Scot Siegel
Bahala Na*
Miller’s mother has dropped us at the point.
Her boyfriend Dan, a gangly deckhand with
a temper, gave us the dime bag. Miller’s father,
a dentist with a fondness for coke, is a ghost.
Beneath the Golden Gate we cast for stripers, our
eyes trained for twitches in twenty-pound Stren.
Barely fourteen: The harder we cast, the deeper
our puberty aches.
Miller’s mother says Danny’s so sweet. She believes we
are supervised. She believes almost everything he
tells her.
Miller heaves one beyond the breakers and hands me
his rod. He stops to lick and seal a joint, then
lights it up.
A girl, so pretty, in a Catholic school skirt skips by––
She looks like Miller’s sister, strawberry hair
and a swivel-hip gait––
Though as she turns, her cheek bares the black
mark of the back of a boy’s hand. I am sure of it,
I have seen it before.
~
Now weak gull rolls on the swell. A sour gust roils
the sea. Miller squints and takes another toke,
then passes the roach to me.
A rush of nauseating heat emanates from
the charter buses. The Bahala Na are stalking us;
they are short and wiry question marks marching––
Miller thinks we can take them, though
we’ve never fought beyond our own
schoolyard;––The gang-bangers inch
close: The one with a dragon on his neck
lurches forth; I look for a gun. Miller utters
Gook, but not quite under his breath this time.
Now something clinks and extends from a
sheath; it spins from the boy’s hip like a trick,
an illusion––
I clench my fist and close my eyes
and wind and kick the boy’s hand, like Jackie
Chan, and the blade spirals skyward––It rises
like a swift over the cypress of the Presidio; as
the gang recruits freeze, a gull screams
over surfers’ mottled hollering in the distance––
Now a wedding procession on the seawall disassembles.
The bride and groom gawk as a hoopah strains
against the wind.
Now I hear the air swallowing a knife:
It dives like a falcon as it sings the fierce
incantations of my lost grandfather,
the one from Kiev, or Krakow
or Dresden. The one
we could not speak of––I think I hear a guy-
wire snapping,
but my line
flags, the gang dissolves,
and the girl is gone.
Advance Directive
He keeps writing I already
miss you
on all his checks.
He’s making a list of things
he will never do again.
It begins with alpine skiing
& ends at bowling.
He’s stuck in a drift, calls it
Splitting Kindling
and it’s a lot harder than
it looks. He’s preparing for
a terminal illness
brought on by lead shot
residue & chromium in the
groundwater. He’s in
training for
brain cancer, because
You can never be
too prepared.
*Bahala na translated from the Filipino means “Come What May.” It is also the name of a fierce street gang that rose to prominence during the 1970s in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bio
Scot Siegel’s second full-length poetry collection, Thousands Flee California Wildflowers, is due out from Salmon Poetry in early 2012. He lives in Oregon where he works as a town-planning consultant, serves on the board of the Friends of William Stafford, and edits Untitled Country Review. Find him at Red Room: www.redroom.com/author/scot-siegel/.