-->
“a view from the top
in july”
Panoramic
Oakland – South Bay-
the City – Northern bits too
and a tiny, tinny
Cylinder Cuts into an innocuous sky
A Weak, pale-blue
which angles at the Slight incline which brings It “up there”
flies by a slender Cylindrical
bird an organic Imitation
ears hear it, Chest
Bones Bounce it away
as a Broad Bellied
airplane of Red
hovers in ease and Defiance
of Dread
Suspension Above me Forty-five
degrees away
another bird, another
plane a Quivering Shake of Day
while miniature Chirps
behind my back
Re-route some
Memories
of recorded tweets
the ones that loop
Harmlessly
at the zoo in Quiet
defeats
This Metallic Bay
bobs down there
like
a Saucer of melted Nickels
ground up with Diamonds
Spread ‘cross a Sheet
of highlands
*Law of Diminishing
Contrast*
I see you now
Spots in the hills Sparkle
Bright with Dots and Dashes
various City slopes and treed motes
a reflected sunshine
in Rarified particles
of Light and sound
Land-locked into Frozen
Bullets
And something Paused
“Sounds From the Top
@ 7:00 pm”
On a Thursday on a hill like this, a big one, Oh, a big one,
Lives a constant swoosh of air and
invisible matter. It weaves in and ‘round an undulating ribbon of cars below
which generate a Rumble, deep like a monster’s, above.
A larger machine than me eats the intermittent
communications of birds.
I do not know them:
The birds.
The soundlessness of wind hits the sides of sand-duned
earlobes Then licks the grass and trips along empty gravel pathways to caress smoothed-stoned-monuments
in the holiest of ways.
From between the inside layers of a Lombardy Poplar a
whistle streams forth to entertain the dead.
“Jewish”
Lost in the Piedmont Hills and Productive in a way…from the
little foray on the Number Eleven bus I am gifted some insight about this
cemetery-skirting neighborhood:
Affluent with mansion-hobbit
houses. Everything in order, down
to the dark, wood-stained window trimmings and perky flowers in rows.
Bus driver says this here’s where the maids, after work, catch
the Number Fifty-seven home, while up higher on Moraga Street, up in the
patchworked-hills made of noodle-bowl roads, a wall growing from the side of a
house tells me more:
Mountain View
Cemetery 1863
Crematorium
Mausoleum
Columbarium
columbarium |ˌkäləmˈbe(ə)rēəm|
noun
( pl. -baria |-ˈbe(ə)rēə|)
a
room or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored.
•
a
niche to hold a funeral urn.
•
a
stone wall or walk within a garden for burial of funeral urns, esp. attached to
a church.
ORIGIN
mid
18th cent.: from Latin, literally ‘pigeon house’ .
Oh,
a Pigeon House.
I arrive and the
Gothic Chapel welcomes me. Giant oxidizing
letters spell it out. Locked doors
but Elegant, honestly beautiful, stained-glass windows possess me…with their
extraordinary pink-violet sheen.
Like a little girl’s Fantasy color. My new leather boots bite at my pinky toes, and I’m cranky. Yet, stealthily, Thick patches of tree
leaves girate above.
Many names branded
with the Star of David: Zimmerman, Zatkin, Rosenblat, Burke, Stein…Jacoby,
Weyl, Foxtoe, Axelrod, Uri… And inside, where it’s deathly quiet, my Breath chases
its echo against the marble walls that are speckled like a Robin’s egg (tan
& brown). Here, a narrow,
mustard-colored leather couch sinks into a cool, even floor. Though the resting
place is armless and short, it’s an island of refuge. Four plaques, more bodies
encapsulated by marble then decorated with copper vases a foot high that are
mounted in front, and fake flowers shoot out in a memorial of life and Here,
the Dead are enclosed and it’s 4:15 and I’m about to get locked in.
“Night Notes”
As we attempt to break in cross over hop onto sally forth
into this mission of nighttime cemetery shenanigans we meet not with the
satisfying success of landing on dead people’s grass but with instead the
jarring splashes of sneaky sprinklers on the outside perimeter of a tall wall.
I have wet socks. Friend has soaked leg. After a mini-brainstorming session that
includes the hatching of new plans that includes the bringing of tiny ladders
and the wearing of black-like-ninjas costumes we drive on.
As we pass the entrance and I say “No, keep going, let’s try
the other side where there’s another neighborhood where maybe the wall is not
so keen on disrupting our hopping of walls momentum”, friend says “No, I want
to go the front gate just to see”.
A new development, aha! The gate is mysteriously open, left
open, left unlocked, perhaps, perchance by some sort of providential accident.
As we wiggle through the divine uncomplication, we whisper
our great fortune; we feel the general freakiness of this dark blue, dark trees
too, a building to the right with-two amber-kind-of-lights place. Even the
stars are semi-snickering.
And I hear a symphony of frogs and a ghostly noise of
chamber music in a foggy far away concert.
As we walk through a building that’s painted like white
toothpaste that’s holding the bones of a hundred at least, that’s mounted a
street that’s narrow and pock-marked we sit against the skinny iron bars of a
mausoleum. Scared while we press
the flesh of our living selves against the wroughtness of this all, we feel the
false protection of two toothpaste pillars which frame this tiny church.
And the ground is white, diamond shaped, and the black tiles
sprinkle their random appeal throughout.
The headstones could be people, and the bonsai tree could be a spirit
and “I dare you to sit there, man, to test our bodily strength and resolute
stupidness”.
As we purposefully pulse our nerve endings I must ask in confused
repetition how does a place transform from peaceful to menacing simply with the
setting of the sun and “No, I’m not going in the direction”, while friend
mentions it’s time to go back.
And something’s behind us, but it’s made of mist and mere mockeries
and a fucking cat pirouettes from behind a grave to set off a domino cascade of
scary things shooting off sprinklers and more ghost concerts in the
distance. Not to mention the
invisible gurgle which is probably a
zombie thirsting for my brined brains which is actually more realistically a
broken sprinkler-head embedded into the earth.
As we continue even deeper into the blue-black-bric-brac I
know I’d be paralyzed if alone, yet we see the entrance gate again and double
back. It’d be quite beautiful here if my electrical cords and vocal chords
weren’t firing and fried and my friend comments that tonight is so “shockingly
quiet”.