The presence of absence pervades as time marches on.
-David Meltzer

I’m lying on the floor listening for
the distant thunder,
sounds like deep songs,
like old lost friend’s voices milling
around the cosmos,
their chairs scraping the floor
in the El Chapultepec Bar.

The heat lightning of revelation strobes:
LA, Denver, Albuquerque,
old outposts
where flashes of inspiration
became epic burns
and the smoke tonight
drifts beyond
all proportion
under these
black gloved
clouds.

Memory, not as mellifluous as camaraderie
but I can hear them
there is more than
echoes and ashes dancing in time
to see or feel
or praise. The
changing features of the sky
can alter life and the lightning
so close,
burns holes in their names
as the standing rain fills them
with an unforgettable beauty.

– John Macker

For Mike Taylor
“sadness, I need your black wing.”
-Neruda

Thinking of you from “over Raton Pass
and across the river”, where loss flows forever
into the flat haunted silence of the plains,
suddenly your death wasn’t burdened
with imagery, necessarily, but
just enough to pinch the soul closed or
force the heart to tell stories about itself
in the mirror.

The news was bitter,
a toxic lozenge on the tongue or
a night that blows in with a purposeless wind
that wraps its voluptuous cold
around autumn. Most things

wilting, the snap, crackle, pop of a
morning walk, the
sweet hangover of memory.

I just saw you in Denver, white-haired, gracious
papa polar bear, bent over the words in the room,
like an old Ute chief,
letting the campfire smoke
wash over you.
We made a deal long ago with the muses:
We’d give as good as we got
We promised not to live forever
The streets would remember us only in
November and only when it rained-

You had cast your poke and poems into the
golden foothills light of family
black wing
white wing, you
wrote, “and even if I could, so what?”
Now the earth is a little more unsteady on its feet.
We could use more rain.
Like Neruda’s abandoned doors,
You will swing again as the soul opens

The river in your voice still flows and
will always be my friend.

– John Macker

After the funeral in Denver, driving south into New Mexico

It’s February on the winter betrothed
plains. I share an anonymous rest stop with a lady
trucker, she cooks something in the parking
space on a small grill.
I can see her breath as she empties
the used grey coals into the snow. I
walk to the fence line and not far beyond it,
near the Canadian River, they
say a trail stop, some structure, a homestead,
once raised a
family, was a life-giving lone prairie light
against the darkness and was abandoned un-
ceremoniously, maybe to the last straw of a blizzard,
or the coming of the railroad,
maybe to the last man standing
over Johnny Cash singing, “There Ain’t No Grave”,
the night when there was no darkness worth its
weight in damnation more remorseless than this
prairie dark;
the last of the whisky finished with a flourish
in the gothic cold
rolled empty back into the black space that was
once a well-lighted room.

– John Macker

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 42 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The bubbles went every which way,
up into the sky, down into the street,
full of lamplight and moonshine,
and then they were gone.

– Carson Reed
12/31/2010

At the LV Lodge trailer park
on South Santa Fe Drive, fall 1949,
eight years before I was born,
my dad and uncle John returned from a weekend of hunting
with a perfect, beautiful buck, shot clean, through the heart,
and changed clothes and went to work, sleepless,
leaving the carcass field-dressed, but neither skinned nor butchered,
a present for their blushing brides.

Sleepy, still in robes, my mother and her sister, Bennie-Wayne,
pondered their project, trying to remember the details
of how their daddy — my grandfather –
had dressed hogs and other large mammals.

(They both knew well how to kill and pluck a dinner chicken,
but butchering was mostly men’s work, and they’d seen it,
but they hadn’t paid much attention.)

They went back to their trailers and pulled on their jeans,
they dragged the deer to a tree at the west end of the trailer park,
they tied a rope around its antlers, and hoisted it up on a sturdy limb.

First, Ben tried to scrape it like a scalded hog,
but when that failed, they skinned it, clumsily,
with cheap kitchen knives,
until it hung, naked from the neck down, dark red, nearly purple,
its silverskin glistening in the cold sunlight.

They cut the carcass in half with a hacksaw,
angling from a shoulder and straight down the backbone,
until the headless half fell away, onto a tarp.

Tentatively, with lots of arguing, they began hacking the two halves into pieces,
sorting out what they knew about loins and chops and ribs and roasts.

A neighbor watched them work, smoking on the step of his trailer,
laughed at them as they circled the deer with bloody knives and serious faces,
stepping back and rubbing their chins
like sculptors pondering a block of marble.

Gathering up the homely, bloody chunks of venison,
they took the whole mess to a local butcher,
who helped them wrap it in pink-speckled butcher paper,
marking each bundle in grease pencil
and storing it in his walk-in freezer for a small fee.

Sixty-two years later,
awakened by night terrors at three in the morning,
she wakes me and tells me this story.

“Back then, I’d tackle anything,” she says,
and I imagine the two of them, barely in their 20s,
heads in scarves like Lucy and Ethel,
bitching and laughing and arguing away a morning and an afternoon,
ready for anything and speckled with blood.

Carson Reed
1/21/2011

At Fort Logan National Cemetery

Early November 1991, and it was cold in the shade,
but the sun was shining and the snow had warmed
and packed down all over the city, encrusted,
and trickles of bright water slid out from under it
glazing the exposed pavement in glistening light.

I was there (section X, site 1381),
with my wife, my children, her children
to see my father put into sacred ground,
a war hero, a decorated veteran of the Pacific Theater,
a recipient of the Purple Heart,
slain by congestive heart failure 46 years after V-J Day.

He was a good man, but not a very good father,
and I could never, ever, possibly explain everything I felt that day,
except that longing and regret were involved,
and anger, and love.

The cemetery stretches forever across a long hill south of Bear Valley,
surrounded on all sides by the landmarks of my feral, parentless, youth.

As I stood among the rows of white stone markers,
the places where I played out my teen years surrounded me,
a time that was not a rebellion (there was no one to rebel against),
but a terrible, terrifying freedom:

A hundred yards to the north, the wild side of Bear Creek Park,
the part of the park south of Bear Creek where, at 15,
I danced around bonfires under the immense cottonwoods;
beyond the park, just north of 285, Bear Valley Mall (long gone),
where I shop-lifted albums and sunglasses, dodged truant officers,
sucking down Orange Julius and holding hands
with my jean-clad, halter-topped girls.

To the northwest, Kennedy High School,
where I still hold the standing record for days ditched by a 9th grader;
to the Northeast, surprisingly close, the bell tower of Loretto Heights
protecting a smaller, less-storied graveyard
where I would go with friends on summer nights
to sit and smoke dope over the bones of nuns;
due west, Pinehurst Country Club,
where I worked as a pot washer after dropping out of school in 10th grade;
north and west across the street, the Bear Valley Club Apartments
(also long gone),
where I spent long days making out with Pat,
a lonely young housewife, almost twice my age.

The burial awning flapped in the wind,
the people around me stared through their sunglasses at that cold blue sky.
For them, Ft. Logan was a strange and surreal stone garden,
but for me it existed within the familiar
boundaries of what was once my universe,
and I was happy that my father would be buried
less than two miles from the house where I grew up.

It was something.

That great sigh they call Taps expired in the windy November air,
and the three soldiers cracked their rifles,
shattering all of the preening and positioning and politics
of fractured, divided friends and families,
hammering the moment open like a filbert.

The soldiers, sensing divine right,
gave the spent shells to my father’s only grandchildren,
my children, the grandchildren he made a point to never know.

That hollow brass, smelling of sulfur, was the sum total
of what they would ever remember about their grandfather.

It was not enough.

– Carson Reed

Accidentally Walking to Target
and Buying a Fifteen Dollar Flash Drive

The weather is turning and the mud bees are mysteriously peevish,
warning me away from the last flowers of summer,
which are heroically blooming in their beds
at the edges of stained concrete driveways
and in their neat boxes at the ends of cracked concrete walkways.

The light in Colorado in the fall still knocks me out,
everything is frighteningly bright but suffused in amber.
Every pebble and blade of grass pops like it’s radioactive,
and I feel as if I’m walking through curling Technicolor.

I didn’t mean to go to Target, my legs took me there,
legs that once took me to the same place where the Spartan and the Gem
and the S&H green stamp store once were,
and to other stores that came and went that were so much less interesting
they failed to cleave to a single synapse.

This is my neighborhood that I have walked, days and nights,
for 48 years. I hate it here, have always hated it here,
but this is home.

Arriving at Target, I find a bargain.
(I am so broke I feel 20 again,
but the flash drive is irresistible
for I am, miraculously, a “Student” again,
a status that is an open sesame to the university computer lab,
a place, at last, I’ve found that I can work, again,
a place I’ve found where I can write, again.)

My American Express Corporate Card,
treasured relic of my entrepreneurial past,
weighs heavy in my wallet.
I’ve been using it all this month to lob my indebtedness, like a bowling ball,
into the shiny pins of my near future.

At the bleak, pointless corner of Warren and Sheridan
I stop to turn a penny from tails to heads,
casting a wish of good luck for some indefinite pedestrian
into the indefinite future.

It’s a cliché for writers to mope about the immortality of their words,
but I am certain that I have yet to write any words light enough,
or to send any words high enough,
that they might float like volcanic ash
into the far hemispheres of the future.

In 1996, when my life was a mess but I didn’t know it yet,
a friend asked me what my favorite tree was and,
without stopping to consider the weirdness of the question,
I answered, a bristlecone pine.

(Mute, misshapen witnesses of our planet,
left unmolested, they can live thousands of years,
never making a mistake, never hurting anyone, or anything, ever.
They just are.)

I laughed when a baby bristlecone appeared on my doorstep on my birthday.
I planted it, even though I knew better,
as if the front yard of my little ranch house in the suburbs
might provide a safe haven for a tree through the millennia.

My little tree lasted exactly six years.
When the marriage ended we sold the house and the new owners plowed it up
to plant concrete, and now a Ford Explorer loiters there with its friends.

Walking back home through my neighborhood,
I see this same preposterous hope everywhere.
These ugly, boxy, post-war houses
are wreathed in bush and tree and fence and stone,
gussied up by owners making heroic attempts
to create beauty and permanence,
as if entropy was a garden pest, easily eradicated
by the recommendations of the lawn & garden expert at Home Depot.

Like it or not, I am home now,
and regret leaks from me in sticky rivulets and turns to amber.
What is left inside me is something as lumpy and pathetic as these little houses,
but clearly there is also hope,
however preposterous, however unrealized,
sleeping in the vast, dark, password-protected emptiness
of my new fifteen-dollar flash drive.

– Carson Reed

Happy Motors

On the pre-dawn run east down West Colfax
at Happy Motors
I spot a miserable guy with no arms in a net shirt
pimp-rolling West, battered by leaf bits
(no wait they’re in the net,
he’s caught himself like a fish).

It’s a hard morning after a hard night after a hard week
& my blood bulges so hard in my veins I can smell it
& my tongue is waxed with bile.

Call me Percy,
and let the suspense roll on.

One of these days one of these Novembers
will cuff me a little too hard but I don’t wonder which one.

This morning the only thing I wonder is
if the motors are Chinese
or could they truly be happy?

– Carson Reed
November 1990

Darkness Makes the Road Strange
September 1992

I’m driving the great coal seam of 285 in the p.m., late, and Cody has curled up in the front seat. All I can see of him is a shock of hair, a crescent of brown flesh between his sweat shirt and jeans, and the black bottoms of his Nikes.

In the back, Noah snores unevenly, his bare arms and legs tangling out of a slightly damp jean jacket. The radio is broken. The car smells faintly of McDonald’s and the boys’ sneakery sweat. I crack the window and light a smoke.

First of September, and I have to reach over to kick on the heat as soon as we’ve passed through a long, curving stand of orange road cones at Parmalee Gulch Road. As I draw away from the construction and away from the creepy alien glow of Denver, up into the high country, the road sinks into darkness.

Darkness makes the road strange. All the rote knowledge I have accumulated about this daytime landscape disappears as I drive silent up the mountain. Nothing looks familiar along these miles, a fuzzy, oily world of trees, rocks, and bushes, a dark taffy pulled back from the shoulder, fading at the edges into degrees of blackness, outlines of shadow and the random blink of lights.

Three one-eyed cars pass in succession. I resist the temptation to cross myself. Not even Jesus and Mary can save me from my sense of doom, Shakespearian in its certainty.

All the towns have closed up for the night, but an outcropping of cars looms up from the parking lot of a roadside bar, emanating that scent I once found so irresistible, that song.

Why is it that a dad is less real to his children than a dragon or a Muppet? I feel the cumulative weight of the boys’ happy and unhappy memories building a semi-soft spectre called “dad” that is not me. In the end, I will be a shadow lurking above the boys’ dreams, something glimpsed from that sweet sleep that can only be had in cars, some flash of memory, a silent man in a flannel shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, smoking, brooding in the dark, driving silent, always driving. How much of our love has passed or been passed over in this tight cocoon?

I want to sleep under damp coats in the night, feel the road beneath me dimly gently rumbling up through my dreams rolling slightly as the car leans through the curves.

Let me leave this driving and brooding to someone else. I want my children to take charge, to hold my head in their arms and console me. Some terrible turning point has turned. All of the strength is in them and none in me.

At Rosalie road, where the meadows open up at the top of Crow Hill, I turn on to the washboard dirt and the children stir and settle back into a lighter sleep, knowing that soon they will have to help me shift their ever-growing weight from the seat and into my arms, to be carried downstairs and to the familiar comfort of their beds.

I leave the light on for Cody. Tonight of all nights, I understand the fear that comes when, in darkness, the most familiar things are the most strange.

If only I could find a way to leave my own light on. Somehow I have let the strangeness of this dark road seep into me, leading to a terrifying place, where love and loneliness have become one and the same thing.

– Carson Reed

In a Booth at Bonnie Brae Tavern

October 1984, and Stan,
the publisher of Up the Creek,
had OK’d a Halloween spread
on the haunted houses of Denver.

So, over pizza and beer (lots of beer),
Tom Noel and Dennis Gallagher
told me about some of the many ghosts,
famous, infamous, and hush-hush,
that haunted the mansions, homes, and graveyards of Denver.

As always, Bonnie Brae Tavern was exuberant, noisy,
a unique mixture of families and happy hour denizens,
a boisterous contrast to the neat, quiet (and oddly elliptical)
neighborhood it was named for.

Tom & Dennis listed off, one after another,
the haunted spaces of Denver,
surprisingly many for a city so young,
but hardly surprising for a city so often built on broken dreams.

But Denver was changing:
At that peculiar moment,
the invisible hand of Canadian oil money was at work everywhere,
the skyline was filled with new skyscrapers,
and scrapers of a different sort began to appear,
leveling some of the city’s oldest houses
(and so disposing of their ghosts as well).

So many of the hauntedest houses were already gone,
victims of speculation and progress:
18th and Grant, the Cheesman Mansion,
52nd and Lowell, the Woodbury Mansion (all demolished),
55th and Washington (burned to the ground),
11th and Grant (exorcised).

Luckily, some ghostly hangouts had fallen
under the protective arm of historic preservation:
the Governor’s Mansion, the Molly Brown House,
the State Capitol, the Richthofen Castle.

Ghosts unattached to developable real estate were safer:
the ubiquitous, La Llarona could still lament her drowned child
(and drown other people’s children)
along every body of water from Denver to Chiapas.
More specific to the Front Range,
the Hatchet Lady still wandered the Morrison Cemetery near Red Rocks,
a place that was unlikely to “go condo” anytime soon.

Ghosts, it seems,
are the manifestations of regret,
an illness that even death can’t cure,
though, apparently, urban renewal
can put the dead neatly to rest,
by destroying their residences,
leaving regret to the living.

– Carson Reed

Just Outside of Kingman, Arizona, 1972
Larry was headed home when his Harley,
a chopped ’48 panhead, broke down,
and as he worked on it, on his knees,
alone in the desert on a dark highway,
a sleepy semi driver tagged him, tossing his instantly lifeless body fifty feet.

Back in Denver, back in Harvey Park,
where most of the people who loved him were,
news of his death came in a simple, unvarnished phone call
from the Kingman police.

(If he had died two days before, as a Marine,
men in uniform would have come to the door,
with sentiments of sorrow from the President of the United States,
but, over time, Larry had become a conscientious objector,
and so he was honorably released, but a civilian when he died,
just another dead guy
that the Arizona authorities had to identify and notify kin.)

I was the person they got on the phone.

I was 15, but it fell to me
to tell my 17-year-old cousin that her 22-year-old husband was dead.

She may have forgiven me,
I hope she’s forgiven me,
but she never forgave her husband,
and she never forgave herself.

A Madness of Barn Swallows

Heading east on Alameda from Federal Boulevard, I drove straight into gridlock.

I found out later (much later)
the traffic light was down at Lincoln,
blinking red in all directions,
testing the ability of adults to make practical application
of the Kindergarten concept of “taking turns”
and they were not doing well,
and eastbound traffic was backed up all the way to Pecos.

I was at midpoint in the steel-and-glass glacier of cars,
inching forward on the bridge that traverses
both the Platte River and the Valley Highway,
and my yearning was split between the tranquility of the former
and the speed and freedom of the latter.

Suddenly,
a madness of barn swallows
descended upon us,
from out of nowhere,
from out of everywhere,
diving,
climbing,
turning,
converging from all directions
so fast
I wondered
if they emerged from another dimension,
or why they didn’t collide above me
and explode like atoms of feathered plutonium.

I’d seen this before,
at intersections across the city,
barn swallows set into a frenzy by stopped traffic,
sometimes by moving traffic,
sometimes ephemerally,
a Blitzkrieg executed so quickly I wasn’t certain they were ever there,
sometimes a campaign so relentless
that I witnessed it going to some destination in the morning,
and again at the same intersection coming home in the afternoon.

Whatever their intent, whatever their purpose,
they always seem to me to be taunting the earthbound,
us poor, wingless creatures sweating in metal cages,
or making us an offer, to stop looking forward and backward,
at our frustration and regret,
to look skyward, into the infinite, where freedom lives,
and, sometimes, lots of small, mad, birds.

Carson Reed

Bundling Brush

All through the morning and into the afternoon,
surrounded by simple tools in the grass
(pruning shears, twine, my pocket knife,
the canvas gloves I find but never use),
I bundle brush from the wild plum.

Though my knees ache more,
it gets easier as I get older,
a patient meditation on the nature of stems and branches and thorns.

I trim a branch, I lay a branch upon a branch,
I straighten the bundle.
I tie the bundles twice with twine,
and stack them by the house.

(Sometimes I take a break under the Linden tree,
with a cigarette and a glass of cool water.)

I am so unvexed by this process
that the dogs in the yards and the birds in the trees and the trees themselves
seem calmed by my labor.

I respectfully put time to rest in work that is equal parts
sock darning and Japanese tea ceremony.

Bundling branches is time out of time.
Like all honest labor, it moves out of chaos toward order,
innocuous, necessary, and free of doubt.

Carson Reed
6/22/08

At the Emissions Testing Station at South Federal and Mansfield
Mid-day, mid-summer, only two bays are open,
and both lines are backed up six deep.

Surrender and riot battle for our mortal souls.

The younger people are perfectly self-contained.
They rock their heads to music I cannot hear,
or giggle at a texted flirtation I cannot see,
while older drivers seem to have marched into middle-age
without the faintest clue how to wait patiently.

It is my nature to accept that one moment is as good as another,
but the combination of a hot car on a hot day
in a bleak environment filled with exhaust is exceptional.
It is pure Beckett.

If it’s true that one in ten drivers in Denver has a gun under the seat,
then at least one of us is locked and loaded.

The employees look as if they have been dipped in coal oil,
and their glazed eyes and flat affect accurately reflect
a function that is purely binary:
Pass or Fail.

A notice in the Long Skinny Room reminds us that workers are
Prohibited By Law from being helpful.

It occurs to me
(and must surely occur to the people working here)
that sharing a garage with a running automobile
is a famously effective way to kill yourself.
Giant ceiling fans notwithstanding,
everyone and everything here is steeped in carbon.

My car and I have been tested, and found wanting
(four times, to be exact),
and so I bring to this process experience enough to know
that I will not evaporate if I cross the yellow line (Actung! Verboten!)
and so I leave the Long Skinny Room to smoke
under the shade of the single, ancient cottonwood
growing at the fence line.

Perhaps this place was pastoral once, maybe even beautiful,
but not in my lifetime.
Rocky Mountain Prestress was once here, or hereabouts,
and Englewood Speedway,
where I spent so many nights in the stands,
half-deaf from the roar of stock cars,
(even then a world of carbon)
waiting for pretty girls with Cokes to amble by,
or for someone to die,
whichever came first.

– Carson Reed
7/17/2009

In a Field East of Pecos Overlooking the Union Pacific North Yards
I take my morning walk sometimes,
amid piled sections of rail, rusted refrigerators
and couches becoming dust,
old hobo camps scattered with burnt Thunderbird bottles
and senseless things, bits of cloth and rubber, lost to meaning.

Today, I came upon two big bulldogs,
beautiful, stretched out in the morning sun,
throats slit from ear to ear.

Siblings, I’d guess, by age and markings,
the brown-and-black coats groomed and glistening, with fierce grins
and as cold and solid as upturned tree trunks.

This was a recent mishap (or misdeed),
last night, some mean-spirited soul
dispatched them somewhere else, not here (no blood)
and tossed them here, perfectly back-to-back, a lucky throw
from the bed of a pickup, drunk, full of purpose and panic,
in danger of getting mired in the soft, sandy ruts running against the tree line.

It’s not in my nature to feel sorry for dead things,
except to know I didn’t care to come back tomorrow or the next day
when these two cunning meat sculptures would begin to melt in the sun.

Thoughtless, with only the barest tiny sadness,
I let my eardrums fondle the sounds of the rail yard,
the beep beep beep of forklifts teetering backward from the flatcars
with their paper-wrapped loads of lumber
and the resounding thunder of railcars hooking together
down in the Platte Valley.

Down in the valley, the Union Pacific boys ate sandwiches in their white trucks
and I suppose they might have noticed a man
crest the hill and stand a long while, staring at something at his feet,
staring at something they couldn’t see.

– Carson Reed
2/23/98

On My End of the Dining Room Table
the landscape, the topography, changes constantly,
but it is always heavy with paper:
bills, poetry, books, pieces of The Denver Post,
coupons in yellow envelopes, the t.v. guide,
all stacked haphazardly, but kept safely away
from my pewter ashtray from Six Shooter Junction.

There are also items of escape: sunglasses, cell phone, car keys.

Mama presides at the other end of the table, no papers there:
just little plastic turquoise glasses half-full of cold coffee,
a bowl of mints, a comb, a nail file, a magnifying glass,
her purple plastic pill minder, a box of Kleenex,
her cloissoné-encased Bic lighter
and Winston 100s in a brown leather case.

The lights are always on, the t.v. is always on.
Our conversations are simple, repetitive,
and are tinged with the long vowels and expressive dialect of the south.

Our world centers on food,
and I have become a pretty good cook of things
that are just the right amount of spicy and not too hard to chew.

We are here, we have survived, drop by any time,
we will pour you a glass of sweet iced tea and tell you stories from our youth.

Carson Reed
2/25/10

Pruning the Feral Rosebush
October 2007

Clutter, chaos, entropy and death,
branches from a single root,
one grows and amasses, one breaks free of the center in a shocking explosion,
one gnaws at the bones of time like an indolent lion;
one taps at the back of your head like a classroom bully.

Their sounds grow nearer some nights,
and in my mother’s mind become entangled, confused,
so some mornings I find her shaking, sleepless, on a second pot of coffee,
always with a plan, an urgent plan, to fix or organize something,
or everything, to throw things away, to throw everything away,
to wax and wax and wax and bleach
to wash and dry everything, down to the last curtain.

Last Sunday her fright-filled stomping began about 4 a.m.,
wild thunder that woke me, and I listened with trepidation until,
at dawn, I emerged from the basement to find her frantically ranting
about the immediate need for gardeners and handymen,
stammering out the details of her scorched-earth plan for the yard.

In an effort to minimize the damage,
I laced up my boots and set out to do the work myself,
though she insisted, almost in tears, no don’t, you’re too busy,
which I took to mean, no don’t, you’re too incompetent,
and it instantly became impossible to sway me from my task.

The thriving back yard privet, which alarmed her most,
and which she swore to cut to the ground, was first.
I topped it out and took it back two feet from the faucet it was encroaching,
until I could see she was satisfied,
as she sat shivering on the back porch with fresh coffee and a Winston,
growing calmer and calmer as the sun warmed away the dew in the yard.

The ivy on the east wall,
whose imaginary crime was tearing the house apart
creeper by creeper, brick-by-brick,
was next, and I peeled it back from the windows and gutters,
leaving a four-foot wainscoting
that she found harmless and pleasing.

By now her mood had improved even more, and her rheumatism as well,
for she was coming down the front porch and into the yard
every five minutes or so, admiring her work.

Emboldened, I set upon the feral rosebush,
which for so many years had been glorious,
an emerald bonfire flecked with the ash of ten thousand tiny white flowers.

But last year’s big snowstorm had made a wreck of it.
All the symmetry was gone, and the new growth grew every which way,
And dead things lay hidden at the heart of it.

I had already pruned her twice this summer,
gingerly, con respeto.
We have shared the same history, and the same mother, for 50 years
and, as odd as it is to say, the wild rosebush
may be the closest thing I have to a sister.

I remember, once she was a simple, domesticated rose bush.
Four gangly feet of big green thorns topped by big pink flowers,
a botanical Tootsie-Pop stranded in a treeless suburb
three thousand miles from the nearest English garden.

But over years of neglect, no pruning, no fertilizer,
she became herself, an enormous vibrant bush,
littered with mild fragrant blossoms,
exploding like a great, silent bomb of authenticity.

But, as I said, a snowstorm had made a wreck of her,
and ginger pruning only made her wounds more apparent,
and I did not know how, or could not bring myself, to make her right,
until that Sunday, when I saw my duty to the forces of order, and to my mother,
in the unbearably bright light of that fall morning.

Alternating between hedge trimmer and pruning shears,
I worked gradually inward toward the heart of the problems,
where the bush was cleaved and broken.

She fought back with mute fury,
Pounced upon me with the teeth of a thousand angry kittens
razor-sharp and venomous,
until my brown arms were red and throbbing
and criss-crossed with lines of blood.

(I was happy to endure the lashing,
enjoyed the pain, found it satisfying and just.)

Out came the clutter to become neat bundles to stack in the yard,
down I drilled to the perfect, symmetrical center, every dead branch and leaf
cast into lawn bags that swelled like bloated black ticks.

Death, of course, cannot be banished by a hedge trimmer,
but a weary heart longs for a good metaphor,
and as I worked I could see that, for a little while, I had made my mother happy.

And I was happy, too.
The feral rosebush was trimmed, but not tamed.
It would never grow great pink flowers again,
but it would grow again,
straighter, prettier,
and my mother would be able to admire that perfect mane,
and I, those perfect teeth.

–Carson Reed

Sheba was my Tenth Birthday Present

She was two years old and either half- or three-quarters Arabian mare. It was that other half- or possibly one-quarter that was a matter of some debate among my aunt and cousins on the Western Slope and so with her parentage in doubt she was bereft of the papers that made her a salable commodity and we got her basically for the gas money it took to haul her over the divide into Denver.

She had less use for me than I for her, but at that time my mother was determined that I would grow up with at least some of the rudimentary skills of the cowboy, and so we were stuck with each other.

We pastured her just beyond the edge of town, in a meadow out on Estes Street, just south of Morrison Road, where big houses are now. At the south end of the pasture, the old Italian who owned the land had a big house with a small sand and gravel operation in the backyard, including a noisy little crusher and a couple of dump trucks that raised clouds of dust along the dirt road as they came to-and-from their work, bringing civilization ever closer.

At the west end of the meadow was a huge cottonwood and in the center was a murky water hole that was home mostly for mosquitoes and water snakes.

Sheba was not saddle-broke, and that job eventually fell to the Oklahoma cowboy and pool hustler Bill Stogsdill, who had come into town that summer on a freight train with my uncle Rex, the notorious hobo and drunk. Rex was gone soon enough, but Bill ended up staying with us a while — long enough, at least, to teach me the game of poker and how to roll Bull Durham one-handed and about long enough to half-break the horse, which is all the broke she ever got to her dying day.

I watched him work her through that spring, a funny-looking thing to watch. Bill practically lay on her back, his crotch at her withers and his feet kicking about her neck as she danced sideways around the pasture trying to unload him.

My mother was working two jobs and I was as preoccupied with myself as any eleven year old, so after Bill left town (headed vaguely in the direction of the Kentucky Derby), Sheba had a mostly restful life.

Whenever I did get out there on some Saturday for a visit, all that leisure, after having been not more than half saddle-broken, made her remarkably ill-disposed to have me on her back, and the only thing that saved my young neck was that she had grown much too fat and lazy to buck with any enthusiasm. Instead, she would seek out the lowest branches of the old cottonwood tree or rub up close to the barbed wire fence hoping to scrape off my leg and so discourage any further horseback riding. On at least one occasion she had used a king snake or maybe a snakelike stick of wood as an excuse to bolt and charge at full gallop to the pond, stopping neat as a pin at the bank and sending me ass-over-teakettle into the pond.

Growing up, I had always had a beautiful western saddle that had belonged to my grandfather, and so had our shared name — Carson Reed — hand-tooled on both skirts. But my uncle Rex, the hobo, had stirred up some trouble the winter I got Sheba and so being hot with police and maybe a husband or two looking out for him, he and the saddle disappeared one day together, the saddle presumably hocked for a bus ticket. Rex cleared out and wasn’t seen for a couple of years until my mother had cooled down and her heart had softened to him.

We couldn’t afford another real saddle, but my mother replaced it with a rig that was a big square piece of foam rubber covered in red canvas with nylon nooses where the horn and the stirrups should have been. It was a ghetto saddle, a sad, temporary sort of thing. But the unintended side effect of that canvas saddle is that it liberated me from my mother and her car at precisely the moment I needed to be liberated.

Almost overnight, I had become a pensive and brooding 13-year-old with an intense need to be alone, or at least to be in the company of someone that didn’t talk back.

That turned out to be Sheba, and, thanks to my theiving uncle Rex, we spent pretty much most of that summer of 1970 together. What happened is: I discovered I could wad the entire foam saddle into an old WWII army knapsack I found in the basement, with room left for a wire brush, a wonderbread bag of molasses oats, a hackamore and a pb and j sack lunch.

That summer, when most of my friends had discovered the joys of sleeping till noon, I woke early most days and rode my sting ray with banana seat and sissy bar the six miles out to the hem of civilization, where I would brush, comb, feed and scratch that horse into blissful submission and then we would stroll in the morning sun from one side of the pasture to the other, or down to the creek, or over to see which infernal contraption was making noise at the gravel pit.

All of this was simply a preamble to the actual business at hand, which was to retire to the shade of the cottonwood to eat lunch and ruminate on our individual misfortunes.

Sheba liked the attention. After a time, she came to accept being ordered about by a person clearly not as smart as her with a kind of queenly grace. It’s not like she was ever rode hard or taken far –she was unshod, after all, so our farthest adventures were up the dirt road to the creek, where the pavement started. If it wasn’t too hot, most days we’d finish up with a big gallop through the pasture over to the shade of the tree.

It was there that summer that I crafted my first bad poems and bad stories, pouring all of my adolescent confusion into a steno pad that mostly rested on my knee as I listened to the rustling of bugs and the rumble of dump trucks.

That summer, Sheba taught me the fine art of being lazy, how to eat slow and stay cool, along with the more painful lessons of how to be as clever and brave and stubborn as a half- or maybe three-quarters Arabian mare.

Also somewhere in that summer, as I slowly and patiently learned the tone of voice that lulled her into a dreamy haze, as I learned how to brush her tail out without pulling, or as I learned the very particular way she liked to be scratched behind the ears, or how to back-comb her flanks without getting bit, I guess I might have learned my first lessons on how a woman likes to be treated — lessons in gentleness and empathy that would come in handy pretty soon.

That was our first and last summer as friends. By the next year I had discovered rock-and-roll, pot, cars, and girls, and I turned down a different road from which there was no going back.

When she was certain I’d lost interest in “the horse,” my mother sent Sheba back to the Western Slope, where people are smarter than horses, and so pay them no mind.

Carson Reed
1/13/2006

At the ARC on South Broadway

It’s half-off day,
and there’s a crowd.

Pretty women in their 20s and 30s
rifle blouses with stern, grim faces
working down the racks as if the shirts
were lines of emigres at Ellis Island.

I have stopped making the rounds of junk shops,
there came a time when all my stuff was enough,
and I go now to specific ones for jeans or shoes
or children’s books, which I buy in grab bags on sale days.

I’m in this ARC because I’ve run out of places
to expend my few hours of freedom.
It’s liberating to be at the ARC and want nothing
– I flirt with women in the book racks,
jostling in the tight aisles,
straining to make sense of the filing system,
we squeal over a good find — a junior league cookbook,
a reference on designing small gardens,
a Stephen King first edition.

I would stay here if I could,
lost in the smell of old, used things,
fondling appliances,
or, head tilted sideways,
reading the titles of discarded VHS tapes.

This is as familiar as a strange place can be,
a mother ship that I could sail to the end of the world,
if there was time.

Carson Reed
3/9/2009

At Clement Park

My most recent misstep
may be the least of all, and the most literal
a bit of bad footing crossing a median
filled with river rocks the size of ostrich eggs
on my way to the shade of a line of Russian Olives
where I intended to sit and write this poem.

I am planted like a tulip in the fat lap of summer,
and I mine the living planet like a bee:

The damp, ragged grass is itchy
and reminds me of my gangles of arms & legs & other exposed flesh.

The whoops of boys in blue shorts on the soccer fields
remind me that ears have no earlids,
are just gaping holes sucking in the living clamor.

My ankle reminds me I have ankles,
frail, ill-conceived sockets for treading the uneven world.

Turning inward (with some difficulty)
I inventory my life and find everything to be the usual mess.

Still, I am almost never out of earshot or arm’s length of someone I love.
True, a few that I loved are gone, a few more simply out of reach, forever.
But those I love most and best bide with me still
and I bide — an itchy fellow with a twisted ankle planted in the grass,
grateful as all get-out for my misery.

The other night, you asked me:
“What if you knew you were going to die?”
and I regret my answers, every one.

Go ask the wind at midnight
its answer is no crueler than mine.

Warming in the sun like an old fuzzy peach,
it seems to me I have a better question:
“What if you knew you were going to live?”

Carson Reed
June 1996

Sister Carrie Truck and I

explore Denver like lovers lost in the canyons,
haunting industrial plantations,
smudged cinderblock faces & pre-stress tilt-ups,
planes upon planes in places unlingered in,
wild, bright, windy corridors of Commerce City,
South Santa Fe, the Platte Valley;
dark alleys under I-25 near the stockyards.

Low buildings let light into untouched
unthought-of places
patches of blond dirt and slate-gray gravel,
pioneer rubble,
wild grasses along high fences,
galvanized chain link drooping concertina,
aged spots of creosote & oil,
& the bright & faded exoskeletons of litter,
cicada of a civilization.

Sister Carrie Truck & I
scream rock & roll nonsense at roadmates,
hurry the transients along their way
through the unhuman places.

We linger,
tasting the dust,
sniffing at thistle,
breaking open stalks of milkweed,
turning donuts in forsaken dirt lots,
raising sacred cowboy incense to heaven.

Sister Carrie Truck & I
have lost the will to destinations
seek only excuses,
live for dust & light
& metal & motion.

Sister Carrie Truck
leaps under my hand
leaps to my thoughts;
loves low, long slow graveyards of Denver.

We are bored with the seamless city.
Our interest has turned to the cracks.

– Carson Reed
June 1987

An Apostrophe for Citizens Park

This is my apostrophe for Citizens Park, which has none,
a perfect miniature counterpoint to Sloan Lake,
across the street, which also has none, and no s, neither.

The last recorded site of Edgewaters underground nuclear testing,
(stones throw from Manhattan Beach, of course)
is neat and low, a grassed sink hole
its east end a rolling hedge against the sound
of Sheridan Boulevard and hundred-year floods.

Somebody dropped bundles here, spent some loot, go figure,
on the post-modern picnic rotunda
the horseshoes court, of course,
and the baseball fields, sodded, extravagantly lit
by rows of vast gas lights so high on aluminum poles
you can see them from across Sloan Lake,
from Lake Middle School if you know what you’re looking for,
(a formation of B-1 bombers flying below radar).

Most extravagant of all, oddest surprise in this postage-stamp suburb,
a nameless sculpture, mild and charming, which I have nicknamed “Chunky”
(as in “open wide for Chunky…” which song the sculpture inspires me
to spontaneously sing out, scaring away women with babies in strollers).

Caught in mid-question or mid-sob, or mid-kiss (hard to say which)
Chunkys chunks are flanked by red sandstone blocks,
chunky benches where Edgewaterians are meant to sit and ponder Chunky,
though whenever I am here, I’m left alone,
left to sing and dream of Lady Bird Johnson
asleep with the flu, dreaming codeine dreams of flying
over Stonehenge and Easter Island and the craters of Mauna Loa,
only to wake and, fevered and half-remembering, designing this park,
replete with the Lee Harvey Oswald memorial knoll,
perfect for picking off horseshoes throwers
or anything close enough.

– Carson Reed
Summer 1996

Things that I have noticed or that have awakened me in places where I have slept fitfully before moving on

The arc of the moon viewed from a dry irrigation ditch in a field full of restless cows in West Texas; the flickering of the television from the couch in off-base housing in Twenty-Nine Palms; the smell of sweaty, unwashed bodies in the sleeper of a semi in the parking lot of Little America; the pleasantly erotic vibration in the back of a Greyhound driving through the night through Missouri; my ice-cold feet in a sleeping bag in a boxcar headed south through central California; every little noise under countless and indistinguishable bridges and bypasses; the complete absurdity of my dayglo-orange tent pitched in the median of an unfinished freeway in the middle of the slums of North Las Vegas; the apocalyptic roar of hourly passing trains under a bridge over an inlet in Miami; the wild force of a sudden wind on Agate Beach at midnight; the Pict-like chitterings of unknown inhuman things on a creepy strange scrubby mountain overlook above Berkeley; the sudden onset of vertigo in the midst of a dream while sleeping on the cliffs overlooking Black’s Beach in La Jolla; small stirring things in a cave at the base of Mt. Lassen; shape-shifters in Canon De Los Muertos; the hiss and pop of rain falling on a giant tree in Oceanside; overwhelming claustrophobia while sleeping in a deep hole filled with tumbleweeds in Nevada; the random bark of a dog on the Navajo reservation after 9 p.m. at Canon De Chelly; the rustle of dogs settling in in my bed in a teardrop trailer in the coldest winter ever on Middle Creek; the ringing of crickets and the layered hum and scratch of distant traffic, and the supermarket Muzak while sleeping in the rough of the ninth hole of the municipal golf course in Salinas; a small pointed stone poking my back along the back fence at the back of the drive-in movie in Victorville; the sound of someone snoring in the next room at a commune in Victoria; a violent argument in the street below a daily rate cheap hotel in Miami; the aftertaste of Kools waking me from a dead sleep in a monthly rate cheap motel on Morrison Road; a gnawing sense of misdirection in a boarding house in Wallace, Idaho; a pervasive yet undefined sense of guilt while sleeping in a cheap apartment building in Knoxville; the tightness of the hospital-cornered sheets at the YMCA in Los Angeles; the limpness of faded adrenaline and the spinning rehash of events after a fist-fight between myself and another occupant of the International Youth Hostile in Santa Fe; the sulphered smell of natural gas at a condemned tenement house in New Orleans; the ringing in my ears in a park in Coco Beach; the occasional arc of a short in the electric heater outside my jail cell in Spanish Fork; the particular smell of California coming through the curtains of the Mondavi homestead in Sonoma; the impossibility of making yourself go to sleep in even the plushest of beds at Playa Tamaya; the lonely sameness of all hotel rooms at the Sheraton in Kowloon; the rattle of armadillos in the ferns near the dunes at Hanna Park; the bite of sand fleas on the beach in Clearwater; the unlabial urgency of Asian conversation on a wide-bodied aircraft traversing the unfathomable expanse of air above the Pacific ocean; the smell of hay and dust and old tools in a barn; and the insurmountable strangeness of the pillowed and perfumed beds of girls and women, whose dogs and cats would wake me in the mornings to let me know that I was strange, a stranger here, welcome to visit but not to stay, as if I didn’t already know.

– Carson Reed
12/03/2006

The Ladies Have Arrived a Little Damaged

They slouch on the covered wood porch
of the two-story Victorian house on 9th Street
where the UCD English Department adjunct faculty are housed,
weighing in with sharp barbs of dry commentary
both self-effacing and every-other-self-effacing.

They are all calm surface,
and you have to squint to see the vibrations
of the small, toothy animals twitching around inside them.

One smoking and bitching loudly (like a mildly former-bad girl will do).
One smoking and brooding silently (like a wildly former-bad girl will do).

They are so much truly tougher than the other professors,
and so much more fragile, and more intense,
they are like cases of weathered dynamite stacked haphazardly on a porch,
and it kind of freaks me out they let me hang out with them.

Look at the ladies:
(I should like to say look at my ladies, but they are not mine)
They care about a world that did not care much about them.
They are my heroes.
Just barely in their 30s and so much badness inside them,
so much pain leaking out behind them like blue-green swirls of marine oil:
Years of being (variously) ignored, abused, addicted,
unloved and misunderstood.

And yet here they are: recovered and ready
to make the world a better place,
whether it likes it or not.

The ladies have arrived a little damaged,
but they have arrived, nonetheless,
and I recognized them immediately.

– Carson Reed
Summer 2006

Three Smells from 1972

At the Jethro Tull Concert at Red Rocks

half-way up the concrete walkway into the amphitheater
a teargas canister whistled four feet over my head
and into the middle of a gaggle of bell-bottomed boys
raining rocks down on two battered cop cars.

They scattered, some up, some down, where we were,
and we all retreated as the white cloud spread out into the morning air.

My cousin, Montey, made sense for once:
“what are you doing?” he screamed at the rock-throwing “hippies,”
“those guys have guns.”

Down in the parking lot,
a Beetle burned so ferociously that the yellow flames rose forty feet into the air.

Who or why would anyone harm a Volkswagon?
asked my drug-addled brain.
Somebody call the ASPCA.

My first whiff of teargas
defined what is meant by the word bitterness,
and I can taste it now in my mouth as I write.

At a Cattle Ranch Outside of Farmington, New Mexico

Helping (actually mostly just watching)
Nathan and a crew of cowboys brand cattle.
A perfect fall day, the Hogback Mountains in the distance.
Branding produces just the smallest puff of white smoke,
and nothing prepared me for the shock of that smell,
as if death itself had entered my body through my nose.

I was obliged to endure it calmly, like a man,
but it is harder to get from your clothes than skunk,
and impossible to wash from your mind.

Thirty-six years later,
I am reminded of it
by the smell of the grinding of my tooth in a Dentist’s chair,
the tiniest puff of smoke of all,
as if death itself, bored with me, finally left me through my mouth.

On Top of the Water Tower at the UCC Retreat at La Foret

Midnight, on an open sleeping bag,
naked under the thick white blanket of the Milky Way,
our clothes and shoes hung precariously
off the lip of this big, rusty spaceship.

I inhaled the world:
pine sap, sage and juniper.
I inhaled you:
soap and sea water,
the most unforgettable smells of all.

– Carson Reed
2/10/2008

10th and Wadsworth

After school
at the city bus stop outside Maria Elena’s
she squints in the cold sunlight.

All the way down the south side of 10th Avenue,
bored parents like me sit in idling cars gushing clouds of exhaust
reading newspapers, chatting on cell phones, picking noses.

On the north side, chittering kids board rumbling school buses.

She pulls down her hat and stomps her feet,
dreaming of snuggling with her journal
in her warm, broad seat
in the far back of the
Rough, Tough and Dangerous.

– Carson Reed
January 1995

The Phantoms of the Opera are Great Movers of Dust

The phantoms of the opera wander aimlessly through the empty sandwich layers of the eight-story Denver Center for the Performing Arts complex parking garage.
They have been sent here by the red-headed assistant district attorney with the burning blue eyes in the hope that, through a mysterious combination of boredom, carbon monoxide and dust, they will be transformed from drunk drivers into solid citizens whose resumes will almost certainly include under the heading “Community Service” the entry: “swept parking space immaculate for couple in Range Rover to see the opening night of Cosi Fan Tutti.”
Brooms in hand, they wander somnabulent (down and down and up and down and up, etc., etc.) muttering quietly to themselves about judges, lawyers, district attorneys, and cops.
The phantoms of the opera are slackers: They hide in stairwells, smoke joints between parked cars, wander as penitent monks in endless Escher-like circles between the fourth and fifth floor (except when the weather is nice).
When the weather is nice, the phantoms of the opera gather like Eloi at the eighth floor elevator terminus to trade stories about accidents, detox, courts, money, unfaithful wives, worthless children, blood alcohol levels and cops.
The phantoms of the opera have no wish to clean, no need to serve. They would never actually sweep anything except they are driven onward by bored security guards in white Chevettes with real flashing lights that work. The guards are angry because guards must work guards can be fired but phantoms of the opera cannot be fired, they can only be sent home for the day. Some punishment! The guards wish they were real cops with real guns that fired bullets into the black hearts of the lazy good-for-nothing-driving-drunken phantoms of the opera.
One-by-one, the phantoms of the opera learn to dodge the Chevette, slip unseen to the basement, stash their brooms, skulk down the traffic tunnel (unnoticed by symphony musicians smoking cigarettes at the stage door) out into the sunshine; across the street to Reese’s Coffee Shop to eat apple pie ala mode and flirt with the skinny waitress from the Bronx.
Not even that makes them happy.

– Carson Reed
Winter 1986

Detritus of Childhood

The model car aisle at Hodel’s, a pickle jar full of mama’s tip change, the soda counter of the Dolly Madison, plucking crawdads from the Yale ditch, drinking Roy Rogers at Roxie’s, playing with cousin Dave in the rain at Axom’s, whispering in the loft above the Albany bar, walking the railroad tracks, giant toadstools, Black Cats, a yellow stingray, Saturdays at Centennial Flea Market, standing in line for Polio vaccine, banana Popsicles, Archie comic books, the wild side of Bear Valley Park, Charlie the angry rooster, Uncle John with his teeth out, the Rockybuilt next to the Ogden, tiny boxes of cereal, my father laughing in a bloody t-shirt and two front teeth missing, discovering fire, barbed wire, fried baloney sandwiches, government cheese, Totinos pizzas and Cap’n Crunch, my mother in a white dress, Sea Hunt and Superman and Ol’ Yeller, the Shakey’s on Santa Fe, an angry chimpanzee, a smart poodle, the bookmobile and the summer reading program, knocking bats cuckoo late nights in Harvey Park, John Carter of Mars, a scary flood, building a spaceship in my basement, trying to go home.

Stories of Chilhood

I am from a white-flecked red linoleum kitchen table
that took an extra sheaf when company came,
and gathered ‘round it like it was a campfire
crackling with stories and smelling of Jim Beam and Camel straights.

I am from Ovaltine and Tang and t.v. dinners
eaten in front of a black & white t.v.

I am from the secret space behind the snowball bush,
and the long line of Russian Olives at the back fence
(full of robins and wrens and woodpeckers)
which hid the rich people behind us and their swimming pools
laughing and splashing through my summers.

I am from laying in the grass and getting sick at my stomach
watching low clouds scud by.

I am from building Mayan cities in my sandbox.

I am from setting myself on fire while playing war with G.I. Joes with gasoline.

I am from Indians who dressed like cowboys,
and from cowboys who rode Harley Davidsons instead of horses.

I am from not talking about problems.

I am “Carson Ben Reed”
and I am named for two hardscrabble homesteaders
who tried to make a life for their families in New Mexico,
thirty years before I was born.

I am from D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

I am from being hungry because women didn’t get equal wages.
I am from raising myself because my mother worked two full-time jobs.

I am from always being poor but
I am from always inviting people without family over
to have dinner with us at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I am from fried baloney sandwitches,
I am from potato soup with Texas cornbread.

I am from “a broken family”
but I am also from “you can be anything you want to be.”

I am from a mother who was shamed as a child by Baptist preachers,
and who dragged me from Ashram to Satsang to New Age seminars.
I am the second generation of someone searching for comforting truth.

I am from two generations of heavy equipment operators
who scoured the earth in search of pipelines to run
and mountains to level and holes to dig and foundations to lay.

I am from people who have loved life,
but have never loved a book or a poem.

I am from people who wanted to love me,
but didn’t know how.

I am from stories I love, told long ago,
from people I still love, but from afar.

– Carson Reed

it’s a workin’ man’s bar
mostly plaid wool shirts
an’ jeans
juke box starts with pop
for the lunch crowd
but plays rock and roll
and c & w
after 5

the waitresses are young
and cute
and strut their stuff
gather tips
and an occasional
hug on the ass
the other women
that come with their men
are few
most look like they could kick
any man’s ass in the place
(if you know what i mean)

there’s a shuffle board
tournaments saturday nite
a pinball machine
2 pool tables
and an electric bowling machine

the bar stretches the width of the joint
20 stools
wood top
with scraped up fake paneling across its face
the booths are vinyl
and worn
the chairs the same
(you get the feeling they hose the place down
every nite after close)

conversation becomes a shouting match
mostly to be heard
but sometimes to make a point
that this is a workin’ man’s bar
a dive
a temporary escape
and when these men laugh
they laugh real hard
and when these men leave
they leave a big part of themselves
behind

– tomas

Pleasing My Friend Reckless
(Ft Lupton, CO… 1996)

i often wonder
why he barks
at nothing i can see
or hear
or sense
out there
in total black

“what is it boy ?”
i whisper (for effect)
patting his head
“what is it ?”

he barks again
a deep throated war cry
i am not so sure as to whether
it is his imagination
or my lack of…

hmmmm…

there was a time i would
yell at him
“Reckless, shut up !”
concerned about the neighbors

but he only barks
when there’s somethin’
to bark at
or he perceives something
out there

an’ just ’cause i can’t
sense it
doesn’t mean
it’s not

an’ besides that’s his job
we all got
our jobs
to do

so since i figured this all out
i encourage him
i pat him on the head
scratch behind his ears
an’ say
“good boy Reckless
ya’ ol’ crazy dog
good boy
you scared ‘em alright”

he gives a final
half woof
half snort
and lies
back down

proud
content

– tomas

One Simple Night at the Skyline
(Skyline Bar, Denver… 1991)

Waitress asks me
“you need anything?”
“no,” i reply, “i’m fine,
how ’bout you (?)
you need anything?”
she smiles
(nice smile)
“no”
and for some reason
i get the feeling
we are both lying

Weird funk tonite
running away
from a crowd of friends
to be with
a crowd of strangers
sometimes
ya just ain’t lookin’
for sympathy
you’re lookin’ for
indifference
topography
an’ a mild dose
of solitude
waiting for that one lost friend
who is happy to see you
because of distance
brought on by something
as simple
as time
someone who knows you
by name only
who hasn’t quite yet
figured out
which of the masques
they like the best
someone who cares
no more than
tonite
if they matter or not
if you matter or not
as if hiding
was anything less
than a gift

She walks up
to my solitude
“watcha’ doin’?”
she smiles
(nice smile)
my eyes traverse her frame
head to …
well, i sort it out
strawberry blonde
petite
alluring
damn sexy
“drinkin’ beer
an’ writin’ poetry”
i respond to her question
“poetry?
what kinda’ poetry?”
she pushes
“uh well it’s not really poetry
in the literal sense
more like slices of life
on paper”
“like you do this for fun
or money
or what?”
“none of the above
i do it ’cause
i am very good”
she smiles again
“mind if i sit down?”
her lower lip curls
and as i put down my pen
she fades into
a completely different
fantasy

– tomas

On Worshipping a God
(Lost Park, CO… 2011)

sitting
motionless
on a rock
in this wilderness
meditating
a small blue and grey bird
appears in a blur
a few feet away

it stares at me
aware of my presence
but unconcerned
indifferent

i throw up my arms
and yell
“I am Thunder”
“I am Fire”
“I am Man”

and as it takes flight
it leaves
a pure white
offering
at my feet

–tomas

On War & Paranoia
(Ft. Lupton, CO… 1996)

There is this one
particularly
smart mouse
in my house

3 days in a row
i awoke to find
the mouse-trap sprung
its bounty gone
and no dead mouse

Ah-ha i thought
i’ll poison the little shit
D-Con
advanced formula (!)
methodically washing my hands
after opening the nuclear box
and stashing it out of sight
to me or my dog

The next morning i awoke
to find little green pellets
of poison
carefully sprinkled
in a cooking pot
left in the kitchen sink
and in my dog’s dinner bowl

Now this is one
particularly
conniving mouse

So i’m sitting here
pondering all this
loaded rifle at my side
and my dog
he gives me this look
like
“you o.k. (?) “

– tomas

Neighbor
(726 Albion St Denver… 1990)

She sweeps the sidewalk
with a vengeance
her eight inch picket fence
hammered into the ground
garden clean and ready
for a summer burst of color
i can’t help but notice
those white legs of spring
kept buried
under jeans
and comforters
all winter
now allotted
this warm spring day
to absorb some sun
and some admiration
from a poet
sitting on his front porch
smiling at the world
and trying ever so hard
to gain the attention
of this blonde denizen
of a pair
of winter white legs

– tomas

Lunch At The Brewery Bar II
(Brewery Bar II, Kalamath St, Denver… 1995)

sitting at the bar
2 guys putting down
the rest of the world
everybody’s wrong

2 stools down
a man eating lunch
a smothered burrito
must be hot today
he’s sweating

the other side of me
a guy flipping through
the pages of westword
keeps looking at his watch
(i get the impression
he’s always
looking at his watch)

i’m on my lunch hour
i’ve learned to pace my beers
exactly to the time clock at work
(including travel time)

the bartender yells
to my bar neighbor
“another beer?”
“yeah, one more”
as he glances at his watch again
i want to tell him
don’t worry about the time
i want to tell him
that last beer
is more important
than wherever he could be going

i want to say something
but i don’t
we all deserve our privacy
even the keepers of the time
there’s nothing more unnerving
than a barroom conversationalist
when you want to be left alone

2 ladies walk past
dressed to kill
i lose my train of thought

– tomas

Late Nite At The Colorado Cafe
(Colorado Cafe, Denver… 1993)

they jump ya’
gang bang ya’
keep the coffee cup overflowin’
not ’cause they’re lookin’ for a tip
(although that’s part of it)
but mostly because
it’s saturday nite
and the drunkards
trickle in
a little at a time
(myself included)
and this place is open 24 hours
and they’re used to the crowd
and treatin’ people with respect
covers a whole lotta’ territory
passive or otherwise
and on top of all that bullshit
is the fact that
she’s slim
and she’s blonde
and she’s cute
and i’m horny as hell
and i put my sarcasm
one notch below rude
which is probably
exactly
what she’s used to
and more than anything
i despise
being
exactly
what someone is used to

– tomas

it…….. The Art
(Muddy’s Java Cafe, Denver… 1993)

A friend of mine had some paintings hanging on a brick wall of this dive coffee house in Denver. Another friend, a poet, sat at the table with us across from the wall (unaware the artist was present); claiming, “Ya’ know, this stuff makes me want to run out into the street and scream!” My friend, the artist, sat smiling. He told me later, “Hey, at least it stirred some kind of emotion.”

meaning
‘it did what it was supposed to do’

it
the art
the catalyst
the poetry
the feeling
the failing
the touch
of one stroke
of a brush
to the forehead….

– tomas

16 x 25
(726 Albion St, Denver… 1990)

it’s been a cold winter
so far
days the Colorado sun can feel like spring
if you stay out of the shade
but the nights have dropped
to a numb indifference
the early morning start
for work
not quite awake
scraping the windshield
steering wheel so cold
it hurts to grasp
with bare hands

i’ve been chilled
every night
in this apartment
until tonight
i climbed into the attic
where the furnace is
and checked the filter
black
blocked
no air to feed the fire
no wonder the fan runs constantly
no wonder i’ve been freezin’ my ass off

i yank the filter
an’ suddenly i got heat
i’ll replace it tomorrow
16 x 25 x 1
an’ i’ll back charge my landlord
for my frozen bones

– tomas

cut stones emerge, acropolis
of an extinct grammar
arranged where a schoolhouse
stood in morning shadows

the coffin of water lifted
after half a century, drowned
hogback town of Stout maps itself slowly
surviving a careless curator

straw hat red bandana relic hunter
combs evacuated gravesites
looking for names, wanders
old railroad bed toward quarries

shining stumps of trees
dusted timbers, shards of porcelain
Victorian mirrors, trimmed hairs
of eloquent beards, lace, bonnets

from the dam, we can see the silver
siphon, repaired after Centennial Flood
of Big Thompson, vibrating with waterflow
it will take a year & Stout

will be gone again, a mind
beneath abstracts of boat wakes
a secret only shadows know
our little Atlantis

out of snowfields in the Mummy Range
gulls fly in, float on slack, silted waters –
enough souls for a little town, backs
for the work, eyes for a long sandstone sunrise

– Skip Baldwin

Two Trees, Confluence Park

to honor the confluence
of Cherry Creek & the South Platte
shallow concrete steps
wade into dour water, a kayak
course has been dug up by the waterfall
& no one is here except
a few kids lurking & drinking
in the dark of a bridge span
upstream, silting lungs with grass

a billboard for Chevrolets
shouts toward the Denver skyline
& provides a little light
so that we see the old buildings
turning their backs of chipped
brick & cinder blocks:
a good place to form a new
government & we will lead the ticket
since we are the only two
silent trees present which can walk
& are registered to vote
in this quiet primary

our leaves are invisible poems
our branches embrace even this acrid
wind, false dawn, rusted barrels
& live to embrace warm spirits
who come to listen, who cannot
be here in collected sound
of ghost traffic, screeching
Friday night tires, clinking
cocktail ice — yes, we will vote
our poems, survive
to lecture non-believers
crossing this silted waterway,
these roots.

– Skip Baldwin

The Sky-Vue Luncheonette

swiveling from a fine view
of the Capitol dome, the cook
bows & continues scrambling
yellow souls, painting blank
electrocuted white bread

down the counter sits a regular
in blue coveralls with a stitched name
unraveling on his left breast
you’ve seen him return and return
to pan a hopper load of sugar
with his bright spoon, to be called “sweetheart”

the empty seat on your right
has been nice, enough room to turn
your knees & watch the Denver skyline grow
& spread out the comics
& view the stammering feet down a row of booths
where they sit back-to-back, being punished

but now a grandmother-father
swings onto the tattered vinyl
into invisible stirrups waggling
a cigar stub with four teeth
beneath his stained white mustache
& wafting flowery cologne with a tricot shirt

he looks at you as if he doesn’t think
you’re worth much, but would give you
a raise anyway & stares until the chubby
waitress covered with jelly stains can’t
ignore him anymore: she calls the manager
& a fight starts about the last walk-out
& the grandmother-father cries into your breakfast

you try, but your smile has changed
over the years & the eggs seem to turn
into a sea of ashes & rotting tears
& gold light glints strangely off the dome
as the cook in his whites and the skinny manager
escort him out to the pigeons on 13th Street

– Skip Baldwin

Big Thompson, after the Centennial Flood

We followed new canyon road, smooth bends blasted above the river course, reflecting arid blue sky, and see how slack Big Thompson can be in July, the work of springs, diminished snowfields, scant runoff.

It was here a thunderstorm, held from straying on across the drought plains by some strange mind in 1976, pitchforked these crags with lightning, scoured washes, slashed the highest watermarks, sent boulders to stroke little cabins, and gathered its water in a twenty-foot wave at the narrows.

Above us, like witnesses turning their heads, outcrops perch, about to breath, and this low water echoes, begins a pastorale for this stunning place where earth shows herself, where foothills sweep off like drifts of fool’s gold.

Where canyon days are mostly shadow, a life continues. The paint is fresh; trinkets, buckles, geodes, turquoise necklaces, beaded belts gleam through shop windows which are still stickered, streaked with caulk, spattered with mud. Cars pull in to the turnouts, tourists pose for little cameras, always looking up, sighting the wild peaks, claiming incredible canyon walls, formations, folds of time.

On sagging one-by-six stands, rattled by traffic, gallons of cherry cider are offered, as if the gifts of plasma are to be given back from the days when churches and schools arched with hymns, turned into hospitals, morgues, press boxes overnight. For each body silent in plastic on a stretcher, a whole family was missing, another cabin heaped into a rough spirit-boat of shingles and splinters of timbers, broken glass, leather Bibler covers. Helicopters, unable to fight the weather, returned empty. Red crosses, little flags patched on shoulders, trekked toward dark trails.

A barometer in our temples fluctuates wildly. The sun above us seems to be a star we can’t know, a warning that each name burned in soft wood, each hand or limb, trying to catch or cling in this deep-six place, is a gesture only for the rain and dust, for light and darkness, something which only for a few years makes a shadow.

There are eyes here, still, which fear the lightest feather of cloud, fingers which go pale in tap water, hands which grasp for roots along the cutbanks as children play splashing in the river dazed by summer.

We walk across a new bridge, our tentative footfalls echo into the pull of slicks and whirlpools, a little dust wishes into small rapids.

Back in Loveland, on Route 34, we find a wide window and order white wine, prepare for rainbow trout. There appears to be a clock with no hands on each plate, and as the meals pass to table after table, we think of the names of the lost who were simply out for a holiday drive on Independence Day, cleaning off the picnic table, finding raingear for the kids, sipping a last beer, hastily raising a tent, bleakly disbelieving the rangers and police, thinking through the words “flash flood” when it hit.

At sunset, sated, we watch carefully how a blue haze rises here, above the flood plane, as if to darken the undersides of the gilded clouds or obscure the strange sun as it pierces itself on a distant peak before we hear the hush of a light rain ushering others from the canyon. Drops of coffee stain the white tablecloth. We leave for home.

– Skip Baldwin

Hogback Fire, First Day of Spring

all afternoon, the sky
so dry & wind struck
you could throw a match & burn it off

around Ft. Collins
smoke signals of a hundred camped tribes
as farmers & ranchers burn out
irrigation ditches

blackened remains of yellow grasses
run with smoke like a blood
from the heart of drought

we look to the foothills
for rain clouds & a cool moist breeze
off the snows of the Divide
for at least a signal, a gull, a green vision

but someone has started a fire
which runs up the flank of a hogback
out of control, jumps to another

when the evening comes there is heat lightning
& long summer ahead, empty reservoirs
feed shadow to baking creeks, fire stalks town
a lynch mob carrying torches

– Skip Baldwin

Coyote Brothers, Cherokee Parks
– For Don Snow

another river’s voice
north wind in strata
above north fork, Cache La Poudre
we keep to our saddle of light
draw the mind
for what might appear

January sun
spawns on small rapids
streams beneath filet shadows
of fir & spruce
& these prisms of quartz
disembodied eyes
modify the air & blue
of false thaw

we hear the gunshots upstream
magpies startle from kill bones
& seven coyotes lope downwind
cross the light of the waters
flank our still sculpted gaze
a few paces below

when they have passed
we stalk for another look
but point coyote has doubled back
seizes ground in tall yellow grass
amber flame eyes slay daylight
tawny fur threatens
& we freeze, two species
in wilderness

the others find us
protect two pups
we wait & they decided to vanish
in seconds over
surreal granite ledge
& we are left
swift only in mind

– Skip Baldwin

From Harper’s Corner:
Dinosaur National Monument

there is a name, a place
for all your voices
Echo Park

new hands in canyon rock
work ones which seem new
true them like wheels or planets

you call two rivers
Yampa & Green
to sing a confluence
above the others, a great voice
you have almost forgotten
kept here
in what seems to be
a burial ground for impossible
light, a tomb, seeps painted
by spirits, for vanished waters

sun sends your shadow
down like a message, your hand
is the whirlpool
stirring away maroon vulcan rock
or the piňon
casting its fossil light
on white sandstone, reversed roots

you watch your shadow
begin to climb from the confluence
on its own
you hear your echoes
pass through them
like shedding skins

when you are near the sky again
above the rim
you can continue on footholds
no wider than simple words
in all shapes
ones you have heard before

– Skip Baldwin

Rollinsville

economy here
seems to be maintaining
the Moffat tunnel, the pass
making strange films, removing snow
or letting it all be

great plows, steep pitched roofs
like flukes of whales
& time capsules of propane
keep in the pine whisper quiet
in the shuffle of time

you could sit here
for a century, the brakeman
of memory beside these tracks
& never know where the Conoco
came from, or the slick little cars
with ten-gallon tanks

I stop for gas, weather
& a six of road beers, wheat thins
for the longhorn cheese, engage
her gaze long enough to pay
& watch the Rembrandt storm
descend dark peaks

– Skip Baldwin

All of the above works are from A PROVINCE INTO BEING, 1984, Bread & Butter Press.

The road to Brighton turns north and cuts through
summer fields of cabbages and corn, green
beans before it snakes back east toward
town to the courthouse. This time of morning

you can tell where the river moves beneath
white air rising, the water’s breath
and dreaming. Dark-skinned men already

at work in the fields, tending somebody else’s
crops. I’d like to stop and get out and stay here
for awhile, bend my back to a day’s work

and at the end of it, walk down to the river.
Sit and listen. But my task lies at the end
of Bridge Street, to sit, mute
in the courtroom, amid the flood
of lawyers’ words that swirl around
the death of my boy—words that will
sweep me away, let me drown
in the dark eye of the killer.

Each day, as I hold to the road below
the heron appears, crossing above me.
Five days running the heron appears
ferrying hope on her great blue back.
Her wings beat away fear. Her golden eye
sees into all dark corners, all dark eyes.

Five mornings we meet and cross
on the Brighton Road—she moving from
darkness into light, I from light into darkness.

We each turn back at the end of the day
and when I look into the killer’s face
how I stare
with a golden animal eye.

– Kathleen Cain

Lowell Crossing

Lowell Boulevard ventures north, crosses 52nd Ave., over the border of Denver proper, into (still) unincorporated Adams County (somewhat improper). Whatever
dangerous
harmful
toxic or
lethal
is happening in Colorado
is happening in demographically traceable points
in Adams County. Walk softly there
and carry 9-1-1 on your speed-dial. Although

you no longer need to pay the ferryman
to cross Clear Creek, slow down
over RR tracks, ignore tailgaters
where the road divides:
refitted gravel pits, into Jim Baker Reservoir
on the west, from the private lake and gated community
still known as Aloha Beach on the east
an old high spot
for low rollers

So park somewhere. Stop and get out. Walk Lowell from Clear Creek
to 64th. It might not work the first time, but keep trying.
You have to earn the permissions of these places.
Give your feet plenty of time to learn, beneath pavement,
the unhurried pace of steps pressed into clay, summer travel
beneath foothills of Ute
Arapaho
Cheyenne

following the game up trail now pavement
north then west
to the Flat Irons.

Keep the mountains
on your left hand. Look up only
when the weather changes, or the road
veers away from water. Keep going.

– Kathleen Cain

St. Francis Without Hands

The nuns gave up replacing the broken hands of Francis on his corner, set to face Federal from 52nd Avenue, years ago. Such an easy target as the gangs roamed north and west. No sense of humor in the vandalism. Not just a cigarette left dangling between the fingers. Or a beer can raised to the lips.

But who would amputate the hands of such sweetness? Take vengeance on this patient man, once an old twelfth-century homie himself?

Then again, St. Frank, does he really need hands? Will his blessings fail because he can’t throw the sign of the cross with flair? Wouldn’t he share bread with you anyway, using only his stumps? Would the rap of his canticles fall less fervently from his lips because he cannot point to Brother Sun and Sister Moon?

I mean, seriously, dude, do you feel safer now? And what makes you think power’s only in the hands? This guy tamed a wolf with words. Talked to snakes. Better be careful. He might come for you next.

– Kathleen Cain

You sit in front of the buzzing TV
Watching the vertical bars, waiting
For the indian chief to appear

Calculating what cartoon might be decent
And which will bore you to death,
Mourning the loss of your toy soldier wars

Oh, those were the good old days, that list
Of secrets you would never forget, the keys
To the universe that you lost one by one

Along with every shred of innocence, those
Rambling bike rides to nowhere, to the edge
Of the city or down to the Platte, that first

Jealous ache at the kid who got the first bike
And his mom said no one could ride it, what
A rat, he’d broken the neighborhood code

And finally you guilted your folks into that
Ultimate Christmas gift and now it lay useless
You were too old, not cool, must WALK from
One end of northside to the other, for no reason,
Too shy to enchant the ladies except for one
Talkative lothario, stopping at various aunts’ for water

And snacks, cruising the alleys with their overwhelming
Aroma of lilacs, munching sweet, tart rhubarb and
Fruit from overloaded trees. Every Spring the short bus ride

Downtown to get our new baseball hats, walk down Lar’mer
To Gart’s or Dave Cook’s, the only two sporting good stores
In town, past the Golden Nugget, bar after bar, weaving in

And out of drunk cowboys and hard living men to 16th St.
Where all of society met, high and low, pointing to some bum
Holding up a spot at the St. Elmo or Interocean Hotel and

Squak, Hey, what’s yer dad doin’ here?, the women in skirts
The men in suits, dodging the mean, legless dwarf on his
Mechanic’s dolly, inches off the ground, loaded with the

Morning paper that he pushed with reckless abandon,
smelling Wolfe’s tamale cart, miniatures, three for a dollar
and rolled with string, dropping a penny in the blind man’s

tin cup, the sound of poverty, too afraid to take a pencil,
crossing the street back and forth to gawk at the movie posters
at the Centre, the Paramount, the Denver, the RKO, the fancy

clothes in windows, remembering the Christmas display
behind glass, detouring to 17th, the tomb of money, cemetery of banks,
over to 15th, stick your head into a burlesque joint just to see how

far you could get, “Get the hell outta here!” , oh the sweet temptation,
and slowly, inexorably pull your converse over to Woolworth’s,
the oasis of sparkling, vinyl counters and shiny steel and red leather

stools, her bright lights illuminating every conceivable piece of junk,
her giant penny candy display and hot, salted nuts on a revolving tray
served in a paper cone, to drool over the most delicious looking pizza

and imagine a girl on your lap in the picture booth, curtain pulled.
Trudge back over the viaduct, teenagers racing hot rods behind us,
watch out for Buster!, dusky purple mountains rising from the jagged

brown hills, a look back at the Denver Dry spire, the gentle slopes of
North Denver before us, Amato’s shining statues, cross-topped
Churches, little markets, tilted flagstone sidewalks, smell of beer and
Stale cigars seeping out bar doors, radar alert for trouble.
Tireless, hopeless acolytes, when you’re 12, you own the city,
Her magic the first narcotic to run through your veins.

– Jerry Smalldone

NOT FADE AWAY

They cut the pascal celery
when the frost is on the ground
frozen fingers wrap it in gunnysacks
bury it in furrows
dig it up at Easter,
white as snow, clean,
crisp, full of new life
…………………………………..
Which way to go, we debate
six of us crammed in the car
weaving our way to Welby
on a trip into the past …

Imagine the city ended at 48th in reeds
and cattails, no houses, no businesses, no highways,
Pecos just a path to walk to the fields,
to drag produce on wheelless wagons, giant
sleds to the market on Cherry Creek,
Brienza’s goats pasturing on the hill running
down to the Platte and the rail lines…
“They had all these old steam engines from the 1800’s
just laying in the grass,” Dad says.

Imagine no mousetrap at I-70 and I-25
just empty land pouring into Globeville’s bloody air,
slaughtering 100,000 cattle a week
down Washington past St. Joseph’s Polish Church,
past Holy Rosary, Transfiguration, past Slovenians and
Volga Germans, and on the west side of the river, Swedes,
“and farther east nothin’ but Norwegian pig farmers,”
packing houses closed, past the Blue Flame, Bomareto’s,
LaConte’s, places with no name, just a beer sign,
Dad names the owners, long gone,
how you could always find cousin Mike Spera
there, he was smart, the first farmer to hire someone
outside the family to work for him, Filipinos.

A hard right amid complaints that we’re lost
and I recognize Ray Torres’ place, circa 1967,
pot of beans always on the stove, pile of fresh tortillas,
black ‘40 Ford in cherry condition on flat tires
in the yard, still starts, he’d get these calls
at school, over the intercom, Ray Torres ,
your cow is loose, and 3 or 4 of us would jump
in Ray’s ‘51 Ford, all black and primer, hole in
the floor, door held on with wire and cruise out.

Ray had the first car, before that a Honda 50,
later a sweet Chevy Nova SS, his Dad died so
young, now Ray runs his own trucks.
We are turning down small roads,
10-acre vegetable farms just 30 years ago,
now an industrial jungle, Steve points out a
little grocery barricaded by blocks of
concrete and steel where he got
the best sausage sandwiches and I’m musing
on about our crazy cousin’s winery, when we
shag past your typical brick bungalow only
surrounded by five acres of vines covered in plastic.
Yeah, they’re selling it for 20 bucks a bottle
and they plan to make money.

As we approach Assumption Church I recognize
Joe Jiuliano’s house, Tony Croce’s, Nick James’.
Help the old ladies out of the car and see Antoinette’s
whole family lined up next to the door like
dutiful soldiers. Kiss my red-eyed third cousins
and brace for the long and beautiful service.
Dad George gone too soon with a bad heart
and now Mom, sweet Antoinette to those
who didn’t really know her, like me,
but also wise and wise-ass to those who did.
She loved to fish, to gamble,
we all know gambling is not a crime,
to curl up with the Enquirer and a cigarette
Grandson Tod eulogizes the stories every grandchild
should know, of fighting to see who’d get to
spend the night at Grandma’s, at Grandma’s house,
the 10 acres on the hill, hemmed in now by highways,
quarries, trucking companies, utilities, like a lost photo
in a family album, but look, look off in the distance,
it’s 1910, there’s nothing around but a blessed view
of our mountains that makes the soul blush.

This home, these fields, these trees,
these smells, these ghosts, these memories
all printed on a For Sale sign on 62nd avenue.
It’s the end, Tod cries in the delicious sadness
the end of a time, the passing of a tight-knit
community, oh, I remember knots of Dago
farmers at vegetable stands, at feasts
and pig roasts and mostly at funerals like these,
how rowdy and earthy and independent they seemed,
they and God against all obstacles, why I always liked
Adams County, that live and let live,
easy on the rules attitude…
Dad ran away from Zi Pupine’s farm one summer,
the hard life easy to desert. As Roxie said, he
didn’t care if you stayed out all night but you better
be out in that field at daybreak, ready to work.
All that work, lavore, why they’d come
all that love and suffering
all those travels to get this far…
so much and never enough
the wheel turns from
winter to spring

They cut the pascal celery
when the frost is on the ground
wrap it in gunny sacks
bury it in furrows
dig it up at Easter
white as snow
crisp, clean, sweet
full of life

sealed w/a tear 3.2.0
　
– Jerry Smaldone

15th Street, 1970　

It was hotter than hell that summer, like 95,
when all the old bars and burlesque
houses crowded 15th St. I was a young kid
wearing tight jeans and a buckskin leather
sport coat, chainsmoking total loss and
irresponsibility. This old lady is floating
unsteadily toward me, a silent film mirage
who probably lived in one of the many cheap
hotels downtown then for single retirees
and social security cases before money moved in.
She is dressed in a long velvet dress, a rich
black jacket topped with a fur stole, gloves
and high heels, costume jewelry, a full black wig,
long and silky, a pound of makeup and thick
red lipstick and rouge covering her ancient,
riven face. She is a lady.
A shaking lady who’s seen at least 75 brief summers,
thousands of days like this, and like the old do,
maybe she was cold when she left her cloistered room,
unaware of the heat. Who is she? She doesn’t look like
she left a 19th century farm, but looks deceive.
Beautiful once, married once, a mother once? Maybe
a saleswoman when all Denver shopped downtown and it
meant something to have a position at the Denver or
the May. She stops right in front of me on the
melting sidewalk and stutters could you, could you
as I ask myself why I attract the helpless and needy,
I’m only a boy and she pees, pees hard as she stands
there and her mouth moves and we’re caught, the two
of us, in this bone trap, the death grip of life.

– Jerry Smaldone

Say a prayer before you write　

Uncle Frank sat on the bench,
slumped against the brick wall
at the back of the house,
under the shade of the apple tree
that has stood for a hundred years ….
and cried…..
Uncle Frank never cried
Uncle Frank told me about when the
first street in Denver was paved,
when the first traffic light went in,
when he lost his cap under the wheels
of the first trolley car on opening day
it was such a big deal, the crowd,
the people couldn’t believe it
Uncle Frank told me how the women hid
when his father walked up Pecos after work,
told me how it took a week to get up in the hills
to fish and hunt, his passions, boulders
blocking rutted dirt roads, he said
modern life’s only improvement was
no flies in the outhouse.
Uncle Frank, that picture of you in your pin-striped
suit, foot on the fender of the model T, flashing
your shoulder holster, always that furbone grin.
You and Benny Duran made your fortune bootlegging,
bought a bar, married the prettiest girl
at the sewing factory, Rose, sweet,
smiling Aunt Rose, absent-minded soft touch,
wrote Dad excuses for missing school,
her sauce you would kill for, how Dad
hid as I walked up to her door and gave her
that single red rose on her birthday.
You had the midas touch, knew every deal
in town on pork butts for sausage,
bushels of peaches to can,
garage stuffed with 5 gallon cans of peanut
butter and jelly, boxes of work shoes and cases
of motor oil from World War II, pieces
of antique machinery no longer made,
and your health rules, only wine and whiskey
brown bread, brush three times a day and
my god, never drink water with a meal,
Aunt Rose laughing at your silly looking
stretching routine, yet at 70 you looked 50,
at 90, 70 and still told the dirtiest jokes
and double entendres, pointed at your wife
and said, When I was young I thought I’d
wear that p—y out….but I never did.
Uncle Frank, straight-talking perfectionist,
making sausage just so, sharpening your
knives and laying them out
every act a ritual, sitting in that boat
in the middle of the lake, thunder, lightning
and rain poring down, filling gas cans with
dozens of fish to feed the family
who no longer need your help.
Uncle Frank, your wife still knows you,
knows your name, you are the only one,
you looked after her, you are 96,
this isn’t fair, you don’t go to church,
this pain in your leg won’t leave.
Your daughter says Mom’s still in good
shape and to prove it Aunt Rose lifts her
leg over her head, like a dancer
and holds it, see, she says smiling.
She points to the single picture
in the institutional room and repeats again
They told me that’s my mother,
holding on, to one last shred of…
Nothing bothers like blood
and I believe in the soul
because there is too much beauty,
because I cannot not believe
built this way, plain and simple
after all the arguments and pain.
oh Uncle Frank, breathlessly
sleeping in your satin bed
what goes on inside her head,
to hold her hand, to feel
the heart still beating
Uncle Frank, you smile down from
eternity with that hard, foxy grin
the light shining from your face
shapes and illuminates
the dark questions
inside me.

– Jerry Smaldone

Un grido dal’ anima　

All across North Denver
you can hear a lonely wail
it settles in the bottoms
of the Platte
reaches out to the truck
farms in Welby and Arvada
the gold in Ralston Creek
shimmers at its call
birds pickup their heads
as it flies on the wind
men and women raise up from the
fields, gunny sacks in their hands
peddlers stop their song
of fresh cherries and apricots
you can hear a flute playing
you can hear the thump of drums
the men in the coal mine
covered in black
the women in the sewing factory
the crews laying track
and in the packing plant
hear a lonely voice wail
to kiss the sadness away
a hundred reasons for sadness
a new one every day
a hundred reasons to sing
a hundred reasons to dance
the sun and moon rise and
set on another bittersweet romance
here in north Denver
you can hear a lonely wail
rising to the mountains
on a black crow’s tail.

– Jerry Smaldone

Open City, 1985　

All the nothingness of a hot afternoon takes
the body out of a beautiful blonde’s hair, leaves
it limp and human behind her shades, as perfume
wafts from her shiny sports car. She moved
here ten years ago, 5 years ago, or was it just
last month, from somewhere more decayed or less
employable, because this town was so clean,
so calm, so…young.
Trucks thunder down the street, city out of control,
the city, my city, this horrid squall screaming
off the plains, thrown against the hills, city
founded by con men and marks, born out of a gold
fever that never died, the whiteman’s bane,
a testament to his true god, pure greed pushing
skyscraper cathedrals higher.
There is no one left alive to write about the
confluence of rivers of hope and faith, about the
old red light district in Lodo, the pros who worked
the Beano Hotel, the washed-up sailors and cowboys
at St. Elmo’s and the Inter-Ocean on Larmer, the miles
of squat, red brick, of burlesque houses, barbershops,
pool halls, dance halls, arcades, dive bars, bordellos,
50 cent flophouses so you didn’t have to sleep on the
street, cheap apartments all over downtown for old vets,
spinsters and amputees.
That city was sold like a cheap whore to those who
equate progress with money, growth with civilization,
and find safety in numbers.
And where the city ends and suburbia ends, there is
no end, only more noise even on the once peaceful
farms, cars bumper to bumper on two lane roads we
cruised on Sunday afternoons.
And you know and I know that with each red brick
building torn down for an asphalt parking lot or an
empty hi-rise so a construction worker from out of state
can feed himself for six months, and with every tract
home built so we can create more $4 an hour service jobs,
a bit of our collective soul is torn out of the landscape
until we pray for a cloud of mythic Indians to rise above the mountains and wash the blur of smog and speed away
with an apocalyptic cry carried to Christ’s statue atop
Mother Cabrini Shrine.
I think of my home in the ’burbs, how natural to want
a quiet, green space amidst the rush, how many in the
past needed it just as those will in the future.
I think of all the old grandmas’ from all over the
world, who found themselves in Denver, who lived
their lives in one house on a sober, tree-lined street,
who died there, and I wonder, who will be living in
those houses in 100 years, will they still be around.
Change is inevitable, developers are not monsters, yet
they have no more right to commandeer the common good
than we do, lost tribe wandering in the desert of the
New, avoiding the question of which way to go.
God bless this town, this two-bit hick pot of chili.
He let us build it and he should take part of the
responsibility for the mess. God bless the poor, what’s
left of them, the humble, the strivers, the self-assured,
the reasonable, the nature-lovers. Damn the rest.
God bless the sacred mountains men once worshipped and
understood, awed by their beauty, now hidden behind smoke,
covered in anthills. They are the massive anchor that
keeps me grounded and holds the storm of the future at bay.

– Jerry Smaldone

DENVER AGAIN , 1990

Oh humble humble humble
tucked away in dark corner bar as beer
and shots and alley tokes kick the buzz up.
“It’s the energy, man, the energy,
I can feel it, feel it everywhere,
this town’s about to explode.”
And visions of a new greenwich, north beach, venice
west, left bank anywhere in timeless archetypal artistic
paradise of fumble jumble rumble hard times but good
times oh the golden glow around our faces,
the moonlight over the Platte, the unreal tint
of the Rockies bathed in evanescent pink and purple
Magic it’s all about magic,
and the magic is happening here
But only if we make it , if we are
the vanguard and we spread the word
instead of waiting for the anointing,
some thunderclap of universal approval,
for rich patrons to support us
like little kids or backstabbing in wasted
breath that only reinforces the image
our damaged psyches leave dripping
on the page, not remembering how
this dream was lost gold from the mouths
of many who came before and many yet to come
Meanwhile, it’ll happen when it happens,
I guarantee it, just live your art, this is
what we were put here for, quit crying
and just do it, never doubt, never curse
those who don’t care but bless the dizzy luck
that granted you this feather pen, this arrow brush,
this bruised bird throat, this clowns face,
this fearless will, this dancing brain
this heart of a beautiful city.

– Jerry Smaldone

All of the above poems are from All Flesh Shall See it Together, 2009, Turkey Buzzard Press

GHOSTS
for Gregory Greyhawk

Old ghosts haunt me
in the dark, quiet hour
but this time
I’m not afraid.

Maybe …maybe they can show me
take me inside
the shadow of the heedless moon,
whisper words in my ear, words so
much easier than the images I struggle with
and live, family, job, age, loved ones pain
and mortality torture my worried sleep,
leave me exhausted and sick.

Another gone, the crazy Indian who thought
he could teach me to write, who gratefully
accepted my beat-up olivetti as he left town,
who proudly took Father Woody’s 20,
slept in an abandoned railcar, ssshhh,
it’s a secret, lest some other down ‘n outer
try to invade. Come, he said, let us dance
on the grand Denver viaduct under a fat summer
moon and howl what our hearts can’t speak.

Let us pretend the women love us
and maybe they do, let us sell bullshit
and pray the rubes buy it, let us
stay up late, ply our muse with smoke
and twist the sound into shapes the
Lady will admire and bless with a
gallon of booze and a good working woman
to keep us safe from the cold hard night.

Let’s talk about missing front teeth,
the sly side of hockey, why Canadian poets
are better, pr jobs where I made and blew
a fortune, the big scores so close I could
taste ‘em, that’s why I’m living in a boxcar
next to the river with an alley cat singing
to me as I cross the deserted railroad tracks.

Here, kitty, kitty, you are the best friend I have,
what a team we make, singing to the moon,
singing to the stars who should never be named.

Greyhawk, remember … to forget that name,
that you ever met me. If anyone asks, you don’t
know me, I’m a shadow who passed through Denver
on the way to another ship, sailing from the coast
on an opium cruise. I’m keeping watch on the stern,
where the stone is ultimate awareness as black as
home Detroit and the water is as cold and deep as
Lake Superior and keeps her secrets and her bodies
just as well. Let us never abdicate our total freedom
no matter the circumstance, we ‘ve forgotten how
important it is, let us be rude and obnoxious and craft
the most precise and human poems. Let us spread
tobacc to the four directions and drive our hatred into hell,
spewing venom at white men, black men, red brothers
who’d robbed this half-breed of all he ever owned,
his own piece of reservation heaven, and a blind,
drunken curse on God who stole his wife and children
in a fiery crash, I can’t, can’t think of it, staring up into
endless black space.

You won’t forget me now, will you, how I loved your
simple family, how I believed in the kindness of hooded
sisters, in the mercy of Jesus, in this Catholic crap,
save that sappy dago bullshit for some other sucker,
somebody who hasn’t killed total strangers for a cause
he was too young to believe in, someone who hasn’t
lost it all, foundering so hopelessly that his psyche was
submerged in the darkest ocean of mysteries, down
down beneath the waves.

I am here, let me speak.

– Jerry Smaldone

hit Denver, I cleaned and vacuumed my apartment and mopped the bathroom and kitchen floors in case any important publishers came over. Mom picked me up outside the K ZIP and made a couple of wrong turns on the way to the Little Greek Café on 12th and Clayton Streets. I’d planned our appointment without knowing there was a limited window of time to secure my free pass to the fest coming up the next day. After we got ourselves straightened out and were again heading toward the Café, I asked, “Is there a way to get there without going through Cheesman Park?”

“Yes.”

“Good, ‘cause that’s where it always seems to go wrong.” I tried to minimize the lack of patience in my tone.

Lunch was tense, but amiable. I found myself apologizing for my “urgency of manner.” I had just enough time after Mom dropped me off at K ZIP to catch the bus downtown and get my free pass to the Lit Fest, beginning the following day at the Colorado Convention Center, a futuristic glass building full of carpeted ramps, stairwells, elevators, escalators, walkways and lounges with the sculpture of a giant blue bear attempting to force its way inside. The book fair would take place in a giant room upstairs filled with thirty or forty long rows of display tables stacked with merchandise from thousands of small presses and magazines and graduate creative writing programs.

The Power Mountain table, in row E, became a sort of base for me in my otherwise aimless wandering around in search of familiar faces when I went back the next day. I ran into a workshop leader from grad school named Miss Michael Kellerman, who’d recently published a treatise on memoir I’d reviewed for the Scrutinizer, and told her I was almost finished writing a book that was a kind of tribute to my time at Power Mountain, hoping maybe she’d help me get it published. “And your book’s been a great inspiration.”

She told me she looked forward to reading it when I was done.

I knew from her assbook headlines Miss Michael was a big fan of the Maker and the Marvins, and told her I’d recently lucked into a connection with an intimate of the Bogchar family I was unable to name (“Wrinkled” Pete had sworn me to a confidentiality agreement). Did she know any publishers?

“I’m sorry, I have to limit that part of myself to my five advisees. I just
don’t have the time, I’d really like to. Finding an agent will be no problem at all for him or her, I assure you.”

“I understand. Power Mountain is known for that, the advisors’ devotion to their students. Thanks very much. Just thought I’d ask.”

It was the first time I’d ever tried selling a prospect to a potential benefactor like that, and I was eager to get it over with, despite having hoped for a lucky break.

In the morning I spilled a glass of orange juice all over my newly mopped floor and mopped it again before heading back to the fest.

On the bus there, I saw a piece of plastic hopping across the ground and briefly thought it was a bird.

I was standing right under the giant blue bear statue outside the convention center when Lamar Crosby walked up, tall girlfriend Cordelia at his side, blonde hair and high cheekbones, and friendly eyes. “There’s Henry!”

Lamar’s brown beard had grown into a little bun under his chin. We hugged and clapped each other on the back.

“Cordelia teaches at the same high school in Santa Fe as me. She asked me, ‘What does Henry look like?’ We were looking for you in the crowd, and I told her, ‘Henry looks like no one else. You’ll know him when you see him.”

“And I did!”

The three of us walked across the Light Rail tracks and around a few corners to a Peruvian restaurant full of talking diners serving spicy dishes heavy with potatoes from a buffet of round covered pots. At one point, Cordelia and I began spontaneously flashing imaginary symbols at each other with our fingers below the general din of the downtown lunch rush. I got a sense of her as a very good person and felt glad to see her with my friend.

Lamar had been to Peru and they were going back together this summer.

“Machu Picchu is this whole complex built on top of these steep hills in a remote and inaccessible valley,” he told me. “The whole place had a mystic sense of focus on learning.”

“Sounds like Power Mountain.”

“I learned a lot about the Inca empire too. I think it was one of the most impressive social organizations in history, not about subduing other tribes so much as encouraging them to join an alliance.”

“Like America.”

“No, that’s just how they hypnotize their citizens.”
Just then an old man wearing steel-rimmed glasses seated beside Lamar added a vial of purple liquid to his water with a flourish, causing a stir of approval in the immediate vicinity.

“What’s that?” Cordelia leaned over and asked him.

“Just my supplement.”

This man and his wife were also in town for a convention, theirs centering on nutritional supplements, and seemed uncannily devoted to promoting their cause. Co owners of a company called Vitalize!, they gave us organic energy pills and pamphlets to read.

“We’re in the top 99 per cent!” qualified his wheat-faced mate from her form- fitting purple dress. “I’m sixty years old! Do you think I look sixty years old!”

On the way back to the convention center, I noticed a decorative column on
one corner reading ALTOGETHERNOW in different-colored letters, and reading it from the bottom at first I thought it was a foreign word or the name of a bank or a company. Crossing the Light Rail tracks, Cordelia said, “I don’t know if I could ever be so into my job as those people were.”

“Maybe that’s just something they’ve mastered, though,” I told her. “Once I saw the Amway tag I sort of didn’t trust them anymore.”

There was a Power Mountain social in a crowded basement bar downtown that evening. We three established an outpost in a corner and I kept circling around the dark room full of groups of people talking with drinks in their hands. I saw Danny Cluck and a couple of other friends from Power Mountain, but still no Heidi Luger, though it was so crowded she may well have been there somewhere.

Lamar, Cordelia and I shared a table in the crowded Thai restaurant next door with four others from the party after it broke up. An elderly couple sat across from them, the wife a poet and Power Mountain graduate, and the husband a mathematician like Lamar. I sat between this man and a woman with a sharp nose and long black hair named Jessica, and across from a middle aged woman named Becky with a child’s round face and thick glasses.

At one point I was impassionedly trying to summarize the book I’d been writing for Jessica—“So here’s my nutshell: anything can be proven—but nothing is meant to be! You can take anything—any point of opinion, and come up with evidence proving it on the Internet, right? So the point is, to have any integrity, you can’t have right and wrong! It’s a matter of—”

“Say, what are you talking about over here?” intruded the friendly mathematician on my right, throwing me off my track and sending me into a brief downward spiral of self-pity.

“Ever since the last skull fracture, it’s hard for me to keep my train of thought,” I lamented to my corner of shocked listeners, “now I’ve lost it again.”

Jessica was a nurse, and seemed especially wary after I mentioned skull fractures, as if I might completely lose my temper at any second. She kept giving me sidelong looks with her blade of a nose. The restaurant was crowded and loud enough that I couldn’t be sure how much of our exchange was audible at the other end of the table where Lamar and Cordelia were.

“You sounded so excited,” the interrupter explained. “That’s why I wanted to get involved. A real intellectual conversation is hard to come by.”

“Yes, they’re rare.” I pated the poor old man’s shoulder and told him, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

After paying the check, Lamar, Cordelia and I walked back to their hotel.

We crossed the outdoor mall at 16th, glowing brightly with neon graffiti from all the marquees, thronged with people and panhandlers, just as one of the free shuttle buses rang its bell, closed its doors and set sail for the next block, closely followed by an unmarked white squad car.

“It’s a living metaphor,” I thought aloud.

“We walked past these singing grates the other day,” said Lamar. “Is that real or prerecorded sound?”

I remembered Billy Possibility and I coming across a grate downtown somewhere years ago that made twittering sounds. “Prerecorded, I think.”

We came to a series of grates from which the sound of gurgling splashing flowing water could be heard. “See, here’s one,” said Lamar.

We heard a deep fat splash as something plummeted into the flow. It didn’t sound prerecorded.

Zack Kopp
April 2010

On the autumn road to Kansas City,
towheaded corn fields wear rough crew cuts,
the artificial turf green of winter wheat glares
amid brown and rust colored rectangles
on rolling plains beneath forever blue,
beneath long lines of flat-bottomed clouds—
but the thing you notice most are the hay bales,
their round barrel ends smashed flat
where they rest on the ground.

Sometimes your eye travels to distant islands,
their foliage punctuating a palomino sea,
those trees in a treeless land
a sure sign of human habitation.
You count the few churches that rise
above the horizon, gray stone monuments,
cross-capped steeples, their trees huddled close.
By hour five you tire of grain silos being the only structure
to regularly do the same—at every town
those cold white cylinders, the likes of ConAgra,
are first to announce human industry.

But in eastern Colorado and western Kansas,
your gaze returns to the hay bales as obsessively as Monet’s—
some saran-wrapped, gleaming green-streaked silver,
others fuzzed and tawny, stacked like wooden kegs,
their short, thick cylinders as uniform
as mechanical balers can make them.
They lie white-frosted in the chilled break of day,
golden at noon, sliced by blue-black shadows
on their far flanks as the sun falls to the west,
dotting six hundred miles of fallow fields—
what you notice most are the hay bales.

– Patricia Dubrava

Funeral for a Magpie

In the sunny breakfast room,
I am finishing the comics, still bitter
over their dropping Doonesbury,
when the magpies create a cacophany.
Magpies are raucous by nature,
but this flap is an outburst beyond the pale,
even for them.
I go to the back porch, thinking
these scavenger bullies have again cornered the neighbor’s cat,
find three of them fluttering from branch to branch
of my peach tree, peering down and screaming.
I cross the yard to find a magpie
at the peach tree’s roots, full grown,
freshly dead, already covered in flies.
The mourners raise their raspy din a notch.
Returning with a bag and shovel, I look up
into branches quivering with noise and say,
“I’m sorry for your loss,”
(cliché, but all I can think of)
carry the carcass to the alley
for dumpster burial in plastic, shut the lid,
turn to see not a black and white feather in sight,
and listen to sudden silence.

– Patricia Dubrava

Balarat Night Hike, 2005
for the graduating creative writers

Footfalls on gravel and ice,
wind through pines
and the faint squeak of stepped in snow:
no other sound.

Moon going for half,
ponderosa shadows inking
over ash
and alabaster ground.

Our waiting nightwalkers
are on their backs,
starstruck.
In the lodge later,
the caress of mud dries
on their coats like a badge of honor.

Denver’s luminous amber pulsates
beyond the burn,
over the white mountain flank scored
with a welter of black quills.

Michael strides purposefully past me
on his last solo,
suddenly looking in the moonlight
like a man,

and I nod, yes,
that’s what they do—
walk on alone,
until we lose sight of them.

– Patricia Dubrava

The Blond Assassin

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy Flower
The Frost beheads it at its play—
In accidental power—
The blond assassin passes on—
The Sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another Day
For an Approving God.

I recalled this Emily Dickinson poem on my fall retreat in the Black Forest the year record-breaking cold left the pines at noon looking as if they’d been filmed in black and white at dusk—a steely gray that just hinted at the green beneath. The meadow grass, its long, loopy blades gone to seed, was encased in white like a sudden crop of linguini. Hard freeze, weathermen call it. Hard time. I don’t know if they were surprised or not, but the potted red geraniums by my door had definitely been beheaded when I got home to Denver—khaki stems slumped over glazed blue ceramic. Trees whose green leaves glistened Friday, were brown shriveled corpses of themselves Monday, their chance for that flare of gold before dying gone. Hard life. We writhe on its hard bed, the blond assassin indifferent, the sun continuing to pass without a pause. And God? Emily says He approves. The day my mother died, her grandson, with his newborn daughter, was in the room. Attending to his baby girl, he did not mark when the old woman silently took her last breath, sun high in the morning sky, God nodding all the while.

– Patricia Dubrava

Manual High School’s Class of 2001

The Russian olive trees were small and solitary, in a row by the barren shortcut path at the western edge of Fuller Park. The park was separated from Manual High School by 28th Avenue, and the RTD bus rumbled past every twenty minutes. By the time the class of 2001 reached high school, that block of 28th Avenue was gone and the front of the school joined public park lawn, with a wide sidewalk to recall where the street had been. For me, living half a block away, the change was lovely, reducing traffic noise, giving me a new path to walk.

Those 2001 graduates arrived as ninth graders after 28th Avenue was vacated, must have thought of the park as theirs, to decide to do what they did. The first time I walked through Fuller after their senior gift, tiny new plants were set in beds of bright wood chips, and three new benches were bolted to pads of concrete on that shortcut path. On one of those pads, the fifteen who did the digging left the year and their handprints.

Almost a decade has passed and on the Class of 2001 garden path now, those sprigs have long since become large bushes, daylilies bloom thickly, and the indomitably invasive Russian olives arch overhead, shading benches that stood in sun before. Some years the section is cleaned and weeded; some it seems forgotten and dandelions choke the borders.

Behind those benches now there’s a fenced-in dog park, the lawn within it turned to packed dirt, the people who use it daily largely white and young, with dogs on leashes, cell phones at ears and babies in strollers. The loud dice games that used to happen in the park have moved elsewhere. Manual was closed for poor performance in 2006, reopened in 2007 as a new school, one that had become largely Hispanic.

When I moved into my Victorian house in 1984, busing was still in place and Manual was half white, half black. I went to a pancake breakfast at Holy Redeemer Episcopal Church down the street and met an elderly black gentleman who had been principal of Manual when busing began in the early 1970s. “Those kids sat in my office and told me they had a chance to do what their parents could not have done and were not going to mess that up.” The integration of the school went forward, he said, without a problem.

Some feared the school would not re-open once it closed, but now they’ve re-done the football field and remodeled classrooms and in 2011 will graduate their first class. Neighbors like me will have our exercise on the track restricted to times it can be staffed: tall new security fences surround the state of the art artificial turf with its bright new lines and numbers. I understand that: I wouldn’t want to see the place tagged or vandalized, now that it looks so good. I’ll miss the summer morning view of the front range, and my turn around the track, but still have my walk around the school building, through Fuller Park and the handprint shortcut.

Manual’s class of 2001 is pushing thirty now. They’ve finished college or military service, have jobs or careers. They’ve married, have children. But the class of 2001, at least the fifteen who left their prints, should know that some July evenings a woman sits on the west-facing bench to watch the sunset from that sweet bower. She has tried out their handprints: some are too small, some too big, and several just right. It was May 2001 when these young people went off into the world. None of us knew what the fall would bring. They didn’t sign their names, just pressed their handprints into permanence in the early spring of a more innocent time.

– Patricia Dubrava