Here's the Test

Grim frigid outpost
of the broken tiles
and pitted steel
and concrete of the bald
inhuman efficacy of New York:

the structure – soulless –
of a subway platform –
predicating winter as
the antidote to sentiment –
New York as unfeeling creature,

barren rocky moon:
no room for, interest in
the loneliness of your affections.
New York is defection
from all softness, warmth today –

its cold and brutal business
soon comes clear:
spawning yet another year.
You think you love her?
Meet her here.



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Washing My Mother (revisited)

I wrote this four years ago to the day: 12/30/04. I place it here now
because I just came back from seeing the marvelous movie
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and it made me remember
this poem. So - here it is again.

(30 December 2004)

"Put on your robe. I'll help you to the bathtub,
mom." A calm like church as the assemblage
of her terry-clothed fragility held onto you as
both of you walked slowly down the hall.

A bath-seat waited, and you turned a gentle rush
of water on, and helped her slip out of her robe,
and surely as she'd commandeered your baby body
more than fifty years before, you helped her,

naked, lift her spindle legs above the porcelain,
and past the shower door, to settle on the stool,
willing that the water be the right degree of warm.
You swallowed your amazement at her girlish form.

You wonder at this moment - soaping, rinsing,
drying the frail dying woman who had lent you life -
overcoming everything that ought to have
forbidden it. You can't imagine how you did it.



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This Was The Year

This was the year I caught Manhattan’s early spring
off-guard – bare-assed – all barren rock and infant grass –
naked as a fuzzy ugly eaglet. This was the year I gave in

to the tumbling New York City summer – let the blunt
force trauma of its humid torrid volupté have its exorbitantly
sinful way with all of me: discovered in tree-ripened peaches

reaches of a thundering penumbral sweet embrace for
which I hadn’t until this year found a conscious place. This
was the year the autumn demonstrated that it knew the lurid

colors of the darker regions of the Universe quite well:
this was the year it offered up an orange moon as horrible
and wonderful as hell. This was the year I grew to know

the winter solstice: let it bolster me with its grave
ambiguities and learn they have a rumbling lot to do
with my own destiny. This was the year I felt my body, bones

link to the reeling wheel – its spokes and bumps throughout
the months – found I was indistinguishable from its feel
and apparatus, spin and rise and fall: that I was bits

and pieces of its rolling all. This was the year I stopped
expecting “deep” and found “complete.” This was the year
my psyche might just finally have had enough to eat.



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Later in the Day

To have, as your medium, speech –
when what flourishes inside
is so beyond reach – when what reels
in the slowest and softest diffuse

sort of way – counter-clockwise –
against what you’d thought was
the natural sway – to think that for this
there were words – is like thinking

you’d know how to fly if you queried
the birds. But query the birds you do,
and whatever you learn turns out
private: inchoate: essentially tailored

to you – inexplicable – secret –
and fine – though it tastes of the delicate
wine of aloneness. Strange how
the soul labors, later in the day.



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After a Phone Call

Glittering and precious
self-defining narrative –
excruciating – crucial! –
how long have you held

tightly to its golden bars
and stayed inside its cage?
Unlatch its fragile door:
come out: engage.



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More Honey

If I were to try to tell you what you do for me,
I’d have to sit here like a hive of bees incurring
batches of more honey, and more honey, and more
honey – each provisionally adequate for this,
abominably wrong for that, and no poor hungry
bee would ever get the least bit fat – I’d not allow

one insect to be fed as I inspected yet another
flowing bed of golden but inappositely useful
liquid sweetness: each would be discarded with
a rabid fleetness for its imperfections – for the ways
it hadn’t spread upon the tongue to offer one
scintilla of a sense of how you tread upon the planet

and invent new ways to turn each quantum bit
of nothing into something that might just as well
be kickass cosmic big bang sex, though it may
masquerade as gentle glance or slow intake
of breath. (That’s the sort of thing I’d say: not yet
remotely on the money.) Back to make more honey.



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Christmas Card from Your First Cousin

Emerges from a jambalaya of past voices – crises –
still alive – if half-forgotten – burbling up like Cajun
peppers – colors – spices: can’t escape
kaleidoscopic chaos at the fringes, bubbling surfaces
of these expansive layered breathing heaving steams,

these bright unfathomed dreams, dimensionalities:
a Christmas card from your first cousin says:
“Still hanging in there” – and at first you think you taste
again the rarefied strange peppered tang of this
exotically elusive just-post-solstice air – but no, you

aren’t here or anywhere you know: this is an atmosphere
in which you’ve never been – stinging like a dozen
dissonantly overlapping saxophones in an indifferent
war of jambalaya jazz bands – moaning out their
frazzled songs about the inescapability of family sin.



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