Newt erects

Newt erects a snakeskin tent,
pulls on his snakeskin boots,
& sings a snakeskinny song:
“Ssocialissm! Ssocialissm!
I ssee it ssurrounding me!” as his
band strikes up “Snakes R US!”
& the crowd greedily slathers
as red mice are thrown into it...

09 APR 10, Santa Clara CA)v4

By the Bay

Alviso CA

Listening to the rushes rustle
in the light wind brings me
back to where I grew up: 

reeds rattling, rushes shusshing.
Do Egyptians feel like this
by the Nile’s reedy banks?

(08 APR 10, Santa Clara CA)v4

Teacher's Aide

Being an unpaid teacher’s aide at 67 is better than I’d expected.

Currently, I help a sometime NASA scientist (Ph.D, Berkeley) with her class of (15) 1st, 2nd, & 3rd graders in weekly after-school kiddie-experiments; we meet in a public-school art classroom in Sunnyvale CA. This 'enrichment' class is sponsored by the Parks & Rec. Dept of neighboring Cupertino (the seemingly unboundaried, entrepreneural public school system of choice here in Silicon Valley.)

Today’s class experiment was to build an unshakeable little house out of odd scraps (lengths of thick paper tube, foam rubber punch-outs, etc.) & test it on a home-made ‘shake-table’ that would reveal its vulnerability. Some kids did achieve a high degree of stability – two girls came up with identical solutions simultaneously, but at separate tables.

On a whiteboard, I drew a cartoon of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1923), to show how he set it afloat in a permanent pool of sand & running water. One drawing led to another: suddenly drawing a clockface, one girl decided to instruct another in how to tell time; watching her, a little boy was inspired to create a daliesque triangular clockface with 21 numerals.

So it goes in Silicon Valley, 2010.

Frozen Gold

The infantile Pope
pisses in the snow
& declares virtue:

“Only I can make
frozen gold on snow.
Look! Taste it!” he

shrieks. Nobody does;
he still has decades
to perfect this ruse...

(06 APR 10, Santa Clara CA)v3

Spring depends

on where you really are:

Auden mocked T.S. Eliot’s
“April is the cruelest month”
as New Englandish, because
April’s not cruel in England.

So far, it’s been rainy here,
just S. of San Francisco Bay.

(05 APR 10, Santa Clara CA)v3

Bass falsetti

Yest. San Jose Peace Chorale had its annual practice/retreat up on Mystic Mtn (just above Alum Rock, an East San Jose latino neighborhood.) This poem's about what it took out of the basses to sing one semi-bilingual piece.

Bass falsetti

We struggle to master the rhythms
of “We All Smile (in the same language)”
in a 4-part arrangement of texts of saints
Juan de la Cruz & Teresa de Jesus,

that I know isn’t quite Spanish, but
isn’t quite not. The bass part’s high,
written way up on the staves,
forcing us to sing painfully high

in throat-straining falsetto. By the time
we reach the end, we're badly strained,
totally falsed-out; can this really be
what the composer wants for effect?

(Easter Day 2010, Santa Clara CA)v8

Seagulls

Seagulls squawk!

reminding me
I’m not that far*
from salt-water*,

just south of south
San Francisco bay,
remembering

Massachusetts Bay.

Note: Remembering Massachusetts Bay simply, isn't possible because it's dramatically different in each season: snowily awful in Winter, thrillingly windy to hurricany in Fall, nicest in late Spring, scorching in high Summer, so the name's long & complex to anyone who's actually lived there for long. How does one 'remember' San Francisco Bay?
* far (fah) & water (wahtah) rhyme in New England.

(04 APR 10, Santa Clara CA)v4