The Los Angeles at Lankershim

After dark when the Santa Anas
descend from the San Gabriels
to scour out the valley, at midnight
when everyone is
asleep and Saturn with his rings
shines above our hill, they let

 the water out. In silence the river spreads
to its banks. From resistance
comes sound. A thousand miles it flows
through aqueducts to reservoirs
that feed the town where succulent leaves,
jumble of vine, and riot

 of weeds exhale moisture back into the air
each night, and released
rainfall resumes its interrupted course
until morning, when the stream
bed dries up again, save the central trough
in which, a few feet

 wide and one deep, something always flows,
a black strip against concrete
containing walls someone spray-painted
with his initials, R.I.P.,
as what’s left of the river descends
cement steps to the sea.

 
—First published in The Gettysburg Review

The Life Cycle of a Chicken

In soft pencil scratched on a single sheet
of cheap paper, first a fat hen lays an egg,
the big-eyed check emerges from its shell,
grows up. A woman carries by its legs
a pullet home from the store. Dead center,
an oven. Plucked and roasted, her family
eats the chicken for dinner. The stick figure
daughter, smiling, bears a peep in her belly.
She squats, bare-buttocked, over a bedpan,
excreting a bird. She flings the waste
out a window to the street. It lands
on a garbage heap in an empty landscape,
where even the refuse then vanishes unseen.
Drawn by Majda Rosenzweig, age thirteen,
in 1944 in Terezin.

—First published in PSA News

Notes toward an Epistemology of Loss

I

You aren’t sure you want one.

II

Watching another couple feed mule deer
Potato chips you decide: Yes.

III

Poor test results but
You test positive.

IV

Before you can tell
It dies. Why?

V

Yes, why not lie
In bed all day?

VI

Trying is antithetical
To desire.

VII

Desire is equivocal;
Still you try.

VIII

Medical knowledge proves
Its ignorance.

 IX

Lying on a stranger’s bed
you wonder: Did they? Was she?

X

When you change the sheets you see
Stains older than yours.

XI

What is sleep? You would give
Years for a night.

XII

Come August the flycatchers abandon
The egg that would not hatch.

XIII

You turn toward each other
Because there is no other.

—First published in The Marlboro Review