William Simone Di Piero

Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
...

Bobby Hutcherson in Oakland
The mallet strikes but something's off,
and so he hits again, curling that lower lip,
purses his brow, as if this sign, this minor woe,
...

a thing that's called radar love,
the whole hog calling,
and here's unhoused Ginger,
distracted wind-beaten beauty
...

My aunts mentioned her just once,
calling her my aunt, their sister,
though she wasn't. They mentioned
the vinyl recliner in the kitchen,
...

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she's close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
...

Where are you now,
my poems,
my sleepwalkers?
No mumbles tonight?
Where are you, thirst,
...

There's no description in the braided stone,
the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark,
bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth.
The dog of work gnaws the day's short bone,
...

Its small celestial reach stops
where the counterweight, the first
tough green fruit, pulls earthward
and returns the brazen, almost rank perfume
of blossoms now six months gone.
...

The Santa Fe Depot's Moorish architecture of displacement—
squeaky kids trawl satchels through the shed, happy voices
mystically far from home, the waiting room's fizzled, tiled light
of life lived imperfectly between one where and another.
...

going on everywhere
in summer's cold wind
winging through hollies.
...

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors
of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards
of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders,
auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green,
...

'NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM.'

Into my backyard's six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
...

A high school mash note's stammering lust.
Father and me, shirts and ties, snapshot glare,
and somehow graphed into that air
a young man's foolscap poem when a just,
...

The .32 Special,
its Dutch Masters box,
still in their bedroom
closet, days after
...

That marsh hawk,
its blown-leaf flight
across Tomales Bay fog,
summer's abraded light,
...

It seems to head from its last stop too fast,
my transbay train's strungout hoo, deep
inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed
into the baritone wail of that guy
...

Snarls, bread trucks, yeast
breathing inside huddled bags,
and sleepers completing lives
behind their gray windows.
...

You're still there in the spectral impress,
the plied afterimage grid of trucks

and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked
on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers
...

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor,
pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us,
his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet.
He smiled, our brother, at the story he told
...

Eighteen-sixty eighteen sixty-four,
six hundred ten thousand men
gaseous gray, blackened body parts
like chopped wood in Virginia sunshine.
...