First, I read “Last Will” aloud, then
halfway through “Notice,” I heard
loud voices upstairs so I set down the glass of whiskey
poured to mourn the passing of Steve Kowit and
went to see what was the matter.
Steve would’ve made the interruption into a poem,
a funny one. Something like “Carpe Interruptus” with
an opening line about how the moment seizes us,
jealous as hell of all other moments,
their winking possibilities strutting by.
It’s true, diems don’t hang out on street corners,
waiting for our come-on.
They run by and don’t care if we can keep up.
So we can run the other way, high-fiving as many as traffic allows,
or we can find our vantage points—carpe locale—and
trade knucks as the parade passes because
all our moments are looking for us;
they’ll find us in the desert, feeding apple to a coyote or
lying on low tide’s hard-packed sand so we can stretch our backs.
In San Diego’s Gaslamp, Steve ordered three dinners to-go because
“we might need them” on our walk across downtown
where, sure enough, the homeless, more visible than accessible poems,
found us. People, coyotes, moments, poems.
Blossoms interrupted, so many rosebuds gathered
and gone to waste, Steve might say, unless
their dropping petals gather our notice,
moment after moment in this seasonal strip tease.
On the afternoon Brandon met Steve at the Napa Valley Writers Conference, they talked
about differences & similarities between poems and stories. When Brandon mentioned
he played guitar, Steve asked him to play behind him that night, a performance they
repeated several times, including for the 10-Year Anniversary of The Sunset Poets in
Oceanside, California.
Brandon’s books include two collections of poetry, Driven into the Shade
(winner of a San Diego Book Award) and Light in All Directions, and a collection
of short stories, When Pigs Fall in Love.