It’s 96 degrees
iced coffee, early afternoon
diligent millennials inside at their laptops
I’m outside in the warm shade
of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel
barely able to breathe.
Some of her leaves
collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats
but she’s hanging in there.
 
How I depend on her! Her massive splotched
trunks cantilevered over the sidewalk
hold.
So long as she stands, I can make it
in this heat, blissfully peaceful in spite of it,
practicing my listening:
 
A workman intermittently tosses torn-out sinks
and old fixtures into an echoing dumpster
gutting a defunct barber shop. In this strip mall,
an older one, that somehow
manages a homey feel, a sort of plaza — its shabby ivy
twists up the wood posts of the overhang testifying
to its tough struggle—
 
there’s a nail shop, a dog-grooming salon, even
that endangered commercial species, a used
bookstore —all
within range of this silent sycamore’s presence.
 
Where do sycamores come from?
Where do angels come from?
Where have we all come from
blown into a strip mall like scraps of paper
clustering together
on our devices, separately
at the C’mon Back Café?
 
The demolition sounds
irritate me until I let them go
into the surf of passing tires,
 
into the silence suddenly reverberating
when the motorcycle stops.
Strange, I hadn’t even heard its throbbing idle
until it stopped.
Every moment’s a culmination.
John Cage would be all for it.
 
I have docked at this space-station
on my way to the far reaches of the universe,
my wife back home on earth, perhaps
doing laundry or reading. Heaven help us
if strip malls keep proliferating.
This wasteland’s so literal it’s worse than Eliot’s.
 
Have architects all lost their imagination?
Of course, it’s fiscally driven,
integrity’s out the window. Amazon
and Walmart have us so hooked on convenience
and price, to be a local now
is to be a refugee
 
in a lower-middle class strip mall—souped up
but temporary and insulting and hideous
as immigration detention centers, not as horrendous
of course, but similarly degrading—all of it
created by international corporations.
It’s a bloodbath. But you know all that.
 
I am visiting my daughter and grandsons
who were able to buy a house on this planet
a little too close to the sun for comfort.
Thank God it has a Y, with a great pool
protected by very expensive fighter jets breaking
the sound barrier several times a day.
 
You always know there’s a war
going on somewhere, even as I sit here
poised in solitude, I’m surrounded by rehearsals
for war—that are supposed to make you feel safe!
I’d feel a lot safer if they’d just give me whatever it costs
to fuel one of those jets for a week.
To think we’ve been at war since 1990—
Twenty-eight years!
 
This is apparently an indifferent
chaotic universe, but I bet
there’s an underlying order
I imitate by temporarily sipping iced coffee
in peace. There’s a core of peace
at the center of this universe. I can feel it
just sitting here in the warm shade. It’s paid for
 
by my small breathing
that in turn attracts a weak breeze
that causes you, my uncomplaining angel, a bedraggled tree
to ache and lift the whole
garbage-producing population of human beings
with your burning wings.
 
I had to get out of the house.
The Trump pimp, federal circuit court Judge Kavanaugh
in the Senate Supreme Court Confirmation hearings on TV
was slaughtering language with phrases such as
enhanced interrogation techniques (meaning torture
used by Bush administration in Guantanamo)—
 
compared to that, writing poems
even if they’re mediocre or shitty
is a way of sharing the shade of a sycamore tree.
 
Now a garbage truck’s backing up, it’s beeper going
the guy on the ground
beckoning it back with his hands, says
 
C’moan back . . . moan back, now, that’s it, keep comin’ . . . moan back . . .
 
that’s the news for the day
from the Moan Back Café.