Category: Poetry

Inhabiting groves of grapefruits,
lime, mango, lemon, Continue reading “Souvenir of Florida”

What graceful primates swinging through branches uninvited,
Sun-risen on frosted eyes uncovered,
a thousand luminescent-rayed sapphires scattered into timbers above, into
near-innocent epithets  of errant farm boys scribbled. Continue reading “What graceful primates”

Hellbent man shaped, by scraping
And pounding, an amalgam of silver and lead.
The bowl of the spoon shaped enough
To hold a measured quantity of jam or
Flax or chia seeds.
Unburied from the hopes of what might
Have been a wedding gift, a passing
Fancy, a dowry,
The edges delicately delineated with the patterns
Of a tumbledown, weeded Welsh Abbey.
The gravitas of this object is wrapped
In tissue, stowed away,
To be unpacked, unwrapped,
And held to a forehead or cheek,
It’s coldness the lightest whisper
And memory, a passing Summer fancy.

We whisper along the rails, from Rhinecliff to
Pennsylvania Station. Small ponds
caught along the wayside are nearly frozen over,
rushes still a source of gold.
The stops are all poems in name:
Croton, whose hills Pythagoras
roamed, but here conceal a landfill.
Poughkeepsie, stone cuts swirling
in an ecstasy of geological turmoil.
Along the impending renovations
graffiti tags and patches
underpasses, equipment housing, tires,
whatever else remains of a few encampment lean-to’s.

In increments we are transported
through brief flashes of sky in Hell’s Kitchen,
Shuddered stop
each released beneath Manhattan,
jostling in our shared ascent.

In each new home, I stood for some time in the basement, tracing
the copper pipes, the old cast iron waste,
the wires electric, even the old ceramic spindles.
I followed each joist to its seat, and sought out the origin of dust, perhaps
from powder post beetles or termites.
I sought out hollow spaces beneath the bluestone flags, hoping
to locate a hidden cistern, or treasure,
historic.
Once, the water feeds were so jammed with rust,
I had to hammer them free. I had to
learn humility and
the patience of plumbing.

Sometimes it was simply the light that fell
across a dining room floor, a built-in cupboard
with distorted glass,
or a back and narrow stairs. I love one
house, the antebellum slave quarters,
then filled with mouldering piles of pecans.
The house was a four over four, with uncanny dimensions.

Another was glorious with detritus, its original inhabitant
a famed suffragette, having left her dampened maroon Baedeker’s,
advertisements for the Hamburg-America. Cunard Line,
Lusitania deck-plans barely impeded the path, back
out the kitchen.

It was all, naturally, torn down.

Reading Herodotus, or
driving through the Catskill range
past the oxidized effluvium of long-eroded mountains;
Past layers of catskills
delta, where subsequent glaciers scraped
at the Helderburgh sea, where
the orogeny of the acadian mountains gave way to
the Brachiopods of Mount Marion.

The Falls give way to the Resevoir, leaving
behind the cheap dinginess of a highwayside grocery, and
the piano hammer factory, where they
housed and loved old machines.

The indian trading post closed, but plaster
totems still stand in the woods, on the hill behind.

Our house was the first,
floating free of its footing,
moving away from the path leading
through the pasture where we would pass
the fly-swarmed dead horse,
fascinated.

I think I was fond of someone next door,
but I don’t remember.

Was it here that I first met
my father, home from Okinawa?
He had a magnificent flat-top crew cut.

They repaired our house.
But it was on the San Andreas Fault
and so other houses crawled,
or the cracks in bedroom walls
were so great the outside would be
more visible than proper,
and we all moved away.
When we returned, visiting,
the homes were used to shelter livestock.

That quiet lot across the road, where
comfort arms crossed, and
woolen-sweater-sheathed
the leapers, criers, the
many children are absent.
The wind gathers the leaves and bits of paper
re-mixes their movement and positing
folding and in-folding.

Galvanized chain link fences, rusted
along the bottom edge do
not so much as inhibit barrier-
crossers, but by deft defiance cause
the crisp light to leap up
into my arms, and running
back, so small, before the bricks and
faded advertising.

These palm lines converge too quickly,
they should encompass a greater expanse.

The lot, the empty lot, rolls downwards
towards the intersection, the lights going
through their motions, their sequences for hardly anyone.
And back across up to the teahouse
where a Paine’s grey watercolor sky reflects
from the top of a tepid cup, tightly held.

Do you ever have those dreams where you’re somewhere,
a bus station perhaps, and
turning the corner you’re in a bowling alley?

Someone nailed my feet. To the floor.
and my heart to I don’t know where, just that
there was a story being told,
a story that from an art-of-fiction perspective,
the dramatic tension, the character development,
was unresolved. And turning, looking,
into your face I was returned
home, opening the front door, back,
to a country, a field, a farm, I don’t know where, just
that it is the place from where I may have.

The freckles on your back are the stars of the milkyway,
My hand, the spaceship, slides down the
ridge of vertebrae, through the small,
across Orion’s belt to the doubleness
of your tush, tukas, ass, butt, derierre.
In these outer reaches of the galaxy
I lose my way – become disoriented.
These brownspots a map of Fire Island.