Author: jdmathes

Here is a video I made for Robert Wrigley’s 70th birthday with a poem I wrote base on Allen Ginsberg’s “A Super Market in California.”

The call of an elk startles me. I look across the rolling brown and gray hills at the sewing-machine bobbing of pumpjacks and feel the disappointment shiver me like touching steel on a hard frost morning. It’s the same feeling I get when I mistake the wind cutting through the wires for a whale’s song …

Read More “The Last Blue Morning”

Against this earth, I’ve struggled   And believed  I had time to dig up what I needed. 

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The first fog of fall brings a chill with the scent of rain, of ichor, the blood of the gods, a mist that looks like a driving rain in the street lamps now switched on from clouded shadows. It catches me unaware, this feeling, as I open the door and the dog and cat run out like children …

Read More “When the Fall Weather Comes – Photo and Poem”

  What’s the use of Genesis without Revelation?  But not the sudden springing  of life from a breath or the sudden fury  of an angry God, no. The long drawn  out becoming over millions of years  to bring us a flower  that grows well in the margins of bulldozed  lands and carved trails cut through  suburban empires. And …

Read More “A Flower for the Post-Apocalypse — Photo and Poem”

A motorcycle wrecked in the carpool lane,  just like when I’d driven  my daughter and her boyfriend here  three days ago.  One hour and five minutes to go one mile.  Time, though, makes all traffic pass,  even if it’s over for some guy cutting  between cars in so big a hurry  it was worth never arriving.  On …

Read More “At LAX – Photo and Poem”

He stands a shade bearing light. The blood of life in conjunction with the secondhand sunlight of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter as they spin along the ecliptic. The hum of distant electric lights sounds like his daughters in the far room with their dolls and stuffed animals arrayed for a celebration or on the daybed turned amphitheater as …

Read More “In Conjunction – Photo and Poem.”

Your final morning in the field. Before sunup, in the dark the pump-jacks automatically pumping like thousands of hearts against the backdrop of stars sounds to you like the herds of elk you listened to in the forest waiting for first light years ago. You are alone in all that darkness as owls glide by and the coyotes shuffle …

Read More “Blue Light – Photo and Poem”

We sit in the car, on a summer Saturday. The cranes are idle and the aircraft gone. For once, it feels alright to be stopped at the light. It turns green, yellow, red and green. We cross the intersection, there, then gone.