Right Effort, Palm Springs

Sand storm winds polish through
twilight's outer azures over
radical mountains, our only jagged critics.
Blasting through a George Lucas
wind turbine propeller world
in a borrowed convertible with Andrea, Ben, Eric,
I think of necessity
and the thin skins we stretch over it:
hollow of a drum, perfected thirst,
the cities we build: ornate, elevated, aching for love.
The cities we build.

Something timid in me,
something still naked and tender
wants to give the desert the bottle of water
and sunglasses I brought, everything I have,
knowing the giving would not be right
like baling my older brother out of jail again
was not right,
and listening when I was 14 to my father
tell me my mother destroyed his life
was never right,
and I don't have a good definition of need,
but I know it's at least as rare
as contentment.

A band of hungry tricksters stole into our dictionaries
and hijacked our meanings while we were out for drinks,
Eric sipping his first martini, Eric, our Midwestern friend who is
mostly more Western than Mid-except in martini élan
and the sudden way,
as serious, as arresting as a field of red,
he told us, in so many words,
something like his heart had been broken.

My generation isn't skilled with blame.
We're too busy or liberal or meta- or post-
to be activists,
too suspicious to take sides,
knowing that this is a trick of the Highly Effective, the Acquirers,
a trick less impressive than a David Copperfield
sawing his perky assistant into three twitching parts:
Mirrors, smoke, secret compartments, stand-ins-
still, we play along, amused.

Ben told Eric he couldn't blame anyone
but himself for laying his neck under the gold-plated guillotine
of reckless attachment.

He needed to hear that, I guess,
but the inner corners of Ben's eyes
softened his grammar's certainty
like Andrea's eyes smiling the hard smile of the bereaved
as we pulled into her mother's driveway
and she pushed us within an ache of weeping
and falling in love with a father we'll never meet.
What do we do, so in love,
and still a thin web of native life
stretches over the desert, stable
whether or not we skim through in a borrowed convertible
or know what we need
or whether our desperate giving
our right loving
matches any need at all,
describing the edge
of the nearest thing to the void
over whose skin
I've ever flown.

(reprinted from can we have our ball back? #16)