Ambrosia

What is it gods eat, this ambrosia— surely
not the beetle’s fungal delight or bees’ bread,
bees wrapped in pollen and honey, their sting
a dying fillip to deathless mouths, and maybe
deserved
given what trials the gods inflict, or God, who tests
our faith as He allows the murder of innocents—
but what if after such a test we find Him unworthy?

Ambrosia? A wrap of pain, of failed prayers,
lost hopes, dreams still to meet their failure,
their failure, the very spice of life, its suffering?
I wrestle answerless in those hours others sleep,
the aging woman beside me, the grandson
in the next room with smooth, unwrinkled flesh,
even the dog, legs racing in dreams after prey
never caught:
or I dredge up literary analogues, Starbuck, pistol raised,
demanding of Ahab,
‘Who is man to judge God?’—yet who then lowers his gun
when shooting a man
is so much simpler than shooting God.

I lie in the dark, driven in on myself, wondering:
ambrosia?
And then know what the gods, what God eats:
it is our love He/they devour, smiling— “Ahhh,”
He/they sigh as they/HE swallow,
“there is such sweetness in what must be lost.”
And then I know too I will never swallow
such a bitter sweet
but demand man woman judge woman man
not gods/God
and stand in our own eternity, however brief.

What’s Needed to survive Fire in Los Angeles

City of cities, mountains and valleys, plains and mesas—
desert, and Pacific pounded shores,
a universe of light dazzling night flights
that descend towards the ocean’s fringe of fog:

City in large, America in small, home of Hollywood
and failed dreams; of slum, and cliff-side homes
with views to Japan— not Sandburg’s Hog City, a place
the cleaver defined, America’s butcher

but one where steal snakes draw their coils around its heart:
of muscle beach, of omni and focused love of every kind:
earth-shaken, drought-tested, flood-deluged, a city
whose golden mean averages extremes:

what’s needed to survive when fire is unleashed in you?

Not a heart all stone, not even one of shining basalt,
child of fire
a darkness that shines
a despair that laughs—

but one a live wire pulled through
fails to jerk and stop,
one whose embrace
absorbs all currents—

not one to harden or crack
or drive us to say “Enough!”
when rain sluices the poisonous sludge
of cremated houses,

ash trees

ash love

downhill to creek and stream,
to channel and run-off pipe until
its gray sludge oozes over the beach
and turns waves into fluid earth

then poisons Pacific depths—

even so:surviving?

What does it matter to endure in the face of
burned memories
burned lives
settled loves
fed into charnel house infernos?

What does it matter to endure when
water was nothing to firemen
who ran to escape
a downpour of red embers

driven by hurricane winds?
Blood is not redder,
grief more consuming
death more final!

What does it matter to endure if
to be that bereft owl
paralyzed on the sands
as great hands of smoke
reach down as it waits,
marooned,
accepting,
doomed?
When tree and shade
when prey and blood
and every hot coupling
in a moonless or moonlit night
when the answer came to
“Who Is There?”
is part of that descending
smothering inflaming grasp—

What’s needed to survive fire in Los Angeles?

Stone that stays flesh
electrocute that lives—
the heart is stranger than we know,
enigma in a well-known land,

soft adamant refuser of the power of
earth wind air and fire

more elemental—

a gentle rain no matter what the flame

a tender kiss no matter how we fail

the softest desire no one can refuse
to go on
to renew
to live

to love

yes, to loveREALLY?

When the world takes a fist to beauty
willfully spreads disease,
maims
uses fire to erase the ground
of memory?

How American,
how Hollywood—
love conquers all—
such banality!
When the world
is the most careless
of friends, its most
ardent embraces
like a boa’s
crushing life!

Do I know someone tendertough enough to endure this?

I do.

Do I know how easily she can be hurtresilient?

I do.

Do I feel such rage married to fire’s
when she is so trialled?

I do.

Then what’s needed to survive fire in Los Angeles?

Love.
Stilllove
for love is an all-consuming power
and defies circumstance
ash
pain
death
for in its wake love alone leaves the heart

green.