Breather

At six-fifteen on Sunday evening,
April sixth, Two-thousand-eight, while
cleaning out my coffee-maker in

the sink, I looked up from the running
tap and realized I’d lost my fear
of death. I can’t think how to give

the depth and breadth of it in any
other way than this: to say that it seemed
simply true that one day I would lose

my view and then skidoo. The coffee-
maker waits for me to push its button,
dawn, tomorrow – but there's no pain

or sorrow at my certainty one morning
it will wait in vain. If I should die
before I wake, not a thing will quake.

You’ll go on and I will not. And then there’ll
come a day or night when you won’t
either. Sit with me: let's take a breather.


.

Night Life of the Pennsylvania Dutch

In the night life of the Pennsylvania Dutch,
bundling was once, is sometimes still, the way
to trundle one’s ungovernably blazing fires
into touch and sway with someone you desired:
human duo on a mattress pillowed to allow
a mumbling stumble of the intimate to lodge
between, against soft layers of a flannel barrier

enforcing chastity: talk and touch, permitted –
naked skin: too much – taboo; wanting would be
muffled – stuffed – into the burning caverns
of the two of you. We are not unlike a bundled
couple, kept from coitus: for us, a barnyard
whiff of essence wafts indifferently into our cage:
promised delectations of the thing outside

so irresistible that finally we rage at being thwarted,
and the walls are clawed, pulled down: our fine
deliverance from full abandonment aborted:
passion’s pyroclastic flow sears ass to ash.
Why not take a breather in the bed, detect
the larger loveliness instead? Perhaps the good
life doesn’t mean you get a thing, but rather

bids you bring a bundling to every swing
of contradicting sense: thus stand to find
the recompense of wrestling paradoxes into all
their wacko parts – find their unrelated hearts.
Then, lightly musing on this elemental feud, praise
right use of plenitude. Maybe bundling answers
in its harbor-fleece. Might lend a kind of peace.


.

Perpendicularity at 5:00 on a Saturday Afternoon

Big
fat
fruit

of
a
day!

If
only
there

were
any
way

to
have
you.


.

The Chase, Cut To

There is no time,
and everything’s
hungry for God.

While I know we
should fill out
the gauzy peripheries,

I’m on the tip of
a whip cracking
out so unslippably

quick and miraculously
that I can’t catch
my breath to say

more. But we’ll
entertain the galore
of the rest when

we get to it: watch it
undress itself
grandly – enticing

eternity out of
each nipple and
thumb: and from

then on, my darlings,
you cannot play
dumb. Sing cosmic

rhyme and sever
yourselves from
each lumbering clod.

There is no time,
and everything’s
hungry for God.


.

Prep for a Poetry Reading

My friend Donna
asked me, “Will your
poems have a theme?”

“Sex, New York and food
and death,” I guessed
would be the team.

“Ah,” she said, “of course!” –
when she had heard me
shoot that wad.

Clearly I’d meant God.


.

Today we'll make sense.

Today we’ll make sense.
Though amassing ingredients needed

to knead and to ball up a sensible dough
and to bake the result

to right point of done
is never a whole lot of fun.

I’ve had my fill
of this bill

of fare.
But there’s

nothing to do
but to stir something new –

consume –
and construe.

I don’t know that the answer
might not be to flip off the edge

of the Earth, and have done with this
business of dying and birth.

But the lungs fill
and everyone’s hungry again.

Today we’ll make sense
but I can’t tell you when.


.

You Say "Shoo!"

Your sweet urgency needs room,
requires optimal fandango music:
floor and light and something
like a tiny fright to keep
you glistening: employed
with just the sort of tug-of-war
that I’d enjoy with you – that lovers do –

fresh from the shower, fighting for
the power, pulling on towels.
You are mahogany with dowels:
you feel the damp and sometimes
cramp with a humidity
that sometimes issues out of me:
your precious wood expands

and shrinks precisely in proportion
to the drinks I foist on you
from my importunately pouring
soul. You need a latitude
surrounding you: you wish me out
of your meshed circuitry. You are
a Chippendale settee that dances

naked Chippendale cha-chas around
the hungry denizens of your purview,
like me. I descend to the impossible
shenanigan of the attempt
to climb you like a tree, and merely
rhyme nonsensically. You
living thing, you singing lesson,

hoochy-koochy dancer, piece of
gleaming furniture, you jockstrapped
stud who models in the sea of
my proclivities: indecipherability:
perfect antidote: bipolar antelope;
you John Donne flea that intimately
sucks my essence and infects,

and hexes. You are the Other who
perplexes: you convince me
of the number Two. I am
in orbit ‘round your gravity –
yet moving slowly out into the space
whose blankness adumbrates
the mystery of you. You say “shoo!”


.