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POEMS IN THE YEAR OF THE STEP-CHILD AND LATER
Frog Hunting at the Ditch -- inspired by above photo called "Drain" by Jeff Wall
There were frogs there
lots of frogs and polliwogs --
frogs' eggs too.
Age eleven
I went there every week
to capture them -- mothers, eggs and polliwogs.
I brought one home to my own mother
(who screamed as I released it --
this wildly leaping creature --
into her bedroom)
so happy I had caught a frog
like me
a captive long-legged changeling.
But what
really grabbed me
was the drain
long as a mile
that five-foot-wide conduit
with two more ducts coupled into it --
those two too small
for even a toddler to crawl --
the omnivorous culvert
tall as I was tall
that went under the railroad tracks.
And if you were lucky
or unlucky enough
the train could blaze
right over your head --
comet sparks flying only feet above you
earth shaking like an orgasm --
in the drain
in the tunnel as tall as a girl.
Like it was just the coolest thing
that would ever happen to you
if that train went overhead
and you lived to tell
about it in school.
But of course almost no one
(except my friend Eileen
who sometimes went there with me)
knew about the drain and the
two skinny pipes
like fallopian tubes
that emptied into it
so narrow that
babies could die there . . .
Like that kid Cathy
in nineteen-forty-something
trapped in a tunnel underground
(or was it a well?)
in god-knows-what-god-forsaken place
where she fell
and fell
like Alice
and Jill
with no jack-of-white-rabbits
to catch her
back when prayers were still answered
and we all prayed
for her three year old body and soul
gathering around the radio
and she died anyway
in the well.
I think it was in Texas --
it must have been Texas --
a place large enough to hold
all the world's falling girls
and the vast emptiness of death
in one constricted passage . . .
Nearby
in dense copsewood
stood the ruin of a house --
its chimney exposed -- and
jack-in-pulpit treasure
sprouting beyond the hearth.
Never had I seen such things
and always I approached
as to an altar
softly
bearing jars of polliwogs.
3/97
Step-Mother's Tale
In this step-mother stage of life I am
bitten by old fairy tales, gray-green
as wolves and grim as the reaping
of those brothers whose eponymous
adjective gallops like a verb through their works,
warning us of life's inevitable,
our childhood's horsemen of the apocalypse.
Old fairy tales open their oven mouths
and I enter with candles of memory.
Dim light simmers with my dangerous thoughts.
I am an unfired vessel over flame.
I watch the family romance on the wrong
side of the glass, half-conscious of a scene
that features puppets and changelings.
Always angry and always disturbed in
some vague way, I am as though roused from dreaming
of my father or lost in a Trojan play.
Who is it who writes the step-mother's tale?
Where is the alison, the teller of truth,
alyssum to cure the rabies and mad dogs in this heart? And what to do
about the oven door that slowly closes?
1/97
Fairy Tales Can Come True
I have seen the dark side
of your snow white child
her face as perfect as the moon
so pale, serene
I could not glean
a creature
as well composed
could cast me
on my shadow
gleaming
wild step-queen by all reviled.
But I am not the first
to fall in love with a flawless face
holy as the snow
discount lip's lingering halo
lace of lies and heroin
and still keep dreaming
until I'd see the fight
was for our own life
then gladly shout
Drink your hemlock, damn you,
but not before you leave my house!
2/98
Upon Reading "Birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes
There was a hole in you so wide
Any hope of building a life
Had slipped right through it.
Guarding my own cautiously nested
Courage in my breast I saw that its nurture had
Swallowed my pity alive
Like a cuckoo's egg
Misguidedly placed in my care.
It's not my fault (never your fault)
Brandished in anthem tones
Stentorian as stamping feet
The collective wail and banner
Of Torrie Amos girl-groups:
You made me do it.
A suicide story
Whining to play and
A note, you say, that was
Signed by somebody else.
Precocious poetry, self-absorbed
Your suckling depression the
step-child of fickle conceit
Requiring a bolder hero.
What was she thinking when
She turned on the gas
Her babies asleep nearby?
Did she mean to take them with her?
Was it all a bad mistake?
And everyone afterwards blamed him
For nearly forty years they blamed him.
In the air prevails
The scent of evil flowers --
Traces of Narcissus --
Their narcotic on your finger tips.
5/98
Step-Child
A step-child of divorce
dies of a broken heart.
They said it was congenital
but hearts still beating know
the aorta burst from
too much love swelling up
inside and a hidden
split upon its fork that,
undetected, would never mend.
Like Christ he bled to death
before his mother's eyes.
On the edge of their grief
I sit with my child, another
step-son of these divorces. My
arm is around him but I know
he is alone. And I watch him
grow up before my eyes
as the minister omits him while
blessing those bereft.
Such are the scenes we cannot
imagine as destiny,
like an axe, cleaves our will.
Fall, 1988 -- at the death of my son's step-brother
A Family Thanksgiving
Alone in the airport
No surprise
Sitting so long
Three days
With my mind's distortions
Inbred like a cancer
Of too many generations'
Weight upon me
Rockaby babies blown
From broken treetops
The end of a family line
On slender snapping branches
Until I thought
I would start shrieking
At the dinner table
throwing glasses
And said instead
simply
I have to go home
It was a tender moment
As you wondered
Did you mean to go to your place or . . .
And I responded
No, New York,
Back Home, New York
Then you began
To weep and plead
How much you loved me
But each remonstration
Just yanked the anger tighter
I tried to tell you
It didn't matter
That I was not worth the cry
And felt my cruelty
Rise like a hatchet
Its haughty tooth
About to fall
On uncleft flesh
Embittered spinster aunts
Guiding my hand
Smiling those one-cornered smiles
While I dug my fingers
Deliciously into your armpit
As in childhood
My crime undetected then
And you smiling sweetly
Bewildered
I dragging you behind me
Little sister.
The others stared
This time bearing witness
One nearly dribbling in his soup
But following every word
The other impassively
Demanding
An explanation I would never give
Since I didn't know myself
And could only keep repeating that
I was no more in the family
11/26/98
A Fall: 2001
It was an autumn of excessive sweetness:
like amber trees burned slowly
under Umbrian sun
or a long late fall in Rome.
But the fall was our home
and the empty hole eyes
the cells in each skull
in the skeleton of steel
were as countless as Roman ruins:
open pockets holding only our imagery.
First, an umbrella of warmth cloaked the city:
a veil of citron and pale orange
that hung its scrim upon our shoulders
keeping out the cold.
Souls of thousands searched for home
confused as the mayhem of the day
flailing feverishly
they warmed the city with their wings.
Then, the sound of the gravel haulers:
emptied
roaring out the mouth
of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel
or other forbidden venues
on their way to Ground Zero
like hardy peasant laborers
again and again.
And the squeal of the N train
carefully creeping through Cortlandt Street
where crudely hewn timbers buttress-up the station
the route from City Hall
to Cortlandt
a perfect S
so that each subway car shrieks loudly
feels doomed
wheels fighting rails, body fighting air
despair of those who jumped.
And, at last, the sight of the ruin from West Street:
movie-set lights, seven stories of steel
still elegant
lovely as a gothic cathedral
with even an entrance
a portal.
And, tonight, I see a blow torch at its height:
at labor a cutter of steel.
How will we remember them
when his last light is done
and winter has finally come?
12/06/01
Lady L.
She is there
Draped in vertigo
Keeping the columns
With her torchlight.
The wind shifts and
A cat turns in its sleep.
2/2002
De Gustibus
My poems are my fatherless children
vague, unattended, not intended.
They are out there staring
waiting in rooms of houses
now belonging to someone else.
Quickly, furtively I view them
and I blush as I's appear
in the ink of their own eyes
voices and open-O mouths.
One near to me and brave
denies a poem is born from pain
declares it borne by art
a child on strong shoulders.
But I have no art, no child
just this pen
bitten at the end and
a need to devour whatever
will have me.
I am the deadbeat father.
10/03
A Yawnless Awakening: 9/11/1
Dreaming of a natatorium
A green marble birth place
Fingering my mind
With vines of memory.
Mossy walls.
A deep pool of wine and
No shallow line
For shore. Dreaming
Over and over this dream.
That day
I always wish I had seen
The dawn that day.
Instead I heard the garbage trucks
Perfectly paced
Backing up their honks
With metal crashes.
Beep. . . Beep. . . Crash
Beep. . . Beep. . . Crash
Why so loud the last?
The dream was swallowed
By a yawnless awakening
And never came again.
11/05
The Vest
The moon is traveling
the fog tonight
Wearing him like a pocket
As the silver watch
wears the vest.
11/05
Circle of Life
Rolling along on the bandy-bowed
Wheel of his legs
his cane the lever that keeps him moving
like the old-fashioned child's toy
a hoop and a stick
pausing in his urgent, labored orbit
and late orbit of life
he hurries his rest
at haste to find sleep.
11/05
Options
There are fewer bright options
Doors close daily
The looks, the wit
The heart-stopping smiles
reveal
Spinach on the Teeth
Some are born with
Spinach - O' - Tooth
They are the early wise
Drawing us
Where we will go
Startled others
Turn to them in surprise.
01/06
Missing Mystic
Do you miss Mystic?
No not anymore.
Why not? asked my insistent sister-in-law
Who was a pit boss in Atlantic City
Who'd been a pit boss at Mohegan Sun.
It was my parents that made me love Mystic.
They were there.
Evie was not your mother.
She was your step-mother.
Evie became my mother
By doing all the things my mother hadn't done.
She cared for my child
She cooked a goose
I so longed for order.
She was all the things
My mother was not
And I am still not
But may perhaps be becoming
Or leaving behind forever in sadness
So long.
But Evelyn had a bread crisper
And it gave me great hope.
08/06
Well Contained Violence
I was sixteen
I broke up all the furniture in my room
I took it to the garage
Receptacle of our highest tragedies:
Old license plates
My father's honorary degrees and
Framed membership
In the millenium clubs
He could not endure
Cars were unwelcome in our garage.
My father did not hit me in the face
As usual
When he did not like my lip
It was though it had been expected
As though he understood
This shucking of our shared past
The second-hand Christmas presents
The furniture left behind by the Rileys
To ill to move it out
Their dust
Their dirt
Their ownership
A lovely Victorian wardrobve
In broken gaslight's light
Not mine.
No it was not the usual hand
Coming at me
As fast as I could snarl.
He had tried after all
He had painted all my furniture pink
In secret places
The pink hung in long enamel tears.
I could not have known the value
Of what we had gladly
Demolished together.
08/06
The Facts of Death
Not knowing the facts of life
I learned the facts of death.
My mother told me to bury the cats.
They were four of five
in number, kittens,
the size of dead hampsters.
I buried them as at Trafalgar
in a cardboard box
in a ditch
Where I dug out a hole
in the soft, muddy earth
too soon to be
bared by reality.
Many have been buried this way.
At Trafalgar the Spanish did
not bury the dead at sea.
As they washed ashore at Cadiz
they buried them in the sand
wherever their bodies landed
As when a teenage cat
ran round our house
then, when I was ten.
My mother explained to me
that all her babies were dead.
She was far too young
to have babies
and too young to bury well
I buried them
as at Trafalgar
to be washed away by next tide
or rainfall in a ditch.
08/06
For Olga
I
The Greeks taught us everything.
They gave us their gods.
All of human psychology
lives in those gods.
They gave us democracy.
They recorded philosophy.
They gave us their art.
Then they said,
Go do with this
what you will.
Never mind
the incredible things
we have done.
We are done.
We have no move to give you.
II
When we went to Sparta
we saw the women
waiting, staring
in the lobby.
They were judgmental women.
Their faces were hard.
They were severe.
But they had your bones.
These were the bones of
strong women.
Your face has been softened
but it's still the same face.
III
And what I most admire
is your strength
tempered by forgiveness.
Such is the forgiveness of Greece
reflected in a face.
12/06
Invoking the Bard
How did it sound?
The roar from your mouth?
Can there ever be another?
Would that one be bountiful
Or merely more than clever.
I have been lucky
Paltry
Poor, at times
But lucky.
Vain, in vain
With antonomasia
Big-worded Bard
Of bawdy moments
I call your name.
I have been lucky
To have heard your words
And understood my paltry little.
12/06
Trailer Park Girl: Camp Shanks,* 1954
I took her to all the dead
and beautiful places.
After all, she was there
Waiting
in the vast parking lot
of Simpson's grocery store
once a place where all
the embarking G.I.'s
had come to buy . . .
In my ten year old eyes
I thought it held thousands.
But she was there
alone
with only a trailer
on an acre of empty cement
her parents had appropriated
Waiting for me.
She said she had no friends
because her family kept moving
in the trailer
from one bleak parking lot
like this
to another.
I tried to tell her how this place
had once been so alive
a parking lot full of G.I.'s
going off to World War II
buying, eatinng drinking
touching everything in sight.
(Simpson's had really been the motor pool --
a gas station, garage and repair shop
its denizens.
But I preferred to imagine my canteen
teeming, seething with dozens of jeeps
G.I.'s and army scenes, army life.)
I told her I would be her friend and that's
when I took her to all the dead and sacred places.
Here was the "colonel's house."
It was a school for awhile
but in 4th grade the oil burner
burst and it burnt to the ground.
Here is where the rose bushes grow
Yes, they still bloom in season
and here is where the grown-ups
made a playground for us.
Look at the rope swings
and all the good things
we had -- tire swings --
their memory is well alive here.
I remember fireworks
on the 4th of July -- in this same field --
so close I thought I could catch them
as they fell out of the sky.
There's a place in Shanks Village
where you can swing on a vine
over a slope and then let go.
Did you ever do that?
The vine slips over the branch
and then you must decide
to jump
to fall
or be bashed
by what you thought you'd left
behind.
Here's the big hill.
We still sleigh-ride on this hill.
We can crash into the FHA**
if we don't take care.
The FHA is where we pay the rent
but my mother makes me
bring the rent because
they have a picture of her there --
on the wall of the FHA.
Is she "wanted" asked the girl?
Why a picture there?
I guess she was a show-girl
she's very nearly bare but
I can't tell for sure
from where I pay the rent.
I dont think my mother is "wanted"
not sure I really care.
I've a story that's better --
about the sleigh-ride hill.
When I was five
my best friend's mother
took us to this same big hill
for dandelion picking and
we whined about the dandelion wine
we didn't want to work for.
But we picked dandelions:
Brett deBary, Mrs. deBary and I.
We picked forever and ever
happily ever after
under a perfect dandelion sun
and Fanny Brett deBary
went home with Brett
to make dandelion wine.
Two days later the wine exploded
kind of like the "colonel's house."
It blew a hole right into
the barrack's cardboard ceiling.
Mrs. deBary had Brett
bring me over to see
and we all stared in thrall
imagining the dandelions' roar.
We said good-by in front of the trailer
and promised to stay friends forever
and always
but I cannot remember her name.
I turned to wave and she stayed
Waiting
in front of the trailer
until I disappeared.
Next day the trailer was gone.
06/07
*The barracks of Camp Shanks were converted to public housing after the war and the camp was renamed Shanks Village.
**FHA=Federal Housing Administration
This is dedicated to Fanny Brett deBary and her husband, Dr. William Theodore deBary, on their wedding anniversary, celebrated June 17, 2007.
Of Course
Of course
What can we possibly do about this?
Two old people heaving in the bed
Like a final swell of wanting.
Ocean imagining all the other things.
Yes, each rogue wave ends like this
Even a tidal wave.
Somehow, someone remembers.
07/07
The Heat
I need to sleep in the heat.
Beyond childhood
Fully grown
When the heat was too much
I would crawl out
My bedroom window
Onto the gabled porch.
I would sit there
Like a griffen
On my haunches
Under the eaves
Waiting for the cool
But loving the heat
Waiting forever --
A griffen gone hunting for a bat.
The bat, of course
Was never to be seen
But that did lessen my love of the heat.
08/07
Sunday Morning Solipsism
It was Sunday morning at the New Jersey Shore
in a diner.
As I recall, my step-daughters were among us.
It was a happy moment.
No one had been disagreeable.
Something, perhaps one of the "girls"
had teased my mother-in-law
into girlish behavior.
She took out her teeth.
I remembered my own grandmother
once laughing so hard
her teeth fell out.
(I happened to be sitting on the toilet
being expected to perform --
I had evidently amused Nana
even if I had not performed.)
Nana's teeth clattered to the floor
like a chattering set of cartoon teeth
while Nana laughted on without them.
My mother-in-law
was likewise amused by her grandchildren
which is one of the gorgeous
wonders of the world.
Inspired by my mother-in-law
I told a story
apropos of nothing beyond itself
about a friend having said to me:
(the context is gone)
"You live in your head."
I will never forgget
my father-in-law as
the smile slid from his jaw to the floor
with all of his teeth intact:
My story was inappropriate.
I lived in my head and
the intimacy he saw
between me and his son
must have been a lie.
But it was not
After all don't we all
live in our heads?
Myriad are the coincidents
not mutually exclusive
and in those moments
the sleight of hand
holds the magic of memory,
chattering mnemonic
cartoon teeth
clattering to the floor.
09/07
Piero della Francesca
In the altarpiece of Montefeltro
Piero della Francesca
Was after perfect proportion.
(That's what it says in
Umberto Eco's History of Beauty.)
The Madonna, indeed, is perfect.
She is perfect and so is the proportion
And perfection of everything else
As far as I can tell:
Perfect Perfection, Perfect Proportion.
Nevertheless
The Madonna is petulant:
Her hands are almost
In motion as she prays.
I would never do that
She imagines in her
Otherwise beatific pose.
But the Babe is about to roll
Over those widespread folds
Covering splayed legs
Given way more than room to move.
All holds barred, the Babe
Is corpulent
Not in the least attractive.
The Madonna would like
In fact
To roll the baby off her lap.
Evidently the others
With their unhappy mouths
Might do the same.
Piero della Francesca
Was ahead of the time
Seeking a new proportion:
Or perhaps, only
Miming the titams.
01/08
Never Mess with a Borderline
Never mess with a Borderline.
Their testing and abandonment issues
Will always come home to bite you on your booty.
They will always seduce you.
They cannot help themselves.
It's part of the package --
Their imaginary self-deal --
I am going to be left by you.
And, yet, they will always leave you.
How do you know?
When you've been left
At the moment you least expected.
NNDiF, Feb, 2008
Nine Eleven and One: or The Eyes of the E-Train*
The Eyes of the E-Train
Still stare at me
Prescient
Before a September morn
And present beyond many more
Afterwards and now
The eyes are still there
The Big Eye of Our Apple
Just at the passageway
From Chambers Street Station
To the Trade Center Stop
A passage of eyes in tile
Mosaic of many nations
And largest of all
Iris Corona of colors
Embedded in the puzzle
Pupil Wide, Open Mouth
Fixed in a Scream:
Our City
Epicenter of the Universe
1/11/09, a synchronicity
*Several years before 09/11/01, artists brought to life -- with dozens of mosaic eyes of many colors and ethnicities -- the walls of the subway passage between Chambers Street and the World Trade Center. The crown jewel of this work was a grand floor mosaic that represented a map of the earth with an eye at its center, yet seemed to me to be NYC as the epicenter of the world. It ushered the parade of mosaic eyes to become, in my mind and in retrospect, symbolic of all the eyes that would close at 09/11/01. This larger mosaic was called "Occulus", and was finished in 1998 by artists Kristen Jones, Andrew Ginzel and Rinaldo Piras.
(Now, in 2016, just beyond the new WTC, we have the Oculus, designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava, a connection hub that continues the imagery by resembling a 'vigilant bird of prey' from the outside and a 'milky view of the interior of an eye' from within. It looks like heaven to me and if well maintained, could become the most perfect of all the Memorials to 911.)
After Reading Taking the Quantum Leap
When I was in my early twenties
And dumber than my dirty blonde
We talked about the "Secret of the Universe"
with solemn appropriate respect.
I said, "It will surely be a paradox,"
Having read about Black Holes being such
And feeling very clever.
Then we talked about the "Afterlife"
And feeling evermore clever I said,
"Maybe I believe in inter-galactical reincarnation!"
* * * * *
In the world of quantum mechanics
I,d like to pop the quiff
Gleefully, with zest
Jumping from Newtonian particles
To quantum interference patterns
(Or is it just the opposite?)
In my solipsistic observations
Of self and other, other and self
Free will and consciousness.
But when I am about to die I shall prefer
Parallel Universes and select the one
Where my possibility goes an and on . . . . .
No more paradoxical than particles
In the face of wave patterns.
04/09
Stalker
When I imagined you were stalking me
Trolling the internet
Did you think that your persistence
Would wear me down
As my indifference
Whet your appetite for me
Revealing your lack of aptness
And quickening my revulsion for you?
I forgot . . . . . I was imagining.
02/09
But You Are a Wicked Old Soul
She feels as though she were losing him already
Yet she always dreaded this would happen.
He was now still younger than most of her poems
Yet older than she when she'd written them.
She had made certain he was perfect
And he rarely disappointed
A shining solitaire
Testament to their once-shared argosy.
How surprised she was at how he'd done it
The way that he would leave her
Always expecting a horrible accident
Or an illness
Felling his body
Cleaving his heart from soul.
She had imagined her own hospitalization
To keep her from hurting herself
At that thrall of outliving one's child
As she rended her clothes
And howled at fresh kill of the moon.
This was so simple, so elegant and so silent.
He need say nothing
It was just a choice
And she saw that a path had come to an end
Family tree with blunted trunk
Damaged branch
Ebbing life upon the bud
Never to be with blossom
Dismembered and maudled embryo.
She was startled at how much that hurt
As though the very roots felt pain
As though she were feeling all the old
Miscarriages of her life that tried to justify
A death wish on a child.
Like Demeter
She would wander
In the kingdom of the barren
While he kindly smiled
Pure as a Prince
Serene as new-born Venice
Sailing to his Ithaca
Still shaking his head, no.
It stops right here.
Always remember
You said I had to go against you --
A betrayal of the highest order --
And that when I did
I would know I had become a man.
You have gotten everything you ever wanted
And now that manhood too --
Most greedy of mothering threshers --
Which is why it stops right here.
I shall not craft
Your Venice for you
Or even your voyage to Ithaca
This you shall not have
Mother.
Now I am my own self
But you are a wicked old soul.
04/09
How Could You Write That
How could you have said that
For everyone to read?
Did you not see how that would affect me?
You always taught me to be free in my speech
But be thoughtful of others.
Where is your thoughtfulness right now?
05/09
Mama Mammalia
My poetry speaks from a dark side
--Sinister window
--Shadow on my soul
So when in my poems
I'm a murthering mother
I must really mean it.
Maybe forgive me
Baby forgive me
A well-mannered mammal
A mama mammalia
--Mammaries flapping
--Occasionally slapping
A socially civilized
Smiling pink whale
Odd moments voicing anathema.
So do as I do and not as I say.
05/09
The Horses of Hector
Who writes of the Horses of Hector?
Hector, Tamer, Breaker of Horses
Dragged around Trojan walls
Again and again
By the Brutal Achilles
Who slew him by knowing
Knowing the flaw
Hole in the armor
Once worn by Patroklus*
Achilles was angry, jugular angry
While Hector beseeched for respect.
Zeus pitied the horses
Those of Achilles
Lamenting their tears
Regretting his gift
Thus garnered
Those horses our honor.**
While the Horses of Hector
Must stare at their master
Mute, shamed and mortal
The slain hero flayed
By the ground about Troy.
09/09
*Hector was, alas, wearing the armor of Patroklus which Acchilles knew was flawed at the neck.
**See "The Horses of Achilles" by C.P. Cavafy.
What I Saw Out My Window
The buildings have torn the sky in two
--Not what you're thinking--
Just Jersey City buildings
Doing their circus side show
Maybe the late night light
has slashed the mauve
with a perfect black wound
that bleeds across the horizon
2/19/10
Reconstruction Site
In the shadow of 9/11
The lights creeep up on you
Surprising lights
Leaping from the shadows
Consecutive lights
High as my shoulder
Under the scaffold
From the blackness at right
And the stranger at my back
Overtaking my back
Swallowing the distance between us
Is my own shadow-self
Doing it again and again
Until the lights are gone.
2010
Callie
We used to talk of things like this
You and I, we two, at Cafe Loup
Where we met for years
Under the brief umbrella
Of dinners with too much white wine--
Champagne and caviar to our words
We spoke portly thoughts
Or so I thought
In those brave days when we were
Hardly old yet almost wise
Still struggling for guises to live
Not die by
Live one's life as a work of art
I brayed while stuffing pate
And you gravely nodded
Always respectful
Even though you must have seen
Clearly
Beneath your great thick glasses
A dour truth about these years
When I knew I knew you
But merely spoke for myself
As we all do in our flailing efforts
To connect
Today
No more fat ducks
As I scramble onto lines--
Mourners asserting themselves--
For a place in your life
Your history
But now we can only agree
You are not here to show it
Make sure they all will know
While we press each other for position--
Mired by our wallow of questions--
To cry I loved her
Or I was her lover
Or I loved her most of all
Almost forgetting the grief
Of those who really did
Too late
We are all here too late
Oddly uninvited
Yet graciously received
Tell me, Callie,
When you called to seek advice
About a suicidal friend
Were you calling for yourself?
Was the bell for thee?
If that, we heeded not
So I tell myself you are at peace,
Make do without your art
05/13/10
Commentary on "Callie"
The six "not knowings" in the poem for my step-sister, Callie Angell:
1) The not knowing why.
2) The not knowing more of your vision.
3) The not knowing of miscommunication.
4) The not knowing of one another's rlationships, and relationships with you, that only you could know.
5) The not knowing what you did and did not know about yourself and what you might have done.
6) The not knowing when one should have known better, as when one should have known for whom the bell tolls.
HAIKU FROM THE iPAD OF EMILY DICKENSON*
SOMEHOW
"THERE IS NO FRIGATE
LIKE A KINDLE"**
DOESN'T REALLY WORK WELL.
WONDER WHETHER
"THERE IS NO FRIGATE
LIKE A NOOK"**
WORKS ANY BETTER?
08/10
*early notepad computer
**e-books circa 2010
The Sun Today
The sun did not get up today--
he has such a hangover.
And his beard of clouds droops
lower than his belly.
What fun if a finger of moon should appear
And tickle him awake anyhow.
Summer, 2010
Dead Pigeon on a Ledge: 90 West St
The pigeon is dead on the ledge
and it seems unbearable
I want to scream
and weep for its dumb mate
waiting for it to awaken
keeping futile vigil
on the slender shelf of window
along our West Side Highway
wind from the Hudson
baring winter teeth--
This building is a classic
designed by Cass Gilbert
he of Woolworth fame
whose name is like stained glass
steepled in spires
at last a hand in need
to still the eye
or shelter December chill--
Only the traffic flying by
can give that bird its wings
and for days I am afraid
to raise my eyes
on that walk I take to task
striding towards its beauty
writhing under truth--
By solstice not a feather's trace
while just behind me
we race to finish the Freedom Tower.
Fall, 2010
Random Thoughts
Our lives seem a war game against our bodies
She killed herself while sitting in a foxhole
Who wouldn't wonder why she's yet here
Or not
Still, I can leave my trenches
Instead,sail my boat
Rudderless
Pretending to be at the helm
Fall, 2010
Dead People
Have the dead people
really settled into our lungs?
Unspoken heart of lamenting
doling and settling with money
they all say nothing is settled
a friend said no one can settle
be at peace without some remains
I remind her of all lost at sea
or those who perished in war
their bodies unclaimed or forgotten
we have lost forever for ages
To me it"s merely the dead people
dead people in my lungs
clawing enraging their way to be heard
unique in their own dust to dust
yet like all others before them
The wailing will never get better
the way they're going about it:
"You need to be angry
as long as you need
but try to remember
you'll never be healed
til you let go the anger"
I sigh
They answer that nothing is settled
until their dead ones come home
never forget the banner of Israel
China lost five times galore
too booted subdued to complain
what numbers do more?
you'd rather percentiles?
where Israel wins for its loss?
I started to cough in
October, October of 2001
I couldn't go home
unless with I.D.
to answer my email
or water the plants
not nearly dead yet
(Whither thou goest?
To water withered plants
To talk to them with
Mighty words
Weighty words
To nurture them onward
Within the dirty air and
So from hither I goeth)
After picking up mail
from Bowling Green post stop
not gone missing
I'd stare at computer
monitor laboring
stunned by the blow
inhaling thin needles
thimbles of people
into my lungs
Every so often
come brief fits of coughing
it comforts me as the
dead in my lungs
I've stopped my response to the
9/11 survey, survey of health
come hopeful to my door
as a lost abandoned cur
But the grace of remains
of Eleven, September
is with me forever and ever.
01/24/11
The Days Before 9/11: Falling Objects
I said to my grown child
Visiting for a friend's wedding:
Don't walk under the bridge
Between Deutche Bank
And the World Trade Center.
It's been closed for years
And I see that metal plates have fallen off.
Why has it not been torn down.
It's not safe.
Don't walk down Liberty Street.*
All that summer
I'd had a fear
Of air conditioners
Falling from building's windows
Since I'd never understood
Why so few had died by their fall
I often stuck to the gutter.**
At brunch we spoke
About Rome
The Palatine
The civilization buried.
When I mused
Rhetorically
That ours might come to an end
My husband soothsaid
He did not know when
"But you can be sure
if it happens we
did not watch our backs."***
The day after tomorrow
It happened****
Pulverized concrete
Crumbled like the Palatine.
12/07
*9/8/200
**6-8/2001
***9/9/2001
****9/11/2001
Poem About Immortality or Be Careful What You Wish For
Gregory Sampson awoke one day
From his cryogenically frozen slumber
To discover that he really was a cockroach.
To be clear, there had been virtually
No transformation
No metamorphosis
He was exactly the same
Except that he now knew he was
Indeed, a cockroach.
Wanting to live forever he had paid
A Shah-worthy sum to have his person sustained
In a medically induced facsimile of coma
That preserved his thought-to-be-handsone
Thought-to-be-himself self
In a special cryocrypt
At an undisclosed and classified research lab
He would be awakened at the Ascension
The Ascension of Immortality.
Unlike his nearly eponymous Kafkaesque forebear
He did not soon apprehend his cockroach status
Rather, his enlightenment crawled slowly as a dull dawn
Until it became blinding: he was a coakroach by comparison.
Gregor Samsa had easily stumbled
Upon awareness of his new cockroach self
Through the awkward misuse of his body parts
While Gregory learned through the sluggish and nauseating
Realization that every creature he encountered
Was far more physically dazzling
And mentally brilliant than he.
He had awakened to a world of superior beings
In which he was an evolutionary nadir
Not the forward-thinking avatar he had imagined.
At this epiphany, his moment of resurrection
Gregory wanted to be dead.
Next came the torture of Gregory
Followed by his condemnation
To irrevocable immortality, an automatic hell.
Winter, 2010-2011
First Sentence in Italian, Summer of '66
It was chocolate and liquor
and keys in the river
not quite in that order
but that was the recipe
Somehow, "Io ho dimenticato
la chiave" had become a theme
and she realized it had been lifelong:
Having a key
forgetting it
throwing it
down the garbage shute
hoisted with it
by her hundred petards
dropping the key in the slot
between elevator cab and
the eternity of its shaft
wanting it back and
the solutions we see
yet let slip away
Even Mimi loses her key and dies
never mind the falling in love
and tuberculosis in-between
was that it?
what have we begun
again and again?
In the end
her father had strung
all his diplomas, awards
in the garage
like doomed hanged men
someone whose history papered
the walls and was written
with long-expired license plates
nailed to an outhouse stall
defiling his own success
Last days he walked a circle
over and over
altogether without a key
10/10
Take My Word
Take my word and
Do not take my words
Don't you dare
I am my words
But I just keep standing there
Like a huge failing tower
I can think them but
I cannot hear them screaming
As they fall
03/ 11
Within the House of Atreus
Make me moan again
All of me
Make me shudder and fall
from the wall
Like Helen of Troy
Helen of Sparta
Fall from topless towers
Lost in Heaven's sky
Towers to be burned
Beheaded
Toppled to the ground
Helen in the arms of Paris
All of Ilium dying.
Circa Winter 2011-2012
Upon reading Helen of Troy
by Bettany Hughes
Let Me Alone
Let me alone
Let me alone with my words
Incantatory
They will rub against my breast
Like a cheese grater
They could make me behave
Or make a soufflee
05/2012
The Word Scoliosis
Almost onomotopoeic*
The word scoliosis
Coils round and around
Like a snake
And the backs of
Me and Richard III
02/13
*metaonomotopoeic said one source
The Most Cutting Thing
The most cutting thing is
the disdain of youth
arrogance of youth
stupidity of youth
wrongness of it
that cannot be told
until you are far too old
to tell anything.
Winter, 2011
The Body is Remembering
The body is remembering
the old young self
now collapsed into
pursy prunery.
crepery papery
And the mind?
Is it minding
that simple self?
And which the simpler
or the worse?
Spring, 2011
The Watershed of Self-Assessment
At the age of thirty-five
I became very focused on my brain
My looks had not led me
To the too-wicked stage
Or God
Nor bought me lotteries of money
And the visage got odder by the day:
Can no longer trade on this
Well rehearsed package
So no more truck with that
I came to think a thought or two
Stir the slumbering brain
Something I had not done
Else and heretofore
Winter, 2011
Once Upon a Stephen Hawking Book
(Or: M-Theory and "The Grand Design")
It has been embarrassing
to have read
in the book I read
thus perseverating
as an obsessive self-replicator
wanting to understand the multiple universes
and that gravity (or was it anti-gravity?)
is somehow imparticled unwaved
energy
that is the opposite
of the nothing
that quantum evented
the big bang
the poop scoop of infinite possible universes
and infinite possible histories of ourselves
Is possible probable?
Is probable possible
God started as a quantum event
grave as gravity
mega as m-theory
gradual as g-force
energy darker than darth vader
energy of empty space itself
hologram of a black hole
where we are stored on the surface
living our lives in god's cosmic computer
08/11
Moment
I am two years old . . . plus a bit
He placed me on a wall
Like Helen of Troy
On Riverside Drive
And we did the alphabet
And counted to ten
My thrilling father
Home from the War
10/2011
He Said
Let me throw you on a roller coaster
Let me show you how to ride the waves
Let me almost kill you
And then know when to kiss you
To keep me alive
To keep us alive
04/13
THE PURPLE PROSE IN MY PINK POEMS
Temple of Diana
In a temple
A Temple of Diana
A Temple of the Vestal Virgins
Sacred Forest of Nemi
He waits
He stays because it's what he does
He can only ever stay
And they, the others
Wait still the vigil
The vigil to take his place
Slay him one shall surely do
As it is long expected
The ritual without a choice*
The virgins sleep
Without a sound
He is waiting
The fire is keeping
All is forgotten
But soon remembered
In deepest of sleep
Tomorrow he shall rise
Disturbed by his visions
Still crouch and pace
Holding his knife
Staying his life
He stays because it's what he does
He waits for his own demise
Waiting to become the kill
As he has killed before
Awaiting his When I Die
Will fighting for his life
He does this, what he must
Thus too, to all of us
08/06
*The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer. Diana's priest, King of the Wood, was required to slay his predecessor in the eternal circle of life and death. Diana of Nemi is associated with the Vestal Virgins and she bore the title of Vesta. The Golden Bough was an oak from which no branch might be broken, a sacred tree within Diana's Sacred Grove near the Italian village of Nemi. The King of the wood is guardian of the Vestals' Perpetual Fire, Diana's Sacred Grove and his own doomed existence.
Death Anxiety
Every day I watch myself dying
In front of the mirror,
I feel as though I am in Nabokov's Laura
Devouring myself alive
But I have eaten this way
Since eighth grade: grammar school
I watched myself dying
Line by Line and
Watching Eating Marching
In the nettle of it
I missed the day
I turned into a swan
I only know I became a swan
Because others once told me so:
You were swanning through the halls
Not knnowing I was absent that day ---
And still---
So busy with my vigil.
06/13
Sailing Knots
I cannot work my sailing knots
Anymore
I am slipping away
On a noose I cannot even tie
I am getting to see myself die
In enormous gulps
That I have always taken of myself
In some carefully secreted narcissism
But also
Of the pale graveyard ghost
Digging at my brain.
06/13
Nefertiti
Nefertiti did not have Tamoxifen
And other breast elixirs or interventions
Which does not mean such tender heel
As breast for her
How did she suffer
This understanding
Of her own mortality?
Did she watch herself
Cannibilize
Her own body every day?
Body yet not betray me again
As you always do
And as it is meant to be.
Please remember
That I shall eat myself alive
Before you win
06/13
Fungible Friable* Breasts
Carcinomous
Reconstructed
03/13
*In medical terminology, "friable tumor" is a term used to describe malignant tissue that is easily torn apart. It is often a sign that the tumor has matastasized. Usually the word friable means crumbling, an odd yet not malappropriate adjective for a failing breast. (A "fungible breast" reminds me of Tom Sawyer's "morbid toe.")
Homage to William Blake
Flower
You are dying
Now cut and put
In water
We shall watch one another
Vibrate and Shimmer
You and I together
As you unfold, we unfold
Forgetting the deceit
The betrayal
The worm-riddled death
Of that rose.
7/13/13
The Panther
Some say that breast cancer
Loves to go to the bones.
They also say I have arthritis
But the pain keeps coming back:
The Panther with his teeth in my groin
claws tearing my loins
I recite:
"Tyger, Tyger
Burning bright
In the forest of the night"
Like a mantra of
Incantatory powers
But it does no good
He frames my fearful symmetry
Tyger and Panther together
Like a story for a child
But not.
5/31/14
I Feel Like
I feel like someone's experiment
A puppet getting rashes
Cancer and other ugly things
Unseemly diseases
Once hushed
Once told in dead filmmaker cinema
Those whispers, sighs and white
Victorian dresses like death
One who must persevere for science
The C.V. of my doctor
Or even the evolution of
My family's proud pool of genes
Swimming like frantic sperm in the ouvre
Of yet another filmmaker of fame --
Even if genes don't swim
But lurk and hover over lives
As ominous birds of prey --
Must persevere for past and future plagues
Assure them I still smile.
10/23/13
Hey, Whit
Hey Whit, Hey Whitman
I hear you whistling
My Whistler Boy, my dandelion boy
I want to roll down a hill of dandelions
With you in my arms.
12/26/13
For Each Grandchild
Oh, sweet baby
Let the world
Not break your heart
Too Much.
Too Fast.
Too Strong.
10/13
Hungry
Hungry, I would break
Teeth on a gourd
I am an animal
Animal anathema
Misanthropic social student
Oxymoronic
An introverted paradox
Self-devouring and
Destined to dance
Seldom speaking to my partner
As though dancing with a stranger
Few shall say such things
But I know I am not alone
10/22/13
Technology
Could we dissolve, devolve
into minutia in two more
generations? I surely am!
Minutia of my mind,
my excuse is age, so
ask yourselves if you are
devolving, dissolving
delicious young ones.
But you cannot
you are in it
I am not.
Our texts are so different
and that is just the start
7/13/13
HAIKU
THE PISSANT DEVOID
OF PUISSANCE
IS PUSILLANIMOUS*
*mnemonic device for the meaning of three vocabulary words
2014
Making It Up as I Go Along
My Life
Everything in Life, my life
Lately seems about Meaning
If not about Meaning
It's Beauty or Truth
Ethics as Aesthetics
Values as Quantities
Morality as Qualities
Capital Abstracts
Emboldened in Gold
Meaning is Beauty
No Beauty is Truth
But Truth is a lie
Beauty nearly dies
Is fleetingly revived
Holds hands with Truth
As they struggle to rise
Ascend to fluffy skies
Philosophy cries
Ethics, Morality and
Noble Values wail
My Meaning prevails
My liar has won me
He rubs his hands in glee
No Golden Bold needs he
1/13/2014
A Beautiful Picture
This is a beautiful picture
The surgeon stated
Referring to the scan, its quality
He quickly qualified
There my skeleton stood
With earring studs and hoops
And I had to allow a gasp
Vanity most thrallful
Acknowledging the
Excessive plasticity of those
Exquisitely contorted bones
Serpentine curve still
Pressing to coil
Like Daphne turning to tree
Imprisoned by my scoliosis
And its Harrington Rod bailor.
I Need to Call You
I need to call you from the window of my brain
I shall throw up the sash and holler aloud
Before I am discovered in the act and my
Gatekeeper slams the window shut
Spring, 20014
The Tollund Man Nightmare
I am lying in a bog with an Incubus
An Incubus of Seamus Heaney
Demonic infant Seamus Heaney
Feeding on my breast
It is the White Mare of the Night
Come at Midnight
Rider on an Ashen Horse
Galloping through the Fright
Squatting on my frail ribs
I cannot pull out of the bog
Or out of the wolf-toothed dream
The wolves are always howling
And I must run with them like Artemis
Diana who runs with the wolves
I cry to my spouse in that half-state
Of paralyzed limbs when the dread
Has settled on one's breast
And the breath is as absent as the voice
And the legs can run no more
Help me, Help me; Pull me out
I cannot move
I saw the Tollund Man
He has the Face of my Father
That River of Blood runs through me
Cliffs and icy fjords slice me until
I am swallowed in the Danish fen
So afraid of that Pale Horseman
Seamus Heaney was not
So here I shall lie with an Incubus on my chest
In a peat bog where I may not have been seen
Barely glimpsed, not noticed in the quaking muck
Sucked downward and hidden by the sphagnum moss
A voice without an echo
Seamus Heaney smiles at me
From the cover of his book
And I see it is the Tollund Man*
Perfectly preserved, prehistoric
The Man sacrificed and placed
In the peat bog, eyes closed
Beatific smile in rapture
Embraced by the primevol ooze
Reunited with the darkness
Blessed
06/16/2015
*There is controversey as to whether the Tollund Man, found in a peat bog in Denmark, is a hanged criminal, a victim of torture, or a ritual sacrifice of nobleman to the gods. This same controversey occurs over the Irish peat bog people and the bog children. (The Yde Girl is a 16 year old girl thought to have been sacrificed because of the scoliosis that rendered her defective.) The poet Seamus Heaney is well known for his "Tollund Man," from the 1972 collection Wintering Out," as well as "The Grauballe Man," "Punishment," and "Bog Queen," which first appeared in his 1975 collection of North.
I Am in a Bog
Still in a bog with Seamus Heaney
Even if he did not choose me
Even if they did not choose me
For the ritual sacrifice
Still makes him smile
And even as I did not choose him
Blind hands are stirring the bog.
03/16
Subway Encounter
I saw a woman on the subway
This week
She was like me
But older
Still good featured in her years
She knew I knew
In my younger old age
What I was seeing
She removed her sunglasses
To let me view
To let me see her work
Her perfect liquid eyes
She was magnificent
Leonine and proud
But that face vibrated
Shook with a palsy of excess
She could not control
Her facial orgasms
Or her desire; or of simply
Having been alive too long
Thus raged at this indignity
08/09/14
This Before the Cradle Falls
My weak genes still survive
I am alive because no one is attacking me
That'll be soon enough
All too soon
The cradle of civilization
Is rocking hard
Is very angry
It has lost its words
And found other means
12/24/14
The Cradle of Civilization
From the Cradle of Civilization
There grew a giant child
Knocking down sandcastles
Loud lungs wailing
How did this come to be?
You gve us something and went on
But you became petulant
Always cheated
Always angry
At our indifference
Allow me please
To apologise for your
Resentment of me
For what civiliztion has done
And you can oly abhor
Jihad-me-not and remember that
ISIS was once Isis
Wed to Osiris
Goddess of Fertility
Now in the death aspect
Of the circle of life?
Because you think to not do it
Often shamed by your own
Blind behavior
But do it anyway
A compulsion
Spewed fro the voracious
Mouth of obsession
Whole continents weep blood for you.
My Cradle of civilization.
12/24/14
Lily of the Valley
I am now a lily of the valley
Delicate, modest
Shy bell eyes averted
Color of alabaster
Turned towards the ground
But utterly poisonous
To myself too soon alas
To others grown weary
Of my bitter taste and
My own contempt for
This lingering this
Underground prolixity
And livid red berries
Once a wedding bouquet
10/13/14
It's Time
It's time for the
Dye of my life to weep
To bleed like madras
Color stopped somewhere
On the cloth
Fading so soon in the sun
10/13/14
Articulate Future
We used to toil
Over these words
Yes we did
When we were
Still speaking
Now we spit
Bullets of text
Cursive gone the way
Of calligraphy
Brave new brain tendrils
Dendrites marching on
Thrilling at their own splendour
The telegram --
Tapped out then
And now another way --
Must have seemed the same
Yet here we are
In spite of ourselves
Seeking novel versions
Of deep connection
Pockets of fossil fuel
In a stormy northern ocean
10/14/14
From a Gabled Dormer
I think I felt the
End-of-life
Vigilance
Sooner than I should have
Age seven, staring
At my Aesop's Fables book
There, a rendition of death
As cloaked skeleton with scythe
Holding the hourglass of time
And that oversized sickle
The Grim Reaper too soon
Came calling in my life
And in the Temple of Diana
Temple of the Westal Virgins
He rests the scythe awhile
But one eye on the hourglass
He always waits for me.*
11/10/14
Being in the Temple of Diana
Give or take
The genetic
Crushing blows
To my body
Balanced by
Several pleasing
Features
Even virtues
I have gotten
Everything
I have ever wanted
And it's terrifying:
He who kills the pacer
In the Temple of Diana
Treads softly as he appproaches
Breaches the Sacred Grove
I do not think he sees me
Wants only to kill the pacer
Lives to kill the pacer
The pacer he's been promised
The pacer most of all
Not got the pacer yet -- he waits
Nor gotten all he's wanted -- waits
Told he might be chosen -- leaps
Too late I see I am the pacer
The prey that he shall keep
The prey that he shall kill.
08/25/15
Animals of the Pack
To have climbed the crabapple apple tree
And gone onto the roof that windowed on my bedroom
Like another dimensioned portal that I might crawl into
In that long hard black hold kind of way
I was clawing to master
Was one thing
But to have been safe in my bedroom
At dusk with a pack of ten cats
Or so it seemed that day
Cats who had climbed my tree
Was another
The cats were howling in August heat
Seeking insistent
Something unfathomed
Or simply infatuated by our own queens
Our House Cats in heat
All to join in a Ferragosto harvest
Harvest of mid-August heat
An orgy on my bedroom floor if I unlocked the screens
But this whole pack? But why?
Cats I thought don't run in packs
Seeking insistent
Something unfathomed
Were they calling me?
I cowered yet cried aloud
To join them for one moment
Before being mayhemmed
Because I had never
Slithered out my window --
Only into it --
Onto the roof
Like the feral feline I became
They are still howling
After me like wolves
Crying alone in alleys
Of my dimming brain
But lions always heed the pride
Never running the hunt alone
Needing the pride
Wanting the pride
I decided to be a lioness
Masked face of golden fur.
07/27/15
The Critic
My father judged my poems
As "laundry" hung in narrow places
A thin line of mismatched flags
Waving between tenement buildings
While I still pray they might
Stand in sight of those "Bone Dreams"
Those lines of "skinny quatrains" *
By Seamus Heaney
08/13/15
*P. 94 of Seamus Heaney:Poet, Critic, Translator by Crowder ad Hall ("Heaney has become well known for such skinny quatrains.")
Gertrude Stein
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose
And the Emperor Has No Clothes
A Rose for Emily
Replaced
By Sacred Emily*
Emily Dickinson Dead.
03/13/14
*"Sacred Emily" is a poem by Gertrude Stein about a person stuck in her character.
Sometimes
Sometimes you just need
To leave the poem alone
It's going to be and let it be . . .
'Til entropy
For then is when
Neither you nor I nor the poem
Shall be
In any form
And this, no worse a verse
Than a rose is a rose is a rose
A verse that arose
That thinks it's a rose
So leave the words alone
10/3/15
She Needs a Boyfriend and More Work
I was furious
Explain your Tibetan Medicine
She is not depressed
By an excess of air
Digestive Air --
Your diagnosis for me, my patient
(we all say shrinks are full of hot air)
And all the rest of the suffering world --
But by love and labor deficits
Next you'll be telling me
About Hippocrates
And the Four Humours --
Though Melancholy could apply --
Say it in a way we can comprehend
You make it more arcane
Than quantum physics
Which I try to understand
And then forget
The strain too hard to bear
The recondite
The conundrum
Palpably ephemeral
Ambiguously ambivalent
Transparently opaque
And other paradoxical
Oxymorons
Floating like ether
To oblivian in my favored
Hot air balloon of art
Those are great
For poems I write
Leave and let reader be
Bring a meaning unique
But not Ever Ever Ever
For my hard-edged everday
Onomatopoeic effect
As in pragmatic like a rock
And my thus far functioning gut
07/22/14
Life in the Lurid Lane
Screw you, God Delusion book*
I want a human delusion
That must invent meaning
Perceives the god
Is not as expected
And then does science
To realize by reprise
That science holds seeds
Of extremely creepy deities --
Because we are a hologram
A projection --
Egads!!!!!?????#####
Maybe even a computer simulation
And if the physicists are correct
Who or what is simulating?
Who or what , if not a "god?"
A loudly laughind computer game
A lurid funhouse architect
Enjoying that we cannot know the simulation
Because we are trapped within it.
03/15/15
*The God Delusion by Stephen Dawkins
Mathematics
The only right and wrong
In the universe is
Mathematics and
Despite such perfection
It seems a metaphor bereft
Time and again a
Closed hard capsule
Like a bi-valve that
Cannot be pried open
Seemingly untouched
By empirical validity
But flawless in its theory
How shall we be without
Metaphor, non-math signs
symbols anathema
Not?
And Yet
If I better understood the maths
Then maybe I would stand in wonder
Wonder stand that it could hold
The metaphor for everything
Algorythms for all our worlds.
05/19/15
Before My Post-Prehensile Days
Before my post-prehensile days
Philosophy was recondite conundrumate
A rock with a fossil inside --
That almost looked made up
A neologistic artifact
Brachiopod shells captured within
Cracked and fractured shale
Before fracking wracking obdurate skull
Could question the would be in the woods
The forest would I ever find it
And what would I do when I found it
Would never understand it
Could not get through the woods
Of words, worlds and woulds
And those mocking my wolves
And my escaped criminals
That we all secretly root for
Because they are very bad but they
Still have that primitive
Life Death lust that is not
Pure and Noble in itself
But that we long for
Because we do not have it
Anymore, No more Forever
07/6/15
Times Are
Times are
I must use words
Like "Must Should & Ought"
'Lest I leave this earth
By equivocastion
Lacking the gravity
to remain earthbound
Drone driven
Without direction
But that may be later
And all anticipation gone.
08/22/15
Many Millennials
Many Millennials are
Sickened with Velleity
Sounds as though they're airborne
Like Felicity or Gaiety
But how so be it not:
Velleity lacking velocity
Lowest level of Volition
12/18/15
A Question of Values
The bird was there
The bird from the t.v. show*
Somehow ravaged by its attraction
To like things: colorful pieces of vinyl
Vivid as its plumage
I could not see how it had died
But it died with its guts full of plastic
I dreamed of the bird
And my dog, long gone
And the bird once again
Both sucked down by the water
Below the balcony
The whirlpool of water
Like a toilet flushed
I wanted back the white wicker chair
The chair I'd tossed off the balcony
To "save them" in its wicker nest
Both bird and dog, but in truth
I only cared for the white wicker chair
Alas, for me, no more anymore
The chair whirled in the whirlpool
And I knew it, too, would be gone
Still, it was warm there in paradise
With bright birds that circled
Like Vultures
01/16/16
*Documentary my husband was watching, which I interrupted by returning home from work.
Only the Moon
Who is watching me?
Only the moon
The sun is too busy
Getting to be
Super Nova Queen
Giant Diva Star
That takes this place
Forever
Only my moon
For now for me
4/15/16
Yde Girl*
I am the Yde Girl
Back from the Bog
Again and again
You can see her
See me in her
Trapped in the Bog
Her blood seeping into my genes
They pull me out
Peat-shovelling peasants
And scream
She is the Devil
The blonde hair is now
More florid than fire
Bog time has done this
They say she was
A sacrifice
Her delicate scoliosis
A return to the serpent
Gave a limp
Thus twice the Devil
Some say she was
Merely murdered
Or ritually executed
Perhaps an adultress
But others say that
Thus flawed, she was
The perfect sacrificial vessel
The peasants chopped her
When they found her
Chopped her with their shovels
Thus twice made dead
To be resurrected by a poet.**
Spring, 2016
*The Yde Girl was found centuries after her death in Netherlands bog land. She was discovered by peasants digging for peat moss in the year 1897. She was almost perfectly preserved by the sphagnum moss that is found in many bogs. The peasants thought they had met the devil (on account of her blond hair that had been turned red by the bog) and nearly destroyed her body with their shovels.
**The poet Seamus Heaney devoted multiple poems to the bog people and was, as he admitted, "almost in love" with the "little adultress," another of his bog goddesses. ("Punishment," by Seamus Heaney)
Wish to the Universe
He found the Yde Girl
As they dug her up
Up from the Iron Age bog
Or even before then
He found her and saw
That she should live
And should have lived
Back then and when
And yes she does
How he loved the leathery bog
Trodding its sphagnum mosses
And its ruminant gourd-like
Goddesses that he caressed
With gentle necrophilia
As I plant by program
My words on the internet
Poems as lost as un-named
Suns in the universe
Like Emily Dickinson
Sewing her words
In the silk sacks of
Her butterfly cocoon
I think of heaven
As being found
By some-one-thing
So far from now
I almost float with delight
Yet trapped in the
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vibrations shimmering out of sight
Till one day lifted
By my balloon of oblivion.
Spring, 2016
Please Bury Me
Please bury me
In a Danish Bog
But Northern Ireland
Bogs would do
Just place me there
A rope around my body
And neck
My hands bound
To a hard copy of
My poems
Encased in the
Time Capsule of an
Airplane's 'Black Box'
Emptied of all voice data
But mine and
Orange as the
Aphrodite waves
of the Yde Girl's hair.
There
My poems grasped
Or not
Stay in my hands
And shall keep forever
In my vision of forever
Become the Yde Girl
Returned to her
Home in the Bog.
Winter, 2017
Wrong Body, Wrong Brain
There is something
Fundamentally
Wrong with me
I am a serpent
Who escaped the reptile
But got its devil
Its fork-ed tongue
Into us, our DNA
Beware the Scoliotic
They have the serpent:
We knew this in the Iron Age
When we killed the fiery Yde Girl . . .
Because, just because
And I among the doomed
A left-hander too.
4/26/17
Girls
Girls streaming down
The escalator
Some with backs turned
Taking Selfies*
Arms outstretched and beckoning
I think them foolish
A school of following fish
And labor hard in my head
To scorn them
Envy whispering loud
Remembering those lost
Salad Days of Youth
Then to my mind a rescue
A poem by William Carlos Williams:**
Come with us and play!
See, we are tall as women!
Our eyes are keen:
Our voices speak outright
we revel in the seas's green!
Come play:
It is forbidden!
Some days later
A brief shiver
And a lively party
Champagne like seafoam
Remind me that what seemed
Evermore forbidden
Is Forbidden Nevermore
As a beautiful woman
Expresses her admiration
Surely it was the champagne
Casting that momentary spell
11/13/2016
*A popular way to photograph oneself by cellular phone, circa 2016
**From the "Birth of Venus Song" by William Carlos Williams (Young girls playing on the shore of West Haven, CT.)
I Ran Faster
I used to go out with the grandson
of William Carlos Williams:
Paul was his name. Paul Williams, a
sophomore at Bates College.
He was a runner, with
a tight hard body
whose muscles were as
peeled as loins exposed
through sweat clung shorts.
My father liked Paul
because he was the
grandson of a famous
poet and my Freshman
Lit professor liked me
because I knew the poetry.
Paul and I would neck
in his grandfather's garage.
He almost had me there
but I was still a virgin
and much too scared of that.
We spent hours in William
C.'s garage, waking
each other's puberty
in the raw winter night.
Paul's parents were formal;
they scrutinized with
oblique glances. But I was
blameless in my ash-blonde waves
and fully buttoned shirtwaist.
Eighteen, I looked fourteen.*
Yet Paul was diffident and
I resonated too
much to his wary
just-cuffed look. I couldn't
bear to see myself
in him, cringing at
imaginary blows,
gagged before a sibyl's words.
I needed a more
conventional man,
a well blonded football
player with melon biceps
and a belly already
beginning to soften
I often think of
Paul and wonder if
I would have liked him
better later on,
been less afraid . . .
And William Carlos?
How glad he'd have been
to know the poetic strength
of his Rutherford garage!
Circa 1980-1985; minor revisions, 04/2017
*To be honest, I cannot remember if I really met his parents. I have a dim memory of this, which might have been an amalgam of having met other boyfriend's parents. One can be certain he met my parents. I'd not have gotten out the door without that. Nevertheless, having met his parents still feels very real.
The Grandson, Paul
Too sensitive
Too fine-boned
Too vulnerable
Too fragile a beauty
Whereas, I was
All that and not
Too available
Closed and passive
As a bivalve
No venus on the halfshell
I shuddered
As I saw myself
In his eyes
His rear view mirror
And turned my head away
For hours we would
Ride in silence
Enjoying the comfort of
The things we did not do or say
Say or do
Back in that year
The Year of our Lord
Nineteen Hundres and Sixty-Two
Our Winter of Sixty-Two
Winter, 2017
This is apropos of almost nothing. In reading the complete works of the poet William Carlos Williams, I learned that he was very upset by plans to build the George Washington Bridge. This irony from a man otherwise so forward thinking. He could not imagine the the beauty and necessity of this structure. To one degree or another, each generation stumbles into the future, nostalgic about the mis-remembered past.
DNA
That my people stayed
Too long in cold northern climes
Has led to ice, a dry ice
Deep inside me
Genes now rising
Like cliffs from
The frozen fjords
In my veins and my
Father's name was Clifford.
12/30/16
Remembering Now
When life was low
And I had forgotten all
Instincts
I would look out
At the River
From my window
Be in the River
The Hudson
Washing over me
Even when it was firthy
Eels at the sewer pipe exit
Just before the Bridge
The River teaching me
To swim
Up in Nyack
Before the hurricane
Sucked the sand away
Like a soda
I used to dream
Of you, River
Clean
Beneath a waterfall
Even before that happened
My dream of hope
And promise
Now you are that and more
And I shall miss you
Everyday when I am gone
Most fulfilling of all*
*But I'll be with you when I am gone, unless they put me in the Danish Bog, which is highly unlikely. (See above, "Please Bury Me," Winter, 2017.)
1/10/17
Five Fiats
Five pronouncements he gave
Never found a place in my brain
First:
You look like that woman on the cover--
That magazine on the hamper--
(A French movie star?! the only one there)
I struggled to dis-decree the decree
I knew I had very well heard
And:
You were nothing special as a child
But you are rather something now
Yes, I knew I had very well heard
Summary:
You'll turn out taller than the the lot of them
And you'll call yourself Neysa
And I came to exist indeed
Even without his decrees
And incantations
His making me with his words
Postscript:
But forty years later
I in early elder, he in very elder
I'd seen my face was
Like his grandmother's
And wondered at it--
Yes, well, maybe so he said--
The ugliest woman alive
She sat in the back yard
Swilling gin and chewing tobacco
She'd save her dirty bathwater for me.
Now he is gone and
I am age seventy-three
Done almost full-circle and
Dis-decreed of all decrees.
1/17/2017
Manually and Late at Night
Manually and late at night
I write poetry on paper towels*
In secret
And always with a Waterman
Fountain pen
Marbled blue but nib
Gone bent
My mother preferred
Her Underwood
That dark towering creature
With brassy keys like teeth
Pounding those keys
Was hard and one developed
A strange animal prowess
One could become a goddess in
The hands of an Underwood
*whose evidence of my indulgence
may be swiftly disposed of next day
shredded and water soaked
dark blue Waterman ink
circling down the sink
paper towel squeezed to wet ball
yet some have made it this far
even as footnotes
poems within poems.
Circa Winter -Spring, 2017
Jello Wind
The wind feels like jello
Said my son
In the back seat of the car
Window down wide
Back when four-year-olds
Did not require
Car seats or safety helmets
Our yet next great restraint
To keep one's safety in place
I recalled another younger
But maybe later day
When we too walked to
Some fno-forgotten-place
Mission important
Now mission Unknown
And a square block of wind
A block from the tongs
Of a toiling iceman
Slipping from top floor
Tenement stairs
Pushed steps back
Yet somehow we still stood
Wind, Iceman and All
MOMMY, make it go away!
I can't; it's the wind--
We can only head home
Or seek shelter--
Now for the child
Comes the loss of
The jello wind
And the first embrace
Of the Iceman
Winter, 2017
Another Caught Fish
My brain is caught
Amidst evolution . . .
Last time brains
Got caught
They had time
Now there is no time
It's halppening and we
Live it before our eyes . . .
Drop downs
Within drop downs
Slam doors
Every Day
And I am hoping
My diligence
My intelligence
Shall prevail
And can't:
Am a lizard hissing
With hate at the too new
Just want to be done with it
But the girls taking Selfies
In dangerous places
Keep calling
And falling.
Early Spring, 2017
Observation
You can tell you
Are getting old
When you start fondling
Objects
Especially objects
In your home
Objects that in your youth
Had no meaning
A stone is a stone
After all . . .
Or is it? Why do you have it?
Suddenly the debris--
The detritis of your life
(Wasn't that phrase in a book you read?
Or did you steal it from your own verse?)
Pervasive as disaster
Everywhere always
Dirty as the Rings of Venus--
Seems neon-fused
With meaning
Suddenly it is.
5/5/2017
Entropy
I let my bones bend
Willingly
to let time go on
It must
And I wait
Willingly
For the next event
Enter silent Entropy
Swift from the shadows.
5/26/17
Stopping Evolution
A problem with cloning--
Stem-cells that regrow us
Body part by body part
Towards flawed immortality--
Is that we evade evolution.
Who says we get to do that?
Who says we do not?
Moreover: who chooses
The chosen forevers?
By doing it we are.
I am not too goddish
But I really think we are . . .
Yet maybe just maybe
Can cloning be a part of it?
Another face of evolution
Precient and ineluctable
Doing what what we did before
Doing what we maybe must
Before it comes . . .
Our Red Giant Sun?
06/04/17
Dancing on the Tree
I was eleven
An ending elvin one
I was sunburned
By a day at the beach
The shore, the Jersey Shore
My father wanted me
To get something
Something from Sid's
Sid's General Store
My grandmother
Who lived with us
Saw Ocean Grove
Had hurt me and
Said:
Just wear your shorts
I was eleven
Elvin still and
More breastless
Than many boys
But there I was
Alone in my shorts
I got my father
Whatever he wanted
Probably his bleeding
Hemorrhoid medication
(Who would send
a shirtless girl
On such an errand?)
Yet we did
And then I went
To dance on the tree
A fallen tree
A tree that I knew had
Been there forever
Well before Sid's
And the saloon next door.
I often ran, even danced
On the boney old tree
Awkward on its smooth
Bleached surface
Imagining my dance on
A solitary moon
Taking energy from its bones
The tree was naked
Maybe more naked
Than my eleven
Year old body and
Its skeleton was clean
The tree was
As a relic
A fallen fossil
Nude and Denuded
And I loved that dying persistence
Even beyond death
Tenacious as a mummy
Then a car
A black car
A somewhere-
Early-1950's-Roadster
In this gravel back alley
And he was dark
This man who thundered up
Just by showing up
Dark as Orson Welles or
Edgar G. Robinson*
And he said:
I had a nice evening
At your parents' hours
Last night
May I give you a ride home?
Well, you know we live
Just up there, I said
Fearful of offending
A friend of my parents
I live just up there
You must know it's only
Two houses away
(And the field
A dangerous space . . .
A presence I could not say
A place I prayed he did not see)
But thank you anyway
I can get home okay.
I jumped from the tree
And fled through
Two backyards
Adjacent to a field
Of weeds that would
Drag my speed
Then there was no one
No one there in Back of Sid's
He actually left
Fled fast, maybe faster than I
And no jumping at me
From those weeds
Who was he?
He could have seized me
But did not
Who is there to protect us?
He could have seized me
But did not
No one in the back of Sid's
Over my shoulder, gone
And I only know I'll never know
And I never went back there again
I wonder, is the tree still there?
06/15/17
*In truth, I had not idea who these men were, but when I saw their photos, years later, I chilled and thought of each: man in the black sedan, man in the post office WANTED papers.
(The following poem must be viewed using a desktop, laptop or tablet no smaller than an 8" diagonal tablet, held in the lateral position. The poem's format, which is integral to its meaning will be scrambled if viewed on a smartphone or other smaller device)
Dream of me and M.E.*
I am a house
I am like the Herzog & de Meuron
Building, mostly blue
Enormous slabs of
Blue marble, except it's not
Blue Marble
It's blue glass piled pie-in-sky high
Like an uneven stack of sandwiches
And my house is full of holes
Water cascading down
Down the open geometry
In a Rube Goldberg design
Where it takes forever to get to the glorious
end
You muse
are on the balcony
cantilevered afar
away from the cataract
your back to my deluge
dressed in ivory
a Victorian gown
and cameos
You are doing a strip tease or is it a dance
You dance with your body
A pole dance sans pole
Perfected control
Barely moving your feet
Your arms embrace you
Your hands remove cameos
Clothing falls like scarves
All Gifts
And the sun is as intense
As my view of this building
Caught from a sailboat
Late summer eve's sun
Steel and glass reflected
A blinding by the building
Mirrored on moving waves
Everywhere this waving
Reflections -- Light -- like a flame
Madly rocked by a cradle of boat
Mirrors of a funhouse
Except it is MY house
My SELF of many holes
Crashing waterr drowns the flame
But the strong pelvis base
Is wide enough for a waterfall
We do not notice I have joined you
Now Our Deshabille in progress
The shared feast of
Participation mystique
I still stare at the sky
Now stripped bare
Become discarded scarecrow
Find me in the kitchen midden
After all the falls
*NDiF true dream
6/18/17
Before the Words Came
Well, Miss Nelson
Do you feel anything
About this poem
Have you got something to say?
I said, Yes, Yes but . . .
I cannot find the words . . .
I see the muscles of your throat
Tight as violin strings
There the words might
Strangle you; take heed
And still maybe yet . . .
I could die of it
The words are always there now
Begin there
Keen low in my throat
Good and bad together
And sometimes there is not
A single metaphor
Or brave lonely image
The words of this language
Their sound and the gift of it
8/17/17
Beyond Words
My surfeit of speech
Has been for others
Even the self-referential
Has its flight by wind --
Purblind
In bat-like night
It's what we do each day
We who've dared
to shape meaning like clay
As though it could be flesh --
Hubris
To warm one forever
And now I have no words
But those whose sound
I put on paper --
Unspoken
Beyond me.
NNDiF, 3/18
(The following poem should be viewed on a device that has, at minimum, a screen size that is as large as an 8" tablet in order to maintain its appropriate format)
Selfies and All
A photo taken of us
You and I
Is what the others see
But the photo is reversed
In the eyes of the child
In 'photo right' the child
May deny your right arm
Is around Mommy
You look at the Stranger
Across from you
On the subway
She is 'opposite' you
In flesh and by metaphor:
What's visually your left field
Is factually her right side
Her wedding ring
At visual right is
A wedding ring misplaced
Ring on the 'wrong' finger
You wonder if she's a widow
Smile at your foolish mistake
Behind her you can see yourself* *you've never really seen yourself
In the darkened subway window a photo comes the closest
Lit by the light of the train until you learn they lie
Reeling between the stations
The familiar image is 'flipped'