Like Mother, Like Child

Every night she was home of her last several
decades of living, my mom carried with her
a gelid green Tupperware tube-glass of milk
up to bed: as iced as the freezer could make it –

so when she’d awake in two hours or so
through a slice of the night, she could take it,
and slake a deep thirst with its still-cold
white liquid – delight in the burst of whatever

delights me when I, too, arise from my slumber
to lumber across to the kitchen to find in
the fridge the gargantuan gallon of milk I insist
upon keeping to punctuate sleeping – to help

me derive a required and kindred effect. She
did it with délicatesse – while I do it more like
a delicatessen, open all night: I haul out
and gulp from a giant container; she sipped from

a slender tall cup. Like mother, like child, though,
in how we got up to go back to a similar well.
Neither of us had been nursed at a breast:
I wonder if that was a part of the spell.

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That Gold Thing

You’ve got that gold thing going on again –
come earlier today –
yesterday you brayed Louisiana rain –
full of storm and sway –

but now you brave a big broad wink of later
summer: hot as hell
but full of angled light – as if a freighter
had come in to swell

the harbor with the first grace of a harvest –
harbinger of fall –
to summon up a hunger for the largest
part of anything at all:

the bounty in the evening we will reap
before we wrestle
with its lack – before we take another leap
onto the trestle

of the bridge of yet another year –
with luck to struggle up into the clear.
But you’ve come earlier today, my dear.
The shadowed angle’s almost here.

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I Don't Understand Chocolate Ice Cream

It seems like it's a good idea, but every
time I taste the stuff, I don't believe in it.
Frozen cream is one thing, dark chocolate
is another. One would like to loft a bit,

the other wants to smother. Blended, they
persist in a resistance: their wedding is a cover.
I think chocolate ice cream really wants
to split, go back to source. I'd say divorce.

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Triumvirate

Each day is a triumvirate: three winning beasts: the first (but
not least) of the second and third is the luminous bird that awakens
at four when it flies through an avian doorway of consciousness

towards a predawning translucence of birdybrain thought –
which by noon it has wrought into filigree silvery musical trills
which it spills into air – which transmutes to the lair that the second

contender – the bear – burrows into to nap – who, after eight hours
of being a bird, is delighted to gird and curl up in one place
for a change: the range of a lap of a redolent somnolence in which

the echoes of birdsong can ripple like fresh gentle splashes
in rapids, whose proddings soon rouse the bear out of his sleep,
send him deep into unexplored patches of woods to dig roots, seize

and grab in the trees at berries, small mammals, then catch
leaping fish from the falls, enjoying their bloody and terrified wriggles
and squalls as their effluent beings leak out of his paws – work

hungrily done, the bear lumbers back to a clearing: he lunkily senses
he’s nearing the entrance, again, to the end and beginning of new
metamorphoses: eight o’clock: funky time! monkey tme! – enter

the ape, the spry primate presuming anew to morph out of the bear –
and his blunt ursine view – daring to sneak into realms you and I lack
the guts and the stamina even to peek at – the sleek little simian

rat piques and rattles his simian aptitudes – snatches, manipulates
up, down, around, over, under the vines with which he must
consort and divine through the night, ‘til he turns into purplish lines

of a dream, which turns into the scheme that turns into the bird
who flies out of the dark night’s large herd of delights, once again,
right at four. Each day is a bird, bear and monkey – and more.

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Give ‘em Hell

A Mission Statement

Let poems
have such
cocky points-of-view –

so scurrilously
querulously
squirreled through –

they might
from this
insistent fro-and-to

sweat out,
at least remotely,
something true.

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Humming in the Eye

Particle or wave – tsunami –
time-free snapshot – motionless
surprise – photographed: forever
delicately startled eyes – or some yelp
rushing, blasting with such force
and speed there is no help for it:

looking through the summer’s
crystal lens – exacting point-of-view –
I can’t see anything held back: nothing
hasn’t been set out, arrayed for me
to see: nobody is covering the truth:
everything is everywhere, on top,

upfront; the surface holds whatever
key that there could be: I’m as much
the sea as sea, or sky as sky:
all there humming in the eye.
I saw a pretty mother push an empty
pram meticulously up a sidewalk –

West End Avenue – followed by
a very little girl, presumably her daughter,
pushing her toy empty pram as well.
Memory has turned them into water –
glass: absent and eternal. Every
image lasts, tinkles like a bell.

.

Fatal Imbalance

Energy
without desire
breeds
a dire anxiety –

desire
without energy
creates
a baleful mire.

Wedded:
breath and art.
Deathbed
if they part.

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