It's the start of baseball season,
and I am thinking again 
as I do every year 
in early April now 
that I live in California 
where afternoon is a blue 
span to languidly cross 
of those long ones 
you used to sort of sleep 
through getting drunk 
on many beers, lying 
next to your radio 
on a little square of grass 
in the sun, listening 
half to the game and half 
to the Pacific water gently 
slapping the concrete 
barrier of the man-made cove.
I have heard it and it sounds 
like conversations among 
not there people I can't 
quite hear. But you could. 
And later you would try 
to remember what they said 
and transcribe it on your 
black typewriter 
in your sad, horrible room. 
When I read your poems 
about suicide and psychoanalysis 
I feel very lucky and ashamed 
to be alive at all. Everyone 
has been talking lately 
about radiation, iodine, 
and wind, and you are in 
your grave, far from the water. 
I know I don't care about you 
at all but when I look 
at your photograph, 
your round head tilted up 
so you are staring down 
at everyone, I remember 
how much you hated your body. 
Today I will go down by the water 
where you used to sit and think
I do not hate my body 
even though I often do. 
When I die please write he tried
on whatever stone you choose.

                —walking along a ridge of white sand—
                                                      it’s cooler below the surface—

                we stop and, gazing at an expanse
                             of dunes to the west,
                                         watch a yellow yolk of sun drop to the                                                        mountains—

                an hour earlier, we rolled down a dune,
                                                         white sand flecked your eyelids                                                                    and hair—

                a claret cup cactus blooms,
                                          and soaptree yuccas
                                                                      move as a dune moves—

                so many years later, on a coast, waves rolling to shore,
                                          wave after wave,

                I see how our lives have unfolded,
                                          a sheen of
                                                        wave after whitening wave—

                and we are stepping barefoot,
                              rolling down a dune, white flecks on our lips,

                on our eyelids: we are lying in a warm dune
                                                         as a full moon 
                                                                                  lifts against an                                                                                                  ocean of sky—

The air is close by the sea and the glow from the pink moon
drapes low over a tamarind tree.

We hold hands, walk across a road rushing with traffic 
to an abandoned building site on the bay, look out across the dark marina.

Sea cows sleep by the side of a splintered dock, a cluster of them 
under the shallow water,

their wide backs covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral.

Every few minutes one floats up for air, 
then drifts back down to the bottom, 

without fully waking.  
They will do this for hours, and for a while we try to match 

our breath to theirs, and with each other’s.

In the morning, sitting in the garden beneath thatch palms, 
we drink black coffee from white ceramic cups.

Lizards killed by feral cats are scattered on the footpath.
I sweep them into a pile with the ones from the night before.   

Waves of heat rise from the asphalt, 
and we sense a transparent gray fuzz lightly covering everything 

as if there were no such thing as empty space, 
that even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full.