San Diego Poetry Annual -- 2008

Finding

Horses without riders
Clouds embracing darkness
Your lips reaching out
Finding what has always been there
Unseen       unfound
                                            ---Sam Hamod

At Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater

We hear her voice before we see her
dark hair, dark face, dressed in black clothing
her speech the cawing of birds as she charges
up and down the sidewalk in front of the box office
She shouts, one arm holding a blender full of coffee colored milk
the other pumping the air
The man in the shop makes me a coffee
looks sheepish when he’s out of cream.
Oh, he mumbles, someone must have used it up!
Don’t mind her he cautions as she dips into the shop
angles out again on an angry wind
She’s off her meds.
We sit at a table, an umbrella warding off the afternoon sun
slouching, our eyes anywhere but on her face.
Her voice rings, crashes around our ears.
                                                         --- Mai Lon Gittelsohn

in praise of the inordinate love of lying

Geoffrey of Monmouth and Agatha Christie and that liar
who by writing a fraudulent second half to Don Quixote
pissed Cervantes off enough to make him finish it,
and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra himself,
and Orson Welles with his world-ending broadcast
and wild man Jorge Luis Borges
and lovers of lying everywhere:

thank you for the incredible stories,
the absurd antics of delightfully untrue characters
who nevertheless make-us-believe;

note
our great gratitude
for the tellers of tilters-at-windmills
who transform us from drooling barbaric herds
into rapt audiences, ready to learn
from incredible lies
the ineffable truth.
                                                      --- DHR Fishman