On the Prospect of Playing String Quartets

It’s a little bit like sex.
You bring your body and your background

and whatever expertise your nervousness
has not completely teased away –

and face internalized assumptions that what
lies ahead is pleasure:

while the secret measure of the thing
brings terror. What’s the error?


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Take this: put it in a song

Amber, bronze, mahogany onset of Brahms –
Piano Konzert, Number Two – last small
warmth-against-the-winter: let its cello serenade

ensue – then lose it in a woozy waft and shake
of snow – let’s pray for early January ice to come
and splinter: stay and never go: let’s never have

another spring or summer: let an upward
snow-drift gather, slumber into glacial cliff –
an Ice Queen palace filigreed with folderol

and fractally Victorian snowflake geometry –
let all this soft encroaching rhythmic freeze
make crystal out of all our parts and needs

and settle them into the gentle unpredictability
and fits and starts of some new grand subzero
physics: breeding subtle quantum scherzo

quizzic intuitions which transcend all messy meaty
heat. Let’s be cold and sweet and magical
and strong. Take this: put it in a song.


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After 'OFF'

There is no silent night.
I press and click and shift all levers,
buttons, prompters, dials to “OFF” –
and then: the grand eternally internally

returning roar! – sufficiency soon
drinks itself into an ever-rising More:
timbres of inanimate apartment house –
refrigerator motor and a subtle nervous

trill: cooing, billing in the groin –
and on the window sill – quite like
the faint rejoinders I can just make out
from the monogamously married

pigeons on the fire escape:
there is this moment every night, before
I fall asleep: I doff my cape and face
the whisper of delivering my

consciousness to fate: doesn’t take
long for the cake to bake and frost
and cut and serve itself and fill the void
with fat and crumb: no ear is deaf;

no mouth is dumb; no stomach
isn’t ravenous. Every moment is a portal
to a cavernously echoing mad
smorgasbord: hungry, gaping, crying

to be fed: rash assonance and circus
in my head: rhyme-zone of a dream-land: –
time honed to a scheme grand
enough to wield distraction – feed

the tummy with the waddles and
the wobbles of its modicum of sense:
exact for me a dense big bang –
pack it into something I can hang.



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New Year's Resolution

(Careful, buddy: this
could get you killed.)

Today’s the day for saying no.

Or rather, shoveling your no-no’s
like a pile of snow and packing
them in igloo blocks into a poem
so they don’t so baldly show.

(Careful, buddy.)

Have you noticed? People
are extravagantly delicious.
Sometimes the only thing to do
with one is lick it like a lollipop

then leave it on a non-stick
surface so that when it wants
to make a break, it can.

Forgive my ambiguity.
“It” means man.

(Careful, buddy.)

Here’s what I don’t understand.
Why put up a front?
Why don’t we do what we want?

Next time I snap my fingers
you will cheerfully appear.
Or, hell, crawl like a cowed dog –

fearfully near. Next time
I’ll be the boss. You’ll be the whim
I simmer to a fine soft foam –

or give a toss. Wrestle in
the rain and loam until we’re
muddy. Won’t stop until some

blood is spilled, or love is milled.

(Careful, buddy: this
could get you killed.)


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New York Barbie Wonders

Lime sherbet against black? – she hoped that someone
might just make her clothing’s colors smack of life
today: in some extraordinary way! And yet Manhattan
winter days conveyed a kind of softer glory whose
rewards demanded, she began just barely now through
her tight-coiffed and pink appurtenance of head
to understand, a subtler story: every time she went for

glitz, the city seemed abruptly to resist – strange,
she thought: New York with all its clamor – and its rep
for glamour – but her hot pink tulle, electric crimson voile,
and glossy purple satin all looked out of sync – did not
do justice to this pearly air of late December’s brink:
she wondered what of her innumerable bright adornments
and accessories would keep her from obsessing over –

yet more loss. She was a Barbie doll after all, a plastic
toss of latency, a temporary dream of little girls: two pointy
tits – a painted face like 1950s vamp Anne Francis –
and a hunger for a whole lot more than Ken. Sitting
stiff-legged on a window sill – left again, bereft, by yet
another fickle pair of hands – she wondered what the color
was for happiness – how would she get it? – when?

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Cloud

Fled the sky in bits and shreds to flit and settle
into feathered, soft, round day – inveigling its
insinuating way – bound for the bottom of the well
of me – as if to cover, briefly, with its velvet gray down,

several tiny creatures made of May – lost winged
things flung from Spring – dazed – without a dwelling –
pastel ghosts of warmth – small bewildered swellings
formed of petal and of sway – paradigms of butterfly

and blossom – so dismayed by their alarming brush
with gossamer perfection they’ve forgotten time
and space – and now are nothing but the glimmered
shavings of some past remembered state of grace –

aberrations from another season – blind to gravity
and reason: fading as December day becomes
a freezing blight – and as the gray turns into colorlessly
darkened lack of light. I am made of May, and they

have looked for me like family: but they are exhalations:
not susceptible to human sight: gone as soon as felt.
Tricks my mind plays, after all the dissonance
of Christmas, as solstice clouds turn into night.


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Brain Freeze

Cerebral diversion! – perils of ingenuity.
Does a kitten think of hope and death and count
vicissitudes? One doesn’t know – which is

perhaps precisely to assert one can’t forget that
every abstract thought is no less an effusion
of biology than spit. (If only that, or anything, were it!)

“I’m just gonna hang out with my cousin.”
“What’s wrong? You don’t seem yourself.”
“I told her you would be there.”
“Tell me I came back and did this for nothing.”

Stabs at prescience: careful divagations of the mind:
“why can’t we ride like normal people?” Ha! – but
here’s the ticklish rub: the fickle tub of a coagulated

cream: the brain: the center, drain, apotheosis
of the dream: spattered paint. You flatter yourself
you’re Jackson Pollock; but you ain’t. You might …

however … not not be – entirely.


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