Half-Past Three Again

We’re here at half-past-three p.m. again – amid new
oblongs, shards of mesmerizing pearled December light –
carved by random closed-and-opened shutters in
the windows: drizzle spits against the panes.
The mystery remains: won’t bend or crack a lip or eyelid
for an interview. I will not say I see more than I do
and what I see is never more than one flicked stricken

moment of a thing – yet something sings: apparently
there’s change, and harmony: I’m now, presumably,
metabolizing tiny mountain ranges of two score
or so sweet red bell pepper slivers – yellow, too – all raw –
with dill dip and some hefty dabs of a voluptuously
mellow hummus which I dropped into the maw of my arcane
biology – and to refute the teleology of time: the strange

illusion that there is a goal, a line, an end implied between
what seems to have occurred back then and now.
I think from here on in I’ll fast – won’t eat another second,
minute, hour: there is no past, and I won’t let one
blasted bit of that hallucination hit: except, of course, in
my devouring dreams. There are, I cannot help but wonder
at them, dreams: let them, and poetry, consume my fat

and lean exaggerations. And still, and still the mystery.
That New York City is the only place for me has
much to do with what it does so metabolically to history:
spreads it like a dip on crudités and rolls it flat.
I digest its digest every day, evaporating and condensing
like the raindrops spatter, splat against the air
conditioner right now: a dash, a flash, a pitter-pat.



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