4:39 p.m., August 31, 2008, New York City

Fine mist of happiness –
gold silt – an entourage of tiny

sparkling particles which follow
light as if light were Apollo:

now the sun as it obliquely hits
and swallows several of the pearly

paper coins of your dried money-plant
ignites the thing to fire: soft probity,

desire – and the sweetness
of the state of mind that this

engenders: tender and replete:
like baby Mozart, chubby fingers

flick pink toes into a syncopation
as he gurgles three-part harmonies:

this infantile art with its surpassing
subtleties: this jubilant involuntary

gasp! – so cowed by the enormity
of fleetness that it breeds a brief

and bleeding sadness: makes you
wonder if this isn’t, here –

whatever gloriously else it is –
the root of human madness.


.

If I Smoked Pot

If I smoked pot,
which I do not,
you’d be what I would roll up in a reefer –
after (naturally) I listened to your briefer
on exactly how you liked to zoom into

a fume (swallowed soft and slow
and shot out fast?):
I’d hope you’d want
to last but wouldn’t count on it.
Extol? Oh yes.

Control? Don’t make the gods all roll around
in laughter. After we were done,
which is to say, exactly
at the moment you’d
decided that the fun

might just continue
in the form of slumber in my arms, I would attempt
to gather up your wafting charms and beckon
them to rest a while with me: like swarms
of fireflies whose phosphorence

needed just this tiny spot
of calm:
before they rose up to ignite the next
bright bomb into catastrophe.
However, I do not smoke pot.

So this is all I’ve got.

.

Where Were You?

“Where has the summer gone?,” you ask.
I ask: where were you? Damned season’s kicked
my ass – takes me to task each dawn and noon
and dusk and night, insisting on its musky self when

I show signs I might enjoy attending to the barest
whiff of something else: operatic and unwieldy,
not the sort of thing you miss: glaring, pouring,
boiling to a hiss and froth, now doping me with

onslaughts of late August sloth: luring me outside
on such a sunny slide – such a perfect promised
opportunity to bask – I don’t see coming up
the sides that I am headed for a pelting bath –

I purchased three emergency umbrellas I did not
expect to need: not to mention those few afternoons
I thought I’d cuddle up and read – when suddenly
the skies went black and passionate and spackled

their electric cracks all over my perceptive
apparatus – indiscriminately making brutal love:
peace! – all the sordid sweaty grease you lease
by living through this smack-down in the city –

please! – an itty-bitty-bit of fall – this rumbling
summer will not stall for anything – that is, until
I sense the sinking sun – notice in the early
morning, early evening that the park across

the street is dark again – summer inadvertently
has lured me into thinking it would never end.
Something in me wants to lengthen – reaches….
Wonder how much longer there’ll be peaches.


.

Shame's Provenance

With its highly practiced line of chatter –
consummating every promise of each prospect
it engenders merely through the slick
deployment of a faintly vulnerable tic that flicks
a little muscle in its cheek –
conveys the charm, and chic,
of something possibly covertly “weak” – and which
appears to put the lie to its surpassing savoir-faire –

oh, don’t go there.

It is a lump, its life is little. It’s a bit
of spittle on the lip of a leviathan belligerently
unaware – and lacking any inclination to pursue
it here or anywhere: it doesn’t matter what it
ever wanted or, quite frankly, that it is,
at all. Emptiness behind another
(ho-hum) fall –

Daddy’s narcissism,
Mommy’s unacknowledged rage,
or someone’s (we’re not saying whose) small dick?

If only it would really make you sick,
instead of quickening
and thickening.


.

Mood Music

Spread your lovin’ arms –
shove over in those warm sheets, honey –
just stocked up on Brahms
quartets for not a lot of money –

gonna kiss you ‘til you’re red
and lick you like two dogs –
and listen to it, loud, in bed
and roll around like hogs –

wallow in its hot thick mud –
vibrato! – syncopation! –
swallow hard, and ride the flood –
get blotto with sensation –

grunt and mount up to the point –
slick with that Hamburg grease –
where we can blow this earthbound joint
and get some damn release.


.

Monkey Nap

Disgruntled monkeys, mostly – one gets the best view
of them here, now, carousing in my liminality – that private
dim sphere of the whirling contraption I’m in, dropping
into the lap of an afternoon nap – animate matters-of-fact
brashly chattering back at me like het-up chimps – pleading

their cases and plots, chasing spotlights across a penultimate
stage – the all-but-last page that proclaims the last drop
off the cliff of the promise of “if” turned to trap – too certain
for comfort: just this side of that, monkey bums drink their port
(Humphrey Bogart flicks play on the TV screen over the bar)

in that place just before the last gap beyond sleeping –
too dark to be seen: they scrabble about in pursuit of a sexual
and intellectual sheen: they ache to be primates with far
smarter brains and alluring physiques – they are pains
in the cheeks of my somnolent ass – and I tell them to get

off my grass and they do, which for some absolutely irrelevant
reason allows me to get up and shoo the last vestiges
of my fatigue like a bush-league of lousy ball-players who’d
rather be chatting than batting. Restored to the gainfully
wakeful! The apes are all gone; something’s lit a new dawn.


.

What I Wondered Today

If I could have climbed into another person’s mind
today the one I would have chosen would have
been whatever generated that clear gaze I saw
in some twelve-year-old boy who hauled his
younger brother – maybe four – into his strong
thin arms – uprooting him from where the toddler
had been tottering on 7:30 a.m. rush hour’s crowded
subway floor – carried him out of the train’s quick-

sliding door and up the stairs to get him safely,
efficaciously back to the street, and on his feet,
where they could amble hand-in-hand to some new chapter
in their unknown story. I wish I’d known what really
lay behind the quiet Monday morning glory of those
sweet and open eyes – seeming to bespeak such
patience, fortitude and grand good-will: as if the point
of anything were only ever cheerfully to pay the bill,

and do the work. I wouldn’t mind investigating what
strange quirk might have engendered that warm
bond between those boys – to sense from inside what
may have been some exquisite if unconscious
panoply of joys – some utterly light unconsidered
happiness – some product of shared life I might today
have understood if I had felt it more precisely from its
inward source – beneath the skin – somewhere

within whatever strange felicitous accommodation –
affectionate soft cultivation – had occurred. Today
I’d like to have discovered – seen and heard
and fathomed – something golden in an entity created
by two people who cared deeply: to whom love was
just as natural as air. Today I wanted to find out
about two people walking for a moment through one life.
I wonder what it possibly could feel like there.


.

The Sweet Succinct

Today let’s praise the sweet succinct –
attempt to breathe inside her –
investigate her small street – think
to soar in some light glider

above her few green tidy lawns
and put to some fine test
capacity to find what spawns
the power to suggest.

.

Event Horizon on West 8th Street

I can tell you where he is
although I’d ask you not
to do what I did when I saw him
for the seventh time: so column-
stiff – implanted right outside
the hot dog counters of Papaya King,
unmoving on the northeast corner

of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street,
nut-brown arms and neck
and glossy ebon hair bared in,
above a short-sleeved cotton shirt –
touching with his forehead the behind
of “Subway’s” sandwich store’s
outfacing placard – holding

its erect flagpole as if he were
a member of a royal guard or funeral –
or waiting for Godot – and moving
not at all – no, not at all, closed
eyes encaged in black sunglasses –
motionless as some warm
living verticality of wall –

until I had to stop, that seventh time
of seeing him, to ask him
how it felt, and was it hard
to stand like that all day – but nothing
in the silent man gave way:
his stance was trance and I should
not have tried to sever his rapt

concentration – aimed at somewhere
so interior and unavailing
to the likes of me that it seemed
prudent to remove myself to see
his grand dissociation from a greater
more respectful distance –
and to speculate, as who could not?,

about the spot to which he’d
evidently laser-beamed his being –
somewhere far beyond this realm,
one had to think: dimensionality
of seeing at some brink set
to prevent my eyes from prying,
spying in or on. His own event horizon.


.

What I Think Would Be Swell

Granite – marble – deeply etched to dolorous effect:
it’s odd, perhaps, that I can’t understand interment
in bare land of coffins into graves – grand mausoleums –
when I spend the wages of my heart each day on turning
pages of this city’s past, read in its architecture – loving
each incessant curlicue and gargoyle of the belle époque
and every calmed and formal doorway of the Greek
revival blocks of tailored russet brick and stone

which grace so many Greenwich Village streets – it’s odd,
perhaps, that I can’t reach the barest sense of rightness
in a cemetery past some grim and buried humor
at the folly of attempting to exhume dead people’s stints
on Earth by giving birth to billboards made of stone:
I scratch my living head and leave the useless and eroding
rock alone: and turn instead to those still breeding hives
of life that offer panoplies of breathing chances to

encounter strife and bliss and damp ennui – and some
new NYU boy’s glee at knowing if he makes it here,
he can at least appear to make it anywhere: I like to see
these kiddies leap and gyrate in the high tides
of their lives ignoring all the sly asides their 1880s tenements
keep winking at them: no one seems to know that he
or she inhabits such a density of glow, such mystery
of history. Edifices are as dead as graveyards only

when they aren’t filled with flesh still freshly wrestling with
this enterprise of being. Let the lights go on in every
tiny split and fissure of this city’s carapace: this city’s
monumentally segmented and elaborately decorated shell –
intensely burrowed-into, with its promises of untold heaven,
hell. And when I “pass” if I am taken out like that day’s
trash and burned to ash, I think that would be swell.
Just sprinkle me where New-York-City-dwellers dwell.


.

Now: Come Back Here!

Sweat prickles: pinched –
too tight! – explode! – each tiny
load of inexplicability pops – flicks
a little imbecility of glint into
your eyes: one may surmise
what’s going on in your wild

dome until the flies come home,
but who wants flies? Now:
come back here! – and rest
assured that I will crack my ear
to hear your faintest nuances,
vicissitudes – and every last

of your fleet beats: and die
inside a bit when I cannot not
size them up as sweet fragility –
as you entreat me to keep pace,
not peace. We race! I’m gassed.
You’re too damned fast.


.

Sextets

How to put words on the glories of their ardor –
the disciplined romance of Brahms’ sextets?:
their confluence of passion, and respect for form –
one sometimes longs for that idealized experience
the Nineteenth Century, as it progressed, so
wished were true: vast ordered view, as of Hyperion,

which might unleash itself from myth and vaunt
into the exigencies and behaviors of the heart
and body – bring the sun into the unimaginable dark,
but decorously: feckless me! – the wreckage
I have wrought through sex: the shoddy mucking up,
inane perplexities, the vexing hexes that beleaguer

still – I saw a man today with whom I used to –
as we then were wont to put it – “play”:
and climbed the hill again to memories which chopped
and stung like toxic breezes through this gloriously
blue and tender August Wednesday: yes, I know
one’s living poem goes without a stop from bottom

all the way to top and out across flat beaches
to the endless reaches of the sea: it only ceases
with the dead-end of mortality – but one produces,
on the way, illusions of capitulating when
one finishes a sentence, eats a dinner, goes to sleep,
or falls in love: drugged hugs – disinhibitions

in one’s disappearing youth, and one will chug
whatever serum blocks the truth and makes
the damned excursion seem to trickle off into
a tolerable stasis wherein nothing ends and nothing
recommences. Strange, although the motive’s fear,
we find we yearn for here exactly what the Universe

would have us learn: the disciplined romance – as of
a Brahms’ sextet – the glories of its ardor, and its glows:
and how despite one’s fuck-ups and one’s dreadful lows,
the thing just flows and flows and flows – until,
of course, it doesn’t. The air, today, is blindingly,
alluringly lubricious. I almost wish it wasn’t.


.

Her Tone

This spread of middle-day –
this grand repast – you needn’t beg
the girl to let it last – she wants it to,
quite on her own. Suggestion
of her tone: a shredded cotton clouded
sky alerts the eye with soft but bright
gradations of too many hues

between the ones we’d choose
for milk and those we’d opt for
in an 1890s belle époque cream silk –
the lady spreads her panoply
of soul as if it were a ruffled satin
stole above décolletage
so pale and faintly eggshell –

pink? no, gold? or beige? – so something
like the brink of an enlarging
stage of womanhood which
now upends, distends and otherwise
extends the brazen white
of debutante seduction into something
like an assignation’s stolen light:

faint swoon of afternoon, an August interim
of an exacting delicacy one might rather
have expected from some early June –
but now she brightens like a dragon
waking up and rends us with her
muscular voluptuousness
like a phallic whip – too thick

to undergo without succumbing
all at once. Abundance of Our Lady
of Transvestites, Manahatta, sweet
compatriot of all the sinning lovers who
still hover ghostlike in her perfumed
sweaty reverie – one seeks again to rhyme
abyss with kiss. Whatever gives her bliss.


.

The Sound

Sometimes I try to bear the ambient experience of day
without the little aural Hansel/Gretel crumbs
I strew ahead, behind that help me to imagine I might
find my way – Mozart on the radio or Joni Mitchell’s
recent odd low alto or selected TV reruns: Star Trek: Voyager
and CSI – or dvds of Judy Garland television shows
or even lately the worn alien incursion of some recently
acquired porn – but sometimes I turn off this fornicating
soft-rock symphony of murderers and astronauts

and men-that-got-away and see what might be going on
beyond the sway of their embroidered influence. I wish
that I could say that the discovery awaiting me was worthy
of remark: perhaps it is – in some way – as when cars
are parked they arguably lead a vacancy of life so private
it defies elaboration – I suppose that something in the mild
mesh of indiscriminate Manhattan air – trickles of the wind
and buses – may indeed have meditative force to lead
to some uncanny entry to some hidden lair: perhaps

a cloud has loudness somehow, somewhere: but I couldn’t
bear it for too long and now am listening (the porn had
long before completed its raw catalytic work: television
reruns are an hour away) to Joni Mitchell singing “Shine” –
her sixty-four year old tobacco-ridden voice alluring –
with the ground bass of a modal melody – tiny blues
transition – sweet – between repeating harmonies –
her syllables confound except as sound, and only sound,
the only thing that matters is the sound, the sound.

= = = = = = =

written while listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Shine” (suggestion:
just listen to it: the youtube visuals are, to me anyway, intrusive) –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNflavqCmEc

To Whoever Is Responsible

Bodies want what bodies want when bodies want it.
Not too long ago my stomach and intestines
both decided to egest abruptly everything they had
ingested through their two most efficacious

orifices, down and up. What were they to do
but (taking turns) erupt? Today my middle part –
supposed in cliché love songs to connect to “heart” –
euphemistically spiritualized by some as “second

chakra” – wants to shock a buck and pluck a duck
and otherwise do things that rhyme with schmuck.
What is it to do but run amok? I’m stuck in
the tautology of my biology. And I want an apology.


.

Only Here

You do not want to live inside
these circumstances. Falling
prey again to the familiar
promise of that dance of dreamy

analyzing – whose alluring aim
is to deny all obfuscating dull
particulars – you press to sense
the purpose underneath the surface:

pulse beneath the skin: pursue
the putatively golden note beyond
the din: as if reality were subterfuge:
a layer cake whose inward dark

ingredients alone conveyed the truth.
And so you ruthlessly ignore
the endless more of sitting in
this vinyl blue-and-green Long Island

Railroad’s air-conditioned car –
affording glimpses out its windows
of a purgatory made of glare-lit
unavailing brown – as it slinks

farther from the sharp availing
magic of your blessed town.
What sounds like drunken howl
proceeds from somewhere in the front –

devolves into a mournful grunt.
The man with MS in a wheel-chair’s
point is blunt. No other place,
no far or near. Only here.


.

Something About Impending Rain

How to square experience of the eternal
with the evidence of passing time?

Might matter be at once the product
and detritus of the energetic moment –

at its generation indistinguishable
from it – even as it’s left behind?

Is everything a constantly accreting
carapace of something too fine to divine?

Something seems to want to – cannot – sing:
instead, bears silent witness to the thing.



.

Your Way

Those plummy lips conceal sharp teeth:
quick bite: as if to break and take your kiss
and spit it out; a viper lashes from

the gloriously blooming garden: routs fresh
flesh – to leave a bitten cheek bewildered –
hardening another heart; the acrid stink

of skunk contaminates the magnanimity
of piney woods; the sensuality of August
plushy cloud – its soft humidity – builds

up and slashes electricity – the gash it makes
erupts loud claps and wakes – installing
shock – and one split rock: a wounded

equanimity; roses rot, lay bare their thorns;
purring cats will scratch; and angels hatch
pink cooing babies bearing devil’s horns.

You want the thing to go your way and oh,
my dear, it does: because it worms
and snakes itself not only out of all your

sweetest least adulterated dreams but from
your dark unconscious and deliciously
amoral, and sadistic, and illicit schemes.


.

Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim*

What have I for you today?
What have you for me?
What has it for us to say
it hasn’t said? Can we

commence again to contemplate
how much we do not know? –
attain the strength to tolerate
the great abashing glow

of this chaotic universe
which doesn’t seem to care
if we respond with tune or curse
or show of savoir-faire?

Remind me what we’re doing here –
do you recall just what
we stopped pursuing late last year
or late last night? Ah! – but! –

let’s not forget the fun we had
this best of afternoons
of going uptown to the sad
and beautiful saloons

and cut-up bodies and old doors
and marble genitals –
the woven alchemy that pours
out of the bends and pulls

of that nonagenarian
whose dark je ne sais quoi
brings light to the contrarian:
the stark Louise Bourgeois.

* http://www.newsweek.com/id/140278?tid=relatedcl

Here We Go Again

Excessive interventions
and extensions of the senses –
nothing’s not extravagant in your fat full
humanity: travel, then, pursuing one
slim aim: to make and enter and inhabit
poems – taste the sentient
and insentient – wastefully collect
too many contradictory
impressions: keep them warm and live
and stow them in a realm in which
they’ll ache to thrive –
wed content to unwilling form –
marry into that wide family of paradox –

poke the calm within the storm –
stoke the balm that treats the bloody wound
and heals it while it cannot not rejoice
in all the lovely violence that speared it
into being to begin with:
heed the sweetly spinning sounds of violins –
faint fragrances of violets:
mix romance with an indifferent brutal
arm and hand and groin whose
singular collective beastliness will join
you to a more than usually
shocking incredulity or two.
Watch the tomcat spray clandestinely away

but let your little creatures stay exactly
where they will: rear your kittens to be
alternately still and purring, praying,
scratching, playing, hatching
feline opportunities
to tease the instincts into
yet less comprehensible propensities:
cultivate a certain funky pheromonal stink
which brings you to another brink
of tender manfulness – then come to yet
another stumbling humbling stop,
right after it has popped your cork.
In other words, New York.


.

Why You Do This

To take an interest in the time
it takes to summon rhyme –
to work a worthy cadence out –
to entertain your doubt

sufficiently to let it go –
induce poetic flow –
investigate the causes
and effects of pauses,

silences in some new scheme
partaking of a theme
devoid of any pretext
but with the force to vex

you into some new orbit
of air: to absorb it
until it is familiar –
abruptly cellular

as capillaries, organs, limbs –
biologies of hymns –
sentient bodily desires –
seduce the thing that sires

progeny that it can call
its own: to make it all
out of the sundry pieces
of your soul – releases

you.


.

Man

Can’t push it, though you want to.
Some part of you refuses to undo
its massed resistance to what it
completely understands is life’s
sole efficacious mode, of letting go –

although it deeply knows it cannot
set its urgent exigencies over
the essential one of simply being.
Whatever must propel spermatozoa
through their hell of uphill battle

to the prize: whatever cloud dispels
the certainty that all but one of them
will die: and that survivor will become
some other creature so entirely
it might as well not have been what

it started out to be – whatever clings
to the extremity of thinking its own
substance is as much as can be
counted on – whatever’s mounting
that receptive orifice expecting

a transcendent lift but doomed
to sift into its opposite: whatever
doesn’t want to know that its trajectory
will end in entropy – whatever that all
cannot do, but thinks it can: is man.


.

Nine Quatrains Murmur: August Afternoon

Softly sound the call for gentleness: allay
the ripples of your small distress: gather all
your schools of minnows in their swoop
and sway and reassure them they are just

the thing today – address your oceanic
consciousness: and bid it offer up its warmest
most embracing sea: let your fishies fin
around as peacefully as this sweet windy

August cloud-and-blue-sky canopy protects
your vastly liquid mind: now scoop your babies
up into a net and render them amphibiously
into some new breathing slippery collective

creature which will crawl onto the sunny
beach to reach a kind of trembling stasis –
glistening with an abrupt autonomy: a nascent
self now warming on a coastal shelf which

asks your widely wondering and wandering
appurtenance of eye and brain to think what
its autonomy might mean: evolve from school
to graduation from the rules and touch a fine

caressing finger to the platypus your newt has
just become: then watch it run into the softly
stirring riffling reeds into a woods where
it can meet its needs to rise up on two legs

and otherwise discover how a thinking mammal
breeds alternatives to instinct. It would be easy
to decide that this is all a dream, but it takes
courage to imagine you’ve uncovered quite

the most remarkably audacious scheme: to ride
imagination into breathing form, and keep it
round and warm, then do a last experiment with it:
bid it sit and speak – and press through its

velocity of evolution for a reciprocity: softly sound
the call for gentleness again as it turns round
to recognize you as its friend. Be warned:
the world felt just like this when you were born.


.

On Your Behalf

Let’s interleave importunate
investigations wantonly
throughout your secret lives –

let the Word devise
an indiscriminacy
with the Flesh – until

your soul cannot
keep from emitting some
soft semi-sentient

sound. Underneath your
porous peel – let’s
listen for the pound

and peal of that deep bell
that wants you to dispel
all doubt – imagine

no impediments
to publicly enjoying all
of every little tasty

frangibility of every
hidden treat. Today you buy
two-thirds of one pound

of Swiss cheese, sliced
thin as sin: you roll its
pieces up to eat, but not

before you’ve salted
each a bit. There’s nothing
you won’t salt a bit.

(Summer writes this stuff
on your behalf. Shows it to
incoming Fall for laughs.)


.

Slip Me Another Biscuit

August rumbles – utilities truck tearing up
the concrete, looking for pipes and wires
to beat up, screw up, tie into new knots –
Feels like I gots
the rest of my life free.
Playin’ hooky for eternity.
Pleasures are too much for me

to talk about beyond, well, two. Let’s say,
perhaps, that in the divination of a couple random
secret vices that I quite forget about
right after I indulge in them,
I feel the promise of illumination.
Yesterday I ate a whole box of Wheat Thins
while watching Star Trek: Voyager,

and I cannot begin to tell you
how it made my time rhyme
to do so:
to renew no
aspect of them now
beyond the faint remembrance of just how
a kind of subspace glimmer

of a sweet-salt shimmer
changed my dimmer,
bumped me up to blinding light
then had me finding night
and all the dawn to dusk between:
crispness of those tiny squares,
keen outline of the breasts beneath that wide-eyed

blond girl’s glare of skintight body suit –
“Seven of Nine” was a Borg –
Heaven and wine to a straight man: lordy! –
slip me another biscuit –
trip me into the hiss of a dimension
in which I no longer need to want to fly –
I ride the stronger steed my blunter eye requires:

Gimme a cracker.
Lemme smack her
with my suddenly voracious heterosexed lips.
Oh, I’m still gay. But voyaging with Star Trek
and engorging with my Wheat Thins
sometimes makes me want to kiss
another way.

.

Waking Up at 2 a.m.

As if the limit were two choices! –
sleeping, waking –
too much else is creeping, taking,
peeping, quaking, seeping, baking,
leaping, shaking, steeping, raking

in the spoils
amid the coils
and currents and synaptic zaps
of the enormously availing mind.
The thing is not to try to dream,

but rather undertake to glimpse
the largeness of the scheme
then give it up –
and let it go –
so you can stow your reservations

and sail off into the conjugations
of your hungry soul:
a seamlessness from dreamlessness
to waking life inside a boxing ring:
from hunch

to punch –
from creaming sweet oblivion
to steaming heat: lasciviously
mean and blasting –
to the polar regions

of analysis
where you are frozen –
perfect – whole.
Eat it all
and lick the bowl.


.

But what the hey.

Too much summer –
too much light –
what a bummer:
I want night –

yet I fight its fight:
obediently requite the season’s
yearning to ignite the power
of its pent-up and erupting fruit and flower

by devouring all the splat-and-shower
of July and June and August
that has barged its way
into my heretofore inviolable day:

which, who knows, may now sour
my past preferences
for April, January and October,
March and May.

Too much,
I say,

But what
the hey.


.

Poem Without a Happy Ending

Remain an instant
to regard this man,
so utterly

without a hand
in the deportment
of his limbs,

who stands by virtue
solely of the steady
arm of his companion –

grim-lipped
woman too inured
to the battalion

of his spasms to do
more than “be”
and affectlessly lead:

retain the image
of his tongue
sprung out

in twitchy rhythms
like a lizard
from his lips,

and his too-mobile
eyes which blink
beneath the visor

of a baseball cap
in the illusion
of perpetual surprise.


.

Aptly Colored

“Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us
is forced upon them by our conviction that they are
themselves and not anything else, by the immobility
of our conception of them.”

Swann’s Way: Combray, Marcel Proust


It’s taken fifty-seven years
for me to start to savor Proust:
I couldn’t not enjoy the plump
advantage of this richly feathered
roost I daily co-create – light

and green beyond my windows –
bright, inside, with such upholstered
densities, imaginary scenes –
now aptly colored by the vague
mist of recovery from transient

illness’ dreams – thus to persist in
this sweet stillness – so to dive
into the dawn of Swann. I could
go on, perhaps I will, perhaps
for quite the rest of life, to get

to where he got – or not. I learn
already from Proust's artful flight
that one has only to attend to
everything at once to get it right.
Ah, to weave one’s own variety

of meaning out of every fiber
of one’s sight! – just slightly sick,
just this strange sprightly
instant right before the quick
becomes the dead: though that

suggests a dread I do not feel:
today I let my senses reel
with just enough of that fleet
enigmatic music to imagine it
as an occasion to reveal the next

concealed scenario – led by this
strange engaging impresario,
Marcel. Brash of me, assuming
such an intimacy! Neither one
of us, perhaps, is quite yet well.


.

On Having Food Poisoning, or: The Other Side of New York

Not a place she’ll let you be
if you don’t have the energy –

not that she will care: she won’t.
Can’t keep up? By all means don’t.

Find a corner, like a kitty cat, to die.
She won’t blink an eye.

(Never has been pretty.)
Want to live in New York City?:

Here’s the trick.
Don’t get sick.


.

A Dixie-cup of Stew

Stir the pot in order to extract
from your dear savory illusion
of hegemony some sense that
you have got a hand in how
the stew will bubble up and out:

all the spices you must call on
are, however, inner, which suggests
you can’t pretend you know
precisely what you’ll have for
dinner; even though it’s cooking

in the most familiar hearth, and –
at least as far as you can tell –
extrapolates itself from nothing
but your own organic parts.
You’re in the kitchen of your heart;

the dining room’s your head:
your pantry is your pancreas;
but every time you shop it’s for
the same ingredients you would
have had had you decided not

to shop instead. Every day you
sit here in the city lights and
contemplate familiar sights:
upholstered bed and wood and glass
and brass kadiddly-doos from

which you daily choose to see,
appraise and raise another
vibrant spread: you’re in the market
for a magic carpet on which you
might shed constraints and fly

into another private sky – pack
a dixie-cup of stew and on a woven
wing discover somewhere new
to find to land and eat and sing.
Or you take a nap. Kindred thing.


.