I tossed a rock onto the sand.
The moment it left my hand

I gave it up. It made no splashes,
settled before the crashes,

but when the sparkling water rose
my pebble changed Neptune's flows.

We trip gods with our crumbs.
The sea is moved by a slip of the thumb.

Aisha

Walking back to the car I saw a woman I remembered. Settled, with flaky orange hair, drooping features. Her name was Aisha and she had been in my sign language class. The class had been taught by a fantastic, sincere guy named Mo whose parents had both been Deaf. Most of the students were there trying to escape oral language courses, with the three notable exceptions. There was a couple, a worried brunette named Elaine and her partner, a sweet-eyed, intelligent Iranian; he was going deaf. And there was Aisha, who was going deaf too. She was in her thirties and she spoke almost normally, but she couldn't say her R's, and it made me wonder if losing the ability to hear also lost you the ability to distinguish between R's and W's.

Once, in class, we'd been talking about the pros and cons of cochlear implants and she had spoken up in her funny crippled voice, said she was considering getting one but she was undecided, she was "scaiwed shitless," and there had been a sort of stabbed silence, all these home-schoolers and hipsters too cool for Spanish and older people trying to pick up another skill and me, a high school junior with half an aptitude for language and half a desire to listen to that exotic voice of people with no voice, all of us sucking in a little, unable to imagine sound growing duller each day, the big chunky plastic hearing aid palpably less effective than it was, the workings of entropy spelled out in the gradual obvious muting of the world....

I saw her crossing the street, her movements impenetrable, unrevealing. I could not know if she had chosen to get the implant. Irreversible, unlike any decisions I had yet to make. Me, still unbetrayed by my curious body.

On the way home I drove along the cliffs, twenty miles per hour. I was driving a different car, and I was still unused to the engine's quiet. The sea was exquisite, shimmery, echoing a periwinkle dome, rippling with light, opalescent. And the sky just above it was tinted orange. I drove and looked and felt like I would die of beauty.

And within meters and moments it had changed. The orange had faded peach and the contrast was lesser and death was postponed, again.

JANUARY

Mixed-up trees stepping in orange leaves,
Skin blessed with affectionate breezes;
Blues, greens, warms, silk feathers,
A crime to drive in this weather;
Bright shadows, flown smiles, limbs bared,
May-in-September-in-January;
If global warming takes me this peaceful way,
I won't revolt, I will obey.

I've been sick. But more poetry class stuff.

It's now official: my poetry "teacher" is a dumbass who I do not respect a single iota.
However, this doesn't mean I can't glean something from the course, right?
Here's a sonnet I wrote today in class which I kind of liked. The assignment was to write about a block you know really well or something. I totally blew it off and wrote about a scene I came across earlier today. Mostly I guess I like the way it fits the form; less sure about the content.

WEST CLIFF SONNET

A white-hot spot up on my beating right.
There is a tree which flattens to make shade,
and here two gossipping old ladies walk,
and hear a shy musician try his trade.
A flock rolls by. Twentysomething women,
all pushing plush and multicolored strollers.
The carted chat drifts by: Today she slept
so well. Today he ate. And how is yours?
They look at me alone and unstretchmarked
and I shift to the water, blue and brighter
than any baby's eyes, its glitter-ripple
always alive, always alive. I'm lighter,
but should my helium be weighted down?
Unburdened, I still dream of greater towns.

he's in movies

There was a man all in black. Ageless, blond, nose red with cold, hat cocked. The folds in his pants were crisp. He walked long and tall and lit upon a bench. He didn't look at the ocean, though it was sunset-blue and ripply gorgeous, a gift of ever-changing lights and motions. He didn't count the flaps of pelican wings, exhausting communication of flight, breathing only during the brief respites of gliding. He looked at his wrist.

He waited.

If he waited long enough George Clooney in a moustache would come up behind him and give him a mission. He was dressed like the kind of man that George Clooney would come up to. It was going to happen, it was fate. I trembled with wanting to go over and talk to him. I had goosebumps. I was wearing a long pink hippie jacket and I knew he would not take me seriously. I was not George Clooney in disguise. I was the opposite of what he was.

I looked at the pelicans and thought, "fuck, I already forgot my poem." I looked at the man again. He attracted me. Mystery.

I looked away again, at the contained self-reliance that was the sea, and then I looked at the clouds, golden spun. Eddies of angel motions, I thought with a feeling of epiphany. The breeze felt nice but smelled like rotten fish. I moved farther from the sea, and soon it shifted and began to smell like figs instead.

I looked back at the man. While I wasn't looking he had folded. His head in the hat slumped between his knees. "Shit," I thought. "Don't give up. George Clooney will still come for you." He was edging close to giving up. Or maybe just wanted to look like it. (In these situations George Clooney likes to wait until you get desperate and do something stupid before he saunters over. "Sorry, I was hijacked on the way, terrorists." "Some preteens wanted my autograph." George Clooney is full of excuses.) If the man had thought of this, he was probably playing it pretty clever. A master's hand. Black bishop. The man was still.

I was in sandals and pants that were too long. The hems of my pant legs were getting grimy. I looked at the man, all alone on the bench. I had been sitting on that same bench a while beforehand. I had picked up a rounded piece of yellow old insulation that had been on the ground and placed it onto the seat of the bench. I wondered what the man in black thought of the insulation. It looked a little bit like petrified wood, but it was soft and smelled strange, artificially clean. I wondered what the man would do if I went and sat next to him. Or stood behind him, George Clooney in disguise after all. "This is your mission." "Can I ask you a personal question-- why are you here in a black hat?" I couldn't remember the name of that actor from the old time movies who wore that kind of hat. It began with an H. Humphrey Bogart, that was who it was. "Why are you here in a Humphrey Bogart hat? Why are your creases so nice?" It could be that he had been expecting a date of less professional status, maybe some girl had stood him up, but I did not think that a girl would stand him up. The back of his neck, where the yellow-blond hair almost the color of the insulation met the paleness of his skin, looked very benign. I did not think he had a gun inside his black collared coat. He was probably not a mercenary. Probably he was the kind of man who worked with papers to find out who the moles were and which Russians could be trusted. Then again, if that were so why would he be sitting by the beach?

Figs in the air, wet ashes in my mouth. My ears were cold and I tried to pull up my collar. Wishing I had brought a scarf after all. Briefly I entertained the idea that the man was a sorcerer from another world, had conjured his way here for an important meeting and found himself the victim of a mix-up. Tragedy. I let this run through me only because I loved the word "sorcerer." (Though I would love it better were it spelled with two o's.) But the fancy of that theory spouted away without taking its time. I wondered how contrived it would seem if I went and sat beside him. There were two other benches, empty. Could I sit at another and still talk to him? I got the impression it was only George Clooney he wanted to hear from.

I stood shivering and watched him. He was like an origami swan. He was so uniform. "Next time, maybe," I told myself. "Maybe every day we'll be silent together like this. Until someday when he will tell me all of it."

He never seemed to see me. Looking in the wrong direction.