
Our braking Buick shudders
like a ship grounding
onto a reef.
We wade out into the rain
and look down onto the Pacific.
The waves slam into the cliff's wall.
It's fifty miles back, our Buick
stalled.
The clatter of horses' hooves
that we hear is only
sliding rocks.
A barricade of rock and mud
is forming behind us.
Our Buick inches forward,
as if it were a heavy cart
being pushed,
like a car about to go over a cliff
in some elaborate
insurance scam.
But we could never afford insurance.
We step aside;
we're like a man who watches
his car burn by the roadside,
helpless.
Only there's no one to wave down.
No emergency phone every quarter mile.
Only the Pacific below.
Only there's no need to worry.
Someone will find us,
eventually.
We have granola and beer.
We have night coming on.
We have windbreakers.
We have our Buick edging
towards the Pacific like a boat
locked in ice that begins
to move.
We have a story to share
together years
from now.
We have a big pain in the rectum.
We're cold. No one's going to spot us
up here, at night.
But we're guys. No one whimpers.
We've scrimmaged in weather
worse than this.
We cart the beer and pretzels
from the car like shipwrecked survivors
carting off the ship's supplies
before the ship breaks
completely
up.
There aren't even animals.
Only plunging rock.
The wind whistling by us.
We stand at the cliff's edge
and look out on our drop
like amateur parachutists
about to step out of our first
plane.
We think better of it
and step back.
There is nothing but the Pacific.
Miles of water and sky.
No freighters. No buoys.
No lighthouse. Only rock
and numbing
wind.
This is what it comes down to,
we say. After all the first dates,
the beer parties, the divorces
and the alimonies,
the jabbing with attorneys,
the house payments
and the kids,
this is what it comes down to,
a mudslide shouldering
our car off the road,
and another weather front
moving inland,
and another chance to look out
at death and the nothingness
that was always there,
pressing against
us,
waiting for us,
knowing that we were like a hood
ornament on a Buick
being pushed over a cliff,
unable to do
anything
about
it.
Baby,
Just nineteen hours ago,
And ninety minutes ago
Seven minutes ago
So don't talk of waiting, darling:
Already an archaeologist,
our child having died, by now, thousands of years ago.
reset your watch:
Earth saw, for the first time,
the stars straddling its saddles of waves.
a froth of bubbles watched the skies,
as pioneers of the land waited for dusk.
our ancestors risked the
hazardous footing of branches, the leaves skeptical.
as white-haired as the moon, is scraping
through tons of decayed pines, wedging off our roof's tiles:
All text and images in The Central California Poetry Journal are copyrighted. Copyright © by Scott Galloway 2000. All rights are reserved. See main Journal page for
copyright information.
Authors and poets submitting original materials to this journal retain all rights to their original work, except those rights specifically assigned in writing to Solo Publications including the right to publish the submitted work in The Central California Poetry Journal. The poems on this page are copyrighted by the author. Copyright © Bob Bradshaw 2000.
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