Sunday Afternoon

​
On the way to a dinner
With my wife and children
Through a suburb
In southern California
Of small green lawns
And ranch houses,
I saw a lean gray
Coyote trotting across
The road, up onto a yard
And towards a fence
Until I drove past and lost him. 
He is a trickster of course
In some traditions 
But he looked to me
Like a creature who’d lost his fear
To hunger, almost.
I think for the first time in years 
Of the man who fooled
Two friends and me
In a narrow pizzeria 
With a shell game on one
Of our first nights out 
In college—he played it
For us three or four times 
So poorly with an affected
Drunkenness until we bet him
Twenty dollars, and then
He fooled us good and
We guessed wrong
And he was on his way.
Thus we were welcomed
To our sanctuary city.





Portland Heroism


To the thirteen
Hanging from St. Johns Bridge 
To block the passage outward 
Of the MSV Fennica 
Headed to break ice for Shell in the Arctic--

I am reminded of Mario Savio saying that one becomes sick at heart
By the operation of the machine
And the only solution is to put one’s body on the gears,
To be torn to pieces, unless,
As I interpret the current of the metaphor,
A humane hand stops the machine, licit or no.

The Fennica has turned back 
To dock again in Portland
And a representative of the protesters says they won’t move until
Obama revokes Shell’s permission to drill in the Arctic.

They have been told by the police
That they are unwelcome.

They hang between the plane of the bridge and 
The expanse of the water,

And it is as if they have stopped time in the midst of a fall

And in that moment there is a day
That is the stillness of the machine
For a few whose trespass is hope.