Calculating Love

I was working with a crew high on a hill overlooking the rolling vistas of Simi Valley when my cell phone rang. It was Dan, an old friend that I hadn't talked to for 5 years. He called to tell me Roger Arrington had died. Behind me generators hummed. Our crew had long range cameras mounted on the lift gate of a truck: we were tracking moving vehicles along a highway miles off in the haze, field-testing the way the computers recalculated the positions of cars as their outlines passed from bright sunlight into deep shade As I talked to Dan over the wind and the noise, I couldn't help thinking that this was just the kind of thing Roger would have loved.
 
Roger had been my mentor when I first started working at Hughes Aircraft Company. He was about my height and a bit younger than me, and he was the smartest person I had ever met. We worked with cameras and lasers and telescopes, and Roger knew all the theory of all of that, and all the practical details too. But he also knew all there was to know about aircraft flight, and shipboard radar, and a thousand other things. We would play a game: pick a subject - and Roger could tell us the basic equations, the primary mathematical laws that governed that particular topic.

For years, every Friday lunchtime Roger held what the intellectuals would call a salon. He and a bunch of us would go to a Mexican restaurant on. It was invitation only, and if you were invited it meant that you had been judged to be one who truly appreciated science and engineering in its many dimensions. We stirred rice into cheap enchilada sauce around a large table in the dim light, and discussed Roger’s latest “thought experiment.” These thought experiments were concepts where all the details were explored: was the concept feasible, what were the engineering challenges, how would the project be built.

They would go on for weeks. But after awhile, most of them were set aside and replaced with the next challenge. But Roger also had challenges of a different sort. Although he couldn’t really comprehend it, he was in love. He was in love with Donna, a woman that we all thought was about the nicest lady in the building. She liked him a lot. They were in their thirties, and it was marrying time. But for Roger everything was a thought experiment, and he couldn’t tie down all the logic involved in this situation. How does one know for sure? And if things don’t work out, should he protect - how would he protect his modest assets.

The last Friday lunch that I remember - we were eating the same enchiladas, mixing the same rice, trying to help Roger understand that love was something he was never going to be able to figure out. The leap of faith eluded him; he was confused and defeated. And after that, none of us were really interested in going out for Mexican food on Friday afternoon.
 
Up on the hill, looking out over Simi Valley, I had a hard time hearing Dan over the wind. He was telling me that Roger had died of a degenerative brain disorder. As we talked, a bit of dark humor that drifted uninvited into my mind– he had died from an overworked brain. I quickly filed that thought away as completely inappropriate.

On the phone, I heard Dan pause.
“You know,” he said, “I just thought of something that I am almost ashamed to say.”
I smiled to myself - and told him “I know exactly what it is.”


            © 2014 Frank Kearns

Honda 250

Raggedy little motorcycle
black and pitted chrome
bits of dirt and oil

tattered seat and
cables dangling just short
of catastrophe

good enough to putter
across Venice Boulevard
and over the canals

sorry enough to droop
it's headlight in disgrace
at the sight of the big BMW

parked proudly on the grass
in front of your apartment
one warm Saturday afternoon

foolish enough to dump me
spinning on the tarmac
to the laughter of all the girls

just good enough to be
enshrined in our mythology
the golden coach

that carried us together
at the start of our
love story




© Frank Kearns 2014

Road Work

This morning my office van-pool slowed
and as we passed an impressive large hole,
three men leaned on their shovels
and contemplated the beauty of their work.

Hail to you, road workers,
gathered in the morning mist,
hard hats, jeans and scarred leather boots,
hoodie jackets and florescent vests

circled behind orange cones,
insulated coffee mugs in hand,
oblivious to the passing glances
of young women in BMWs.

Stuff, what wonderful stuff you have,
dump trucks full of asphalt and sand,
shovels and jackhammers, picks and bars
metal to be hoisted and swung all day.

Oh you, the prince of the backhoe,
your levers control the mighty arm
with the scoop that lays bare
layers of tortured rock and macadam,

And hail to you, king of the ponderous roller
regal barge moving massive and slow,
giant cylinders steaming over still soft road,
and you sitting motionless high in the seat.

© Frank Kearns 2014

Jawbone Siphon Song

 



Jawbone Siphon Song                 

                                         “There it is. Take it.” William Mulholland

Bart drove Sarah up Three Ninety Five
then North away from the two lane blacktop
on the unmarked graded road

to where steel pipe as wide as an automobile
bends up eight hundred fifty feet
a giant “V” carved on canyon walls

They stood on the warm steel in the sun
and felt the heat work into their shoes
felt the vibrations under their feet

and heard the Jawbone Canyon Siphon’s
hum         almost inaudible above
the desert sounds and silences.

Bart talked cubic feet per second
incompressible fluid and the pressure
of a column of water towering high

and Sarah listened        but listened too
to the song from inside the arched metal tube
as the water raced passed hoop joints and rivets

echoes of flowers in Onion Valley
and trickles from glaciers nestled in
the granite slopes of the Palisades

she heard the scratchy resonance
of dried out fields      sold-out farms
and the whisper of men at the spillway gates

and a mantra of names
Eaton Mulholland Lippincott
Otis San Fernando Los Angeles

a chant repeated by the wind
as it picked up the salt and sand
from the dry brown bed of Owens lake

to twirl across the empty flats
and sift through the shells of windows and doors
in the broken-down sheds of Olancha

Copyright © Frank Kearns 2014

 

The Pump House

The Pump House

Bethlehem Steel was my war, my trial by fire, or whatever other phrase you want to use to describe the searing, testing experience of a young man that shapes him and gives him the confidence to stand up in this world.

I had remembered the dark feel of the place, dusty gray-brown under giant sheet metal bays two hundred feet wide that ran for a quarter mile. I could hear the rattle of the overhead cranes running along tracks high up in the bay, hear the clatter of table-sized magnets dropping long steel billets onto the cooling beds, and feel the thunder of the electric furnaces roaring through the night as one hundred tons of scrap steel melted to the torture of the electric current.

I remembered how we blocked out the fear as we stood in a pit to position long gear casings; reaching up to guide them as they came down swinging, being lowered too fast into the confining hole by a drunk crane operator. I could feel the metal as I straddled the crane rail fifty feet off the ground, reaching under the trolley to grease the railroad-car sized wheel bearings. And I can still feel the tingle in my leg as I rested my heavy boot on a bar running low beside the beam, which I later learned was the hot rail for the crane’s electric motors, 220 volts of direct current fed by room-sized generators, and I can see my lead-man’s face turning pale in an instant when I told him about it.

But what I had forgotten was the pump house, nearly a year spent off the rotating mill as the plant started to die and they cut back crews, a year of working days by myself, fixing the tall water pumps that were wearing out like everything else, taking apart two to try to make one that would continue to pump the cooling water that kept the searing heat from melting the machines.

How they were lonely days, left to my own devices, mind massaged by talk radio, trying to make usefulness from junk, trying to make sense out of the world and keep the dying plant alive, a year of watching the slow death of something way bigger than myself.

© Frank Kearns 2014

Modesta Avila

 

 

Modesta Avila
     First felon of Orange County - 1889

Thin columns of rising smoke
trace the mesh of railroad racks
out across the scrub and farms
of the ranchos of Southern California.

Stubby black engines pulling
cattle hides and oranges
spurt rhythmic blasts of exhausted steam
and startle the jackrabbits

in a mundane daily working way,
as if the sleepy donkey carts
of the land-rich Californios
had last rolled centuries ago.

Modesta’s teenage eyes flare out,
steady in the booking photo;
her crime       she dared to string her laundry
across the Southern Pacific tracks,

an eighteen year old       Mexican,
upturned by the shifting tide,
tired of the incessant grunt
of indifferent locomotives

sealing her childhood beneath the rails,
unable to see a world beyond,
a woman knowing no way to stop
the hard steel wheels of the passing trains,

willing to lose the sunsets
glowing orange in the ocean air,
or trade the sight of butterflies
drifting from fresh spring grass,

or       rage welling in her neck,
nothing more than wanting,
wanting just one chance to say
this land        it was my father’s.


Frank Kearns 2014

The Walk Light at Rives Avenue

The Walk Light at Rives Avenue

 seems to take forever to come on.

Cars come down Florence quick and constant,

flowing as an un-swimmable mass

of blurry colors and blinding chrome.

A man on a rusty bicycle stops

and sets his feet on the concrete walk;

plastic bags full of empty cans

sway back and forth on the handle bars.

On the far side a woman in running shoes

leans against the stop light pole,

presses the metal button once,

and pushes back in a long slow stretch.

We have come to a stop at anywhere,

like townspeople frozen on a page

of a yellowed hardbound picture book,

on a city street between world wars,

waiting for the drawbridge to set down,

sharing in casual nod and glance,

this momentary intersection

of unconnected lives,

or travelers bound together,

by a pause on an ancient river bank,

the ferry still at the opposite shore,

the river moving fast in deep mid stream.

Meditation On 1963

First pangs  of passion for a girl

first twinge of trouble in my world

first view of fabric always tearing

and scabbing back on ancient seams

John F Kennedy shot dead

as we sat silent in our classroom

and Pope John the Twenty Third

a light for searching Catholic youth

dead before the sparks of hope

could light a warming fire

While out in California

Pat Brown’s housing legislation

is opposed by most state senators

and up and coming Ronald Reagan

Say what you will about smoke-filled rooms

Jesse Unruh strong-armed them

beat them all into submission

and passed the radical legislation

banning housing discrimination

For every healing mend a rend

Ah             the greatest generation

and real estate associations

who pushed a state wide proposition

to kill the ban on discrimination

The voters passed it

                                                two to one

and three years later

                                                Brown was done

defeated by the hero

                                                Ronald Reagan

                                                

Cupcake and Lace

Carol Kearns' Cupcake spy stories were inspired by the Cupcake character in Reflections on Espionage, by John Hollander

------------------------------------------------------

Cupcake and Lace
     by Carol Kearns

            Cupcake checked her messages and noted Weber’s time of arrival.  Then she sat down to prepare her pictures for Instagram.  This week a picture of crepes meant a meeting after breakfast, 10 AM; a picture of a pizza said meet after lunch, 3 PM; and a picture of sushi said meet after dinner, 9 PM.  If she applied a red filter, it meant a quarter after the hour; if the filter was blue, it meant half-past; and if the filter was green, it meant forty-five minutes after the hour.

            The pictures of food were always accompanied by “sightseeing” shots:  at least three pictures of public landmarks or famous buildings, and somewhere in the middle of the series, a picture of the structure across the street from the actual meeting place.  This week she saw that the Agency had created 130 followers on Instagram on for her. 

            A call from the boutique came just after she posted her final picture. 

            “Cherie,” said a feminine voice.  “Your order has just arrived.  The Belgian lace is beautiful.  Would you like to come for it now?”

            What?  This was not in the plans.  Giselle was one of their most reliable contacts.  But Belgian lace was the code for come now.  It must be important.  Cupcake put her gun in her purse.

            Ten minutes later, when she entered the shop, she saw Giselle arranging a new display of intimate apparel.  A husky man with graying hair was near the window, casually browsing through silk kimonos

            Giselle looked up as Cupcake approached.  “Bonjour, Cherie,” she said, but her eyes revealed anxiety as she glanced at the male customer.  He now held a gun and was walking toward them.

            “Alright, you two, close up shop and head for the back.”  He motioned with his gun for Giselle to lock the door and put out the Closed sign.

            “Who are you?” demanded Cupcake.  “Is this a robbery?” 

            “Don’t make me laugh, Cupcake!  Yes, I know your name.  And don’t pretend that you don’t know me.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she insisted.

            “Yes you do; you call me Lucifer in your reports.”

            Cupcake’s face remained a mask; she would not give him the satisfaction of a confirmation.  

“Get moving I said.  We’ll have plenty of time to talk in the back.” But before Giselle could move, a customer came in, nicely dressed in a sport coat and slacks.

“Hello,” he boomed, his voice projecting too loudly as he closed the door just a little harder than necessary.  “My girlfriend told me that she loves your shop, and I want to get her something special for our first month’s anniversary.”  He was moving briskly around the displays, touching everything, smiling as he examined the delicate clothing. 

            The husky man slipped his gun back into his pocket. “Monsieur, Madam was just closing up.  We have a business meeting.”

            “Lavender is her favorite color,” the customer continued, oblivious to the tense body language of the three people already there.  “Of course, I think she looks great in red.”

            Suddenly he sneezed.  “Sorry,” he said, “I’m allergic to some perfumes.  Is someone wearing Tabu?” and this time he sneezed quite violently, falling against the man with the hidden gun.

            Seeing her enemy stumble, Cupcake was on him in a flash.  She kicked him hard on his backside before he could straighten up and sent him sprawling amid the brassieres.

            Giselle sprang to the phone to call the police, and the loud, clumsy stranger was now direct and efficient as he put a knee to the man’s back and applied his thumb to a pressure point on the neck.  The man they knew to be Lucifer stopped struggling and went limp.

            “Weber, what are you doing here?” demanded Cupcake of the man who had just come to her aid.  “Control said you weren’t arriving until tonight”

            “I’m supposed to be here now,” he replied, as he searched Lucifer’s pockets and found the gun.  “You sent a picture of French fries with a blue tint – after breakfast, 10:15.  Good thing I saw what was happening through the window.”  

            “That was last week’s code,” Cupcake said with a sigh.  “You do good work, Weber, but I think you need another day of training with this app.”

-----------------------------

Carol Kearns' Cupcake short stories are inspired by the Cupcake character in Reflections on Espionage, by John Hollander

Making a City

One summer August when I was about twelve, my brother and I embarked on a grand undertaking. We decided, in a dusty second floor room in the abandoned shed attached to our old farm house, to build a civilization. We had a large flat space. We had paper and glue. And we had, wonder of wonders, access to my father’s office mimeograph machine. On a grid, maybe four feet by four feet, we laid it all out: main street, side streets, houses, yards, shops.

I think of this, standing under the sun outside my office building, looking across the parking lot, across the boulevard, to the blue sky above the strip mall restaurants. A grid city, laid out and planned with restaurants here and a gas station there, patterns repeated over and over beneath the glare of a nine zillion watt light bulb.

There is Sweetie Thai, with white table cloths, tea lite candles, thin waitresses moving in the dimness of the dining room away from the glow of the windows. Carl’s Junior. One of a thousand in Orange County, and the California Fish Grill, where every Tuesdays fish tacos are half price. Every Tuesday one of the ladies asks around the office. She collects the orders and makes the call, and then we walk across the street, talking of home repair and children. The smell of some exotic oil on a hot pan floats from Sweetie Thai. Inside the California Fish Grill, the noise of clanking spatulas and the sizzle of batter are background for the chatter and laughter of a hundred people jostling around the island filled with pots of salsas and cilantro.

In that dusty room we placed the people, two types of men and two types of woman, a boy and a girl, several hundred copies run off on the mimeograph. We had cars, complex folds and strategic spots of glue placed after cutting along the blue lines duplicated on a pile of paper. There was a bank, with lots of tiny money, and a restaurant and a factory where the cars were made, a couple of folded houses and a restaurant, which we thought was really pretty close to everything that we needed to complete our little world.

It all lay silent as the next school year started and dust filtered in through the shed. And now, as I stand on the concrete side walk, press the metal button and wait for the walk light, I think about this rolled out city under the sun, and realize that in my long lost little world, I didn’t know about the sizzle of batter, the smell of fried shrimp floating across lanes of asphalt, and the lady who gets up from her desk about eleven every Tuesday to collect the fish taco order.

Desert Roads

The baking two lane blacktop stretches
to a point on the still horizon

where progress toward the distant mountains
is imperceptible at speed

In a trick of lazy geometry
on-coming trucks don’t seem to rush

they just grow slowly larger
then pass in a blast of turbulence

No curves from here to a far off rise
miles of scrub and ocotillo

hawks and silent emptiness
of a single cabin by a wash

and the crosses and dried flowers
that mark passing of miles and time

Orange County Intersection

I’m standing on the corner of Valley View and Cerritos Boulevard waiting to cross at the light. I’m thinking about poetry, and the magic that I find in Robert Hass, and wondering what twists and turns of imagination and real events led to something like January. I’m thinking about how alone I felt in the park just a few blocks away, by myself at a picnic table, in the shade of a tree, and how even the school next door was silent with the children inside after recess, and how the small birds picking at the nearby hedge spend their whole life like this, under the sun, surrounded by green and far away noises.

And I’m wondering how a poet describes this intersection, almost a field of asphalt baking in the sun, the way the cars flow through and split off in smooth streams like the red blood cells flowing endless through an artery. The subtle lean of the oncoming cars, sweeping in an arc from the left turn lane that brings their heading right at me before the steady hand below the face maintains the angle of the wheel, and molecules of tire and roller bearing keep their anonymous separation from asphalt and steel spindle and the car completes its quarter circle passage three good steps in front of me. How alone the electron, the vibrating carbon atom caught in a tangled petroleum web forming the stage for this long dance.


black rubber
tire tread
asphalt rough
sun cooking
tire carcass
twists and rolls
contact patch
shape distorting
air pressure
wheel bearings
suspension struts
inside spring
relaxes as
steel body sways
away from the arc
of turn

and we control
all of this
with a certain
nonchalance
inches away
from curb and
waiting pedestrian
who thinks how
the four lane flow
splits streams of cars
into three forks
constant globs
some here
some there
like movies of
blood cells streaming
from an artery
into separate veins

meanwhile asphalt
sticky, black
Valley Boulevard
under hot sun
becoming soft
tires mainly
synthetic rubber
a polymer
elastomer
synthesized
from petro-
leum products
come to life
again
for one more dance

Third Thursday Poetry

This Thursday: the fabulous Tamara Madison at the Rives Mansion. See you there!

Window Frames: A Mothers' Day Post

Old wooden window frames lined the walls
in the rambling two story farm house:
heavy sash windows allowed to raise
by solid lead weights, white woven chord,
stamped metal pulleys at the top of the sash.

Chords worn from years of sliding
over wheels that had long ago ceased to turn
would always snap when an open window
was the thing that seemed to matter the most.

The spring winds smelled of lilac,
washing out the stale smells and memories of winter,
and the best thing that we could do for mother

was to take apart the window frames,
free the pulleys and string new chord,
rub some wax in the sticky places,
and let the windows open again.

Copyright © Frank Kearns 2013

Off The Grid

I really like Carol's short story "Off The Grid." We are excited to say that it was recently published in the latest edition of The California Writers Club Literary Review.

Off the Grid

by Carol Kearns

Teddy nodded his thanks without missing a note as the young woman dropped some change into the open saxophone case. As he anticipated, foot traffic was heavier than usual in front of the Dollar Store this Friday, and people were feeling excited and generous about the beginning of the holiday season. It was the day after Thanksgiving, with many people already in the mood for Christmas.

Today Teddy’s playlist of recognizable pop/rock and occasional jazz tunes was salted with songs of the season. “Feliz Navidad” was a big favorite in this neighborhood, and most of the families recognized “Rudolf” and “Frosty the Snowman.” This mini-mall was not the most profitable location on Teddy’s circuit, but the high volume of steady customers gave it a measure of reliability. The Dollar Store was a modern-day Five-and-Dime, with only the name changed to reflect the inflation of the past sixty years. The store offered simple things that people would always need – household items, certain packaged food, hair care products, stationery, costume jewelry. People came to shop, buy lottery tickets at the liquor store, and dine on Chinese take-out. Teddy lived within walking distance himself, and he worked this strip at least several times a month. With clouds looming from an offshore storm, Teddy felt he had been prudent in postponing the long bus ride to Best Buy until tomorrow.

Third Thursday Poetry: Beth Ruscio Featured at Downey's Monthly Poetry Series

This month's featured reader is BETH RUSCIO: poet, actor and vaudevillian! THIRD THURSDAY POETRY this Thursday April 18th at the Rives Mansion. You will love it!

Boarder Fence

a dark line marches
across the sand of the Sonora desert
almost black
it stands there dull and silent
in this stretch of baking earth

earlier at the boarder
just south of Campo’s dusty streets
nothing was visible over the wall
except the bright sky high above
it felt like the end
of the measured world

now west of Yuma
where expanse of sand
glowing in the midday heat
echos ancient Lake Cahuilla
truck tracks weave across the wash
why would any one be here

certainly not to tend the desert scorpions
or watch the plumes
stream off the crests of graceful dunes
certainly not to tend this long dark line
a line in the sand
where nothing moves
where the map of America stops

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And there continues to be creative attempts to get across the boarder. Sometimes they don't work that well.

The Farmers Market

We are fortunate to have such a nice farmers market here in Downey. We often meet friends and neighbors, and over the years have come to know a number of the vendors.

This photo was taken from the parking garage, before the market was moved to Downey Avenue.














Here is a poem

The Farmers Market

A couple works quickly
stacking tomatoes
his trimming knife slashes
basil and thyme
she weighs and makes change
while answering yes
her children are well
and that’s perfect with fish

she is short
her fingers are
thick from the work
apron and jacket
cradle her chin
where the glow from her smile
takes over and floats
up past her delicate eyes

© Frank Kearns 2013

The Weight

The Weight: Written by Robbie Robertson and originally recorded by "The Band," thie song has been listed by Rolling Stone as one fo the top 50 "greatest songs of all time." It has been covered by some notable artists including Aretha Franklin. Amazingly, I had never heard her version until a we saw a band cover it last week.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wta5GU3FNhA

Then this morning I heard it again ...

The Weight

The mist pressed silence into the morning
the way the heavy quilt
had muffled the sound of the radio
drifting in from the bathroom

They had heard a band perform “The Weight”
just three nights before
and now the chorus

not The Band’s funereal march
but the soaring cries of Aretha
rolled across the room

take a load off Fanny
and three female voices spread their harmonies
take a load for free

they had argued         she had said
the lyrics made no sense
and he said it’s like a painting

the soaring voices like the rays
of sunshine just now finding
pathways through the morning fog

and as the commentator talked
and the hair dryer started behind the door
he felt her company all these years
holding him weightless and warm

Location: Our Place In The World

Last year Carol and I met a young violinist whose family lives in China, but who has lived in Los Angeles by herself since she was a teenager while pursuing advanced music studies. She has traveled the world teaching and performing, and is the inspiration for this poem.

Location

the subtle tones of the violin
maple from Croatia
and Spruce from the Black Forest
tingled her cheek in the same way

her cashmere scarf      in a fall breeze
blowing up from Puget Sound
rose to muffle startled breath
and played across her face

her home       they asked her that last night
and though she thought she said Shanghai
the New York sidewalks         LA sun
felt as real as her warm tea

her home         a metal folding chair
wedge foam cushion placed just so
back straight head back      left wrist held up
ancient wood against her chin

the slight curve of the tensioned bow
resting level with her face
marking out a graceful line
drawn anywhere in space