Dan Harder: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Dan Harder

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Dan Harder

Five Poems

Blowing Hot When It Should Be Cold

(December in L.A.)

Things happen

when those wild dry winds

chase through the canyons

like a pack of wild dogs,

like yucca-skirted dervishes

whirling in in winter.

Things snap and burst

when this bush-burning miracle

rushes in from the East,

a devilling of wind and dust,

to brush a smoke smelling umber

across a parched December sky.

The light, the skin, the city

is pulled brittle and lizard-tight

and all the craziness below

begins to fly -

like gulls from a blazing shore,

like a young and anxious Maenad

first surrendering to dance;

awkward, naked, mad.

Ohhh,

when this dry gale sings,

such strange things.....

happen.

The Lobster

It stands out like a 6’ 3” linebacker

in stilettos and a pink dress at an NRA convention…

Hypomyces lactifluorum,

a mushroom’s mushroom—literally:

one mushroom—or more precisely, one fungus

growing and feeding on another,

a lovely parasite that turns a common white Russula

into the flaming queen of the woods,

a flamboyant and delectable show,

a garish Gestalt—each on its own not so attractive to taste,

but the whole—parasite and prey—

making a much more delectable meal

than the parts could ever be

alone.

Amanita Phalloides – The Death Cap*

Such a beautiful specimen

  The taste is sweet,

                              and it doesn’t even protect itself with

          a flesh that’s firm—there’s nothing,

                              alarming colors, shapes, or smells.

                          really nothing not to like,

                              It is what it is—a very attractive mushroom:

           so you want

                              a smooth, suggestive parabola

                   more of it after the first taste

                              tinged with a subtle, verdant sheen,

           and feel completely satisfied with

                              discrete and fertile white gills,

        your meal, no discomfort anywhere

                              with an erect volva below a pubescent stipe—

                             or if so, just a little and

                              it invites the mouth.

       just for a while.

                              Like Eden’s snake,

                            In a day or two, though,

                              it preys on

              everything

                              the innocent.

                             will feel horribly wrong.

                              “Open your mouth to me,

There’s nothing you can do now but pray.

                              and die.”

* One of my “zipper” poems, 3 poems in 1: left side, right side, then both zipped together

A Band of Brothers in Oregon

With a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt (1988 Appetite For Destruction Tour)  worn over a scrawny chest, he jingles like a shop-door closing when he works¾the trinkets and bracelets and talismen rigged along spindly arms jostling as he paints the house; fast in the morning, joint and beer-slow in the afternoon humming "Back Off, Bitch" and talking about the six guys that he lives with¾all of them, he says, brothers, sharing, if not blood, at least the eight cars, three motorcycles, and a pickup truck junked in the front yard or parked under the leaky carport roof of the rented home out of which one brother sells speed, another sells weed, and in which all of them party to a restless oblivion most Friday and Saturday nights, brothers for as long as they're there which is usually only about three months (the cops, child support notices, a job out of state, or a fight visiting and disrupting the "family" with chaotic regularity) though he's been there the longest, eight months, he says, eight months after he was kicked out of his step-dad's place and had to live homeless on the streets for a while until he moved in with his brothers who he'd do anything for, anything, he swears, which seems to include painting a house for cash and becoming the stable bread-and-beer-winner for this All-American small-town family.

We Are What We Respond To

Do we change

                Fundamentally

                                       if we,

detached from all human sights and sounds and

                                       for a time, experience

               living, alone, with the all-surrounding

                                       gentle,

       presence of trees, the differing advances of

                                       transformative,

                             twilight, of a moon enlarging

                                       evocative,

                                 in a darkening sky, and the

                                       challenging and unusual

   “WHOoo…” of an owl muffled in the woods,         

                                       sounds and sights 

  these sights and sounds,

                                       very different from what we

                        for a time

                                       are used to?

                       will change who we think we are.

Dan Harder had a plan: he’d stop working for as long as he could and, instead, make his first million writing poetry, prose (fiction and non), and a play or two.  Not too surprisingly, he was back at a paying job within four months, but writing proved habit forming, and he’s been doing it in all sorts of forms ever since.  Poetry books – Generous Misgivings (1986), Askew (2007), and My Brilliant Destiny and Other Distractions (2022); operas – Zipperz (performances at Oakland Paramount Theater, etc. 2008...), Here I Stand (performances at the PRE-Trump Kennedy Center, etc. 2014..); children’s books – Colliding With Chris (1998) and A Child’s California (2000); a novel – Rancho de Amor (2020); 8 produced and reproduced stage plays (1985-2026), and dozens of features for the L.A. Times, the S.F. Chronicle, and even a couple of commentaries for NPR. He was born in Hollywood, and–but for a year and a half in Oregon and three years in France–he’s lived, worked, raised a family, and exercised his “craft or sullen art” in California.