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Poetry
(rd king dot net)poetry and digital art
American Summer
Poems written while traveling.
Beppo's Garden
After an hour and twenty minutes on the Santa Ana Freeway, after forty thick and inefficient minutes of rush hour, I unpacked pots of cactus from the backseat and got out my amplifier and electric guitar—to be restrung, to be watered and cared for for the summer. I gave Beppo the one instruction and showed him my new cephalocereus senilis. I pointed out that the mammalaria durispina was going to bloom. In his backyard, under an avocado growing heavy with fruit, I watched a string of dumb jets in their approach path overhead. One after another, in timely intervals, hearing their roar when they drifted beyond the fig and massive avocado in the yard next door. There was a lapse between sound and vision. Two doves sitting on the telephone wire, stupid as doves; and the hollyhocks were already going to seed. Old fences; bougainvillea, bamboo, ornamental plum, foxglove and peonies—native as me. I was two stop signs from the thick graffiti on Atlantic Boulevard in Bell, California, just sitting next to my cacti and his cymbidiums. back | ToC | next
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