Golden Gates

The earth loves repetition.
Mountains are pyramids.
The Golden Gate quotes the city
On the hill, rolling up into itself
Like clouds. The bridge
Could be a prison or a barge.
Cars mimic clouds rolling to work
Dreaming of being water, blues
Under the bridge or mountains
Sprouting gentrified houses
For people in the center of the fringe.
Look how earth became steel,
How steel became a road over water,
How water would destroy the bridge
If not for painters, for golden paint
Named International Orange
Ironically the color of rust.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Furnace Creek Phenomena

Your face is a ceramic tiled roof.You think I don’t see water roll off you.Some days, your hands and feet hang limplyFrom the windows of your limbs.You walk over stones placed by no hands.Your car, with wheels for feet, aches for grass.2015in response to Les Barta's photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015:

Frank Synthesis

There are arches in Marin County
thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright.

Some echo parking lots, frieze
facades and Frank’s own eyes.

Meanwhile, power poles dream
stupa spires punctuated by light.

2015
In response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, Frank Synthesis, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015 (my apologies for glare on the image and poor lighting)

Scotty’s Palette

Are your legs columns or turrets?
Walter Scott says both.

Do you realize Scotty’s castle
Was your own sweaty back?

Death Valley drove away
In endless cars as stories.

The ending was always the same.
Full of Scotty’s windows.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Frank Religion

Our bodies are crosses walking,
windows with four panes.

Perhaps our own spines
are two yellow center lines of a road,

saviors who say, Do not cross.
Others pass the opposite way.

2015
In response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, Frank Religion, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015 (my apologies for glare on the image and poor lighting)

Rock Phenomena

The earth makes bricks, stacks
them with hands we call our own.

We leave openings for doors
to dark places, make windows.

Like water and wind, we eat stone.

Who can last? We carve
our names into rock domes.

Winds blow sand, water erases
letters we mistook for home.

2015

in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Abduction

Reading white-tipped feathers, I knew more.
She was stolen just inside the henhouse door

and dragged north for eight feet before
she stopped struggling, throwing poor

wings against the sharp face of her predator.
From that point, no clues. Wide prairie evermore.

No hope for pomegranate seeds. Wrong story.
Some god did not impregnate her with future glory.

Who fed? Feral barn cat? Star eyed raccoon?
Coyote who noticed the open mouthed moon?

2015

Prescott Flowers

When your arms unfold lanceolate,
My chest spirals
Fibonacci. We die into seeds.

Will you sit in the small boat
With me and row to sea?

Mourn the bees?
Notice the world is a stem

For what we want.
You too are a stem.

Most days, our rayed heads hold
Fragile yolk,
Scheming a beak, wings.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Designer Umbrellas

If umbrellas are daisies
and clouds, what is my head?

We tourists, for a moment,
give shelter to the boat.

We pay to point at mountains,
numb to the inner view:

Mountains, too, are parasols
along with this proud lake.

Even a field of stones
protects the under-nest.

Choose your ribbed shield.
How easy not to merge.

Over what precious thing do you open
and spread to avoid its getting wet?

2015
In response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, Designer Umbrellas, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015 (my apologies for glare on the image)

Sedona Phenomena

Any arrangement of five could be you or me.
Make my head a violet petaled bloom,
a trail head sign, a twisted tree.
Your two arms serve as penstemon,
my legs two creosote. Still, my head
could simply be a head. Twenty years ago,
Sedona was my dream.

Your limbs were nearly shrubs then,
my left leg was a sign.
If clouds were bushes and moons,
my mother limbs were clouds.
Sedona loves to dream.

The carved sign tells you how to find
the overlooks and loops.
Shout from the spires and buttes,
from shadowlines of roofs:
You are Sedona’s dream.

What is your vantage? Where will you stop?
When do you finally open your robe,
unbutton your blouse, expose rocks?
They are smaller than you think,
so close, or possibly farther away,
receding atmospherically—
Sedona’s fading dream.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015