What the Night is All About

 

In your floating yellow predawn dream,

your bed is evanescing into ghostly splotch
and something pastel green appears
to want to watch.  Another crack of late

night morning – one to two – breaks open

to uproot you – as if consciousness in sleep
were mostly proving more unwieldy than was
good for mental health. There must be wealth

in wanting to be wakened. Something’s

shakened, but it isn’t telling. Something
irrepressible: a fresh upwelling takes another
form and there you are again, still warm from

having been accosted, lost in almost pleasurable

doubt which, like a melon smashing, wakes up
into wet and ragged pieces – manifestly you –
wondering what the night is all about.









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The Romance of Bad Weather in New York

 

Weeks away from Spring, late afternoon is lighter

than it used to be: turns dusk as if the atmosphere
through which it has to suffer weren’t there –
the air, a brittle edge, a frigid slice of thinning Winter

cuts the skin – and suddenly I know this city

saves my life. Spirits in me softly climb and tumble –
seizing and releasing. The storm will soon arrive.
My city! – oh my city, oh my city! – is alive.









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All of This

 

for Catherine Synan Green

Aiming my investigative apparatus

at the voluble variety of you,
I find myself acquiring a picture
which entirely takes up my point of view:

that of seeing you not caught so much

as situated in the network of a spine
directing neurological behavior
and sensation in some vastly larger

glowing creature whom my irrepressible

imagination is suggesting is divine.
Something knowing gives a nod.
All of this is God.










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Beat

 

To try to find you in your fine defended privacy –

to touch and understand what overwhelms
in those most unreported realms –
to conjure up some access to the primacy

of what enrobes your soul in secret

and provides its impetus, its locomotion –
to chart the dark expanse of that great ocean –
come upon its meditative calm and peek at

something at its levitating center: sense the heat –
the endless deep research, the trenchant leads on
what I’d need to get at what your psyche feeds on –
has me beat.










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Your Findings

 

Abandon your notions

of cause and effect
and express some affection
for who or whatever’s nearby.
Report on your findings.

Oh my.

.

In a Way

 

The apples you purchase

in March in New York at bodegas
relate to the apples you get in September

at fresh produce markets the way

certain yearnings for romance
relate to the last time you

can’t quite remember

that you were
in love.

In a way.

Push never quite

came to shove
today.










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This Thing That Sits and Talks at You

 

This thing that sits

and talks at you –
when will it stop?

You aren’t fond of stories.
The flop and splay of facts
arrayed as if

their manufactured tactics
all intrinsically
had interest doesn’t interest.

This thing that sits

and talks at you –
its infinitely intricate specifics!

You crave to be inoculated
by the serum of the flow
of what persists below.









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