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Poems in prose clothing like Mardi Gras traveling incognito conjuring San Francisco street scenes through a Cajun filter with mystic Tarot reading kickflips and Southern Baptist backslides while a half-forgotten dream lingers somewhere off-stage fiddling with the dial.
Get yourself a copy today.
The key to the motel room was a metaphor
rhyming with the allegorical sunglasses
which may be the point of it all
pointing due north
An ounce of nightingale
versus banjos in the eucalyptus
which I took to mean the prototype
& to lay it down then
w/a little 2/4 oom-pah beat
spinning the wheel of outrageous fortune
like taco Tuesday on a Wednesday
but knocked from the karmic loop
whatever is going to happen
like it already has
& all of it leaning up against yr mind
like a bulldozer
leaning against a feather of mist
Here's what the poet Ed Dorn wrote about Stephen Emerson's short stories in 1982: "Steve Emerson notices everything. At the center of his style there is always some detail which, when uncurled, reveals the story in its veins." That statement holds true with Emerson's latest, his first book in over 30 years, How I Met Jack Buswold, a new selection of nine short stories now available from Blue Press.
All that I no longer am
yet carry w/me
an inheritance left unclaimed
half buried in the sand
half washed away in the tide
w/I suppose Oceanities of misappropriated
albatross-befeathered
shadow wings on the waves?
Only the tender caress of oblivion
can take the guesswork out of mercy
is another way I could have said it
but if I was talking to you I
wouldn't have to say a thing
The sky its azure reticence
(azure residence?)
between rainstorms
The Dark Rose in her bed of thorns
pinwheels, springs, pendulum ghost shapes
& in the space between molecules
a tractor gracefully rusting
as I said to the lady behind the counter at the
gas station mini-mart
Doris
a name that means "gift" in Greek
in mythology a sea nymph
geographically a mountainous region north of
the Gulf of Corinth home to the Dorians
I said "Descriptions should always be misleading"
"Whatever" she said
In French "d'or" means "gold"
There's no place I'd rather be than
half way there
walking like a Peloponnesian
as though it might cure the common yearning
love leaves in its wake
The audio clip ticking like a waterproof watch
from the T'ang Dynasty
A sun tan neatly folded over the
balcony of my heart
& sure you can pretend that you see your reflection
in the polished blue mirror of the sky but
it isn't yours
until you give it away
Cashing in on the 7 Deadly Sins
Trying to build a banjo out of
used car parts & a lost weekend in San Bernadino
Jimmy Reed & Ida Lupino
Listening to the wind skip like a broken needle
Motive & Opportunity
I could swim thru all that you spill I said
but drinking from a puddle
at the bottom of the ocean
wasn't the only way to
express my thirst
The onshore breeze as articulated by
Big Sur windchimes
at 4:19 in the after-
noon the
sunlight coming in at an
autumnal slant
Did you notice? I didn't until just now
the surging ocean waves paved for sunset
My troika was pursued by wolves
but I do have an assortment of acrylic paints
& the gravitas of an Obi-Wan Kenobi or
Baba O'Riley
tripping the light fantastic they used to say
practicing eccentric breathing
scanning the dial for the sound of gulls
insinuating fate
It will either inspire prophetic dreams
or leave you stranded in a dark corner of yr mind
begging for more like I said to my gal Sappho
the first one's free but I'm seeing double
The Wizard of Oz wasn't a wizard at
all, but a little guy named Oscar who
had a glass eye & a knack for the short
con
knocked around Venice Beach w/a hunch-
back named Vera
operating in & around a phone
booth outside the Fox Theater on Lincoln
Blvd circa 1971 or so
A few years later . . . no where to be found
yr guess as good as mine
I moved north to Half Moon Bay in '76
the phone booth went away two decades after that
The Fox Theater was converted to an
indoor swap meet which
is pretty much what it was
any night when the lights went down
& the screen lit up
& a drowsy numbness was dealt out in dime bags
