Poems in the Year of the Step-child and Later

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 millennium 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 as 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
Too ill to move it out
Their dust
Their dirt
Their ownership
A lovely Victorian wardrobe
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
of 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
bold 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, eating, 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 don’t 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 and Brett
brought 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: 
the Jersey Shore and
breakfast in a diner.
As I recall, my step-daughters 
were all three with us.

It was a happy moment.
No one had been disagreeable,
No early morning fussing.

Something -- perhaps one of the “girls” --
had teased my mother-in-law
Into antic and comic behavior:

She suddenly took out her set of false teeth-!!!

I thought of my own long-gone Nana,
once laughing so hard her teeth flew --
from straight out of her mouth to the floor--
as though to speak magical words.

Splashing in the bathtub at the time,  
 I'd prattled some long forgotten rhyme 
that amused her and her teeth clattered 
to the floor like a chattering set of cartoon teeth
while Nana laughed on without them,
 joyfully laughing with me.

My mother-in-law
was likewise amused 
by each and all of her grandchildren,
and such bond is celebrated today, 
among the 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 I could count on
slid from jaw to 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?
But I never could explain myself.

Myriad are the coincidences
not mutually exclusive
and in those moments
the sleight of hand
holds the magic of memory,
chattering mnemonic
cartoon teeth
clattering to the floor.
                                 Circa 1990-1991

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 Titans

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 never forget those eyes.

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.

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.

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 now?

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.

I WONDER WHETHER
“NO FRIGATE
LIKE A NOOK”**
DOES IT 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 buildings' 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 cockroach 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 chiave” had become a theme
and she realized it had been lifelong:

Having a key
forgetting it
throwing it
down the garbage chute
hoisted with it by her own
hundred petards

dropping a key to eternity
Elevator . . . Shaft . . .
    Then Basement below:
Lost sound of key hitting ground.

Then watching another key pinwheel
caught on the sash of a sunhat
Freed itself swiftly and sink.

Another was swallowed
By the lining of a purse
To return when she'd long before moved.

Wanting them back and
Needing them back:
The solutions we see
Seem to still slip away

So We Say with a Sigh:

Even Mimi loses her key and
Even Mimi dies.

(never mind the falling in love
and tuberculosis in-between.
was that and is that it?
what we've begun we have already done and we'll do it 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