Emily and Me in New York

I wonder sometimes at the call
Miss Dickinson derived
from every atom in the hall
of living – which she strived

to blast into a blinding frame
of flame – expunging breath –
so for an instant she could name
that moment before death

which we call life: predicament! –
or so it sometimes seems
that her sole cool medicament
for dealing with all dreams

proceeded from a cracking egg
that no one else could eat
or see, or think to ask or beg
to explicate the heat

of human hearts – that Emily
prevailed in any way
through metaphor and simile
to undergo the sway

to-wards the darkness and the gold
of turning on the light
on everything, not least the cold
experience of night

exhorts me: what would I have done
had there not been this city? –
there is no place I could have gone
as ample or as gritty –

it is as if Miss Dickinson
had taken over here –
deployed a magic trick, or sin –
thereby to commandeer

each atom for me of this grand
experience of place
so she could wield her wild hand
to grant it fathomed grace.


.

Punkass Daddy

Sweaty bluish prickle
on a pale shaved head
topped delicately by
a cone of coiled

finely braided ropes
of hair – shiny black
embroidered strings
of tiny beady bumps

against a bareness –
elegant coiffure
bespeaking Egypt
on a rocker boy –

rangy weedy dude
behind the pramful
he is pushing on
First Avenue of baby

joy – toy and product
of his loins – infant
cooing and enjoining:
braying at the day

as if there weren’t
any other way but
to be in the grip
and saddle of his

punkass daddy. Life’s
a feast of spillage
and glitches. Sweet
East Village bewitches.


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Objects Left Behind

Objects left behind are strange – as if
they’d lost their skeletons and had no gravity –
inwardly they flop about like airy ragdolls
full of brainless purposelessness – vaguely
scented by what once sustained them:

memories and yearnings strong enough
to form a presence: full of ardent longing:
strong enough to stand them up and give
them balance and a place: now all replaced
by almost empty space. Oh, they have

shapes – silver baby brush, a moustache
cup, a little flannel monkey puppet give
their ghostly nods to their forgotten
goddesses and gods: those now dead
perpetrators of their fates: their “owners”

whose demise erased their slates:
and here they are: blank legacies and soft
ridiculous abatements: artifacts of lives
once lived, now riven utterly, ground down
to waste. Still – they have a kind of grace.

.

To Get It Right

Here’s what gets me:
twenty-one-year-olds
paroling streets as if
the streets that they paroled
were new – I guess that’s
almost true: but also
wrong: I mean, to get it
absolutely right you
have to long for –
and demand to have at once –
what was, will be, as well
as is: to get it right you
have to stop and stand
smack in the middle
of whatever grand or humble
swatch of city ground
your feet have just been
pounding and resoundingly
declare you’re here

and, dammit, want the rest
of everything this instant!
Once, not long ago,
in fact this afternoon,
I had a blessed stretch of sex
with someone red-haired
and resplendently endowed
with pheromonal maleness:
after which I found
a Filipino cafeteria
which dared to serve crisp
deep-fried chicken skin,
whose sin I happily indulged in –
after which I came home,
ate first one and then
another golden plum.
I’d cried loud at New York
I wanted infinitely everything
and it had come.


.

The Indiscriminate Obesity of Summer in New York

The indiscriminate obesity of summer in New York! –
belly-whopping into you like frenzied Rubens ladies fresh
and sweaty from a steam-bath in their sopping pink

voluminousness: what a mess of lard and pork! –
and light: oh! – too much light – and yet: a kind of heavy
brightness enters you into the lottery of fate with

something like the great experience of – “gratitude”
is not quite it, no: nothing adequate in that pale thank-you
to this hex and salty potion of a blinding exaltation

that the indiscriminate obesity of New York summer
would exact from you – it’s true, you cannot not report on
what and who you are at any given moment, like the riven

foment of your heart right now – as you galumph again
into that frenzied Rubens cow who wants far more than
your frail maleness will allow – or than it’s got – well,

let the whole thing rot, and sing a song of summer
and the way your love for its psychosis keeps you
in the fray of living here. Fate swivels near: spits at fear.


.

As You Perfectly Well Know

Thin haze and hiss of static: oh,
the miracle is all here, as you perfectly
well know – and yet “ecstatic”

strikes you grimly: somewhere dimly out
beyond the hiss and haze’s cloudy
glow – past which you clearly

cannot go. You’ve pushed your aging
body through the layers of the day:
both it and you’ve acquitted

yourselves nicely, given circumstances –
which are: what? Every moment
butts and inches toward the end

and it would seem the only interest
that extends to you right now
is this intensifying sense that if

there is a purpose to the whole shebang
it isn’t to persuade you of a unity
at all; but rather to accommodate

you to the stark necessity of tuning
yourself to the perfect pitch required to
sing solo – in the thrall of the abyss.

Though you suspect this may
have something just a bit to do with
your just having given and received

a kiss – for which you hadn’t realized
until now you’d harbored hope.
Left you feeling like a dope.


.

I Will Be Woven Into It

Victorian aesthetic certainties abound in this strange

city: silent tombs of eccentricity all cheek-by-jowl

like mummies in a sprawling catacomb: their legacies

are surely those of tone: their carefully bedecked

repressed proponents so determined to portray

a status quo complacency quaked – trembled –
in the fear of anarchy not one whit less – perhaps
a good bit more – than we: no strangers to that

dark catastrophe of entropy which wants to suck
the soul into its sea: but come with me and peer up
at their grand defense of cornices and doorways,
ledges and adornments, loops and stoops galooping
out of this Manhattan cornucopia’s extravagant
array of egocentric fearful hungers to, and for, display:
appreciate their mad appropriation of the whole
of European history which lards and twirls their bricks

and granite into such a spree of concrete fantasy
one wonders anyone who walks among them
doesn’t stub an awestruck toe or bump a swooning
knee – Elizabeth the First, Napoleon and Bismarck
pirouette and smash into Miss Havisham’s gray
wedding cake: unending slices of it clot the streets
in rows of arrant indigestibility: each hull and shell
and carapace of which I now enliven with my mouse-

small light: organizing their mismatched baroque
extremities and finenesses until they form a shelf
for my live self. There is a strange security to be
lapped up among these many dead appropriated
glories. I cannot tell you how in love I am with every
one of their implied forgotten misbegotten stories –
to each phrase of which I add a wanton drip of my own
blood and sperm and spit. I will be woven into it.

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