A Book of Matches

will not be catalogued or found by
Library of Congress classification.
Although a kind of paperback— good for
a little light reading— it probably

will be overlooked for Oprah’s book club
and the Times bestseller list. Could it have
a story to tell? Ephemera of
consumer culture, hardly worth noticing

until a man lights a woman’s cigarette
with it, writes a phone number on it,
puts it in a pocket. Then it becomes
part of a story, a detail remembered

about a certain time, a certain place.
Whoever opens this book expects
a brilliant beginning, a consuming
plot, and a tossed-off ending: a man may

be sitting at a bar, staring for a long
time at a matchbook next to his glass before
absent-mindedly picking it up. Here
the author perhaps tells us the matchbook

becomes a door, the way everyday objects
open up and allow us to wander
deep within ourselves. Anyone else sees
the cover with some advertisement,

which he untucks and retucks behind the sand
striking bar: did anyone actually
go back to the “World’s Most Romantic
Restaurant—Shangri-La” in Sisseton,

South Dakota, “Learn Basic Computer
Programming at Home” and become one of
the “Experienced Men Earning $7-12K
Per Year”, or see “Bill and Fay” at “Southside

Pool Hall” in Caldere, Kansas, “You’ll Like Their
Beer”? Opening the cover, he finds stapled
inside two rows of ten matches—dipped red
phosphorous heads, cardboard tinders and

handles—that can be torn out of the book
to strike, followed by the familiar scratch
and sizzle in the dark, the comforting
small glow inside a cupped hand. Twenty

little tales to tell, he imagines, each
one beginning a story: one to light
a joint an old high school buddy offers
him, one to illuminate a forking

path on a moonless mountain, another
to light a candle beside a bed where
his lover has waited for him.
Not the light of a firefly, a star,

the eye of a cat, but the spark of
something just as brilliant, something
that makes him feel there is
no match like love.

Her Book of Hours

1.

Her marriage had been like the Euplectella,
a tropical sponge of transparent silica
columns and calcium lattice,
a protective cylinder for tiny bioluminescent
shrimp who enter and feed on whatever passes by—
and each other—until they are too large to leave.
Finally, only two remain in their glass house,
mating and consuming their own offspring
to stay alive.


2.

An old survivor waiting in the maw
of darkness, she dips raw calamari pieces—
cold, slick, slightly sticky slivers of meat—
in a special marinade and has a cocktail
before her guests arrive. She looks forward
to the silence of serious conversations amid
the general party noise, the aquatic echoes and
shimmering reflections from the surface.
She always thought that distraction—
not meditation—would become the abiding
habit of her life.


3.

The night rises like the ocean at high tide,
filling up the kitchen window with sand and shell detritus.
She remembers how the Sixties
filled her with a kind of madness—
she was called the Kim Novak of Old Irving Park—
how the half-drunken company men,
with their bourbon breath, their beard stubble rough
on her neck, their groping hands
in the poolside torch light,
excited her.




4.

Our faded beauty lights lamps of Himalayan
salt crystals, balancing positive and negative
ions, bearing the burden of balance
against the turning night tide—
and the burden of memory suddenly dredges
to the surface the time he pulled all of her lingerie
from the bureau, cut it up with a fishing knife,
then sailed off to Maui with his young office-wife.


5.

The lucid interval of romantic love passes
as she leafs through the jewel-toned, postcard
illuminations in her life’s book of hours
and nibbles a sprig of mint,
the bitter taste of his sex on her tongue.
If it is the Hour of Vespers,
it is the Hour of Solace—or at least
the Hour of Mohitos—to wash away what none
of us would choose.


6.

Against her still wet skin,
the silky antique kimono reminds her to dress
before her Spiritual Cinema Circle friends arrive.
The film tonight features Azurus,
the Polynesian tantric siddha who reads soul
frequencies and charts horoscopes.
Is it fated that her grand-daughter will ask
for breast implants for high school graduation?
Of course she remembers the urgency
to be desired when who you are is not enough.


7.

To leave her children a few beliefs
instead of the ruins of an old courage,
an empty palace beneath the sea—
is that too much to hope?
Let them find wild manzanita,
purple jacaranda, and a view of Big Sur—
like the one from the deck of Nepenthe,
crowded with seekers,
drunk on the wine of God.