Art by vincent rinehart
GUIDANCE
NIGHT WALK
CHARLESTON ..... at the charleston museum
MEET ME AT THE LIGHTHOUSE 2
Piano Man
JUDY
CHRISTINE
JACQUELINE
THERESA
RAY
INTERNMENT
VILOMAH
IN THE GARDEN
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rinehart kroeppler comp 1
Rinehart kroeppler comp 2
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Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet and critic. He has published five celebrated volumes of poetry and three critical collections. For six years he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He is now the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California and serves as the Poet Laureate of California. "The Poet and the Painter series has been much fun. It is strange to see my words turned into shapes and images. It reminds me of the experience I had of hearing a composer setting my words to music. My poems change into a new work of art." Visit "DanaGioia.com"
HOT SUMMER NIGHT
Let's go downtown. It's a hot summer night.
Lover's are sitting in sidewalk cafes-
Breaking up, making up, hooking up, cooking up
Plans for tonight that leave them amazed.
Let's go downtown. It's a hot summer night.
Let's not stay at home and get in a fight.
Let's eat spicy food in a dark little dive
And let our bodies know we're alive.
Summer has come. The young are on fire,
And every tattoo spells a word for desire.
They're strolling as naked as custom allows.
They never say later. They only say now.
Let's live in the flesh and not on a screen.
Let's dress like people who want to be seen.
Don't bring me home till the dawn's early light.
Let's not waste this hot summer night.
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EQUATIONS OF THE LIGHT
Turning the corner, we discovered it
just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on-
a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long
resting between the noisy avenues.
The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves
across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window
glowing through the ivy-decked facade
promised lives as perfect as the light.
Walking beneath the trees, we counted all
the high black doors of houses bolted shut.
And yet we could have opened any door,
entered any room the evening offered.
Or were we so deluded by the strange
equations of the light, the vagrant wind
searching the trees, that believed this brief
conjunction of our seperate lives was real?
It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,
a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,
a curl of smoke flaring from a match,
haunting a world it could not touch or hear.
There should have been a greeting or a sign,
the smile of a stranger, something beyond
the soft refusals of the summer air
and children trading secrets on the steps.
Traffic bellowed from the avenue.
Our shadows moved actoss the street's long wall
and at the end what else could we have done
but turn the corner back into our life?
The Voyeur
... and watching her undress across the room,
oblivious of him, watching as her slip
falls soundlessly and disappears in shadow,
and the dim lamplight makes her curving frame
seem momentarily both luminous
and insubstantial - like the shadow of a cloud
drifting across a hillside far away.
Watching her turn away, this slender ghost,
this silhouette of a mystery, his wife,
walk naked to her bath, the room around her
so long familiar that it is, like him,
invisible to her, he sees himself
suspended in the branches by the window,
entering this strange bedroom with his eyes.
Seen from the darkness, even the walls glow-
a golden woman lights the amber air.
He looks and aches not only for her touch
but for the secret that her presence brings.
She is the moonlight, sovereign and detached.
He is the shadow flattened on the pavement,
the one whom locks and windows keep away.
But as he watches here is his own life.
He is the missing man, the loyal husband,
sitting in the room he craves to enter,
surrounded by the flesh and furniture of home.
He notices a cat curled on the bed.
He hears a woman singing in the shower.
The branches shake their dry leaves like alarms.
PSALM OF THE HEIGHTS
I.
You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.
Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills
You can mute the sounds and find perspective.
The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,
And our swank unmanageable metropolis
Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage—
Until only the radiance remains.
That’s when the City of Angels appears,
Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.
The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.
The freeways flow like shining rivers.
The moving lights stretch into vast
And secret shapes, invisible at street level.
At the horizon, the city rises into sky,
Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.
II.
Surely our destinies are written in this zodiac,
Whose courses and conjunctions govern us.
Look down and name our starry constellations—
Wilshire, Olympic, Santa Monica.
In speeding Comets or sleek Thunderbirds,
We traveled the twelve Houses of the Heavens
Ascending Crenshaw, Sunset, or Imperial,
Locked in our private worlds of lust or laughter.
Who will cast the charts of our radiant sorrow,
Or trace the secret transits of our joy?
The traffic shimmers in its fixed trajectories,
Dense and indifferent as nebulae.
Though you resist the gaudy spectacle,
You can’t escape the city’s sortilege.
III.
Move away, if you wish, to the white Sierras,
Or huddle in the smoky canyons of Manhattan.
You’ll miss the juvenescent rapture of LA
Where ecstasy cohabits with despair,
Lascivious and fitful as a pair of lovers.
Let someone else play grown-up.
Here the soul sings like a car radio, and no one
Asks your age because we’re all immortal.
Inhale the spices of the midnight air
Drifting from Thai Town and Little Armenia.
Here on the hilltop, the city whispers to you,
“Come down and play in the traffic.
Merge into the moving lights, our myriad,
The luminous multitudes that surround you.
Join their fiery orbit. Shine with us tonight.
Where else can you become a star?”
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Cruising With The Beach Boys
So strange to hear that song again tonight
Traveling on business in a rented car
Miles from anywhere I've been before.
And now a tune I haven't heard for years
Probably not since it last left the charts
Back in L.A. in 1969.
Every lovesick summer has its song,
And this one I pretended to despise,
But if I was alone when it came on,
I turned it up full-blast to sing along-
A primal scream in croaky baritone,
The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred.
No wonder I spent so much time alone
Making the rounds in Dad's old Thunderbird.
Some nights I drove down to the beach to park
And walk along the railings of the pier.
The water down below was cold and dark,
The waves monotonous against the shore.
The darkness and the mist, the midnight sea,
A perfect setting for a boy like me,
The Ceil B. DeMille of my self-pity.
I tought by now I'd left those nights behind,
Lost like the girls that I could never get,
Gone with the years, junked with that old T-Bird.
But one old song, a stretch of empty road,
Can open up a door and let them fall
Tumbling my throat for no reason at all,
Bringing on tears shed only for myself.
Elegy For Vladimir De Pachmann
"How absurd," cried the pianist de Pachmann
to reporters from the Minneapolis Dispatch,
"that my talents or the talents of a Liszet
were confined to so small a planet
as the earth. How much more could we have done
given the dimensions of a fixed star?"
He began a prelude quietly, then stopped.
"Once Chopin could play this well. Now only me."
When he brought his socks into the concert hall
and dedicated that night's music to them,
or relearned his repertoire at sixty-nine
using only the fourth and fifth fingers
of one hand, the critics thought his madness
was theatrical, but the less learned
members of his audience, to who he talked
while playing, knew the truth.
Porters and impresarios told of coming on him,
alone in a hotel suite, his back
curved like monkey's, dancing and sceeching
in front of a dressing mirror,
or giving concerts for the velvet furniture
in his room, knocking it together afterwards
for applause. "Dear friends," he whispered to it.
"such love deserve an encore."
Now relegated to three short paragraphs
in Grove's Dictionary of Music
and one out-of-pocket of Chopin,
he appears only by schedule
in a few selections broadcast on his birthday,
music produced by rolls on a mechanical piano
where no fingers touch the keys as each piece
goes to it's predictable finale.
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Corner Table
You tell me you are going to marry him.
You knew almost at once he was the one.
Your hands rest on the quilted tablecloth.
"Such clever hands," I used to say.
I gave them names I never spoke aloud.
You tell me how you met and where you'll live.
It's easier to watch your lips than listen.
Your eyes flash in the candlelight like knives.
The waiters drift by with their phantom meals.
Tonight the dead are dining with the dead.
You twist the wineglass slowly in your hand.
And I speak of other things. What matters most
Most often can't be said. Better to trust
The forms that hold our grief. We understand
This last mute touch that lingers for farewell.
At The Crossroads
Here are the crossroads where old women come
Under the quarter moon to cast their spells,
And where young lovers meet to argue out
The secret terms of their surrender.
It is a place that each see differently-
The saleman scouting, soldiers tramping home,
The scholar napping by the riverbank
While someone else's fortune drift downstream.
But if you stand at crossroads long enough,
Most of the eager world comes strutting by-
Businessmen, preachers, cats- all going somewhere,
Even the Devil striking up a deal.
I used to wonder if they ever got there.
Be careful here in choosing where to turn.
You learn a lot by staying in one place
But never how the story truly ends.
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Sea Pebbles: An Elegy
My love, how time makes hardness shine.
They come in every color, pure or mixed,
gray-green of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz,
granite and feldspar, even bits of glass,
smoothed by the patient jeweled of the tides.
Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried,
shaven by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked,
stratified, speckled, bright in the wet surf-
no two alike, all torn from the dry land
tossed up in millions on this empty shore.
How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts
light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers.
It glints among the shattered oyster shells,
gutted by gulls, bleached by salt and sun-
the broken crockery of living things.
Cormorants glide across the quiet bay.
A falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent
to the burdens I have carried here.
No point in walking farther, so I sit,
hollow as driftwood, dead as any stone.
MEET ME AT THE LIGHTHOUSE
Meet me at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach,
That shabby nightclub on its foggy pier.
Let's aim for the summer of '71,
When all our friends were young and immortal.
I'll pick up the cover charge, find us a table,
And order a round of their watery drinks.
Let's savor the smoke of that sinister century,
Perfume of tobacco in the tangy salt air.
The crowd will be quiet--only ghosts at the bar--
So you, old friend, won't feel out of place.
You need a night out from the dim subdivision.
Tell Mr. Bones you'll be back before dawn.
The club has booked the best talent in Tartarus.
Gerry, Cannonball, Hampton, and Stan,
With Chet and Art, those gorgeous greenhorns--
The swinging-masters of our Wesy Coast soul.
Let the All-Stars shine from that jerrybuilt stage.
Let their high notes shimmer above the cold waves.
Time and the tide are counting the beats.
Death the collector is keeping the tab.
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Summer Storm
We stood on the rented patio
While the party went on inside.
You knew the groom from college.
I was a friend of the bride.
We hugged the brownstone wall behind us
To keep our dress clothes dry
And watched the sudden summer storm
Floodlit against the sky.
The rain was like a waterfall
Of brilliant beaded light,
Cool and silent as the stars
The storm hid from the night.
To my surpise, you took my arm-
A gesture you didn't explain-
And we spoke in whispers, as if we two
Might imitate the rain.
Then suddenly the storm receded
As swiftly as it came.
The doors behind us opened up.
The hostess called your name.
I watcehed you merge into the group,
Aloof and yet polite.
We didn't speak another wood
Except to say good-night.
Why does that evening's memory
Return with this night's storm-
A party twenty years ago,
Its disappointments warm?
There are so many might-have-beens,
What-ifs that won't stay buried,
Other cities, other jobs,
Strangers we might have married.
And memory insists on pining
For places it never went,
As if life would be happier
Just by being different.
BALLAD: THE STARS ON SECOND AVENUE
I'd say it was the stars
Reminded me of you.
But I can't see the stars
From Second Avenue.
The shimmer is just neon
Reflected in the rain
From the little corner deli
Where memory comes with pain.
I'd say it was the moon
That made me lose my head.
But I never saw the moon
In the window by our bed.
It was just the streelamp
Shinning in the dark
Above the empty bench
In the empty park.
I'd say it was the wine
That eased by heavy soul.
But I never take a drink.
I never lose control.
Maybe I should blame myself,
Maybe I should blame you.
The stars won't tell me anything
Here on Second Avenue.
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GOD ONLY KNOWS
if Bach's greatest work
was just an improvised
accompaniment
between two verses of a hymn,
one that stopped the burghers
squirming in their pews
and made them not only
listed to the organ in the loft
but actually hear the roof
unbend itself
and leave the church wide
open to a terrifying sky
which he had filled with angels
holding ledgers
for a roll call of the damned,
whom they would have named,
had not the congregation
started up the final chorus
and sung
to save their souls.
THE BURNING LADDER
Jacob
never climbed the ladder
burning in his dream. Sleep
pressed him like a stone
in the dust,
and when
he should have risen
like a flame to join
that choir, he was sick
of traveling,
and closed
his eyes to the Seraphim
ascending, unconscious
of the impossible distances
between their steps,
missed
them mount the brilliant
ladder, slowly disappearing
into the scattered light
between the stars,
slept
through it all, a stone
upon a stone pillow,
shivering. Gravity
always greater than desire.
CALIFORNIA HILLS IN AUGUST
I can imagine someone who foundthese fields unbearable, who climbedthe hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,wishing for a few more trees for shade.
An Easterner especially, who would scornthe meagerness of summer, the drytwisted shapes of black elm,scrub oak, the chaparral, a landscaprAugust has already drained of green.
One who would hurry over the clingingthistle, foxtail, golden poppy,knowing everything was just a weed,unable to conceive that these treesand sparce brown bushes were alive.
And hate the bright stillness of the moonwithout wind, without motion,the only other living thinga hawk, hungry for prey, suspendedin the blinding, sunlit blue.
And yet how gentle it seems to someoneraised in a landscape short of rain -the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass,the empty sky, the wish for water.
I can imagine someone who foundthese fields unbearable, who climbedthe hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,wishing for a few more trees for shade.
An Easterner especially, who would scornthe meagerness of summer, the drytwisted shapes of black elm,scrub oak, the chaparral, a landscaprAugust has already drained of green.
One who would hurry over the clingingthistle, foxtail, golden poppy,knowing everything was just a weed,unable to conceive that these treesand sparce brown bushes were alive.
And hate the bright stillness of the moonwithout wind, without motion,the only other living thinga hawk, hungry for prey, suspendedin the blinding, sunlit blue.
And yet how gentle it seems to someoneraised in a landscape short of rain -the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass,the empty sky, the wish for water.
MEN AFTER WORK
Done with work, they are sitting by themselvesin coffeeshops or dinners, taking up the booths,fillling every other seat along the counter,waiting for the menu, for the water,for the girl to come and take their order,always on the edge of words, almost without appetite,knowing there is nothing on the menu that they want,waiting patiently to ask for onemore refill of their coffee, surprisedthat even its bitterness will not wake them up.Still they savor it, holding each siplukewarm in their mouths, this last taste of evening.
Done with work, they are sitting by themselvesin coffeeshops or dinners, taking up the booths,fillling every other seat along the counter,waiting for the menu, for the water,for the girl to come and take their order,always on the edge of words, almost without appetite,knowing there is nothing on the menu that they want,waiting patiently to ask for onemore refill of their coffee, surprisedthat even its bitterness will not wake them up.Still they savor it, holding each siplukewarm in their mouths, this last taste of evening.
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I’m a paragraph. Drag me to add paragraph to your block, write your ohttps://youtu.be/FgPiI2BPGNkwn text and edit me.