– my box full of lists you never knew you were on. Junk, most of it. Once, a Christmas card came from your cousin. Not everyone knows that you’re gone. I try to unknow it all too. I kept that card, cut it in half, found some use for the useless: bookmarks now to see the progress of pages I read to fill the quiet hours. I haven’t finished a story yet. I keep the covers open, find my mind floating back to you, catch myself reading a sentence again and again – a hopeless trick to never let me say it’s over.

“[loopy scribble] as I’ve never experienced
      as though I were a volcanic sand dune              stretching
into the distance at night, and winds
blowing me, shifting my shape, exposing layer upon layer
Felt my colors change
      to sunbaked dark brown
            and blue, warmth                 as in Kandinsky, not Goethe
Only a few bright shards of obsidian”

The old lady had a fondness
for small dogs that had gumption.
And so, the shelter staff said
he was part chihuahua.
And maybe he was. In his dreams,
he whimper-growled,
legs running off ghosts
much bigger than him.
He’d been there too long:
hardscrabble coat, snaggled teeth.
But he had the kind of eyes
that forgave the rest of his face.
His name, which never
would have fit a chihuahua,
not really, suited him – weathered
and sea-worn as he looked.
Like a lot of us, he’d survived
knowing how to pivot
from emergency to chance,
knowing how and when
to make yourself small enough,
working your best features,
hoping the lady, with her smoke smell,
her tender way of reaching, ​
might think you’re what you’re not.

The neighbors were gathered and laughing when he came out of his
house, walked easily to the dying pine tree, and shook something from
a crumpled towel into the bed of rust-red needles under its branches.

1.
Janis in Port Arthur, 1965

Here am I, la di dah, Texas in July, sashaying down Main Street in a blue and white striped cotton shirtwaist, all crispy when I walked out the door but getting limp. I’ve got on white pumps and for god’s sake, nylons. The girls I went to high school with, they still walk across the street to avoid me. I’m trying to be normal to please my mom and dad, and because I’m scared. The doctors told me to go home. My mom cried on the phone. My dad said I’d be dead in a year. Well, I don’t want to die. I don’t think I do. So I’m here. But the music is running in my head. Every day I keep trying to move forward/ But something is driving me back. Work me, Lord. I want to let go right here in the center of town and scream the blues. Right. Can’t they see what’s wrong with this place? Three cages – one white, one black, one Mexican. I’ve got to cross over, got to open the locks. There’s this guy who wants to get married. He’s a good man. I could. I could make tuna casseroles in a shirtwaist dress, iron his pants, sing lullabies to my babies, haul cookies to PTA meetings. Yeah, be a dancing bear. I don’t think so.

2.
Janis Joplin Writes a Letter to Her Mother

Hey Mom,
I think it’s your birthday, today or maybe last week.
I miss you a lot, and Dad too, though not Port Arthur
which was way too flat and hot. Now I’m here in San Fran,
where the ocean is too cold to swim in,
can you believe it? Gulf Coast water is like a bathtub,
makes you want to slit your wrists,
but here the fog that rolls in at night is gray velvet.
Mom, do you know it fills up the valley
so you can’t see a thing. It rolls in and lies down
in the hollows between one little hill and another.
It feels good, cool and so safe.
You drive down into a cloud and you can’t
see a thing. Not even yourself.
Love, Janis

3.
San Francisco, October 1968

Dear Diary, we started recording today, a woman left lonely, yeah that’s me right now. Ain’t got much voice left tonight, just as well ‘cause there’s no body to talk to. I’m in a particular situation yeah, I’m feelin’ pain or I’m feelin’ numb. Scream or groan. Pain or whiskey. Which door do I walk through?

Walked all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf after the session. I wanted to be by myself, uh huh. Just walk. Threw on a black pea coat I found on a rack in the studio, pulled on a watch cap. Hey, l looked like a sailor in civvies. Nice to get out of the smoke and the noise and walk in the air that smells a little like seagull wings and maybe dead fish or the broken shells of clams. And kelp, right, washed up on the beach, hanging out under the wharf slapping up against the rotting planks.

The wind cuts like a razor, man it shaves the pain close. The air smells of a long way away. I could walk forever.

4.
What I Live For

Heat like the furnace of a steam engine.
I’m gonna shovel in some coal and make it roar.
Lights like God’s eyes strobing
an Old Testament moment. Yeah, I’m gonna
lay down the Ten Commandments of the Blues.

Got my flask of Southern Comfort
to keep me warm and easy.
Got my boys out there raising up an ocean
out of bass, guitar and drums.

In a minute I’ll walk on stage, velvet and jeans
and long thick hair. I’ll walk through the waves
maybe on the waves, how about that,
and I’ll call up a storm of blues. Ride it
with my voice. Like the best sex I ever had.
Every preacher knows what I’m talkin’ about.

Hey people, get up on your feet and move.
You’re only as much as you settle for.

5.
Just Another Word
(for Janis)

1969. I’m tossing back bourbon
and dancing alone in my living room
to your smoky chain link barbed wire voice
biting off chunks of pain.

White girl from Texas growling out the blues,
channeling Big Mama Thornton and Bessie,
the way they rode the blues migration north
to Chicago and New York off the front porches
out of honkytonks and vaudeville tents
into Saturday night bright lights
and everyone’s house
     through the miracle
           of the wind-up Victrola.
They re-wrote what women could do –
and the price.

Forty years later, thumbing your nose
at Port Arthur, you sped out of town
on a sixties road trip to North Beach and the Haight,
mixed blues, rock and the beats to sing your throat raw:
   We may not be here tomorrow, no
       I’d say get it while you can

Voice big as the Texas sky, an oil well on fire.
Shivers, sugar and Southern Comfort
brown velvet and white horse, needles and nettles
pounding summer sun and never
quite fitting in.

Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.
Break it.

My neighbor kneels on the cold ground
freeing the tulip stalks from under the leaves.
I watch her from my window
think about resurrection,
about not being here
to see the spring. I hope that someone
will clean my garden when I’m gone,
allow the tulips and lilies to flourish
in their purple and pinks.

My husband is gone, buried nearby at Mount Pleasant.
The ground in the cemetery has caved in and the caskets opened.
All the bodies were freed from the cold ground.
It has been a hard winter for living.

I used to say, when asked why I’d want to write poems
about a cemetery, maybe I think about death
more than your average bear, an answer both flippant
and wildly presumptuous, given that I have never studied
the ontological beliefs of bears, nor surveyed
their contemplative practices, let alone charted
the frequency with which bears exhibit metaphysical concern
(nor would I be keen to specify what I mean
by average, in this or most any context).

What I should have said: I think about death
more than might be supposed by the pitch of my voice,
by the spring in my step, by my various profligacies
and profanations (intractable); better yet, I think about death
more than the alternate versions of myself
across potential universes think about death
though in those universes, too, I lumber along trails
trodden by wiser forebears, seeking sweetness
and fattening for winter, which, scientists say, probably
will come again, and whose storms, experience indicates,
will, without provocation or remorse,
buckle the soundest den.

Your stardust awoke a black hole
at the heart of my galaxy
more massive than the sun. 
Voracious, we devour 
each day and dance, 
time 
slowed 
and worlds set aglow 
in our wake of radiation.
My green and blue planets remain
intact, in orbit, in the peripheral
while we create melodies 
through reflections and refractions 
of our love’s light.

She doesn’t buy literary journals or subscribe. Her budget won’t allow.

Picking them up, instead, here and there for free in places that people leave them for free and sometimes reading online. The New Yorker, she thinks, is thin for her dollars.

Once, she bought a copy, used, for only fifty cents, but hasn’t read it yet. Men who buy her poetry books often want them signed (in person) to pay for all her drinks (in person) to impress her with lists of investments and assets (in person).

She’s thin for their dollars. They like her that way.

Her mother married a man (her father) to get away from a man (grandfather) hoping she’d married a man she didn’t want to get away from. Agency is merely the art of surviving dependency. She’s trying not to have to do the same. “You made your bed, now lie in it,” they said, after mother panicked and tried to get away.

So, please buy this book; in fact, buy five or six.

• This is her list.
• This is not a date.
• This might be a poem.

Keep the drinks coming. I’m just getting started leveraging your time.

With illumination, everything is possible.

In 1900 Samuel Gold sh ne: Gelb sz walked from Nova Scotia – via Birmingham, England, via Hamburg, Germany via the Warsaw ghettos – across an unmanned border, to my hometown. At a mill he ascended from sweeper to foreman to seller of gloves. Then, papers in hand, he left for the glitter of the other New York & then for the promise of California; he emerged as Goldwyn, a sunlit lion – filming Squaw Man in black & white.

Just watch the janitor climb his ladder, torch on a long pole, rushing to light each chandelier before the room fills with gas. Reels spin. The projectors run full tilt; outside, gloves fill the air. Stones rise from the rippling Cayudetta. Until the current foams. In the pub, in the sign shop, in the church, in the firm; fire catches from the chemically coated walls. Until testicular cancer & the boy’s prison. Until we drink at the tar pits & one of us falls. Back then, we fixed a wound with a buttery wing.

Those in the foreground are searching for bodies. You can hear the piano keys jingle like mirrors catching what’s left of the light.

Yellow machinery next door. Calamitous clatters,
felled trees. My brother studies Einstein in thick books,
scribbles equations on clipboards – a blizzard of cogitation
behind the shrubbery of an old man’s eyebrows. Gray
as Phil Silvers on an old tv: remember? Houndstooth confetti.
Shift the antenna, someone says, but nothing works. Was it
for this our parents hated each other, paid for ice skates,
psychiatrists, college, said their cold hellos at graduation?

Sometimes I too feel estranged – the world a bitter spouse
in search of better. All those PhDs, but what we didn’t do
decided our disasters. A single horseshoe crab inverted
on the beach – brown bowl so thin it glows; fires, floods,
rubble, floating shoes – Curved space, my brother says.
Time changed by stance and speed. The buzzsaws pause.

Silence. A house wren’s watery trill.

Each room a cave
in your mind, a safe
you can lock. No one
else breathes its warm
air. No other footfalls
stir dust. At last you wear
the garment of your own
desires. At last you remove
your crown of false smiles.
Cover the mirrors. Pull down
The shades. Sometimes light
Within you flickers. Sometimes
It dazzles and blinds.

– after Dave Chang

“Well, somebody certainly didn’t stop,”
says the cop to the fireman, eyeing two
cars t-boned at the four-way, adjusting
his sunglasses with one hand, resting
the other on the butt of his gun. Is this
suffering? A silly question to be asked the
day of the great _________, all the
hermit crabs on the beach circling one
tide pool to pass their too-small shells
on down to a smaller cousin, sing
the song of wrack & fester, then skitter
synchronously away in one sine wave
that stills the ocean, the gulls torrid
screech & scavenge, the sky turning pink,
the tongues of water stretching across
the long sandy flats turning neon.
Then night arrives. You realize you have
ascended into the kind of person who
drinks martinis. A doorway opens in
front of you, an even older, skinnier version
of yourself, wearing your favorite, now-
baggie jeans with a t-shirt of Bill Murray
teaching the groundhog how to drive,
beckons. So, you climb aboard the stand-
up paddle board that was your mid-life
crisis gift to yourself & off you go.

30 traps
takes 2 grown men
4 hours

to pull up, clear & bait.

30 years takes
30 years.

We pull &

pull,

curious,

    hopeful,

optimistic even.

We pull each trap year.

Each birthday.

Happy in
    wind for a while.

Happy out
    here on the water.