parking lots of Nordstrom’s and Macy’s, 
it’s the seagulls catching the last light 
that give me the beauty 
of their white bellies; with these I’d be 
for I am here for beauty, perfume or maybe
a lily or a suit, fine enough I could imagine 
wearing it, in a pinch, even for my funeral. 
There’s the beggar, suited in shoes of burlap, planted
at the base of an aluminum light pole as if believing
he’ll flower again, face of torn ham and dried, 
black jam and his signs with their reasons reminding 
me of those half grams of granular hope, that memory 
almost taking off all her sweet clothes
right there in the truck. But I’m still trying to push 
the door open soberly while the wind keeps gusting 
against me, first pins of rain driving into my turned cheek. 
Just now I was listening to a podcast about how dying
makes you more alive than ever and thinking, 
Well, there’s enough there for a book but not mine 
because I have no doubt I was most alive in that garden 
hut with the one enormous redwood on the right, another 
to its left, the roses there, running renegade and overgrown 
along the fence tops and the rotting windowsills, 
the raggedy privets everywhere, and, I, 
in that first heaven of plenty, only twenty and immortal,
time to burn in my vacant solicitation, sitting there getting high
just watching a fly or, often, a wasp, like a small thorn of light 
etching the windowpane, my breath coming light 
as one dying, spending all what time was mine waiting
for the bidden word to come nestle in my ear, alive  
with its right rustle, its honest, memorable sting.