Interstate Ode

I.
A few days after the wheel - we will call the human A - A thought up the axel.
Then A died.
In the memory of A we have the cart, which a sweating Aramean yokes

to an ox for a walk at a time when roads stretch slowly behind
unfolding in reverse. Ruts repeated in grass and mud.
Time. More carts. The idea of the wheel spreads
a slow fire where it goes. Roads follow, a map shows,
errant spokes on a freehand sketch radiating outward. 

If only it were flat, damn it.
The world has no respect for roads, or planar geometry.
Just mud and ruts.
And why is the shortest route between two points no longer, necessarily, a line?

It is probably a road.

II.
Two cross (perhaps in a wood) a problem: intersection.
Solution: code of conduct. Eye contact,
a gesture from the unoccupied left hand,
a grunt signals to a cart how to proceed and then progress.

Etiquette today:
octagonal, red rear-view tar smeared asphalt evergreen
air fresheners concrete curbs and rear-view mirrors slurped sodas
sunglasses cell phones Technicolor green electric lanterns red to yellow
jangled in the dusty wind on cables rear-view strung from metal pylons and
A wraps hands around a wheel wrapping objects in rear mirror are than
they their own Safari ® steering in acrylic leopard pelt appear

an asphalt kiss
in precise symmetry.
Two, three, four lanes – in either direction. At any given exit,
an entrance available in either direction where the only reason
to pause is lack of fuel.

For Inspiration

I just found this one the Poetry Foundation's website and thought it could be some help to all of us. I rarely feel as inspired as I do after listening to a sicknasty poem.

Poem of the Day

A poetry reading

Eliot and Keats sound just as you’d expect:
one nasal, one booming, both buoyed by affect.
I scoured the files and at last found Ms. Plath,
whose rage was more definite than I had empathed.
We grew up with Ginsberg and Dylan’s a given.
In fact, there’s no trouble with poets still livin’.

It haunts me, the voices that I’ll never hear,
though the tone and the diction resound in my ear.
Have you wondered, at times, of the timbre of Dickens,
or if Sappho’s drawl made the Grecian pulse quicken?
I stay up at night, just tossing and thinkin’
how sad it is never to listen to Lincoln.

Dear Me

I found mouse droppings on my childhood diaries
in a drawer that opens for anyone to read.
This is what comes to diaries.

Upon Listening to Mark Strand Read

Really there was my Self, and that

is all there was. The moving car

and the bar at midnight - both

me, as much as I'll ever be. And as for those

sad lost things, the shadows around

a planet's composite rings, the outline

of the iron dust a magnet lifts, the gifts

and the fire trucks, they too are here,

somewhere. Search through the pockets

of the memories I haven't got

and underneath the lesson plans pre-written

for what I've yet to hand

over to whoever's in charge you'll

find a guarded, secret place: here

is where You take shape.

Ugh-ly

My room is steamy.

Didn't I leave Miami

to avoid this crap.

Ode to Joy

Stop circling the bell,
Just ring it, Loud!
Throw all your butterflies
Into the crowd.

Snappy

I found her to be
A snappy lady.
Not to be confused with
The Snapple Lady. Whose products
I fully endorse.

Four questions

what makes you the expert on poems?
who is grounded when the sky’s the limit?
how much merriment does joy merit?
what is mania but the American Dream?

The Most Important Lessons of This Child's Life, So Far

Have not resulted - as the boy's father assumed
Before becoming a father - in tough-love scoldings,
Tears, and forced apologies. Instead, they occur
Unexpected, in quiet moments, and they pass
Before he can think of saying or doing the
Fatherly thing.

Driving, he listens to the boy in the back seat
List the people coming to Easter Lunch, guessing
Almost everyone right: Papa and Grandma,
Annie and Mike, Uncle P and Tee-Tee. He is
Wrong only about Tee-Tee, a once-certain
Future aunt.

"Well," the father starts, "Uncle P and Tee-Tee
Aren't together anymore." The boy's blond scalp
Tilts in the rear-view mirror. At the next stop sign,
The father turns to face the boy. Both pairs of eyes
Land on the squiggly dinosaurs dancing
On the boy's undersized necktie.
"Do you get it?"

The boy answers with innocent certainty. "Yeah."
He has learned to answer this way to questions he
Cannot fully understand. Do you love your baby
Sister? Do you love Jesus? Does Jesus love you?
He has also learned to walk, to swim, to not take toys
from his infant sister's hands, as all humans do -
Through repetition.

Hours later, the father holds an empty glass
By the stem and calculates how many years
Will pass before he learns the perfect words.
The boy opens and closes, opens and closes
The plastic egg he discovered in the yard,
As if willing the three jelly beans inside
To change color. He looks up, eyes searching the air
As they did the first day of his life, and he asks,
Where's Tee-Tee?

new haven

i have a tendency to chase them out
with chance encounters where
we reflect on celestial kisses
and symmetry and how stars shatter
before shivering and recently with them these
ghosts i survey what was never ours.

i climb to rooftops where i slip
under wet steel barriers between
quips about necks and lips
to stare at a city submerged in fog.

it is a fog that blurs its spires
we tell ourselves while we talk
(yes it is that kind of city).

it is here that a roof becomes precarious
in the way that only a precipice can
and we grow too close to the ten story
limit, telling and telling and telling.

chayefsky is with me from floor thirteen
to the lobby, while i dream of fellini
and screens and and all the years between
and my mind drifts to a fall - nothing
serious. ziggy just jumped off the roof
at a wedding. two storeys and
all he had was a cast and ziggy
is just a white dog with a neon cast.

our thoughts and words, our vision
hazy with the fog, spiral
in admiration of the prestige our
city never attained (acid weakens
does not strengthen stone structure
and you cannot reinforce the past
with steel) is what we learn
in and around the silences. we agree

sitting on parapits stinking
of damp tobacco. we stare at cars
that circulate a roundabout parking
lot, down and down and down.

this is my city, or was
caught in a hairpin turn
several ivy miles
from the buckle of the rust belt.

Scallion Pancakes

Scallion pancakes

are essentially sponges.

Sponges of fried dough,

with a few green slivers

scattered inside.  Just enough

to give the dish a name.

But many good foods are sponges.

For soy sauce or syrup,

or broth, or liqueur.

We learn in youth

that we shouldn't run 

our fingers through sticky pools, 

no matter how sweet 

or succulent they may be.

So we strive to create a perfect vessel.

Something to cordially carry 

the liquid flavors to our mouths.

But no matter how much 

we elevate these inventions,

they are really just 

glorified sponges.

French Music

[This and the two earlier poems like it, Matin and The End of the World, are I think becoming first drafts of an extended sequence called Documenting the End of the World]

It looked like it was raining

so we tried not to get wet

and hung umbrellas

from the sky like lily-pads.

I mailed a package and you

waited outside. We

both agreed that you should have been

smoking. When will it be

too late to recover the lists

we never made?

Shake what must be a hole

in the umbrella's worth

of rain from your hair and put

French music

on the stereo so we can pretend to be deaf

and transcendental.

Untitled

When you stare through the glass of the el window,

You can will poetry into any picture.

Stare long enough

And the metaphors overwhelm,

So seemingly full of profound poetic possibility

I cannot bend or form them.

Misspelled graffiti so large you can read it blocks away. Does ‘cock’ seem meaningful this morning because of the size of its letters or because tomorrow they will vanish under a wash of black paint?

The homeless stranger who screams Thank you, thank you now at the same intersection every morning, the words escaping from his mouth with only the slightest twitch at the corner of his eyes, as if he is not entirely accustomed to expressing gratitude to those whom it has never been due.

The light that comes on beneath your feet, beneath the sidewalk grate, illuminating a ladder as you step.

The arrangement of the words APPROACHES TO VALUE.

I am incapable of reflection,

of taking the lives I stare at and folding them

into prose or verse.

I watch them until I hear my blood

pounding behind my eyes.

I challenge someone

to make eye contact,

I am terrified they will.

Stare is from storren, to stand out, project. I do not want to think and so I stare. I try to fill these vessels, trying not to see the projection of my own hollowness through the window.

Is there poetry in a train car filled with rows of people, heads bowed together, reading the same newspaper in unison? Is this less of an act of worship than the screaming woman in the wheelchair who prayed for each one of us? Jesus I compel you, lay your blessed hands upon this bus driver and all bus drivers.

Clapping, singing, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

That mint

We scraped my chairs across the floor,
and taped notes to the windows, open.
A decent day at last.

I plugged the griddle, poured the batter,
so you could watch my tadpole swim
the kitchen, magnified.

Carrying a Cuban mint,
a purple-stemmed, hopeful thing,
I followed from the bedroom to the porch and back,
wondering if that man loves you. With you.

We reached a time of affairs somehow,
and yesterday my fingers never smelled like onions.
We both smoke, but I carry mint.

I wanted to post a poem titled "A Loss of Meter and Dignity" but thought for all of us that this might be a better choice...

I-94

When I’m on the highway and pass other people in their cars, I always imagine that they are brief poems - so far from me in their compact metal planetary systems. I just passed a lady that looks like she’s sitting in Mars. Then another comes on some comet shooting by. Then I pass another on the left – is that an old satellite he’s sitting on? One can only guess. Everyone rides in their own meaning.

you will know them by their glasses

by the blank lens, large and flat before their eyes.
you will know them by their patterns
plaid and polkas, paying no patronage to their prairie roots.
you will know them by their music,
the names spat back and forth in contest of i knew them when.

if you are still unsure, look to their bottom lip
look how it quivers, how it leans forward
waiting to pout.

be mindful of darting eyes at a party -- they seek
a hidden ladder behind you. do not trust anyone who sings
in full vibrato in the shower. count the proper nouns
and divide them by the kind words in each sentence.

when all else fails, look to their fingernails.
if they are not chewed ragged, you will know them.
the righteous cannot keep a manicure.

Apertures

For Namir Noor-Eldeen

1.

Took in the coughing light

of a fire shouldering from a truck

and later the light disappeared

from the shelled out remains

of a car, burnt and twisted the way

bones do not. Here are children

and in front of them two sandals,

a pool of blood, the unghosts

of what was, perhaps minutes before.

Sometimes a woman praying.

Sometimes children throwing rocks

at the aftereffects of explosions.

The sand cushions the knee when bent

for stability.

2.

Black and white, not for dramatic

effect. Grainy, people as the structures

that move. The helicopter's camera

wobbles while invisible voices

speak in another language: Crazyhorse,

Hotel, Charlie, Echo. Count

the bodies. Hollow the insurgent with

a camera. Leak the bastards into the bastard

street and leave them, unholy.

We cannot see their faces anyway.

3.

I too am twenty-three, though I do not

lie down ripped apart and drilled through

where the light can peer through the holes.

Double Down

Bacon, cheese, 

spicy mayonaise,

served between two fried 

breasts of chicken.

Using meat 

instead of bread.

A sitcom gag 

brought to life.

When it debuted,

in "special markets,"

people thought it was a joke.

In my heart of hearts,

I still do.

Or perhaps, my heart  

just wants it to be;

seeing it's mere existence 

as a threat to my health.

"Don't worry," 

the menu coos,

"it's most available fried,

but can be grilled too."

Matin

This morning the sun lay

like planks shuffled over the rooftops.

I placed my hand on the stair-railing

as I walked up the stairs just to feel

the railing. Someone called

my name. Only, it wasn't anyone I knew

and it wasn't my name either.

I thought about the lightness

of great things, like feathers,

and souls, and tried

to compose a poem where

the sky was a levee, broken apart,

like eggs with the yolk spilling over

the rooftops, and everything.

Haiku for the Sun

You, my wily friend,
give and give and give and suck
the sleep from my bones.

Burrito

I've tasted sugar, spun 

so thin that it floats.

I've eaten pillows of foam;

effervescent clouds of flavor.

I've sipped champagne, which

feather-like, tickled my nose.

All these things, 

and countless others,

have delighted me.

But whaddya know?

Sometimes all I want,

is a belly full of burrito.

fulton market

fulton market is a dinner plate
of a street

                 I walk down

wearing a dinner jacket (of sorts)

and gloves. 

                    unlike many meals
there is first a dumpster
perched on a dovetailing glacier
that bleeds rust,
                         flecks of sea
scales, silver pepper on ice
and by the salty smell of it
we’re having fish

but as any eater knows

dinner really begins with pork
where the tines of a fork-

lift carve into the curb. they 

are propane powered, 

turning on dimes. they 

haul meatpacked sirloins and flanks

while disused shanks 

wind up in Scrap Waste,

(a truck that conveniently trundles 

by at eleven).

                     it travels across 

the carved curbs leaving curlicues 

of rubbed off rubber

as the hunks of fat and flesh leave
bits of fat on its metal pieces.

these are the macro
markings of a morning industry.
The Jungle where buzzwords

circle over head 

but never swoop down

to the ruts and grooves

because there is nothing

- no blood - that should course

through these veins while

meat is packed, boxed, 

saran-wrapped

in the shadow of that skyscraper full of ice

(for cold storage)
and everywhere, there hangs in the air,
the smell of old, wet fur.

are you still proud?

old hog-butcher? or have you

grown starved and thin, 

hiding your knubbly bones, 

your bloody hands beneath a clean

apron in the morning sun.

is it for shame that you

hose down the sidewalk 

by five?

            in any case, you missed

a liver and a breast and a pair

of lungs here on the street.

          
but the trucks don't seem to mind.
they trace time the same way that it carves

streaks into overused china

gathering the signs of use
along with those of disinterest.

on fulton, there’s always a puddle
to push down the drain

and Blommer's will cloak your stench

with chocolate, and suds

will accompany blood to where

it all began, as so much froth

bobbing on the lake.

Why I Hate New York, by Mariah Beth

[Note: Instead of writing a poem today, I celebrated National Poetry Month (the cruelest month!) by helping my sister compose a list poem. She is 15. I think it’s pretty darn good. Suggestions for revision are encouraged!]

Why I hate New York

Smog
People
Skyscrapers
Litter
Gum on the sidewalk
The antemath of bruised flip-flop toes
Negligence - ignorance
Penthouse people plowing past the homeless
Heat of the Crowd
Screech of the Birds
White of the Walls

I don’t like people. I really
don’t like people.

Merry

For Tim

Merry, merry, merry,
merry, merry, merry, merry,
merry, merry,
donut.

The Adoption

They were beautiful, and barren, blithely fishing.
The woman was wading in the water.
In the shallows of a sandbar, caught my brother.
She adopted him, a son, like a fish pulled out.
She saw nothing but silver in the fish, nothing else.
The man with the face planes I would inherit
Idled his fingers in the country's long water.
And he thought of nothing. He was watching my mother.
The fishermen's wives were silent to the strangers.
They mended the nets that my brother had broken.
At the prow my salted brother was drying in the sun.
They took him home and life as he remembers it begun.

Numbers

Numbers don't work well in poems.

They trudge along, 

all with the same rhythms. 

One, Two, Three, Four,

dum, dum, dum, dum.

They are all predictable,

concrete. Difficult 

to bring to life.

You can't make a number dance,

only plod.

Except for seven.

Seven.

Two syllables in a sea

of monosyllabic dreck. 

You see,

Seven can fly, 

Seven can sprint,

Seven can waltz across a room.

Perhaps this is why it is lucky.

Come on,

Papa needs a new pair of shoes.

Weary

For Nina

Weary, weary, weary,

weary, weary, weary, weary,

weary, weary,

weary.

The Terms

For the past nine months
I have shared my body with this city:
allowed the ground’s tremors to rumble
in my chest, the skyscrapers to steal
the sun’s warmth from its rightful place
on my cheek, the heavy air to weigh
my lungs with curry, musk, and garbage.

For nine months I have incubated
in the small rooms of Harlem, Dumbo, Hell’s
Kitchen. I have relinquished my unfettered
right to the sky, accepting the airshaft
and a stolen Central Park afternoon as enough.
I have learned that no space is mine alone.

In the springtime, expecting to come to term
as the perennial flowers do, I found no change.
No great labor to render my body my own again.
No epiphanous pain that ends in joy,
No sudden, primitive love for her.

So I boarded a red bus like a tourist.
The second story retold the city's face
as that of smirking gargoyles, stained
glass jubilation, and proud topless mermaids.

Why did she never reveal herself to me
when I came offering full devotion of body
and mind to the Bacchus temple of her boroughs?

Today I checked my map often and thought,
I am a stranger in a strange land.

This city answered, now we can begin.

Squinting Without My Glasses

This crazy moon lights up like a kaleidoscope,
I see moving constellations in the dotted ceiling--
Orion's belt unbuckles into Cassiopeia's upside-down head,
and I make the Seven Sisters sun sick from their own light
that they burn and combust into something
that looks like my first grade teacher--
and soon the pupil of my eye has reached its limit
and I can't see what's waving in my face.
It never touches but the motion makes me sneeze.

the violet hour

he speaks the liquid grammar.

the tumbling syntax of a bartender

with bitters in hand, playing shakers

like instruments and separating 

a raw egg in a single hand.

he drains it into stainless steel,

the violet hour come round at last

shaving the peel in silence

off an orange

like a scalp.

thin, taut skin – an open blouse

bares no extra fold of flesh 

across her freckled 

synthetic chest.

it is as bare to the world as 

she is barren,

wrinkle free like warm cotton, 

fragrant and washed 

by others' hands. 

                          this woman avoids

the brown liquors 

(they cause wrinkles).

"a vodka drink," she says.

"with pineapple juice

and you guys usually put something special in"

a manicured lawn for hair: 

fungal blond foil highlights

Singer threaded eyebrows.

thin lips let drip her flat free words

she talks of metabolism

factual as politics:

the dirth of annualized ingredients,

the danger of calorized drink obligations,

actualizing her asset-backed securities

from a spineless barstool

while somewhere in a far off bungalow

sitting on its own in an acred lot

or underneath clean sheets

the ceremony of innocence 

drowns.

at least we all agree 

that the proper word

for what's slung round her neck

is choker.

Pantoum For The Day Before Easter

The day continued like clockwork –

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain;

A world passed underneath as we missed

An invisible struggle too quiet to hear.

Boring, and yet too intricate to explain,

The day continued like a clockwork's

Invisible struggle. Too quiet to hear,

We missed a world passing underneath.

Soup

Last night I dreamed of spilt pea soup.

But I did not drink it. Instead,

I carried it, sealed

in a a thermos.  

Or was it an urn?

I couldn't say.

The vessel was smooth,

metallic, and cold,

and stayed closed, 

tightly.

I kept the soup pressed closely 

to my chest, 

like the ashes of a loved one.

And I cared for it just as deeply.

What did this mean?

What was I mourning?

The loss of something

profound?

Or, like Scrooge,

was this simply a case

of undigested food,

a "bit of beef, 

a blot of mustard"

a phantom

"more gravy than grave"?

This seems likely,

because, in the morning,

I woke hungry.

I slaked my yearning,

with Rice Krispies. 

A food my grandmother derides

as empty.

But with each crackling,

snapping, spoonful,

I felt fuller,

if only for a moment.

A Collaboration

Crickets chirp
But it’s too late for me to
Eat them.
I might get a bellyache.

i can't do long

it is the season of shorts

Holy Terror

“All miners name their mines after their wives,”

so complained one wife to her husband in an old

story from the Black Hills during the rush, he complied:

today an antique store carries the name in Keystone,

the home of Mount Rushmore – once Paha Sapa,

the sacred hills where Lakota boys would camp

to dream of the Great Spirit, Wakan-Tanka,

and in the morning wake in a holy land

that by night had made them men – Holy Terror:

a joke to the miner who did not have to watch

the bounds of holiness collapse into wear, or

rock-blasted into the faces of men who taught

a country to walk too well before it came

to the borders of a land, and a god, and their names.

Stuck

If you're writing a poem and get stuck,

and you try and you try with no luck,

you can keep your mood fair,

and try hard not to swear,

or write a limerick and say, what the fuck.

In re: Can Animals be Gay?

Note: Reference is a 10 page NYTimes article under the above title, which can be found here.

Darwin, Darwin, man of birds
wrote a book of many words
describing finches, tortoises too,
a book that’s since caused much ado!

‘Teaching theory!' Masses cry,
‘Is blasphemy that doth deny
creation’s certain spontaneity
by hand of our benevolent deity.

And furthermore!’ They humph and scold,
‘Old Darwin’s theory’s full of holes.
It can’t explain the cell’s complexity,
nor man's desire for safe sex-ity,

It has no answer to our query
on the queers, and their cashmerey
decadence! It can’t be true!
Harumph! We will boycott the zoo,

the school, and other institutions
who push these spurious conclusions.’
And that, my friends, is how we lost
this battle: to an albatross.

I've got more poems in my poem-maker than poem-makers can make poems.

Shutter Open

When I see the half-moon, I want to slide
the dark away with my finger like how I broke
my father's camera by placing my finger on the lens
and forcing those shutter eyelids blindly open. Slide
and click, shutter open, to reveal such a solemn blank
face. I saw my reflection, waxy, smooth and irritating as fog
on a winter windshield, and I broke my nail on the image
of my face, and so I dragged my thumb to make it disappear.

People People my People People

Where oh where has my little
god gone? Where oh where can He
be? I was told He was in everything,
in every leaf of grass and every whisper
in the back of the Synagogue reflected
His mightiness.

We were once called a stiff-necked people,
but we have gone soft and well-clad.
Necks become stiff from the act of sticking
them out too often, from righteously placing
the body before the machine. The office chairs
at Goldman Sachs and Fried Frank have round supports
for the lumbar and neck, to keep them supple.
It’s the ones with the stiff necks we watch for now:
Madoff, Wolfowitz, Leiberman, Libby.
The best among us lack all chutzpah,
while the worst fill their mothers with passionate tsurres.

Where oh where has it gone, this God of mine?
This God who taught me to love a good argument,
to favor David over Goliath,
to count myself as my brother’s keeper?

My Rabbi asked me once to prove that we are the chosen people.
I could not, because I did not believe it.
He opened his laptop and typed the words into google,
and hit after hit revealed it to be true: the Jew.

Simple Pleasures

Fuck cars,

Fuck poles,

Fuck parking lots.

Fuck dings, 

Fuck dents,

Fuck parking, a lot.

Fuck buttons,

Fuck thread,

Fuck holes in my shoe.

Fuck Sting,

Fuck The Police,

Fuck "Synchronicity II".

Yeah, my car turned too slowly,

And my clothes are all wearing,

And my deskmate has headphones

That he never thinks of wearing.

But on a day like this

When I can't catch a break,

At least I can end it 

With a coffee milkshake.

The End of the World

came and went with little forewarning
and less recognition.
A car in Rogers Park failed to start
and measured
tragedy
distracted everyone as last year's actress
died from an overdose. March 25th
was the same as March 24th in almost
every way, except
warmer. We took our coats off
and sat on the rocks
overlooking the lake and did not
speak. We watched a leaf
for metaphor's sake. We napped,
exhausted
at being meaningful.

National Poetry Month

Begins NOW.

One poem a day.

Or at least a sporting try.

Enjoy!

Grandma Clementine

Young hands to old hands like the skin of a clementine peel--then peeling and then drying and then cracked. I've been crumbling dried clementine peels and smelling my fingers for the catches of dying scent. Her hand moving, patting my palm and plucking at my fingers. It was only then I realized the difference between touching and being touched. I left one peel by her side. I broke it evenly into dried pieces that smelled like candy and left them there. I know I cannot save them.

Blue and Cyan

A feather carried by a current I was,

Hair unspooling like so because,

•

And Underneath it all the brush,

And us.

•

Weightless, lifted, pinioned,

Strung and pulled, unbuttoned,

•

What we edge, have edged, and halved,

Is yet the steps we have not pathed.

•

And underneath it all the shadow,

the blood, the bone, the marrow:

•

I will meet you on another day,

When the air is warmer, when the sky is gray.

•

The river hides us, though we pass,

And underneath it all the mask.

[the poem takes its name from the accompanying beautiful painting by my friend Maria Dimanshtein]

Fin de siècle

When we walk at night, the wind sharp as

cool wood splinters, we see nothing but the ebb

of our shadows from the pacing streetlights when

all at once a great black beast of a shadow

whose approach we did not hear in our study

overcomes us as a steel wire of fear is plucked within,

buzzing until we are a cold shock of edge, and we

watch the bicyclist whisper past. Or else

we do not watch: we are yet clenched in the tightness

of everything lost even though it isn’t, clutching

what we possess into our hearts and digging

our chins into our chest bones. It was warmer

back there, back in the café even though we knew

it was cold outside, or back yesterday, or back

a season ago: yes, then we walked about without socks

and once in a while ran our hands through the grass.

How we would sleep there, never to rise again,

if a single blade would push its way through

the tundra that we knew, we really knew if you pressed

us, was coming. Now there is only ice and the promise

of ice, and the sick lights that carve mirages along

the sidewalks good only for predicting the horrors

we are too frightened to turn and see as only a

bicyclist. Here is where we live, on the cusp of exhale

and the moments we we will not remember in

the peace of continuity, without knowing it because

even if our past has taught us all we will ever need

to know, we will curl beneath the shadow and wait

for the consequence of every sin that is as real

as the end of time, except that when we walk at night

only the wind is sharp, only the lights move

since only we move.

The Most Important Attempt of All

And what had we decided? Oh,

a great number of things – this was

the problem, this out-stretching

of our wills past time and the very skin

that should keep us well-enough

informed of ideas like limits.

If only we had not evolved past

the days of ideas: action

was what mattered, everything

else just cloud and waiting, and we

were done with waiting.

Some ideas hung around like ghosts

or model homes, unsubstantial things

that we assumed were real or else

were always this light and fragile.

One was revolution. Another was

justice. We wore them like the robes

of kings we had never seen except

in great myths and we sung their

liturgies as if we knew exactly

what we meant but at the end of the day

only our throats were sore: the blood

was still threading the course of our

bodies, the bones were yet intact,

and our homes shown like lacquered

paper, glowing warm and incandescent.

Nothing was lost except for what we

had not lost. And that, too, was gone.

Tomorrow we will be angry – or how

could we remain so few seconds before

every exhalation? We will pretend to live

in brighter days where ideas enfleshed

the spare forests we will devastate

in our quiet studies and we will call

our imagination passion, and later,

the most important attempt of all.

And in a magnificent frenzy of every

tension scraping its plate with every

other brittle mockup of emotion

we will strive and yearn and finally

beneath the stars we still see through

our own putrefaction we will climax

and fall asleep.

All I really, really want my love to do

My greek teacher told me over and over
          Repetitio est mater memoriae
Only he wasn’t a greek teacher, just a science teacher with a love
of Greek and an excuse
to repeat with us the alphabet that runs from Alpha to Omega.

My mother would scream to me that repetition
          was the mother of insanity, if one repeated expecting
different results. But she was speaking of actions,
of relationships and sacrifices repeated, of the relentless
way the phone rang with relentless attorneys on the other end
repeating hostilities from the father of insanity.

I can’t write except when I’ve got a song on repeat,
          a song that’s nothing to do with my subject but everything
to do with the loop of instrumental, vocal, crescendo, fade.
Something with a chorus. Not the Greek kind
but maybe something Aristotelian, with a climax.

Gertrude Stein told me once that
          Loving repeating then in some is their natural way of complete being.
Loving repeating, repeating expecting, expecting memory,
all this to say what if there is no repeating
because every time the meaning shifts a little
or the being shifts a little
and so expecting repeating, memory of repeating,
believing repeating and repeating belief is the mother
of insanity, but loving repeating
loving repeatedly
loving repetition
loving repeating
is the natural way of complete being
is the natural way
loving repeating is loving, repeating, loving.

The Old Woman Explained, Pulling on Her Sweater at a Red Lobster in Plantation, Florida

I don't wear it for the warmth;
I wear it for the color.
This color gives me life.
Only it's so heavy! It practically pulls me
right down to the cellar!
But this color. This color
gives me life.