Another Melon Day

Another melon day –
focus gone translucently
astray – warm and strange
and fat – kept on the vine
by nascent summer

misaligning with surreal
collective memories
of monasteries full
of chanting monks –
humid with their breath

and modal melodies –
and all the blowsy
incense-funk and rote
of abstract prayer: although
it’s New York City air

we might be somewhere
other than we are: well, no,
we’re here all right: Manhattan
is the Universe’s sacristy
as we bear down on this

last day of May: en route
to its wet final night:
full of melancholic
holy melon light and its
peculiarly sweet delight.


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Family-free Tree

My father lacked a father
and my mother lacked a mother –
not immaculate conception –

merely early deaths –
the sorts that, while they left
bereft the rest of anyone

who loved them, didn’t cause
untoward surprise. Premature
departures were more common

then – and everybody dies.
But now I wonder how or if
my idiosyncratic eyes might

somehow have revised their takes
on what they see if those penumbral
absences had not occurred to me –

through both my father
and my mother as unconscious
legacy: lives pulled by wind

off barren branches:
a family-free tree. Is loss
a lack – or liberty?


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Sitting Down To Do It

To know the apparatus works –
its engine is in gear –
accept, forgive its fragile quirks –
its means of fighting fear –

to sit it down and ask that it
articulate the soul –
then watch it make a task of it –
pursue that foolish goal

without one bit of evidence
that it is on a track
of anything: improvidence
in front of you, and back –

like Jonah, in his sleepy whale,
while it was biding time
before deciding to exhale:
catastrophe!: you climb

atop the blast of Orca’s sneeze
and there you are, suspended
on some abrupt propellant breeze –
indifferently upended;

and yet the apparatus works –
its engine is in gear –
you’ve grown to love its fragile quirks –
and how it fights the fear.


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Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do

Little glimmer –
fleeting phosphorescence –
beguiling in your way –

enough, in fact, to tempt
my heart to stay –
and pay for it.

And pay
I do. Why you
eclipse my sight –

and keep me
from all other sources
of a sustenance –

is quite beyond
my grasp:
and yet

I’ll always ask –
implore – the gauzy
vasty reaches

of your last exasperating
astral effability –
for more.


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As If They Were Choices

Taking stock, I want to make a rhyme of it –
as if to beat some lilting time to it
would be to give it sense: who knows, perhaps it does:
for when I contemplate my batch of loves

and set them side by side before they wriggle off
to lose themselves in an embarrassed cough –
too fragile, too complex, and probably too small
to matter, really, very much at all –

the fact that I can make the first appear to swing
in assonance with who we were in Spring –
and I can make the second dance to devil’s trills –
perhaps convey a whiff of those dark thrills –

and I can draw a slow dirge from the third –
to let our aching loneliness be heard –
and I can render beats like punches to the head
to that drug-addled fourth love, and instead

of splaying out our chaos, find the pith
of how we managed to go on, and plead the fifth
was really just a wrestling mat for sex,
and cha-cha smartly through the vexing rest –

perhaps allows a chiming meter to emend
and bend the heart more softly, thus to lend
some solace and some meaning to the voices
I try to sound to comprehend my choices.


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Milk & the Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto: Memorial Day

Chugging fresh cold milk right
from the plastic jug – helps to sluice
and moderate the syncopated
slugs that Brahms persists
in drugging me with on this turgid
torrid Monday afternoon – this hollow

lunacy of holiday – this strange
deranged memorialization of a history
of slaughter: wave a flag, imbibe some
stylish water, pass the fat-free popcorn.
Shopworn Brahms in B flat major
on the radio clumps harmonies

like fertilizer on the plain of my
besieged, besieging brain: chords
arrive in thicknesses – like heavy
aromatic Caribbean rain: stewing his
arpeggiated lumps into a further richness:
straining blood into a fertile mud:

war into a distant thunder: seeking
to extract some wonder from its
blunder. Maybe constitutes an answer
to this charmless country’s propagating
fears. Defending war and praising
death is murderously hard, my dears.


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In the Belly of the Whale

By the time I’d reached my fifteenth year
I had within my cramped and tiny context geared
myself to tackle Mozart's violin concerto,
number four: I lumbered poorly through the score
at first: the prospect of uniting such a happy
burst of semiquavers with the flavors
of the maestro’s bright ebullience was quite

beyond my scope: but when you’re fourteen
you are biologically disposed to hope –
and, more important, have the muscles
and the reflexes – wed to a terrible anxiety
to please – to grow from hope a living being:
draw a pastel forest from its trees. I found a larger
place at last and populated it with Disney

prettinesses – knowing not without a little fear
that somehow, somewhere in the vast
still unexplored deep shadows of the music’s
cool and whispering surrounding woods
I’d find – when I was braver – where its dearer
goods were buried. So many years since then
have flurried; I still savor – play – some

strains of that concerto every now and then:
the notes are blurrier – more softly married:
Disney has long given way to something faintly
Kurosawan – my Mozart has a taint and taste
of Rashomon – wherein four witnesses of one
dark crime belie each other’s tales and leave
one wondering – stories within stories

that regale us with the questionable glories
of a human blundering. Ah – but – then: I think
of what those Disneynesses all entailed –
excitedly in tension with what fourteen year olds
barely sense lies dark – beyond – through many
lenses – their opaquely pretty veil: adolescence
plays its Mozart in the belly of the whale.





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