08-19-2014, 05:05 AM
Our Crim Law professor told a story
about a robber who shot point blank
into pillows believing it was his enemy.
It didn’t matter, the man was dead already.
The professor, an Irishman, drank all semester
from the same cup, which may very well
not have been water, to quell the sweat
forming along his Polo shirt.
And, for a moment, when he stopped,
the light held still on those chairs.
I thought maybe it was something important,
but then it was over,
and he rushed outside to a brick wall
where he puffed down three cigarettes,
and then walked off alone into the Oakland sun.
I never understood how anyone read Criminal Procedure,
then took a Sunday drive listening to Chet Baker.
My second winter in law school,
stuck in a hospital bed on morphine,
I stared out at the wet streets
and saw three girls dancing under the stars,
a thin haze around them.
I am sure they were ghosts,
but all I wondered was who would be liable
if the streetlight broke
and fell on top of the little one.
In a California I will never see again,
late autumn in a mall parking lot
with a woman I was soon to leave,
something inside her
was beginning to take back every memory we made.
She fumbled for her keys,
searching for a lost syllable.
But we didn’t talk about it, we let it end --
as each shop shut off its light,
and the woman lifted up her jacket collar
as she did when the nights got cold and sleep was near.
I was starving then too.
Only I was unaware if she stayed two months longer,
I would have had a cohabitation claim.
I wrote in the street outside the house where I was born,
because while I was gone, the mortgage was sold in escrow.
For years I believed that what went unsaid
lingered in pure and unexpired silence,
but then I read the Uniform Commercial Code.
I don’t want to die alone with the law
like a poet with his pens
so tonight, I look for you, Jackson,
as a young girl closes a car door.
It is so hot that she rolls her sleeves up.
The law has touched even her
as the stars shine on a black sky.
So sit in the darkness, tonight.
The river will keep running.
about a robber who shot point blank
into pillows believing it was his enemy.
It didn’t matter, the man was dead already.
The professor, an Irishman, drank all semester
from the same cup, which may very well
not have been water, to quell the sweat
forming along his Polo shirt.
And, for a moment, when he stopped,
the light held still on those chairs.
I thought maybe it was something important,
but then it was over,
and he rushed outside to a brick wall
where he puffed down three cigarettes,
and then walked off alone into the Oakland sun.
I never understood how anyone read Criminal Procedure,
then took a Sunday drive listening to Chet Baker.
My second winter in law school,
stuck in a hospital bed on morphine,
I stared out at the wet streets
and saw three girls dancing under the stars,
a thin haze around them.
I am sure they were ghosts,
but all I wondered was who would be liable
if the streetlight broke
and fell on top of the little one.
In a California I will never see again,
late autumn in a mall parking lot
with a woman I was soon to leave,
something inside her
was beginning to take back every memory we made.
She fumbled for her keys,
searching for a lost syllable.
But we didn’t talk about it, we let it end --
as each shop shut off its light,
and the woman lifted up her jacket collar
as she did when the nights got cold and sleep was near.
I was starving then too.
Only I was unaware if she stayed two months longer,
I would have had a cohabitation claim.
I wrote in the street outside the house where I was born,
because while I was gone, the mortgage was sold in escrow.
For years I believed that what went unsaid
lingered in pure and unexpired silence,
but then I read the Uniform Commercial Code.
I don’t want to die alone with the law
like a poet with his pens
so tonight, I look for you, Jackson,
as a young girl closes a car door.
It is so hot that she rolls her sleeves up.
The law has touched even her
as the stars shine on a black sky.
So sit in the darkness, tonight.
The river will keep running.
