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California Secesh 
(after reading "California Today: Secessionist Group Seizes the Moment," New York Times, Nov. 10, 2016)

California wants to go 
to places where the liberals grow
the attitudes that best reflect 
the values valley girls respect 

Where love that dares can shout its name
Brown, black, and pink are all the same
From market share to yoga stretch 
Good vibes are everywhere to catch

Where eager feet and hearts incline 
sweet dreams to Hollywood and Vine
And vegetarians feed their pups 
On Birchers murdered in their cups 

Yet migrants harvest vines for tips 
And sweatshops make the things with chips 
I'll tell you what you may not know
You stayin' till your brothers go




Black on Black; White on Black


But how could I be sure?
"That's Dominique."
"I don't know. I wasn't sure."
"You're not sure it's Dominique?" 
We agree to run the video again. We are alone in a room, the six of us.
"Yes," reluctantly, "it does look like him." 
Still, what if I'm wrong? What if my senses deceive me?
What do I say to the dark-skinned parents of the dark-skinned young man when 
we meet them later — you can imagine the circumstances, you can always imagine 
circumstances, however coincidental, unlikely — 
and they tell us (I'm imagining you're with me, to share this unfolding)
what happened to their son,
after we, their white jury, found him guilty of assault 
way back then, that day we sat in a room and watched a video.
I don't even watch videos. I'm too old to watch videos. I listen to words. 
And what about the other kid? 
The African-American young man who 
his teachers and administrators were so eager to sell to us 
as the fourth young man in the criminal "assault"? 
Or the skinny fourteen year old, also black, 
who somebody said snitched on their friend?
This, he tells us, is how it began:
Why did you snitch on Elwood?
I didn't snitch on Elwood
Did you know Elwood? Yes, he was — I mean I thought he was a friend.
I'll never talk to him again.
Then what happened? He began punching me. And?
The other kids jumped in and started punching me. How many?
Three, and then... Four overall? Yes, there was four.
What do the parents of Dominique say to the parents of the victim, let's call him Benir,
all of them some shade of color, to the eyes of white people that's enough.
Yes, Dominique looks Latino, while 'the fourth,' that's what we do call him,
does not. What he looks like is stone African-American, I realize,
appalled that after centuries of civilization (freedom, democracy!) these ancestral origins
should matter so,
that evolution works so slowly, even on the social side,
that white juries sitting in judgment of black defendants
hearing from black victims, listening to white lawyers, 
and one newbie black one
before a white judge
in a white courtroom, white clerks and court officers, 
a jury pool of sixty almost entirely white faces
can make you tremble with unknowing, 
and the fear of getting it wrong.





Waiting for The Elegies 
(for Rilke)

After all these years I see you
staring into the gazelle,
the panther, the block of stone, 
losing yourself
to find your calling in the mind of life, 
in the cripple on the street,
the empty hours of your book, the cluttered alleys, 
the metropolitan stations of the cross 
where your doppelganger haunted the streets,
as you did too,
finding self only in self-banishment, other-becoming, 'feeling-into,' 
seeing the world through the eye of the big, impounded cat, 
'in-seeing' the life of the rock
like the master 
for whom all the world was a piece of stone 
Releasing the world, 
dissolving it on the chipped paint of old walls,
something beneath color and light
until your words were sculpted
trees made of earth, rocks made of people, 
the unglimpsed concatenation of waking ideas 
assimilated, munched by the billions of tiny eyes
who make us
what we dream we are