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Bob Perkins
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the poet
Bob Perkins is 81 and married, with two 40-ish kids. Once a boxboy, submariner, handyman, typist, lawyer and teacher, he's none of these professions now. Bob reads and writes with the Manhattan Beach Poetry Circle, and has had poems published in The Los Angeles Review, Consequence and Delta Poetry Review.
the poems
Drafting
Coasting down this California coast, we’re
twenty or forty pelicans in a loose line,
riding each other’s coattails,
taking turns as leader till,
spying a friend or careless fish,
each goes its own way.
This is co-operation, not discipline:
no goosestep, no chorus line. You flap
when you want to, I’ll station keep for lift,
my flap lifts the next guy. We see, we use,
vortices, whorls, forces invisible
to the grounded.
Is this survival of the fit? Sort of.
We practice prosperity of the team, but
it’s understood: anyone can dive
any time. Till then, you stir the air
for me, I for you. It’s not quite communism,
but it isn’t capitalism, either.
Call it community. It worked for eons
until a different thought, call it DDT,
call it domination, call it human,
dealt death to us last century. They thought,
'Let’s control the fields, let’s exterminate
the bugs, let’s make more profits.'
It worked, too. But turns out
it isn’t the economy, stupid,
it’s the ecology. You start killing, bugs will die.
So will bees and birds and boys and girls.
They got smarter that time, banned DDT.
Did it again with the ozone layer.
But now, they’re flying high with carbon,
greenhouse gases, global warming. We
we can’t tell how this will end,
but you might see us as birds of good omen,
soaring since the eocene,
never ruling, always getting by,
sharing the work and the world.
Trigger Finger
My middle finger, dominant hand, pauses
when I open a fist, then springs into place. It’s a caution:
that finger has done my bidding for a long time, but now
is considering rebellion. 'What,' it asks,
'is in this for me?'
It’s not alone. Eyebrows are restyling themselves,
peeing is a sometime thing, my hair left town a decade ago. But
somehow this gesture – my own body giving me the bird –
speaks to me. It reminds me this will end, will not end well,
will end soon. I won’t get the last laugh;
I will write my last poem. This might be it.
And yet, it’s kind of fun – a new trick to do with my body,
stepping from the gliding analog world of youth to
the binary future I don’t understand. I, starting with this digit,
am becoming digital, robotic, reducing to two states.
Open or closed. Up or down. Alive or dead. I’m glad
it’s happening slowly enough that I can watch the show.
You can, too: here, look – it’s open. Shut. Open. Shut. Hey, presto!
The Archimedes
Palimpsest
1
They killed the lamb
for dinner and for profit,
flayed it, split and stretched its hide,
sold the parchment to men
who rewrote Archimedes there.
Someone scrawled an Aristotle critique
over the parchment.
Later, medieval Christian tastes
cut, folded, scrubbed it clean
(almost clean) and twisted
the sheep’s skin for a prayer book.
Just last century,
some Frenchman faked illuminations
to increase its market price.
Now, sheepskins upholster sports cars
and the digital palimpsest
is on the net, a Google book.
Oh, lamb.
2
Above Tom’s Place, off 395,
I sit beside Rock Creek
and watch the flow.
Holy, hypnotic, the motion distracts
from displays of standing waves and eddies,
leaf and sky reflections
flashing on the stream’s stretched surface.
If I look at them
I cannot focus on the creek bed’s rocks
or shadows, and whichever avatar I choose,
the clear water itself slips by unseen,
almost absent
unless some trout swims there.
3
First I sought your pink,
your so-white skin beside my brown,
your unpainted lips, eyes, breasts, hips--
tried to know you in sex.
The fluid years drift by, draw tighter.
The mass of your kindness leaves its mark.
So do our quarrels and congruences.
Sometimes I see flickers deep within,
sometimes I hear our humdrum babble;
sometimes your body grips me once again.
Sometimes I am distant.
Lives are too large for telling.
I say, 'Ink. Fish. Love. Skin,'
one word at a time.
I should shout all my words at once
like a creek,
like a bleating beast.
Publishing credits
Drafting / Trigger Finger: exclusive first publication by iamb
The Archimedes Palimpsest:The Los Angeles Review (Vol. 8)