I will be taking you from your third and fourth periods to hear him read his poetry and discuss writing. I will get all the information to your teachers in a few weeks, but you can mark your calendars now and know that you will have to get your work in ahead of time in those classes.
Wayne's College of Beauty
I know what wages beauty gives
--Yeats
We have dropped out of the other schools
to enroll here where no one fails; everything
is fixed, fluffed, teased into its temporary best
at cut-rate prices because we are all novices
in the art of making beauty, learning that beauty
is not so hard. Beauty is not so hard we learn,
because it is not chemicals or varieties of fashion.
Our scissors and combs, our libraries of lotions,
our bright mirrors assure the timorous or imperious
elderly they have come at last to the right place.
Wayne's is not the Heartbreak Hotel, and when they
leave beautiful, it is because they are briefly unlonely.
We have said, "How are you?", "How would you
like your hair?", and we have touched them not cruelly,
and with more than our hands. When it is over
we swivel their chairs so they can see themselves
carefully from several angles while we hover silent
just above their doubts, a calculation that provides
two faces in the mirror, ours smiling at both of us.
Natural Disaster
(January 1982, Santa Cruz County)
Overflow advances across strawberry
fields, insinuates streets and suddenly
everyone has a house on the water. And
such rich, redolent water, water carrying
land with it, effluents, aromas, stranded
cars, bodies in cars; water driving snakes
ahead of it, water augering through levees
and piling the fluid tonnage of itself against
bridges that break, great trees that swim
away from the bank and ride the roiling
surface until they are snagged by other
trees and slam sideways, trees logging up
into dams over which the river schusses.
The names of the creeks: Lompico, Bear
Soquel, Zayante, Kings, Two Bar, Empire,
Aptos, Granite. And the rivers: Pajaro,
San Lorenzo. The names of the dead:
George, Leon, Sheila, Juan, Unknown and
Unknown. The names of the gods: Jaweh,
Father, Holy Spirit. The name of the lake
on whose bank grows a tree said to form
an image of the Virgin Mary in its bark:
Pinto. The name of the lucky one, not
home when his house slid over the edge:
Robert. The name of the thing that brings
the rivers up and the hills down: rain.
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