_lrm-test

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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

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:
rubble 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?

She is there
Draped in vertigo
Keeping the columns
With her torchlight.
The wind shifts and
A cat turns in its sleep.

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.

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 marking 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 their honks of warning
With metal crashes.

Beep. . . .Beep. . . .Crash
Beep. . . .Beep. . . .Blast
Sound of Bombs Bursting in Air

Why so loud the last?

The dream was swallowed
By a Dawnless awakening
And never came back again.

The moon is traveling
the fog tonight
Wearing him like a pocket
As the silver watch
wears the vest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
b 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 laughed 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 forget
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.

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.

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.

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

The Eyes of the E-Train were there
Long before anything happened
I cannot remember when
They first began to watch me

Walled eyes of tile stared me down from
Commission date in 'ninety-eight
Until September, two thousand one
Followed me through swallowed horizons
Of pedestrian tunnel—linking warrens
Of underground trail—connecting and crawling
From Trade Center’s exit to the A-Train, Park Place

And patiently sitting between those two stations
The E-train would rest with wide open doors
Watching the eyes of mosaic while waiting
For eyes that were living to give her their fill:
The E-train’s next journey to Midtown and Queens

Mosaic eyes and open E-trains
Tailed me in the morning and
Then again at night and I suffered them
Because they kept me warm with constancy
Assured me I could stay inside
The winters are harsh in New York
And their cold eyes began to seem warm

No two eyes in the corridor were alike
And they followed you as you walked
They stared into their mosaic emptiness
Until you passed in front of them
And then they looked straight at you

Were they the eyes of those who lived
Or the eyes of those who would die?
Though I only mused this much later
I still wonder if they had more to say
By miracle they survived the Falls
Hundreds of Eyes on the Walls

Any who saw them before or thereafter
Could neve forget those eyes.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 chiav” 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

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

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.

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 souffle

Almost onomotopoeic*
The word scoliosis
Coils round and around
Like a snake
And the backs of
Me and Richard III

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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 knowing I was absent that day —
And still—
So busy with my vigil.

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.

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

Carcinomous
Reconstructed

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, sweet baby
Let the world
Not break your heart
Too Much.
Too Fast.
Too Strong.

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

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

THE PISSANT DEVOID
OF PUISSANCE
IS PUSILLANIMOUS*

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

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 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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.*

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.

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.

	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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.**

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.

Please bury me
In a Danish Bog
Though the Bogs
Of Northern Ireland
Or the Netherlands’
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.

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.

Things came and went
In my life
I lower my face
And raise these eyes
Something inhuman
The tyger, burning bright
But in the worng place
Deep-set eyes of the North
Rolling under their hood of bone
Faces that brought fear stay–
While I shiver and feel
I shall die of the cold
A stranger among my people

My people were not nice
people
They routinely sacrificed girls
like me
Back when I was a girl
But before I existed:
						Briefly
						Now

Sarifice has been before:
Some even got famous
Self-sacrifice famous
Called to be martyred
Obliterate self of self
Fabulous press

While girls in Danish bogs had
Only their peat bound bodies
To affirm their sacrifice
And were forgot*
With nary a rune**

They are their own only record:
Goddesses of sphagnum moss
or
Overwrought concupiscence
Seeded by a corn god or two

Tacitus branded the Norsemen:
Natural born killers they were
To whom did he refer:
These early gifters, givers to gods?
Or Vikings in longboats, men who set forth?
What gave them the worth of said name?

Not all Danes were Vikings
Not all Vikings Danes
Sacrifices became
Then came back again
Driven by hunger
Seldom for glory or
Fame for oneself

These givers were clever
Understood to conceal
The remnants
Of a god’s last meal
And so they did
Until the bog
Offended
Regurgitated back

We were everywhere
Back then
But soon to be no more
Like Neanderthals
Also forgot, nary a rune
Big heads, redheads
Our eyes too narrowed, deep
Theirs too set apart, open

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
Extends her admiration
Arms embracing

Surely it was the champagne
Casting that momentary spell

I used to go out with the grandson
of William Carlos Williams:
Paul was his name, Paul Williams
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 would have deflowered me there
but I was still a virgin
and much too scared of that.
Many hours were spent in
William C.’s garage, awakening
each other’s puberty
with awkward hands
in the raw winter night.

Paul’s parents were formal
They scrutinized with oblique glances.
But I was blameless
In my careful ash-blonde curls
and fully buttoned shirtwaist.
Eighteen, I looked but 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
both too shy, too much alike

Mute before a sibyl’s words
her beckoning incantation
we only heard our bodies touch
rarely disturbed the silence and
I knew I needed a more
conventional man,
a well blonded football
player with melon biceps
and a belly already
beginning to soften

I still often thrill to
think of Paul and wonder
if I could have banished my fear-fraught
chill had we just gone somewhere warmer?
Shared a seasonal eggnog?

And William Carlos?
Sound asleep upstairs and nearly deaf?
How glad he would have been
to have known the poetic strength
of his Rutherford garage!

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 Hundred and Sixty-Two
Our Winter of Sixty-Two

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.

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*

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.

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.

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

My brain is caught
Amidst evolution…
Last time brains
Got caught
They had time
Now there is no time
It’s happening 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

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’
Like a mirror’s clever facsimile
Yet not quite the same
As your reflected left shoulder
Feigns illusion—mirage of being
Behind her —
Riding on a bus
And your left arm mirror image
touches her right arm
In your field of vision

You have seen your source of alarm

And lean forward
Toward the woman across to say
Lips barely moving:
Your left cheek is bleeding
But she touches her right
The opposite cheek from
Where she is seeing
Your hand touch your own
As though you were a living mirror
You smile and shake your head:
No the other side
Offering your handkerchief

She accepts
All errors corrected
Except
The one you might be about to make
While the last car pulls into the stop
And the doors open wide.

I remember my grandmother
She could not drive a car*
I never once saw her dial a phone
Being at home without a dial
Back when the Operator
Breezed out: Number Please!
In a tone that assured she
Was smiling just for you

But Grandma “Gram” surely dialed
Dialed a time or two to ‘sit’ for brats
Sat for twenty-five pennies per hour
Later for fifty—maybe catch a silver dollar
But mainly my mother gave her the messages
A transfer of data that
Kept her in Babysitting Biz’
Those precious copper and nickle coins

                                                                  *There’s a photo of the three of them
                                                                  parents and daughter
                                                                  must have been a showroom
                                                                  or photo studio
                                                                  maybe Coney Island
                                                                  as they never owned a car
                                                                  my dapper grandfather in
                                                                  smart-alec attire—I imagine
                                                                  he wore spats—pretending
                                                                  the top-down was his
                                                                  my mother and grandmother forlorn
                                                                  huddled in their Sunday best
                                                                  likely embarrassed at the flagrant
                                                                  charade&hellop;some might admire his
                                                                  swaggering pride
                                                                  certainly I

And what about me?
Turgid with technology
I can use a computer and
Brandish these badly clad skills, yet . . .
Squeezed between my expletives . . .
I break screens with my ill-placed will
Punch them like a coke machine
Keep insisting
Hoping for the change
Poking on the cell screen
As though it be in deep sleep
A child I might awaken
Whose response determines its life
I fantasize its death as I toss it from
My seventh floor window
Pleased but for a moment

That never works well
But does deter the hand
And
Birdlike
I wait for any morsel to my eyes
That might reach my brain

In the end I mostly figure it out
But shiver at the price

So uncharacteristic
Of my friend
What was she saying
Why should she reject
My offered request
Suggestion to dine

Repast shared
Intended as a gift

Do what you will with this
‘Twas only addressed to you
I need not know you never saw it
Need not wait for response

Yet still I wonder
What she saw
What she heard
Viewed not as gift
But spoiled child
Taking leave

Now a coyote paces
Where lions and leopards
have stood
Once a tiger too

And maybe I didn’t speak these things —
Just placed them in
An envelope of text
That somehow ended here.

Your honesty drives chariots
Of pain with wheels grinding
Punches in my solar plexus
Wind knocked out of me is as
A hand violating the trachea
And pulling out the lungs

Wished for something subtler
Words unspoken, understood
Why now this raw confession
Outspoken feelings for another

I have my secrets too
No need to speak them
No need to sound
Or dispel their potent spell
By shaping them in my mouth
No need to wound

Instead I leave you
What may be hidden in my fist
A blow withheld and my
Incantatory power
Of words not spoken

Laced with the smell of her
What is that familiar perfume?
Trussed up by my
Jello shots of the mind
Imagination mine

You Swelling
With her narcotic
Overripe fruits clinging
To both your vines
Hers growing larger
More grotesque than
Mine, my own perverse
Arthritic knots

Daphne turned into a tree
To escape the arms of Apollo
But your trunk is entangled
By one who wishes to be
Caught and cultivated by you
In her hothouse of glass
Butterfly pinioned
Trapped by the act
Of her own will

And you?

Nothing happened
Even though it seemed
Meant to happen
Indelible Desire
That could punish
The merely carnal
With its purpose
Its puissant belief
In Destiny

To witness it
Thwarted
Gave me great
Pleasure

I want to visit my friend
I want to drive there in a car

I know how much you hate my
vanity even though it may be
sweetest and gentlest of the
seven deadly sins:

At heart a venial sin
Only its skin touched by hubris
A tip like the heel of Achilles
While hubris full-blown
Hates with a dagger
Danger unseen and
Those who carry it
Secreted in their cloaks
Cannot view their own venal selves

So please let me visit her

How am I saying this
What do I want
I never saw your
Subtle help that consumed
Agency, the freedom I sought
I loved you as never before
Now I am as before

Now my eyes are all empty
In the cellphone photo grabs
You make at me and my life—our life
That seemed violated by my own imagination
Gone wild as you say

My lizard skin begs for soft kid gloves
That cover well above the elbow

Six months ago I was Bella
Donna-eyed in the same
Center Parterre Box
When you cared eough to be
Scared for both of us
In a box we made
Made long before
Thinking about it
Long before its cliche

When you look at me
Your eyes are dead
This body and soul
Once so loved is
Nothing now
I cannot
Carry it
Alone-
’til its
End.

My Poetry is about
The sound, the sound
Of the English language
Thus
There is no translation
Just the words
I am glad for such words
Each too dear

As I lose my hearing
My ear grows better
And I remember my
Child
Surprised by Spanish
In Nursery School:
But Mommy
There’s only English

No, Child;
How so be it:
Many more
Than anyone knows

Wake me before you leave me
Don’t spare my sleep in fear —
In fear I’ll wake without you
Find you gone
Somewhere
Unknown
Never knowing
While only you be spared
Better to feel the loss
In the fullness of the
Moment
As in
Present and
Sentient at that
Last—that final breath
At birth all eyes were on me
But memory was not with me
And I am most alive at moments of
Death.

Thermopylae and Salamis**
Narrow passages
Time of Oracles
Times of Cunning
Where did she go
Just when we were winning?
Where do we find what was lost?
Whither the madness divine?

As Daphne eluded Apollo
Shall she forever slip away
Ineluctably
As we waken from our dream?

Don’t leave us
Oh Voice of Apollo
Why rain such
Paradox upon us?
Return us your terror sublime***

Pythia
Sybil
Sibylla
Goddess
She Who Knows:

Return me
To the sea
But let me
Undulate on this earth
This solid land
As long as I can…

I’ll curl my scoliosis
Diagnosis: severe
My primitive
Serpentine self
Across the land
Pythia slithers
Down the omphalos
Of the earth

‘Til then
‘Til the end
Then let me be at sea
Where All belong
At the last

With wattled hurdles
I’ll be pinned to the bog
Buried at the stake
When logic sees
The pull of the rope
The tug-of-war
Waged by my primitive genes
New ones take care

I Come From a Quiet
and Terrible People:
Not like yours
With their loving words
That linger on the tongue

And their candid loud betrayals
But a people with deep bogs
That suck like a vacuum
A black hole
My voice finally screams
As the bog sucks me down
And you'll never
Hear me stop

The cards of days
I have been dealt
Look smooth as
The dealer’s shuffle
Their faces to the table
No cheating, no tricks
But wait until I turn them over
As I have been doing each day
Until now the deck is almost
Empty.

Well past twilight
Even midnight
After the bath and
Other aftermaths
Mostly in my mind
I make love to myself
Tender and asexual as
A mother holding her child
Just the stroking of skin
Caressing the face
The neck, the arms
Something gone
The need still there
For the pressing of creams
Still feeling the escape —
The slipping of soap —
And the solitary pleasure
Of this ritual still sustains me

Looking over the
Ruins of glasses
Too many to be sure
I see your eyes
And your face
That never lies
Too much of you
So often…
Still not enough

Papa said:
Writers should write
Not speak
I nod and
I understand:
My poems live in my head
And should be read
Aloud
only with caution
I enjoy each face
And Its place
On the page

SEX WITHOUT MEANING?
MAYBE
POEMS WITHOUT MEANING?
IMPOSSIBLE

POETS VESSEL* LOSS
WHEN WORDS ARE TAKEN AWAY
HEARTS MAY BE BROKEN

A ROSE IS A ROSE ‘TIS TRUE
ABSENT OF SOUND
I MUST SEIZE HER FLOWER

Thanksgiving gone and
Only the oaks still hold leaves
Tenaciously
Even the thin ones
That barely can carry
Such solid name

As wild winds blow
The supple necks and heads
Become young girls
Girls in delicate dresses
Of fraying summer linen
Caught in surprise by a storm
Trying to hide their long legs
And bodies from such tempest

They are girls
Girls being told
Told to undress
For their annual physical:
An examination
This one held age eleven
But several seem older

Those more mature
Are calmer, clad
Demurely in bras
Panties Plus Bras
No frantic rustling
Whipping about of their hair
Yes they are preening
Enjoying their bodies
While we willful ones
Still bearing leaves
Scant panties and dresses
No full disclosure
Fight like the Furies
Just to stay covered

This shaming defeats us
We too stubborn fighters
And we’re scolded with words:

One should embrace this
This Seasonal Occurrence:
Come, you are a deciduous tree
I am the School Nurse
Blown in by nor’easter
Dr. Winter is waiting

He is waiting and does not care
About your tiny nipples and little pubis
You are not special
No different than any other tree
Being asked to shed her glorious cover
The dress your mama made
Only for you**

As the last girl surrenders
She flies in her mind
Outside to the schoolyard
Whispering
Soon you shall turn to a Laurel***

The boy is beautiful
Byronic forehead Falling curls
I picture him in profile

He’ll be a fine poet
Such vigor blended
With careful strokes
All finely bred

This so easy to recall:
All my “Why only just yesterdays… “
To be remembered and replayed
Trail off in unfinished sentences

He asks how I grow
My life as a poet
A reasonable question
From one with such talent
Who tends his ambition
And nurtures what’s given

I stare at him in wonder
My mouth agape
Brow stitched into Z-puzzzles
As startled as the Wedding Guest
Seized by Skinny Hand
But the skinny hand
Indeed be mine
And with those roles reversed
I tell him I have
No tale to grow
And have already been pruned
Too much, too hard

But if you stay and hear me
You'll learn I have no choice
‘Tis simply what I’m compelled to do
The way I may stay alive, not die
Tithing my slave who sets me free
What I wear around my neck
Is but a noose that let’s me be
Be fully who I already am
And strangely keeps me sane.

He asks me how I grow my poetry
I stare at the boy: such a beauty
So much talent and so sincere
Byronic curls favoring his brow
Nonplussed, I say: I do this to stay alive

My words sound disingenuous
My eyes are held askance
My cantilevered mouth and jaw
Careen head-long against
My full body protest
My rigid body dismay

Incredulous, I say:
I know not where it grows
Have stiffened at all the flavors
And lost my sense of taste
Alone by the pool I must stay
And that is all I know

Any refelection could be my last.

My mother’s beauty was liquid
Uncaptured by camera
Uncaptured by man
Both sybillitic and sublime:
A determined goddess of destiny
Indelible as threads of DNA*

With blood and love
It poured from her vessels
Wineskin to throat
Eyes and lips to my mouth
Sybillitic, sublime

In the photograph
She is fully present
Dominant and clasping me
Yet I also have a presence
And can be understood:
Petulant mouth, unsmiling
Pencil dangling, barely held
Curiously languid fingers
For one with such ill will
Had she staged it all?
Placed the pencil in my witch hand
Left hand leaning towards the devil
Where she’d foreseen it would stay?

All that before she spent then
Hour after hour
Reading William Blake
And Walter De La Mare
Aloud to my infant ears
Incantations in my hair
Potions in my brain

Any choice I thought I had
Was lost to free will’s illusion
As it always was and
Always shall be
At least for me.

You live in your head
She said
You were always a willful child
He said
I think in my gut and feel in my head
I  said

And where has it got you willful child
They said
The somewhere of everywhere
That looks to you like nowhere
I said

Too many, too much
None can survive
where even the sun
Must fight to shine
Failure to thrive
In this stagnant choked pond
Of seed pods
Whose lilies all look the same

I don’t have a sense of time
Keep wishing to try to tell them
Green keepers honest and true
Tectonic plates are creeping
Turning quietly while we sleep
Their slumber stirring deeper
Deeper than our deepest sleep
And we cannot ever save
Truly save the Chesapeake
From the Ocean’s widening maw

Which does not mean
We should not try
Nor should we give up
Give up on anything
Including new places to thrive
A cosmic surgery, maybe two
Could do until entropy ends

Yet, so often I wish it would:
Entropy’s last grand entrance
The day that entropy dies
The day that everything ends
And we start all over again

Listen! Hold the shell to your ear
And you shall hear the ocean roar
And awaken to the last wave’s call

Man wants to be perfect
Then needs to destroy
As the child destroys
With the blocks he knocks out
By the delicate removal
Sadistic removal
So like betrayal, betrayal of self
Removal of one, done with great care
So crucial to the whole
So crucial to its fall

The child feels imperious, even imperial
Look, I have done something!
Spoken with glee
Someone did something, said she*
Something indeed
Mother forgiving, forgiving the child
One cannot imagine the deed

We’ll do it again, again and again
Can’t keep ourselves back
Intended as we are
To imitate our universe
Of which we know so little
Spinning toward the Something
Someone named entropy

Entropy is
Said Professor Emeritus
The measure of disorder
Disorder of any system:
The most intriguing concept
Concept In philosophy
Concept in natural science
Entropy as a concept is
Of very many faces**

Our primitive filter for the truth
Has been ripped—torn off our faces
We’d thought we shed a mask
But our eyes rolled out for the taking
No longer can we recognize
What is real or one another
No longer can we see by Nature
Behold the nature of our Self
The nature of ourselves
Beyond to gone forever
For only our computers
Can process and predict
Make Delphic Oracle models
Of knowledge we once knew —
Maybe on the Nonce, the long gone Nonce* —
When we saw, smelt, touched and felt
We are gone as we were
And “Whan that Aprill
With his shoures soote,
The droght of March hath
Perced to the root” **
And we’ve noticed that April
Really is the cruellest month*** 
Perhaps on the Nonce, revived,
We shall see and hear the Treasure Lost 

I walk across Twin Towers
Reconstructed in my head
My own Philippe Petit
Tightrope tossed between the two
Lasso like a noose
Carefully balanced
Erected by me
Only by me

I have forgotten…
Only can see
Steep cliffs in my eyes
Cliff and Fjord of
My father’s first name
Precarious edges
Osprey and Eagles
Hawks on the highwire
Tear at my feet
Always the same
I dare not look down
Wire and pole become
Now Cross and Albatross
And yet I do…

I look down at You
Star Spangled River
Dancing down the eddies
Ebbing Tide now flooding

And at You
Star Spangled Bird
Flying in our skies
I know you and
Still see you climbing high
Wires and poles no matter

I thank you for your gifts
Memories once known
And understand these cliffs
The cliffs we walk between are
Those we have made in our minds.

Perhaps illusions
Perhaps delusions
Needed for my survival…

When does your caution
Someone ele’s caution
Start to kill our spirit?

Time marches on
Such a cliche
Striding through
Our lives…
But there she is
Perfect as always
Perfect as ever
While we struggle
To meet her thunder
Our shared desire
This mutual fire
–Such futile fires–
As she tears away
Each metaphor
Leaving us longing
And long behind her
All the bad timing with the good.

Dear heritage@website.web:
There is important information
That is missing from your profile
Of Clifford Colmer Nelson
I am Clifford Nelson’s daughter
Nikki Nelson (nee Crabbe}
My father married my step-mom
Evelyn Baker Angell
in April of 1973
Perhaps it was ’74
But his marriage to my mother
Peggy Nelson in September of ’42
Has been obscured or forgotten
I am the eldest of his four children
I and my two younger siblings
Eamon Nelson and Dana Nelson
Survive the youngest sibling
Noel Nelson who died on her birthday
Of injuries sustained in a car crash
I cannot remember the date
Beyond it being mid-90’s
There is one grandson who is my own son
Frederick Locke Crabbe IV as well as a
Great grandson Whitman Hwa-Crabbe
I don’t know how much information you require
But I think your current profile covers
A time-frame that was not
So significant in the larger
Biographical picture of my father
Should it be of interest to you
I can provide more material for
Your website beyond the
Photos you have chosen to post
Of my step-sister who committed suicide
And her rather famous father
Who declined to recognize our family
And possibly his own family
It is very bizarre that a photo of him
Appears on an entry for my father
Oh I see my mistake  I understand
It is just an ad—an ad for your website
And your errors are greater than mine
Sincerely Yours,
Nikki Nelson DiFranks

Sorry, I am off on a
Nils Bohr Quantum
Entanglement and
I am annoying you
I’ll meet you when
I shall meet you
Further now:
The closer
Far apart
Still here
My child

Nevertheless

Nils Bohr
So frustrated
Einstein

I DO NOT ARGUE
EXISTENCE OF “g”
SWEET DISECTED MORSEL OF

OUR SO-CALLED I.Q.
ANY MORE THAN I ARGUE
EXISTENCE OF GOD

Call it a witch thing
She wakens at night
Two nights in a row
Two nights for two hours
Chanting in bells
I wonder the moon
The moon soon full
Night goddess of darkness
Searching for light
For now or forever
So too the granddaughter
I said so yet know
Know that she knows
These gifts are too precious
Too precious to squander
Tend them not and they die

Tonight makes it thrice
Eleven through one
Nod to the witch hour
The chanting continues
With bells on our tongues

I have a secret
I am tall and pale
On this paddle board
That I have chosen
To navigate the waves
My body a frail mast
On dark water
Impossibly
I stand on driftwood
And paddle
Like a Viking I
Sail and row
Tell me why
Such words, my words
Make me paddle
So long and hard
When my secret
Holds all I don’t know.

So many barns
So many bridges
Gone by my hand
Secrets given away
To sorrow the telling
No sin ever shriven
For deeds such as this
Unforgiven by others
Nor forgiveness for self

On this small fragile craft
I have pushed too far from shore
I shall continue seeking
Seeking Shalimar
Solitary  Willing  Staying
Finding solace in those losses
I have chosen to embrace.

Do you remember
The house in our town
Built as a bomb shelter
Bomb shelter crumbling
Crumbling all edges
Those ‘Fifties on ledges

Denizens waiting
Waiting for something
Something to happen
Always there’s something
Waiting in the wings
Wings on the waiting for us

Mommy is waiting
Is waiting you said
For something to happen
She cannot come out now
Rehearsals for fear
You knew not to drink it
Those early days’ ledges
The fear never yours

You still rode your bike
Wearing a sllicker
Slicker in rain
Deluge towards danger
Your purposeful journey
Two towns away

And I said okay
Seal of consent
And you’d better
Come back here  alive!

Off you go then
Off to the Hobby Shop
Quest you must make
My Love, off you go

Writing poetry
Pen put to paper
Thought into word
Word that is planted
Soon shall become
A vestigial tail
Perhaps an appendix…

The appendix is ready
Ready to burst
Eruption so corrupting
The rules won’t be taught
No rules anymore

So What? say the children
While we say Then What?

CHINESE PICTURE OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS:
						THE BACKBONE OF
						THE BLOSSOMS IS

THE GNARLED AND KNEELING TREE
						HOVERING LIKE A BLACK
						AND TREMBLING APE

I shall soon
Be full of the future
Whether I like it
Or not
Whether I meet it
Or not
Whether it likes me
Or not
Future forever
Goes past and shall be

I am an embarrassment
Someone once beloved who
Now must be censored and hushed
All those watching can see that
And feel my shame with deep pity
While I feel my own pain for them

No more able to stumble
Just stumble towards the bog
Where always it was waiting
Drawn to Denmark by its fens
I felt only cruelty
On the faces of my kin
My horror at their evil
And the ever sucking bog
Dragging its victims to death
Victims of ritual murder

My visions of their evil–
Evil on the rise again
Recants of Biology
Shamers now become Sinners
The Virtue Signals endless
The evil now more subtle–
Recede when I remember
Another time, a different time
Engine 10, Ladder 10
Hour of Nine/Eleven
Young men of the Ten House
Firehouse nearest our home
Their bravery defying
The face of such horror with
Courage that countered all evil.

I never wanted to write
Dissident poetry or
Compose political verse
Or trade in respect for contempt

Even Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova
Sounded deviant to me–
Name that caught in the throat
Like regurgitation and rumination
A need to keep mouthing the cud

Her boney doleful face
Poised at oblique angle
Androgenous
Opaque averted eyes
Expressionless
Motionless
But for the yield curve
Of that elliptical face
The photopraphs shot
By so many cameras
Orbitting that medieval monk mask
Capturing each subtle change

So she became a mask of death
Mask of death by censor
Thwarted by the Nobel Prize
She certainly did deserve
Stalin breathing down her pages
Tearing black holes in poetry
A Dialogue Diabolique

Yet here I write of politics
And I shall call this poem:
Pure Wool, Perwil, Pure Evil
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experience

I think of myself as Queen Lear
And shall say and do as I choose
We share our society
A mutual society
A society of contempt–
Yes we do, you who read this
We share our bitter contempt
You'll only find ugliness here

I never thought about Living–
Living in a time of Pure Evil–
My father had fought that War
Antidote to end all wars
Third generation repeating
All that the first said would cease

I never imagined Being
Co-existing in time with Evil
Pure Evil: so close to “Pure Wool”
Tiny tag on a small stuffed bear
That my child had named: Perwil
Or that’s what I heard in my head

I had liked this name Perwil
And wondered it all aloud:
So close to Percival
Its sound so like Parsifal
Wisest of grail-seeking fools

So he held forth the bear’s tired tag
Carefully sounding the words:
Made in USA, Made of Pure Wool
Percival, Parsifal, Perwil, Pure Evil
What is the reach of Pure Evil:
Until innocence breaks its heart.

You must protect yourself
You cannot unsee what you’ve seen
You must hoard your knowledge where
They cannot know you are wise
Dumb down and hunker down
Keep your cunning in your vest
And your hands in your pockets
Just enough to stay alive
Learn to slip through their alleys
Have patience and just wait
Until others can hear what you’ve seen

It is getting redundant, itsn’t it?
This perseveration over evil
Yet when the yets arise
Like Delphic phantoms
I can see how afraid they are
I am unsettling to the ones
Who’ve settled all moral
Dilemmas and struggles
They grasp their cellphones
Like batons and torches
The path to truth
The path to light
They know what to do with me

I carry in my genes
The burns of witches
Not so much their torture
As my dominant left-hand blows
The left hand blurring everything
As I pass it across the page
No words have time to dry
And the curling scoliosis
Where I can see that
Any backbone like mine
Is the backbone of a snake

Beware my words
Beware my incantations
The serpent has taught us much

Don’t kindle your bonfires too soon.

One such as I
Can no longer practice
Can no longer summon
The dark art of therapy
Pschotherapy whispers
In cowardly ways
Furtive and avoidant
My friends and my family
Seem sheep-like to me
Yet sheepish I follow
Even become one
Try hard to not run
Try hard not to ruin
The fabric of networks
Already straining at
Ties and at ropes
But I cannot remember
My old happy prattles
My silly sweet sounds
Once as much ken as
They too once were kin
My empathy’s fled
As fast as my soul
Friends, family, ‘n’ all
We all seem as strangers
As though they had died
And come back frkom the pale
Yet t’was I who have left
I want this to matter
And mattered it once:
But now nevermore
I want to “Go Queen”
And sing a new song:
Nothing Really Matters
Anymore

Quantum Physics
A Parallel Universe
Black Holes
and
Dark Matter
Interest me more
Than Black lives Matter
Which is not to say
That Black lives don’t matter
(Think: Cogito Ergo Sum)
But only may matter less to me
In terms of interest
In terms of importance
Than they do to you
And that remains
My right to declare
My right to share
What matters to me
Matters of interest
Are matters of choice
Though we may not agree

You loathe me because
Of what matters to me?
Who gives you the right to decide?
Loathe as you will
You shall still not decree
That which must matter to me.

PROLOGUE

People shall say:
How vile can she be
For alas they fear
To Free Speak like me
Double Speak being
All that they know
And Woke Speak being
All that they hear
All that they hear every day

NARRATIVE

I have reached a Time
The Time of my life
Time to enjoy my own self
A Time to delight and a
Time to submerge in the gulf

Just this much:
Not so much, not too much:
Not the same as
Not much at all
I wear my indifference
My boredom like a banner
To cover my sinfulness
Cover my nakedness

Barely I glance at the others
Eschew all attempts
Attempts to engage
While feigning an interest in them
(Pity my vanity, pity my pride)
They no not that I am here and
They know not that I do not care

EPILOGUE

Dark Matter surrounds me
To my Black Hole shall guide me
Where I’ll see no beacon of good
As I fall towards the Parallel Universe
Where I hope to find goodness again.

In the elevator
Express heading down
My father derailing
On buttons non-stop
My failure unknown
Elbows raised in defense
Become weapons instead

Enough is Enough
Old Man shout I
You have treated me like
A bend sinister child
My scoliotic curve
Accordian collapsing
Slinky toy on sacrum stairs
Like the heraldry shield
Of a bastardy heir**

And now the turn is mine
Pay back time is here
Pay back time has come

He stared at me
His first born child
Speechless, incredulous
Through headlong floors
Punched his chest & poked
His finger in my face:
You, me we’re alike
I nodded and thought:
You'll forget this moment
But I wear you back and front***

In the elevator
Express heading down
My father derailing
On buttons non-stop
My failure unknown
Elbows raised in defense
Become weapons instead

Enough is Enough
Old Man shout I
You have treated me like
A bend sinister child
My scoliotic curve
Accordian collapsing
Slinky toy on sacrum stairs
Like the heraldry shield
Of a bastardy heir**

And now the turn is mine
Pay back time is here
Pay back time has come

He stared at me
His first born child
Speechless, incredulous
Through headlong floors
Punched his chest & poked
His finger in my face:
You, me we’re alike
I nodded and thought:
You’ll forget this moment
But I wear you back and front***

When disaster strikes and all hope
is gone, get down on your knees
and pray for Shackleton.
																Sir Raymond Priestly,
																Antarctic Explorer

He came home one day
With such a strange gift
His mother had moved
And my father had helped her
Things must go
They weigh you down

He gave me the glass boat and said:
It belonged to your grandfather
The grandfather who’d been at sea
Years on an oil tanker
The Captain I never knew
My father’s words were few
And he meant no disrespect

The awe I ought to have felt was
Flattened by my narrowing eyes
Eyes that sought flaws and
Could seldom recognize
A beauty that was clean
Something that was pure
Pure as the lines of a boat

Why was the boat not in a bottle?
That’s how they come: ships-in-a-bottle
How I wronged this glass boat
So unseemly to my eyes
Not made of wood and too large for a bottle
It seemed rightly placed in a whole other world

‘Twas a sailing ship,
A schooner-bark
With lowered sails
Three proud masts
And an endless prow
Pointing to the sky
All glass—as delicate as
Barely frozen icicles and
Smartly showcased in more glass
Ensconced in a lidded aquarium
Sides taped together by silver foil
And quivering on the ege of disaster
I felt fearful whenever I moved it

Inside, there were cellophane waves
Unattached, moving like ice floes
Whose pieces were rigid but
Shifted slightly whenever the
Glass case was lifted —
A swaying of the seas

I became fond of this boat
But in my careless hands
It slowly fell apart and ten years later
Glass case giving way
At the silver foil seams
The cellophane waves spilled out
And I gave little thought to
What I was seeing
Or what it might mean:
Bored with the boat
I threw it away—after all:
You can’t bring a glass boat to college

A lifetime later, well past
My Century’s close
And the glass boat’s demise
I saw the photo, the Hurley photo:
The Endurance: taken at night
Frozen in Antarctic waters
Crushed and trapped in the ice
Unconsciously I apprehended
My grandfather’s boat of glass
Too familiar it seemed
This archetypal scene

I mourned a loss and
I mourned my disrespect
Forever in search of true words
To open unseeing eyes

All Summer long
They seemed bound to fall
And I wondered why they did not:
Constantly kill people or better yet:
Had not been declared illegal

Cautious walks down quiet streets
Close to the center as I could dare
Made me feel safe—almost safe
From Air Conditioners poised to fall

Wherever I could be discreet
Trying not to look insane
I tried to find Manhattan streets to
Manage my tightrope down their middle–
Streets empty enough to negotiate
Or new enough to wear few of them–
Dangling so precariously
Monstrous necklaces upon the buildings
Like ponderous bodies about to fall

Never before and never thereafter
Was I so certain, so sure in my prescience;
Old Stuyvesant High School
Crowned my best street: an absence of cars,
A surplus of windows, cold exposed bosoms
Whose falls I escaped—with impunity
By cleaving the center of streets

And then:

That last weekend’s warning
Addressed to my son:
Don’t walk beneath it, the
Footbridge on Liberty
It’s been closed for ages
You can’t walk across it
Traffic still goes under it
But pieces have fallen
May fall any moment
I always avoid it
And cut through South Tower

A word of warning
A gift to my son
And to his betrothed
On their way to a wedding
Warning to wedding guests
Albatross in the sky

Next day was Sunday Brunch
Nine/ Nine/ Two Thousand One:

Old memories wrapped anew
Wedding guests returned enthused;
We shared our recent holiday
Recounting the Palatine ruins
With lost and buried Romans
Doorways and Romans covered by time

How long will our civilization endure
And what may bring its downfall?
I asked aloud to no one at all
Not even expecting an answer

A final sip of coffee
Broke my husband’s silence
Broke it with a cliche:
When it ends it will end
BECAUSE:
We Were Not Watching Our Backs:
The silence of a Finished Cup

Words unexpected, words that chilled
Did the chill belong to retrospect or
To prescience in the air!

I remember, too, the night of the tenth
The Eve of Nine/ Eleven
Dinner and wine with a friend; then:
Ascending from the subway
I chose the longer way home
I walked across the Plaza
Lifting my face towards the sky
Lifting my face towards the towers
It was cool and I shivered
Regretting my wandering choice
Wishing I’d stayed underground
My face not facing the towers

I shivered again and thought:
The Fall will soon be here.
I was only thinking of Autumn

Now intermission, a pause for sleep:

Next day, the South Tower fell
Six Hundred Feet from my home
Running down the esplanade:
My Firebag, Laptop and All
My dog to his neck in the ashes
With blankets of paper like snow
Strange how such shreddings survive

Watched from Hudson River
North Tower’s slow motion fall
Was rescued by a water taxi:
Yellow boat that looks like a toy
Alive in my Yellow Submarine
I observed my watch wasn’t ticking
After the North Tower’s Fall.

Afterthought:
I wish I could say I made this all up
The Autumn/Fall a Freudian slip/But it is true to the preternatural
You have a gift someone once said
And I don’t know what that meant except
I stopped being afraid of falling air conditionser
You hardly see them anymore.

You'll leave because
I am entering
My dreamworld
And you'll be angry
And say mean things
The mean things you
Are already saying
Between the nice things
I shall say way meaner back
Have no way to calm us
And then it shall be
Like most other endings…
Except when the velvet moss
Dark matter of the universe
That begat me
Reminds me that…
I must never say
It is a pleasure
To live oneself
To be one’s own task.