Ken Siegelman - City Souls [Complete]

[spelling errors are his]

City Souls

Shaman in Korea
Marry the souls
Of single men
To single women
Who die only days apart
Of one another.
Everyone understands
Because loneliness
At any level
Is the greatest cruelty of all.
We brush against
Each other
At the theater,
And in trains and buses;
Scurrying to our apartment floors
With city poker faces
We hope will hide
The fear and disappointment.
sometimes we remember faces
Fashion statements
And even idiosyncrasies
As the minutiae of the moment;
The fleeting, futile photographer
We cast out
Like the morning fisherman's
First few throws
To wake the sea into familiarity...
She lived here
For as long as we remember.
She always got the Sunday paper
early.
She wore long beige gloves.
We thought we heard some screams.
But who could tell for sure
Right off the avenue.
No one claimed her remains
And no one was arrested
For the murder.
She went off to Potter's Field
As if she hadn't lived at all,
And we have no shaman here
To wed her soul
In the company of another;
No way to make her
More in death
Than when she was alive.
_____________________________________

Obliteration

I mean to gravel every path of my beginnings,
And concrete any pore which bleeds
With the minor scrape of nails or thorns
Or insects feasting off of me;
Capillaries sanded clean and epoxied without a hint of
evidence -
Sand blasted with shaved lettered corners
Like a tombstone withered by the rain;
Perplexing to the scrutiny of those who venture past my
epitaph
A stumbling block for jaded biographers,
Suited in unchallenged roots,
Who etch their mark on those like me
To fill their published works
Like carrion, pincering flesh from bones
As they attempt to fathom every vein and artery
G-d has taken from me at my final breath;
Before the first fly larvas on my skin...
I will leave a steel mesh lather's grill
Beneath the concrete of my origins,
Which no pick or ax can penetrate;
Leaving just a residue of pebbles
To puzzle all of those who seek to find me
In my father's sperm or my mother's womb.
_____________________________________

Bensonhurst

Like many
In those fig tree yards
He tended an ungiving vegetable garden
With shovels of measured spilling cow manure
Cascaded wood stick baroque lattice arcs
Castled for grape vines
As if raising an ancient goblet in a toast
To the memories of Italy in a grandma fire escape song
From a century ago in the Lower East Side...
No one ever seems to hear
The seismic thunder of the El.
Just above New Utrecht Avenue;
Theirs is the stoicism of all the black dressed widows
Gnarling through their rosaries on the front stoop chairs
As if the rest of Brooklyn and the City
Had long gone to hell all around them -
Never touching their Sundays -
Stirred into their gravy
With the determination of a chef
Conjuring the secret mix of ingredients
Locked up in the long term memories of the race.
And always,
It was the fathers;
Grandfathers
And all their sons
Conceived in parked Buicks with the passion
Of hot blooded Romeos who never read Shakespeare
Or heard of the Renaissance
But picked their Juliets out of convent homes
Just a few blocks away.
_____________________________________

Things Not Really There

From the backseat of those globular 1950's cars
Children elbowed up to watch the clouds
Trunk like ponderous elephants
And stalk like leopards through wisps of prairie camouflage
Covering their teeth and eyes.
I'm not certain when I stopped seeing them as real;
Perhaps, when I realized that the wind always
Blew them into disarray -
Much like the quilt soldiers on my bed
When yellow light fevered through my head,
And I moved my knees to watch the musket men
Disappear into dark ravines.
It got me thinking they were dead,
Or never real, when I moved my legs
To make them come alive...
The darker scrolls woven into parquet floors
Cast facial frowns and clownish smiles
As I checked my head off the bed.
They seemed more permanent than clouded animals
Or musket men ever were;
Yet when I caught a seconds' nap
They also disappeared.
_____________________________________

The Mule Driver

When father left for work
I only heard
The tumblers in the closing lock.
I never saw him leave
Or take his keys and change
Off the Empire vestibule
In the hall beside my bed.
I think I heard his cigarette voice
Sweetly say goodbye,
And that he would return
With dirt and grease
To scrub Boraxo powder
With me at the bathroom sink
Just before supper.
Our grime co-mingled
In the sink like a transfusion
And I felt certain, for an instant,
That he was my father...
Many other times I sensed
As though I lived
With the same shudder of surprise
That people in the 1950's felt,
Before winter forecasts,
Became more than simple guesswork.
I would wake
To find them cordial
But remote;
Cemetery eyes casting
The awful feeling children have
When they know never
To ask why...
In some street game,
Lost inside my memory
I had learned to love myself
For simply being there;
Listening to the kids call my name,
The way I wished they had...
I pressed my father
To tell me more about
The driver
On the 20 mule team Borax can;
And when he realized
Where I was heading
He toweled and left me at the sink
Next to all the ghosts
I learned to sleep with
On weekday mornings
When he left for work
Without recalling
what he looked like standing there
Or what he might have left unsaid
In the shadows
Of the vestibule and
Cedar smelling drawers.
And when I washed
For school
I used the Boraxo soap,
Just to tell that mule team driver
That I hadn't given up.
_____________________________________

Edward

I was held back by my father's arm
A yard away from Edward's grave;
Robbed of any fantasied brotherhood, -
Reigned off by a family troika.
I was close enough to wobble in a faint
When they whimpered uncontrollably, edging on
hysteria.
They reached put to him in the flowered space
Above the prickly ferns
Where even mother seemed oblivious or blind
To any bees...
Father told her no one was responsible:
He died before the doctors they took him to
Had common use of penicillin...
I wondered why they grabbed my wrist
When I discovered photos of him on a tricycle;
Plump cheeked, with curly hair
As I imagined they thought he's look forever...
In a Bayer aspirin tin, wrapped, up in a rubbed band,
He'd hidden pennies in place
Only parents are supposed to know about.
When I broke the rubber band,
I feared my mother's tears would shrink her
In a second final death
And shook to think of father's rage
At breaking through a sacred seal
I was never meant to touch.
_____________________________________

San Diego

Later on in life
My wife and I passed through San Diego
A year before my twin daughters were born...
Father still wore his strapped rowed linen tee shirt
To the train on tawny sweltering summer mornings in New York,
And brown buttoned flannel plaid shirts in winter
With his navy woolen cap
Cuffed around his upper ears...
San Diego was still 3,000 thousand miles away,
But light years in the past.
When he tattooed mother's name
Winging through a red heart on his arms...
The flat homes made me think of impoverished haciendas
With wilting palms in the tearful scenery
Of Southern California,
With just the slightest hint of boot camps
In corner Army, Navy Stores...
I never asked if he was drunk
Or Sober
Or the month in 1943,
When he held his arm up to the needles
That painted Pauline's name beneath his skin...
I'll always think of San Diego
In the times I saw and didn't see
My mother's name wiggle unintentionally
Which he carried through the years -
When he moved or fell to deathly stillness
With San Diego printed in my mind.
_____________________________________

Lake Fishing

I watched him grimace when his line tangled
Into the roots and drift wood in the lake
Where the algae morsed a perfect feeding ground
For big mouth bass...
He thought he had the patience
Of a perfect fisherman -
Rolled down khaki sleeves
And a brimmed hat full of lures
He cherished like Christmas decorations
His family prized for many years...
He imagined strutting home
With his index finger hooked inside its gills;
Dreading the look on other's eyes
If he walked in flat foot steps
With is rod held to his side
Like a solider in defeat...
He pen knifed those arching strings;
Dumping line and hooks and everything
While he cursed the afternoon as a conspiracy -
Only half believing in his fate.
_____________________________________

Transfigurations

I remember when father first raised his fists
And with a grimaced smile, told me he would hurt me.
I was numb with rage and beer
As if no one left on earth could harm me,
Anymore than all their whispers
When I stood alone through adolescence...
I was certain that he'd take me down
With his southpaw swing I never saw coming.
I landed on the linoleum, more than once,
Ready for the next barrage of jabs when I got up...
I hated him for not being the father who had seeded me,
As much as mother's somber look
In which I saw the same tearful eyes
Which resurrected him she buried
Years before they took me in;
To bundle in the winter and bathe in the summer...
I wondered if "The Enemy" had won the war
And if they'd put a pistol in my hand
To point at fathers' head
And butt my mother from behind...
Would I hesitate to annihilate those who sheltered me
With the anger I felt after watching bulldozers
Sanitize the graves at Dachau,
Or the horror of the walking dead
At the liberation of Auschwitz.
_____________________________________

After-Birth

Curled oak leaves eddied in the corners of the hospital
Where ground keepers found it hard to rake
In that Staten Island winter when the first snow
Teased inside the purple morning sky
But turned lavender by afternoon...
There were shallow graves crackling everywhere
As if the chilly breeze breathed up in restless mounds
From underground rather than the sky.
The limbs of trees shrugged like twigs with a sigh,
Looking at the brittle dry mouthed soil
Pursed for any sign of sleet or snow
Or even slanting rain
To enzyme things long dead or already close to dying...
I don't believe mother ever felt this
Like an artist or a poet would -
Counting only seconds through the night shift
For the cab to drive her home.
_____________________________________

Father's Room

It was a puffy February
Bloated in a softened steady snow;
Pillowed on each trunk and mattressed when I fell
As if collapsing on my bed -
Knowing I would empty out my head
Of those who broomed their porches
In dreadful fear of glistening ice by nightfall...
I always felt those gun grey afternoons,
With the flakes plastered to the windows,
Were a time when the ax man in Peter and the Wolf
Thighed through the Russian landscape;
Marking for a low slung house
Marked by chimney smoke
Sneaking through the tree line
Perhaps, he was a father
Bent on coming home at last
To see his half-grown son
Who stared in sadness
Trying not to feel alone
With just the stories that his mother told him
Misting in the puffy February snow.
_____________________________________

Mute Canaries

My parents were forever tourists,
Even when welcomed like long lost kin
In plank wood boarding houses with checkered table clothes
On the Canadian border.
They tip-toed to the hall bathrooms,
Much the way they cautiously and politely
Slid their seats at the full course diner,
While the other guests joked as they complimented the hostess
On her gravy and fine cuts of brisket...
They carried their strangeness like cautious canaries
Into a mine shaft, poled ahead of lamp helmeted men
Who watched their heaving yellow breasts
Bulge and gasp at the first scent of unseen gas
As a prelude to some human tragedy
Father always spoke about in the deep shafts of Pennsylvania mines...
On an embankment of concert seats
Ampitheatered on a brink of Canadian night in July,
We watched fiddlers play the chorus to fifes and drums
While children of my age
Were hugged and sweatered by their parents
As the lanterns swayed like stars across the lake...
On that night I shivered like no winter
I can remember before or since;
I, the colorless canary
Who'd lost his will to sing.
_____________________________________

The Totem

I now understand just how much my silence
Empowered me through their sofa scans across the living
room.
He lifted up his rimless glasses to her foreheard,
And rubbed his eyes,
While resting back upon the doily she crotched,
More for looks than use...
In one or two angry moments
I told them they were not my parents;
More than half expecting some denial
Which I never got - but hoped for nonetheless...
I first saw my totem through the frosted bathroom glass
When I closed the door
On an adolescent birthday in February
When in any other tribe
I would have come of age -
Winged across the firescape, it nodded to me in whispers
Like shrews make nostriling into dark woodpiles,
Or giant birds pulling up in the updraft
Of misty mountains high above Hudson's sky...
I think that they believed I saw my messenger
Locked up in my secret smiles and uncomplaining ways.
For many years I endured their silence
While I let them slip away
Into the obscure snake plants mothers watered weekly
And on the footstool pile of newspapers father never read.
_____________________________________

Fragility

An older woman kneels in a soiled bathrobe
Cupping edges of her backyard sprouts
Where ants trail up and down like soulless hikers on a
rampage
While she shakes a sprinkle from a plastic planter's sprout
Before the later morning sun will dry and singe
Them into charcoal grey...
When the two of you were born,
I watched you from behind the nursery glass,
Willing you to stay alive and wishing
You would never feel the burning sun or stinging ants,
And all the disappointing roads I tread
With every fear I'd come to know,
But, never could let go of...
In that narrow walkup, the heat broke down in winter,
And I watched you move in double layers of pajamas
That the doctor said we should never change
Until the heat came on...
When you cried in the pitch of night
I worried if a rat had scaled your cribs,
And when you reddened in hysteria when fed by day,
I microscoped the bottles you drank from
To find a trace of soured milk or poisoned pulp of juice;
Rooting in your throats, festering in your stomachs -
Shortening your lives by the latter part of summer.
_____________________________________

Tantivies

Father galloped on an imaginary horse
And so no hoof dust or imprint of a trail
Puffed the carpet of his origins
Or any of his many temporary destinations...
He roomed in inexpensive boarding houses;
Where he cotted in-between the hours he slept
And those he waked the boat out to the lake
Where he hunched while going fishing...
Of all the wildlife that he saw,
Mirrored in the speckled grayness of his eyes,
He always felt that fish would never learn to talk
Or tell on him -
Minnows at the shore, and frogs who bulged their invariable surprise
At turtles necking up among the lily ponds
Put him most at ease,
Like an old time prisoner on a long term stretch
Others would ignore...
His seed was the wasted innocence
Of those whose lives margin on the privacy
Of egrets who take to flight
When cameras or binoculars sight
Them in captivity...
I chased him to his grave
Where I only found a cross and name
On the ivy flat-living of his trail
Into eternity.
_____________________________________

Father's Mind

Father drew schematics at the kitchen table after supper.
He imagined the copper wire wedged into the slits of wooden
screens,
With a butter knife he dulled and shortened
Like a surgeon lacing ligaments through microscopic things.
Mother tipped his cup a little darker,
Keeping still in slippers on linoleum
That snake skinned at the steam pole
With the multitude of colors of those who lived here
Long before...
On the evening of the day before
He promised me a dog,
He'd been bitten in the backroom of a Greenpoint bar
By a black tongue chow
Waiting for his footsteps like a jungle cat...
Father drew schematics after supper,
And I knew never to bring up
Adopting some poor dog.
_____________________________________

Splinters

Over time,
Mother mostly used her long thing sewing needles
Less for mending clothes and socks
And more to glow their tips on stove tops
When we hobbled home from the July beach...
She raised my foot to pinch and probe for slithers,
Burrowed in the softest skin I never really thought existed...
Perhaps her first and greatest lie to me,
Was that it wouldn't hurt;
The best of options to put my trust in her
Like the doctor who would foot the stairs
When fever swayed me from my bed
To the bathroom down the hall...
My every nerve tremored repulsion
While mother said I only made it harder...
My trust in her faded, even when she smiled success
And clinched the splinter to my eyes,
While it hurt as much before she ever touched it...
Over time, I think she lost the will
To sew and mend, or knit the scarves
She mostly bought in stores on sale -
The sewing kit flowered in a snap on tin
Waiting through the seasons
Just for splinters in the summer.
_____________________________________

The Grave

I left his open grave in Winter
While the diggers stalked behind their orange trucks,
Drinking to bend the slanting snow away
With the promise of a stronger blizzard later in the day.
Whirling in its way with the stringing of a white out...
Part of me remained at peace, had the casket man
Knocked on his lid,
To show that he was ill - pronounced as dead; so everyone
Could hear him tapping, -
But the soiled hole he lay inside made me sure that he was dead...
Carpenters, who were his friends, tilted at every sound below
As did all the loved ones with wet socks and soaked stockings
Who hoped against all hope that he would rise again...
We kept the rats at bay all that later morning,
For as long as we circled around this open pit,
And the crows towed to the tree limbs,
Waiting patiently for us to step away
And move into our cars...
I thought of all the global shallow graves
We ignore; moved and pushed by careless hikers
Who lift moss and kick the stones
Without a second thought to crippled birds
Or sickly squirrels overrun by ants and centipedes,
But I never thought of him that way
Until the headstone set and flowers took root
To hold him firmly in his place.
_____________________________________

Ben

How strangely the twilight fell that evening;
Rebounding on and off the clouds
Like a boxer who had stumbled to his knees -
It vasolined with purple cuts along his cheekbones,
But he rose again,
As if his final knock down would never come
While he teased the shouting men to cheer
In a roar of thunder from the crowd
On a distant hill outlined from the cheaper seats...
I thought that you would die in that groggy state,
And hoped like hell you never saw me sulking
At the ringside seat;
Reserved for sons who never waked their fathers
Or thought of flowers wilting on their caskets...
In life you pinned one white orchid
To the lapel of your Klein store jacket;
Beckoning anyone outside the photograph
To fight you over hidden fears
I never quite could understand.
_____________________________________

St John The Divine

If my mother is charred in an Italian urn,
Yet, I sense her in the fleck of dust on August beaches,
Where others blanket in a tent
To shield them from the sting of sand
Swept in eddies from the beach;
Brazingly moving to the boardwalk...
My father rests with the promise
of a resurrection like the one
Jesus raised to life
Behind the flora and stones,
In a tomb where shrouded decomposition
Kept the faith he had in every one who doubts...
In either case, they move with me in a flight of doves
And sickly pigeons
Where I think I'll fly along side them;
Although no one in my family will wait for vigil,
Or foresee,
The hour and time I'll visit them
In August sandstorms or trimmed September ivory
On my settled father's grave...
I will not wake my wife,
Or tell others of what I'm sure will be -
The fate of dust they blink at with annoyance,
Or my father's grave
Which will unearth
And finger tip to life
On the day of resurrection.
_____________________________________

Father's Ghost

I always thought of him
In the gas jets bubbled over in a hundred watery paint jobs,
Sealed inside the molding on our bedroom wall.
He was the speckled frosted glass
On the French door handles
That rhinestoned any light at dawn,
And eyed at me in the gothic key hole
Few thought about anymore...
In the silent part of night,
Before the alley cats hunched and screeched,
Waking me from what I felt was sleep,
I smelled his flannel workshirt,
And the woolen winter cap he always pulled around his ears...
On a summer fire escape, I dreamed him dead
A year or two, before I knew he'd taken ill...
In death he came to life
As he never did while living. I head him through a grey haired Negro
mop man
Soaping up a diamond hall
Singing Carolina songs;
Humming shadowed premonitions on the borderline of Blues and jazz -
As pleasing to my ears
In songs I never heard before.
_____________________________________

Cows And Bulls

My father's memory is as deceptive
As the bulging eyes of a Jersey cow's
Munching sloppy fodder.
She jewels in rings hanging
From her shoulders bulbous like her teats;
Curling from her box like molars with slightly swinging
hips...
On my father's gothic tombstone
His name is etched in rough-hewn script,
As if he was the brazen bull in life
Who stomped and hoofed the looser soil
While snorting grunts of anger
In an updraft from his lungs...
I think he understood,
More so in his later years,
How the best of bulls are chosen by a matador
To quiver into death -
Because they neither birth new life
Nor offer any milk to drink.
_____________________________________

Hall Of Souls

I found my first name in my 30's
Blazoned white on India ink of hospital microfilm;
From that time, until now,
I confess I looked over my shoulders to see the condor wings
Of Saint Michael in the passing clouds of wispy days
Shadowing over me.
My grandson saw the plaster statue of Michael in my bedroom
And overlooked the murky star fish shape
Of a defeated Satan speared by the archangel as his feet...
All he seemed to see was that Saint Michael wore
Silver strap on sandals,
Which made him think he was a woman,
When I realized his hair was bob cut in a bandanna
Like his mothers...
Until then, I always thought that parakeets were green
And canaries glinting yellow.
I'm certain if I pressed the point
He might think of me as one who fought the devil,
But he was old enough to see blue parakeets
And red canaries singing in the Hall of Souls
With Sparrows.
_____________________________________

The Silence

There's a certain silence which makes me certain
Everything has disappeared;
More than just a new moon, or foggy July sky
When the thought of an eclipse never comes to mind,
Or a gun grey winter sky which fools me to believe
That rain or snow is on its way
While the only sound I hear is a dripping faucet
Caught in sync with a Little Ben alarm clock
Ticking taps with its second hand from the bedroom
To the front room window sill,
As if the snake plants might be slithering awake
In a low pitch tone that even mice can't hear
Shouldering at the shadowed walls...
The ceiling fan and refrigerator meld as one
In the deafness of the dawn,
Where once a flock of sparrows
Sopranoed on a nearby gate
With the slightest hint that at that moment
I was not confined by limbo closing in...
The seams along the parquet floors
Have also lost those faces I remember seeing
As a child;
Even when the silence settled in,
If only for a moment.
_____________________________________

Younger Men

Younger men with sprightly troding steps
Angle from their hips;
Pressing down this trail as is they don't know
Where it ends,
Or as if the end is every thing
Is their illusive inner path which clearings up ahead
Through a rush of adrenalin
I haven't felt for years...
In the shadows of the twilight
When cardinals jump limb to limb,
It seems as if these wise old birds are holding back;
Waiting for the brash young men to bend the weeds
And snap the branches,
Searching for those thing they've already seen
But by-passed in the periphery of youth...
I am breathless, patient, flushed and sweaty;
Numbed while sitting on a flat rock off the trail.
I'm watching ants devoured by worms
And worms looping shelter in the shade.
There's a part of me that wishes
That this trail would end differently,
But it's satisfying just to wait
Until the younger men return this way
With news of things I don't remember seeing.
_____________________________________

Rescuer

She mounded like a blob of drying potter's clay
Cast off from the wheel;
A residue of pale and brittle outer forms
Scalped off the curves and symmetry of the spellbound
Syncopated piece, wheeling the shape of some finished art;
Waiting for the final touches of the bruch and kiln
To stroke it to perfection...
She was the poor holding on so fragily
To the edges of a park bench on the avenue,
Where pigeons beaked wild birdseed from what might have been her
finger
Bulging from the lamb-like folds of her printed dress;
Thighed in pasty friction, even when her legs were widely parted,
In the abstraction of what I think I saw
When my car blurred by...
She's a bulb-eyed doll who feels too much
While remaining voiceless like all of those we throw away;
Waiting for when the pigeons leave at twilight
And cats tongue in and slouch to drink...
In the unrelenting dryness of a July night
She'd probably collapse in flaking pieces,
To be broomed away by dawn
When only pigeons and alley cats
Would remember her at all.
_____________________________________

Cracow Outskirts

Perhaps, I was the only one who smelled grandma's washed out
Printed dress as flowers;
Roses running into lilacs like those she hummed about
In broken English;
When as a young girl she sandaled home
From cleaning the houses of the rich and lazy...
She never cut her hair, bobbed into a tiger colored comb
And her azure eyes never angered
Nor ever saddened over all the years of shearing work...
Whatever English she could grasp
Came from watching daytime TV...
She hauled a kitchen chair out front
To wash her windows, well into her eighties...
Mother tried to trim her bristling chin hair
And I remember how she laid back reluctantly
To meet the scissors like a child who who only trusted barbers
That she knew would never hurt her...
I sat half a night at her casket,
On the vigil of her wake,
In a cloudy room without a window
Where the candle exhumed the smell of incense
I drank away the remaining hours at a nearby bar,
Thinking of the flowers bleeding on her dress -
Those I'd search in vain to find
In any other Polish landscape.
_____________________________________

Tompkinville New York

The years have long since passed through more than just
The change in seasons,
When women moaned the loss of children
Who were placenta red out as still borns;
Blanketed in a flag wrapped burial shroud.
As mothers pushed and pressed their hips
And prayed to see and hear a greasy fetus
Come to life with a bloated head and mucosed nose...
Celia never wanted me alive
And anguished with the fear of carrying my life inside of her
In the abandoned Staten Island place.
Her shame echoed past the narrows off to Brooklyn
And frenzied her in the loneliness of disbelief.
She kept a muted silence all through the nodded conversations
While she smoked inside the sky lit waiting room
With women bulging like herself...
Perhaps, we all scream while entering the unwanting world
And some are chosen just to see our mothers only once,
As they name us and stride off to the bus stop
And the ferry;
Distancing them, from the life they've given up.
And the one they've left behind.
_____________________________________

Alex

Alex brought a stray pigeon into his seaside window
When a gale trapped it in his wrought iron gate
As November held it captive;
One hundred feet above his blowing checkered curtain...
It was as homeless as he felt he'd always been
When the father, he had never known, took flight in
Puerto Rico,
And left his mother all alone to carry him to Coney Island...
Many like him coveted secret thoughts of flying
Or jumping out;
Fearful of he claustrophobic stairwells, where eerie
Razor bladed dealers and snarling dogs
Waited for the sound of sneaker steps
Of those they knew never would belong...
His mother agonized about the lice, jumping off the chairs
And couch,
And finally led him to the madness of snapping off the pigeons neck...
He took in an unmentored cat,
Teaching it to use a litter box,
While it curled upon his mother's lap
And pawed inside the cabinets at night
And open pipes where mice gnawed into the smallest spaces...
I think that Alex always missed his pigeon
And kept the cat to give his sickly mother
A reason to live on...
Hew knew the cat would eat the bird,
But always wished to have both of them live together in his flat;
One to scale the project's skies
And one to keep his mother alive.
_____________________________________

Darkness

His students secretly confessed to one another
That he only saw crows beaking
In the brown pre-dawn across his canvas;
Mindful that he never seemed to see the pin hole light
As the minutes grayed in contrast to his paint whipped purple black,
Even as the sparrows squeaked from dinosaur silhouettes
In the flattenings of song in tans and whites;
And bristled squirrels seemed to look more like rubber rats
Squeezing through rusted dumpsters on the avenue...
Here, the snapping anarchy of ripped black garbage bag,
Startled lonely walkers,
As much in winter as in summer...
There was no solace in the late spring elements for him,
Who'd abandoned the proximity of black to green,
Where everyone, but him, it seemed,
Kept the darkness in his heart;
Searching for the crows who fled the light;
Locked inside the whispers of his students,
Who brushed shadows into gray,
And profiled walkers
Taking deeper breaths
In the dappled light of day.
_____________________________________

Joe Bryant

The empty stepped thicket highwayed through this line of birch
Howling in a steady blast of wind
With snow and ice bearded on their every side.
It was the look and sound of February's amethysts
Purpled into glinting blue
Which trailed along this naked path
Where thought of you
Almost seemed to shadow when I moved,
But disappeared while I stood still.
For a moment I imagined your cheshire smile,
Tilting toward me in the Fall
When the cries of your not born litter
Assured me you would stay forever...
I wondered where you'd gone in Winter,
Half-resolved you made a homestead
In a secret tunnel on this homeless stretch of birch;
Blurring my myopia, while penciling a black hole
In the horizon as they converged into an optical illusion
Bending in as birch are prone to do
While slanting in a windy snow...
Your poetry lyriced soul to language
And wagoned suffering to a more friendly place
Where I also wished to go .
I knew there was a chance
I'd see you once again;
If not along this row of birch then somewhere else
Much closer to the peace where we began.
_____________________________________

Rocking Horse

So many are pastured into shingled musty attics;
Wedged in corners where they're frozen in an eerie stillness
As if they had no history of ever rocking rhythms in children's
rooms
On lower floors...there they were shined and dusted daily
As a centerpiece of that early stage of human freedom
When they conjured up smiles in those adults
Who thought of them like Pegasus, or even rodeos,
That promised all adventures yet to come
When moving on, whole growing up...
Through the shadowed light of filthy attic windows
Their marble eyes seem dumb and vicious like a sharks,
While spiders web them in obscurity
As if they'd all been buried above ground...
Perhaps, in dreams from time to time,
Adults who swayed on them as children
Meet the secret thoughts they had of other things
When they rocked on them incessantly?
Things that boys and girls need never tell
Themselves or others,
But which parents may have guessed about,
And put out of their minds
When the rocking horse was stalled up in the attic.
_____________________________________

Leo

He was a flat liner most of his life.
Who oiled the hinges of his pigeon coop
When the chimney belched a charcoal mist
Atop his roof in Bensonhurst...
He opened the shaky wire gate
When he heard them coo in he lost hours of August nights,
Before the sparrows chirped the brown predawn to grey..
He gobble walked to the closest store on the avenue
That sold wild birdseed,
And kept it sealed in the shadows of his fig tree yard
As if the rollers could detect
The pencil yellowed slats of food kept fresh
From those that bloated wormy brown
On the steps of slated veiny rocks of backyard steps
Fired up in the merciless spoilage of July...
I never really got to know him;
Colored like the gray plaid shirts he wore by late October
Disappearing in and out, and back again,
From the basement of his house
Where he scraped the curls of cellar paint
And tapped the pigeon coops securely,
After winter had its way with wood and rusting nails...
I think he always wished to be as free
As the puffed chest birds he kept as pets;
To wing in figure eights,
While never losing sight of them or Bensonhurst.
_____________________________________

Empty Crates

Until a certain age,
Children love to crouch in Christmas cardboard packages
And take delight when being dragged across the floor
As they hunch like jack-in-the-boxes;
Popping up in smiles more genuine than any clowns...
Piecemeal latticed toys clutch inside unreadable instructions
And irk adults who bend and fumble
Screws to nuts which rarely fit;
While children wisp laughter in its empty crate
Where like squirrels they scratch and ill-defined identity
With little need to see the toy
Constructed in a disappointing way -
Almost always a let down from the colored cover on the box...
So I keep paintings on my walls
Which I smile at from my bed or couch,
Imagining I'm inside the scenery;
Moving in a crate along some summer pastoral
Or skidding down an icy hill.
Here, there are no toys bent out of shape
Or mumbling fathers cursing fate
For buying things that test the patience
Of everyone who waits to see what comes out
Like a diagram...
The paintings blend and shadows all around my sight,
Where the crate I'm moving in,
Keeps me young inside a box,
Sealed inside a balanced frame, where I am free forever.
_____________________________________

A Roaming

There are streets not far from here
Where walking seems to out of place.
Here kerchiefed women in long tweed coats
Cross when they see gaunt grey men
Whose socket eyes match the wrinkled khaki
Of their unwashed shirts...
The sparse remnants of maple leaves in shallow pockets,
Hold to a drizzle even on the brightest days.
Their diseased limbs flake bark;
Sopping wet on the concrete,
Hematomed to the asphalt...
Those who shuffle on these fecal streets
Hold to silence when returning;
Distressed by a shrug of guilt
And their private needs to go a roaming,
But never just to take a walk.
_____________________________________

United States Of Vagabonds

On this narrow highway bending into nowhere,
The reddest barns peel in curled anonymity
With grey psoriasis of transfiguring into tool sheds
And missing shingles dripping rain or leaks from G-d knows where?
There are still some chickens pecking at the sod
Where particles of circus peanuts from late summer
Garbage in the softening mud of early Fall;
When those, like me, imagine long dressed farmers' wives
Scattering feed we might have missed when leaving late from
Our motel...
It is the United States of vagabonds
We seldom think about when twirling maps in our cars,
Mistaking chicken hawks for roosters
And rotting corn for scarecrows;
Imagining farmers in brown straw hats
And women traying out warm and buttered biscuits
As we stop to ask directions...
Dickensian children, underdressed in late November,
Stomp at cats who claw innocence
From fence to barn, across the balding convulted paths
No one rakes or seeds or sickles any more...
There's the tinge of yellow fringes at the doiley edge
Of curtains, ironed by the midday sun,
And chickens speak to us in ways
They've always done,
While most of us see what we think we see,
Imagining something slightly better further
Down the road.
_____________________________________

Street Lady

Even when disheveled in long woolen skirts and long sleeve
shirts,
Out of place by early May,
She remember all her children's names
And grandkids she had only glimpsed when they were born,
But, which she kept as curled and faded photographs
Reminiscent that her world stood still
As if months and years lived like soldiered dominoes
Along the benches in the park she passed;
Hoping against hope, none-would fall,
Clipping off each other,
In a collapsing bridge or wall
That she resolved would only happen as acceptable,
In a breeze passed or pigeons landed their indifference
On the chess boards...
She knew the cats she fed
And by faith believed they responded
To the names she'd given them
When they were half-inclined to hesitantly slouch
Into the food and milk she left for them...After all, she picked
her meager meals
From wired baskets wrapped in foil;
Not too concerned if no one knew her name,
Which she'd forgotten long ago.
_____________________________________

Mermaid Avenue

Tunneling between the ocean and the Bay
Its bodega corners fry neglect in summer,
And polar narrow walkways through the snow.
Disabled, splintered concrete curbs
Flamenco those who skip and jump in High top sneakers,
Bandaged into sweat sock rings as if the seasons melt like one
Through tales of mermaids
Men in baseball caps have smiled about since long ago...
Mommies samba their selective skip beat memories
Of "The Island,"
And floral fire escapes with the bandara of Puerto Rico;
Single stared like the flag of Texas at the Alamo...
Nelson lives here with his wife and kids
And a Chihuahua cross who bites before he barks.
He's often blind on Absolute and drugs,
Gesturing in Spanglish rhythmed speech
Resonating the background of black hair Indians
Tinctured white by the Conquistadors
And rituals of the Catholic Church...
Outside Saint Margaret Mary I tell him
That I'm running out of hope
As the darkness twilights into me
In a red moon eclipsing any promise of the sun...
He says that no one should look for any light
Except the one inside,
And it all makes perfect sense to me
Because he's lived his life on Mermaid Avenue.
_____________________________________

Longfellow In Brooklyn

There was no poetry in my father's house;
Just raking in the Falls and shoveling in winter,
And those of us who feared to fail at anything...
Mother aired the bedding cold as death
And scraped the tiles of any memory
That we had showered and left it wet,
She dusted everything away
Which makes a house a home
And strangeness met us at the door
Though no one understood...
And when father read from Hiawatha
I wondered what he really saw behind the words
But no one ever asked him.
There was no poetry
In my father's home.
_____________________________________

Tusks

The Narrows heaved the surf in maddening splashes
Off the Brooklyn side
Where land droops like a boxer's jaw
Wired with metal hangers from dry cleaning stores;
Dislocated even more, by the fingers of gaunt frail women
Stretching them from the backseat of their cars.
Into the apartments of Bay Ridge...
Lightening swiggled a Teutonic rage
Through Northern Staten Island,
And I wondered if the microfilm coiled and frayed
In the obscurity of the basement hospital of my birth,
Might be singed and gnawed by startled rats
More than they already were...
I thought of all the Georges
Interred much further south,
Where a rainbow arched its mystery
Along this occlude front...
Why, it was much more than a pot of gold
Droughted in their far off graves;
It was the secret burial grounds of elephants
Who'd given me my tusks.
_____________________________________

From The Brooklyn Side

Only the puffing power of a Moran tug
Interlopes through the shadowed gianting buildings.
They remind me that the river worms its way
In what otherwise might look just like a stream;
My laps of memory or consciousness congests
Whatever sense of geography I can plainly see or read on
maps...
The purple water seems slick with oil and diesel spills,
And I'm not certain if I see a river swirling in my myopic gap
Between two boroughs?
But a buxum snarling tug boat webbed with a goatee or beard
Gnarled along its jutting jaw
Calls to mind old photographs of barges and acromegalic
liners
Needing a push into the deeper sea
Where the Narrows are left behind...
The shadows of so many cabled bridges
Is a deception of the water's girth and currents
And place me momentarily in a cell block
Where for long term prisoners shrinks their sense of hope
And an appetite to escape...
Off the docks, in stagnant water, Brooklyn summer boys
Cast their reels and smoke a cigarette
As if they're on a boat ride around Manhattan island;
Assured that carnivorous eels, no one can see,
Have eaten everything alive.
_____________________________________

The Back Room

I don't remember the singing smell of wood shavings
Scenting past the closed door
Between the back tool shop
And the florescent office atmosphere up front.
There, owners swiveled on detective chairs
Speaking mathematics to potential clienteles...
The magic of tea shirt artisans
Mirrored in the confidence of the neck tied brothers
Who vied for senior partnership,
And underscored the final price
Of things they had no knowledge of
However much they tried from time to time
To tell the workers what should be done
Hands palmed on their flaking hips;
Red faced with admonishments
And with high pitch voices
Revealing the very worst of bourgeoisie ways...
In the tool room father and the others sweat,
Whispering just a frequency below
The grinding saws and hammered nails
Like alchemists dungeoned in a misty place
Where kings and viziers expected
Silent miracles.
_____________________________________

Pigeons

They were cooped inside the minds
Of my father's generation;
Men who never gave a thought to mites and lice
Or gooey droppings where their feathers stuck
To backyard seams
And tar roofs of rippled tin
Walled with chicken wire...
Stove topped chimneys puffed like older men
Who fumed before they lost their temper;
Releasing them to dip and flank
Where the sky seemed stilled in thoughts of heaven;
Blanketing the pettiness of men...
There's a comfort in those things
Which make for home
Forsaking any choice they have for freedom -
Cooing like a child's deep satisfaction,
Rocking in its mother's arms.
_____________________________________

Franky Fringe

In his family
He was likened to that second car
Used just to make those local stops
At the grocery or bar;
A flat based grey with liver spots
Rusting well outside the range of thieves or vandals
Who winced and looked the other way
As if its own pathetic poverty
Cloaked it in invisibility
while parked or moving hestitantly
In plain sight of everyone...
I would guess he stuttered
Even as a child,
sometimes more
Often less well after those who taunted him
Died or moved on
To greater levels of cruelty...
He waits under the awning
Of a newstand on the avenue;
Braced as if a bone chill winter rain
Is always falling -
Cascading into icy puddles
Inches from the dry spot
Where he holds a steamy coffee
waiting for the newstruck man
Who always takes the time to smile...
He says he loves to go out dancing
In places where the lights are dim
And everyone transforms into shadows of imagination.
It's a place where no one talks too much
and awkward body moves
Masquerade as innovative steps;
Timing his arrival as he does
when the open bar has blurred our vision
and slurred our speech enough
To make him feel like one of us.
_____________________________________

Rockaway Lullaby

I think of all the unwashed dogs
Leashed on cords
By white shirt men with bulging guts
Who walked the streets of Rockaway
Between the ocean and the bay;
Yards with sinking wooden fences
Strewn with rusting kiddy wagons
And bicycles sleeping off a binge
Passed out on their arms...
How quickly all those humid summer nights
Spent in Play land
Closed in like their stuffy bungalows
Beaconed by the sadness of a sleepy single porch light
Where mosquitoes, waited violently to feast
On their return...
Tipsy mothers cottened citronella on their kids
And fathers sweat their beers off
Snoring a lullaby to Rockaway
In the deepest growls of sleep.
_____________________________________

Gerritsen Beach

Green cut-out Shamrocks
Still triad many of the front windows, clustering
At Easter
Much the way some outside Christmas lights
Always seem to linger well into mid-February...
An old plaid man in a New York cab cap
Stares into his small frontal patch
Tossing chunks of Italian bread
To Brooklyn squirrels at the highest levels
Domesticity...
The day is Liverpool gray,
Dublin in its harmony of the Chieftain's music
Piping and fiddling out of an open
Side window...
Small, law-slung bungalows I remember
Seeing in Old Rockaway
Tar and reface here in the pretense
Of something more exclusive
As if they understand that the other Rockaways
Are gone and only reappear
On St. Patrick's day and in AA meetings;
Assembled and dispersed in hours...
Walking past St. James there are times
When adults unleash their dogs
Silhoutted by the inlet reflecting
Off the Great Salt Marsh to the East.
There are hours when neighborhood kids
Act beer-tough,
But they too are just passing by,
As much as they seem to permanently belong.
Perhaps it is just the shaking, jolting
Bush tail grays
Darting out like a half-remembered dream
Which makes this bog as haunting to the senses
As it was the first Celts when they arrived?
_____________________________________

Cemetery Dogs

The pack of dogs exhaled a tight-lipped fanging fog
Through the late November mist
Which melded one cross to another,
While sulking statues of the saints
Seem to touch robe to gown
Watching over everyone and nothing
Like stone is blind to stone...
The dogs paw at the residue of brittle and untended graves,
But I think of them as watchmen
Bonding all the dead as one;
Oblivious to the good and sins that marked them when alive.
In thought of visitors,
Peeking out of car windows,
These strays seem like primeval wolves or gawking hawks
Bristling alarmed and disenchanted thoughts
Of what a final resting place can easily become...
Perhaps, they are the changelings
That souls and spirits resurrect to guard
The inner sanctity between the gates
In this city of the Dead,
Where the hidden thoughts of all the living
Are best kept at a distance,
And better left unsaid.
_____________________________________

Winter Cats

Things glued to city streets and scraps hung on streamers
Of black plastic garbage bags
Prod me to wince at the scent and screech of ejaculating alley cats
I hear while turning in my bed;
Even when the roses open in the purple dawn,
And lilacs simmer up the ivy of my windowsill,
Felines conceived in later Spring and early summer
Romp between the parked car tires,-
Shortly after mothers leave them to fend all on their own...
On the crispest November mornings when hypothermia
Anesthetizes those born too late,
The kittens hunch as if they understand their fate
When robbed of all the refuse left in disarray in summer streets
Crying like starving orphans for a time,
Before they still in windless corners where they chill
To hold the wind at bay -
Barren in the spaces of swept leaves raked and bundled into ties,
With little on the sidewalks for them to them to eat...
Moving down these sleeting streets there's a large woman
whose age is hard to tell.
She spills milk into tin canisters
And greasy chicken bones falling out of dumpsters;
Sometimes leaving jagged edges of cat food cans...
I often wonder if her children died in winter
Many years ago,
Or if in fact she only feels for other living things
Which would hardly make it through the snow.
_____________________________________

Silhouettes And Shadows

The dawn is always cast in silhouettes
And the canopy of corner shrubs wilt in shape
Of dread knot hair...
Sneakers squeak dipping into ankle socks
While stiletto women clap their path
To the elevated subway train...
I'm pressed to hear some harmony
In the clicks and thumb slipped bongo drums,
While pigeons nail their lice
From the armpits of the BMT...
Shadows hover up ahead;
Taking time, wasting time
In angular distinctions
Between birds and me,
New sounds rivet
As the brown predawn
Squints into different profiles.
_____________________________________

Mrs. Lengyel

It's a ghoulish snow in March;
Tan potatoes running off the dog path to the curb,
With a hint of carrots, here and there,
Adding something we surmise as flavor.
Paprika sprinkles layered on top soil
Which makes us think that everything red
Has its own taste...
There's a certain loneliness in this snow
Which should have stayed as rain;
No anticipation of a blizzard
And the steam cabbage Mrs. Lengyel ladled for us
When we trod with frosty boots down the hall
To plates already filled...
In this forlorn, remnant of winter
We do our best to heat up Campbell soup,
Silently spooning in,
Wishing we were young again
And Mrs. Lengyel still alive.
_____________________________________

Doll's Head

There's a doll's head piked atop a stop sign
On an amber Brooklyn street.
I imagine drivers passing by
Shake their wheel and pulse their brake
At its balding hair and cat-like eyes.
Her tattered dress hems a brocade of fireflies
While the western sky tops a bruise
Of lavender mellowed into streaks of pink...
In a shift of focus, the canopy holds its green
Until the ghoulish knots spring to life
On the lower pitch of oaks...
We are often headless, mindless
And abandoned as our alter-ego
Stakes on metal corner poles;
Transforming into changeling goblins
As the light begins to fade.-
Startled by the staring doll's head
Reappearing further down the road.
_____________________________________

Seasonal Yard

The curling fallen leaves fulcrum as overall imbalance;
Seltzered like ocean surf puddling this November yard.
I imagine larger children torturing smaller ones in July
By a cruel subterfuge on the seesaw
Where the pretense of some victory
Left the little one to bounce and jerk
When the larger hammered down his weight and size.
Balance even then was a superficial pipe dream...
November zooms its sweat from a distance
Until summer sneakers drench like sandals
In the clammy mulch soaking through rubber pinholes
Of worn out shoes; canvassed by a film of mortared sand
Which held through most of August...
Now it is the season of ambush
In the quicksand eddies under mounds of brittle leaves.
The season in the yard shoulders any way
The wind blows
In a place where no living children play...
Those inside listen to the clinking chains of swings
Snap, like sling shot birds
In a free fall to the ground,
While those who perch along the iron gate
Seem to see phantoms of summer's children
Race along this former flat and noiseless place.
_____________________________________

Postman

This morning crawls into afternoon,
Waiting for the postman.
He mounts the stairs with a somber stare
As if he doesn't understand that we are waiting
For anything to read...
It is the emptiness of March
Which seems to last forever;
Thoughts we crowd in the hyphenated lapses
Of those who chalk or golve their hands
To touch the chill and clank the box
Where we overlook ourselves through a one-way mirror -
Breathing deeply at the doormat
For things we wish were there,
More than they seem to care about us...
Oh, if only the birch would blossom
And bend a welcome hand,
Or if the postman hinted in a smile
The penmanship of things we understand.
_____________________________________

Cocked Ear

There are a few like me who will always bend our necks
And tilt our good ear
Which pounds inside grey toned crickets,
And the guttural waking of cats
Who hunch the brown pre-dawn,
While stalking sparrows when the grass still sponges wet at
dawn...
It's in my convulted passageways that I hear the bones of shaman
Just about to hum my name,
As if some totemed part of me
Has survived through every wind and breeze;
Swirling with the pinching sound of deafness
Where nothing but the naked branches in the Fall
And the magpied clustered branches of Summer
Allow other souls to rest in the hoot of Summer's catacombs...
On jittery Brooklyn streets
Where many mothers called my name to others,
To this day I even tilt my head
To better hear what trees are whispering
And what they are about to sing to me.
_____________________________________

Shadows

Sometimes early on,
I used to back step in the July sun
On the streets where the only shade I saw
Bristled in the canopy of trees standing guard
On the other side.
It was easy then to keep my balance
While I thought of steps an aunt of mine
Taught me in a dance whose name I can't remember now...
I looked behind, and thought I saw my shadow shrink
As if I'd fooled the sun's ghost at my back,
While part of me, I must confess,
Compelled me to heel this way
When I felt that shadows were chasing after me;
With dubious intentions...
At times like this
I felt that others just in front of me
Would cast a voiceless reprimand
If they turned to face me with their ashen faces
Which would haunt me while I tried to fall asleep,
As I heard them toe the twigs outside
My flapping bedroom curtain,
But, mostly I believed the one's behind
Gained on me, although their shadows
Shimmered in a void,
Which I imagined much more sinister
Than those who walked ahead of me.
_____________________________________

Heavy Mist

The wrought iron banisters between a slide and sticky
Goo across our palms,
While the pavement mauves humidity
As those who heel to make their trains on time
And those hunched with the same humidity following their pulling dogs.
Both seem bent with tiresome defeat
While following their steps and dogs as they wait impatiently
For them to nostril at the concrete cracks.
It makes everyone look depressed as if the weighty atmosphere
Of the intermittent drizzle plays a tune on tinkling umbrellas
And the crab grass woven into mud...
There's smudge of half-dried charcoal drawings,
Easeled at an open window by a tired artist's arms
When late at night the sky seemed clear and the moon
Outlined a crystal ring
With the hope that shadowed shading would stay that way
Until they pasted dry, the way the artist had intended...
There are no rainbows arching in the void between
The shinning sun on the horizon,
And the downpour of purple clouds racing from the other end,
To raise sadness into hope...
Morning coffee sours our stomachs
And muffins crumple with a butter knife,
While despondent men and women zombie in a half-sleep,
Finding little reason to stay away
On a day lost in squeaking bloated shoes
At curbs which never fully dry by afternoon.
_____________________________________

Broken Toys

Older men with pasted hair
Oxford through the snow, icing at Brooklyn curbs...
In dumpsters left ajar since New Year's Day
There are doll's heads hatched with corded hair
Spliced by freezing temperatures,
While children fog their lips at toy store windows
And grip the old man's hand
To still with smiles that there is happiness
Hiding somewhere in the glass...
I've lived long enough to understand
That we are all broken toys;
Crumpled in our dreams of plastic
Shining like china plates
Where we imagine nothing breaks
Or cracks in disappointing falls...
I'm the old man with pasted hair
Who silently complies with every childhood dream
Just to keep children smiling -
Feeling that my days are numbered
Before they realize I will also fill a dumpster;
Ignored by everyone who lives past me
Blinded by the fate of broken toys
And new ones in the window.
_____________________________________

Caged Saplings

There are curled iron gates bonding sapling near Brooklyn park,
Off a curb where summer refuse sticks and flutters
Melting into into candy wrappers, caramel and painted goo
When the later morning sun draws birds to peck and squeeze
Between the lattice of the rungs to feed.
We are all diverted from scenes like this while walking
From our cars to stores and back again;
Timing parking meters and annoyed by those who hobble steps
To destinations we are sure have little less than nothing
To do with anything we have to that day...
We shoulder past them, with cerebral blindness,
Much like the momentary glimpse we take a of dirty streets
Where skittish birds skip retreat
As we come closer...
Some architects will fathom the built in obsolescence
Of cornering saplings into prisoned grated circles,
If one day we hope to see them broaden into trees.
Perhaps, some poets will understand
That jobs make way for other jobs,
And all we ever see are nervous birds
And weak old people
Always getting in our way.
_____________________________________

Lost Island

On nights of blistering cold
The garbage barges singed in cycled flames
As if glinting at Valhalla,
In the skies above New York Bay...
Pea coated in collars upturned to our necks
We swigged sickening sweet pints of Southern Comfort
Sleeping on our pockets,
And opened only when felt it safe;
Out of sight of the ferry men,
We then thought of as the police...
I mumbled to friends,
While pointing to the bleak horizon
On the island of my birth.
The gun ship grey above the East
Made it look much the same at dawn
As it did at night;
Unwed mothers
Pacing through wards of hospitals
With too much on their minds
To think.
_____________________________________

Concrete Fields

They've ruptured everything serene and clean;
Wrought ironed as monstrosities
Shrinking nature into plots property -
Myopic of concrete cracks in the aftermath of winter
And more sterile devoid of life
Than any cemetery
Where starlings peck at flowers and berries
In a nature harmony with nature;
A place where those who died
Revel in the company of those who've joined them later on...
There are older homes,
Bid for at the highest prices,
By those who see acres trimmed of trees which never grow
And crew cut grass which drives off cats and strays
Honing in to find a secret place to go...'
They're not missed much as Christmas
When snow blankets every landscape much the same;
But at Easter,
The Holy Ghost pulsing in the browning eastern sky
Reveals what we have done
And the choice we've made
To languish in the morning
Very much alone.
_____________________________________

Goldfish

There was that Coney Island goldfish
Swimming in my memories;
Lapped on a crowded weakened train
Back to my apartment where nothing seemed to stay alive
For long;
Spilled into a tiny bowel,
Then pushed into a crowded corner of a room
Beyond the hesitating blades of light
Dimmed by brown venetian blinds
Where everything froze into a winter half-sleep,
Irrespective of the season of the year.
He was prize I really didn't
Want to win;
Trying hard for several months
To rid myself of him
When the kiss I'd gotten for winning him
Lapsed into the awkwardness of meeting her again
As she spoke only of the goldfish -
Of all the other things I flushed away
Without a second thought
Or tossed into my alleyway
He had stayed alive
As if to spite me.
This living think I never named
And hardly ever fed
Swam in circles through the years
In a bowl inside my head.
_____________________________________

About Eastern Dancers

This day unveils itself in transparent silk
Like an Eastern dancer's shoulders swaying to her undulating hips.
There are no bells or tambourines
And those who bubble sweat across their cheeks
Percolate with tickling ghosts through the viced humidity
As sounds of sirens base across the avenue;
Lasting much longer than they should
When the crisp May morning rarifies
The interchange of soprano sparrows
Making room for squawking crows by later afternoon...
Gardeners palm the mounds,
Faulting from their plants,
Leaving finger prints as they press the moisture
Pumping into sticky clumps beneath their finger nails.
The soil heels into a gauze-like mist,
Allowing me to guess, if drizzle
First rises from the earth.
Adolescent girls lower their halter sleeves,
And Kleenex shoulders and necks,
While bathrobed mothers bend along the stoop
To pick the morning papers up;
Wondering if their daughters danced last night
In swaying steps mothers sometimes dream about,
When watching movies movies on TV.
_____________________________________

The Return

He hadn't been this way for years
And while sitting to catch his breath on that rocky
outcrop
It seemed the same as he remembered.
But, he swallowed golf balls through his neck,
Unsure of why, and what he'd come to fear -
Stepping through this path where the birch leaned on
the oak
Like a roof bending to collapse...
The birds disappeared into twilight
Making room for the brush of things
Unseen in the taller grass
Where he used to think of them as welcome company;
Watching over him and prompting him to mind his steps...
He felt the dogs echoing barks just beyond the tree line
Were all the unchained, snarling with the scent of him
Although he fed their mothers
And stroked their heads while growing up...
He couched on warn out sofa
With a lantern lit against the dark;
Trusting only in his dogs to watch him
Or comfort him at night.
_____________________________________

L-rd Byron

I often wonder if
Byron shot his flintlock
At the gliding swans freezing in the icy landfills
Mirrored on Swiss lakes,
When he tired of aiming at the pines,
And missing rats and rabbits jaunting up the marble stairways
Shimmering in unswept leaves
Where no hunter really makes a kill...
Did he tire of missing pines, most of the time.
But soon saddened when he struck one swan
That sank into a momentary bloodbath;
Quickly covered up by floating ice?
Stealing the perversity of hunters
Who love to see the clarity of their thundering sound
To witness the smoking barrel from their gun?...
Was he moved to rhyme when his trigger finger
Burned and blistered, while the pen lessened all his guilt
By later evening thinking of humankind?
A time when the darkness clung to castle drapes,
And ghostly tales of Mary Shelley
Made him rest his flintlock on the desk...?
There is horror in the voice and words
Of women who have overheard the men whose chose their poetry
In single shot to dead innocence
And often cause an avalanche;
Burying rhyme and thoughts to death, -
Where only parts of us stitch like corpses
Half alive, but mostly dead.
_____________________________________

Lost Sister

Even then,
There were certain imperfections those desperate childless
couples
Could not accept.
She had been born with a cleft palette
And I learned, later on,
That I was denied a sibling because of this...
As I grew from baggy summer shorts
Into marble pocket jeans and loosely fitted tee shirts
I felt the rooms grow colder
While mother always kept the drapes closed in summer
And the girls who played inside the courtyard
Beneath our window,
Led me to believe that less discerning people
Had adopted her.
I fantasized which one would have been
My sister;
A soul mate in the company of that multitude of bastards,
At a time when we were rummaged through
Like dresses crowded into bargain basement racks,
With a shrug at the irresistible prices,
And afterthoughts of inexpensive dressmakers
Who always stitched them back into perfect shape.
_____________________________________

October Revolution

They bayoneted every full-length mirror,
Arched like gothic entrances
Where nobles saw themselves
In times when Nicolas' tired eyes
Betrayed an unforgiving doubt
In an absolutist Czar...
They cut the chandeliers in a free fall drop,
Picking diamonds off the mosaic floors
For peasant wives and girlfriends
And packed some in their ammunition pouches
To palm like dice in thatched roof cabins
For women who would come to life as girls
When they turned the lanterns off at night...
Whatever absolution they might have sought,
After breaking everything apart,
At least they never had to watch themselves
In confessionals where thin lipped bearded priests
Admonished them for being wrong.
_____________________________________

Private Property

The man who stood alone
And free
On a mountain top in Tennessee
Named the mountain for his family
As if the Indian burial grounds
Were invisible in every thicket
He passed through daily
Hunting game...
He carved the forest
With his ax
In a clearing all around
The house he built
To better see
Whoever might advance
On him -
In his loneliness
he came to see his rifles
As a guarantee
That other men would stay away
Or detour miles around
To find a mountain of their own.
His cabin steamed in simmer
In its shadeless clearing,
So he took to camping out
All day and night,
But worried if some passing
Pilgrim or Indian
Would occupy his empty home
While he was away.
He fenced his property all around
But found the deer
Grew scarce inside his little kingdom.
So he branded them as his
Inside his mind
And tracked them yards
Outside his fence;
Where another mountain king
Shot him through his head
For trespassing
On private property.
_____________________________________

Hessians On The Landscape

It's on the second thump
When roots crack more than once,
Bolstered by the dark,
Stilted soldiers brace their ground
And never seemed to blink;
Elbowing tall muskets and pinpricked bayonets...
I moved into the steel window mesh
Of late July,
Where the full moon shadowed farm dogs
Racing their obscurity in filtered porch lights
Which made me wonder how far away they really were...
I used to think goblins and ghosts
Walked among the grayness through the mist after twilight;
Coughing in the morning dew rising as camouflage
Flirting with an artist's shaking hand
To black the green lawns into pitch
In a molt of seaweed, without a breeze or wind...
I moved back into my bed allowing the professionals to shoot
Or pin them to a tree
While turned into the sweaty sheets;
Knowing that the Hessians gave no quarter to Americans.
_____________________________________

Thickets

I've always thought of thickets as the realm of rehm sleep
That escaped me on sweaty July sheets,
And in the shivering which kept me awake
When January peeled its onion skins in gun metal skies
From New Years into the uncertain borderlands of March...
My toes and arch were most alive then
When the pine cones whispered to me
To close my eyes while standing up
Like hoboes lost in pipe dreams;
On this Spring mattress woven by crickets
Interfaced by larvae and cocoons about to hatch...
There was always desolation in the barren fields,
Where snow thawed into puddle ice in winter
And rotting compost during Fall.
Yet, here the farmers waited for planting time,
And hunters for a clear shot just to make a kill,
But in the untouched thickets I was left alone to sleep.
_____________________________________

Climbers

On crackling crags of pointed shale,
Tremoring in the snow and rain,
I will climb for no apparent reason -
Permitting those who follow me
To guess that I have clawed, just to reach the precipice...
There are anomalies speaking through the poems
I've never written,
Where homicide toyed with suicide
Pulling in a dead draw every time.
In my sleepless nights I saw myself like a broken
Animal twisted in a deep ravine
Where no scout or Indian
Would descend to bury me...
Of course, I could have slipped,
And only G-d would know,
How tightly I chose to finger grip
Or test the stepped embankments
With the care of climbers
Who were never poets
Those who cherished some unnamed ideal
I turned away from years ago -
Those who have always made me sadly smile
Wishing I was more like them.
_____________________________________

Gnarled Paths

I always favored paths knuckled with rooted oaks;
Twisting through the shadowed camouflage
Where young hikers often stub toes.
They called to mind the fragility of searching out some balance
I was partnered with throughout my life;
Painful sprains and putrid bandages
Mummied while my mother set my foot up on a hassock
On those stifling August afternoons
When sweaty friends fanned themselves to relieve the mustard smell
Like visitors in a hospital who make ready to depart
At the time they nod hello...
As I remember, my ankles were as white and lithe as a ballerina's;
Confident in a leap from one base to another -
Eyeing up the shortstop in the instant when I gasped approaching
first...
Yet, there is some great equality
In the meanderings of arthritic oaks
Which foreshadows the aches
That spire our child-like sense
Of never growing old.
_____________________________________

Blizzards

There is a sadness at the end of blizzards;
The plasma sky disappears as stars shine
crystalline
Bracing for mornings' shovel thrusts into the
snow
To drive it back to rain...
There are those who wish it had never snowed at
all,
And mostly boys, and men like boys,
Who wish it had never stopped.
There are those who always think
The next will bring an ice age in,
And they are not as sad
As when the blizzard ends.
_____________________________________

The Inlet

In this inlet, the water flattens like purple pitch
As I imagine farmers, somewhere else, spading in a bog;
Hoisting weighty shovels into a natural pyramid
Before its wagoned off as fuel...
The brush surrenders at the shorelines as if caught
Inside a foxhole prayer, and wails that special silence
Reserved for rotting trees who never speak a warning
Before they break and fall...
They bleed their green leafed twigs into this blackened grave
Where rotted pilings clench like fingered fists
Which the gulls touch off, before taking flight again -
Mindful of slipping to their deaths...
It's hard to tell if the checkered rain
Falling from the sky in pasty droppings,
Splashed black onto shimmerless ooze,
As if no lighter color could exist
Higher in the mist...
Men lean against a rusted railing
And wince when bitten by the sandworms
While impaling them on hooks.
The lacquered water blinds everyone and everything
Even as the lamplights aura in at twilight,
And the inlet looks more like a solid liquid
Or a liquid fogging into gas.
_____________________________________

Closer To Squirrels

There's an all pervasive sense that even squirrels have somehow lost
their way
Through the translucent grey despair on this day in May
When drizzle bows the grass and leaves.
It reminds me of soaked August beach towel frowns
And blankets dragged across the sand to a canopy of false security...
From my bed, where even on the brightest days, shadows hung like
puppets
From the close line;
Over time I was whimsically adapt at annotating dialogues...
Now I knew the EMS would shortly come,
And shroud me in gurney to the Clorox pincered stench of a hospital,
There, florescent lights would coma me
While people in crinkling white would wisp along
Aloof with the obscurity and sterility of noticeable indifference...
The pitch of night sales imperceptivity into the brown of day
While doctors are paged continuously.
In sounds like sales announced in department stores
Yet, when they mask my face
The light of Spring and warmth of Summer
Chase the hanging drizzle off.
I see squirrels stand on their hind legs
Pitching smiles to me across dry mattressed mud
They chase away my fear of snow;
Assuring me that where I go
They will take time to speak to me.
_____________________________________

Cotton Mouth Lake

July muddied into August on the shoreline;
Lilies strangled in the reeds
As if the lake's placenta bled into a stagnant pond.
I swept my fingers off the boat
And the tepid water seemed much warmer than the air...
Hounds and spaniels ostriched to cover
Their suspicion of the silt,
As the cotton mouths weaved inside the camouflage,
And the frogs scattered out of reach...
I thought of jumping in,
Where the shoreline faded back into a lake,
But my fear of snakes
Made me think they'd followed me
Into these deeper waters...
I rowed back to the boathouse,
Barging frantically with one oar
Just to reach the shore;
Downing a cold beer
Foaming like the gaping cotton mouths
While staring at the bar man
To chase away my fears.
_____________________________________

Coniferous Forest

I am the ribbed remains of a lost coniferous forest
For want of a more specie name;
Wickered out of a penciled negro soil,
And gray leached into seaside sand...
I've always been here,
To watch the few remaining pines
Canopy  desert distance;
Stretched like pitiful umbrellas held up
By my fingered thorns
which clutch around their trunks
and push them to the sky...
I know the digger and crane might diesel me
One day,
And I will struggles in every way
To hold onto this special place,
Overlooked by time -
Revealing the rot of my desiccated body
Through the gnarling shrubs,
While I keep their other thoughts
Locked in the divine of separated pines.
_____________________________________

Fertilizer

Clumps of cow manure aura through the backyard
Of this hedged in field,
Like bison droppings once mounded shaven prairie grass
Hoofed flat in the far West...
Women took to wearing tall laced boots like men
And farmers wrinkled sloe eye at the scent,
While taught, high cheek honed women aged prematurely
At the souring change in atmosphere,
Whether carried by a breeze or wind
Or winged beneath a flock of birds
Fanning their ascent or landing on a nearby tree -
Blowing in their nostrils, then clear into their heads...
From closed suburban verticals
Few, if any, watch the landscapers
Dig and trough and spill the secrets
Covered by their clanging tools
And undiluted laughter;
Hopeful that by mid-summer the grass
Would shine like emeralds -
While underground, and out of sight,
The dung would worm its cure-all
So visibly obtrusive in the smelly early spring.
_____________________________________

Mothering Strangers

Some think it is a pathetic sight to see a mother
Flutter over cracked and splintered eggs
Where hatchlings of another species
Beak her abdomen into oozing capillaries
While tossing strands of woven sheets on to the forest floors...
I was overdressed in Fall and Spring,
With quilted buttoned coats,
Chaffing red rings on my neck,
And a woolen hat with wisps of light blonde hair
Waving just inches off my high forehead...
I learned to sleep motionless
Inside the rack of wood, lined on the outside of my bed
Where I watched mother's face listening to my breathing;
Knowing death can come as easy at night
As in the brightness of the summer sun
Where polio festered in her nightmares ;
Print skirt women arching through urban showers
With a large bath towel cupping inside their arms...
It was a time when trust puddled sewers in America...
I believe she mated only once in life
And her hatchling died when she flew
Blinded through the moss and thickets to find him food.
She cared a little more, or less,
As the next one looked differently
Through the weeks when he grew older.
_____________________________________

Food Chain

The reeds stood taller than most men
And only wilted in a shadow boxers' way.
While no wind or breeze rustled on my cheek.
Yet, I seemed to smell the breath and hear the puddled paws
Of packs of dogs rumors warned about when entering
This sea of camouflage, where nothing but the reeds
Took dominion on all points of the compass...
Orange diggers splotched with work week mud
Tingled when the first drops of Sunday's rain
Drummed in an unnerving way,
As its tank treads bulbed like a submerging submarine;
Perhaps everything unhinged by the humidity
Which I believed set the feral dogs off to track and hunt...
There was blindness just an inch or two away,
While my earns imagined every fear
With little hope of an escape
Should the dogs muzzle a snarled attack
In an instant of surprised alarm...
I cursed those who dropped off dogs out there
And yet admired how they survived
Generations after never feelings human warmth;
Learning, over time, to see those like me
As lower on the food chain.
_____________________________________

Island Of Hatchlings

It's best the living never see those who interface with G-d
Through the curtained wards of hospital screens;
Ashed skinned, like new born snakes who crack their shells
And slither out of eggs on mossy thickets.
There, point nosed shrews at night, and mice at dawn,
Feast inside the intertwine of hatchlings;
Tasty dumplings squeezing to the shoreline...
I question the day I survived,
Gumming on the larvae in the mattress of Autumn's moss;
Spider webs umbrelling on dead Fall mulch...
The earliest thoughts I had were of those who wished
To trap and devour me...
I slid along the mud to find a pond
A few feet from the shoreline...
Cecilia never saw the seltzered surf
Weeded in winter,
Nor the sinking sand in summer.
I don't imagine that she gave a second thought
As to how the minnows and the crabs
Nipped and clawed along this edge of Staten Island...
She was a jackal-eyed monstrosity
Who shyed away in the wake of larger vultures,
And retreated when hyenas found me
In the last breath of my life -
Rolling up my eyes into a balding state of white.
_____________________________________

Overkill

It's a field of piecemeal acres,
Where compact thrashers and field track diggers
Giant and overwhelm the effectiveness
Of getting any job done with surgical precision;
A simulation of highway jam
We are all too familiar with
Where orange cones string a narrow track,
And cars wait their turn as machines take position
Much like diggers flagging off the farmer's squeezing in
between
With pickup trucks and scraping rakes;
Finger nailing what is often left undone
Or uncompleted...
Clumpy soil mounds like a barren womb
Tinged with the blood of tree roots at the periphery;
Cut and hacked into a plasma drip
Much deeper than was probably intended,
While incessant summer rains submerged the sinking land
Still deeper, well below the top soil
Which should have bound the surface flat,
For what was needed in the Fall...
Nothing seems too small for almost any force
And incites the engines to overkill...
Farmers never seem to understand
How self defeating and burdensome
Their final hand strewn labor is in early Fall.
_____________________________________

Cold Storage

On the meat hangers of a dry ice misted slaughter house
With bolstered foot think slated doors, swing on curbed steel latches
Lambs and beef grapple hooked like dreams.
I remember these like a departing kiss, I really can't recall
Of those who bent to bid farewell
To drained and made up corpses;
Altered at their wake in death
As they never were adorned in life...
Gold coins pasted on their eyes
To blind them to the incantations of a priest
Who knew he'd lived beyond his crutched gaunted time on earth.
His tearful benedictions switched to the Latin litany
He was nurtured on, and turned to once again
To hide the tears cascading from his eyes -
For those who never said goodbye in death
Or searched in vain for a welcoming sign at birth...
It is best to pump out all the organs
With toxic tubes of embalmment
To undermine disease and age
And suffering endured in life
When the freezer doors are shut
As the dry ice resurrects all things dead
And others looking almost alive.
_____________________________________

Trees

At best, the birch pockmark like a blur,
Shimmering the palsy daylight ghosts
Who slouch into illusive wrinkling profiles...
They are not the bulky oaks,
Cramped into an arthritic hunch,
Entwined with maples oozing hints of autumn's syrup -
A twinkling breeze children skip and jump around
As if they've caused the air to liquefy
And cool them in July...
The weeping willow cuddles at the lakeshore,
And sheds it tears
For all who've wasted into slime;
Curled up in the sludge and wormy waters,
That the oak and birth and elm
Never pay much mind to.
_____________________________________

Nightmare

Of course, for just an instant; maybe more,
I realized the wilding weeds had only snared my ankle
On this intertwining web of a poor New Jersey farm.
I felt like an old doll's balding head; shredded
And neglected in this cratered space between the curtained
house and stables...
The tree line fisted in what seemed to be a closing circle,
And made me certain that the foliage had come to life
To bind me in this place, while zooming purple headed flies
Trapped me there like a moaning bear whose pain echoes
Off for miles;
Stinging me until the twilight moved them out,
Making room for giant mosquitoes
To blister whatever part of me remained...
The horses shook their manes,
And swat their tails,
While their bulging eyes stared at me
The way so many horses do when apprehensive or alarmed...
I felt that desolation feeds on loneliness,
And the fear that no one really cares
What we feel when we're awake;
Stuttering into another's ear
Who had walked this field like me, -
Never thinking of a nightmare.
_____________________________________

Scythe And Sickle

The scythe outlined its hanging space inside the shed
And on the worker's table was an oiled black stone
To keep it sharp enough to wisp the taller grass out back...
It was harder than any dance I ever learned,
For fear of falling on my face, or slicing at my ankles,
Until I stepped into the proper pace...
The sickle, just as sharp,
Made me swing reluctantly;
Layering in my wake mattresses of flattened grass
And the ever-present fear
Of hooking in my face...
I was bound between the savagery of these simple sounds
And the morning breeze sweating into the afternoon;
Tasting ice cold drinks,
Sinking in the shade
In any place I sat
Where I couldn't seem to move.
_____________________________________

Heartland Terror

On this flat mattress of prairie scenery
Where saplings wither long before they blossom into bulging trees,
Stripe shirt children wile away to the Oklahoma heat,
While hopping through a snaking punctured hose
Left on throughout the scorching heat...
In the momentary glance of artists, or camera visitors,
Who stop for gas at one pump pebbled stations,
Terror seems so far away...
Laughing children splash and drip close to an irrigation ditch
Tributaried feet away from crumbling cinder blocks
On which they sometimes sit and rest -
Wiping off the water from their heads while
They laugh about disguises made at Halloween...
Blending in the salt and pepper glinting sun
A pack of wilding coy dogs with quivering fangs
And drooling lips drives on to circle in.
They race up to the children, deafened by their screeching fun,
and the shimmer of late afternoon...
There are maulings that we never see,
But listen to on evening stops in cheap motels
Where local TV stations shake us cold
As we remember them as lanky kids
Escaping from the heat...
I twist and turn upon my sheet
As if my sweat has catalyzed bed-biting bedbugs.
While thinking of the dead, disfigured children
Left hours alone in the Oklahoma heat.
_____________________________________

Chance Of Showers

The afternoon is gauzed in one grey bandage
Filtering the light as dimly seen
From alleyways in hospitals
Reflecting off the ghostly floors
Where the dominance of cleanliness prevails
For no apparent reason...
And so we take a bit too long
Staring at the emptiness;
As if imagining who and what we're waiting for...
We're ambushed by creaks inside or bones
As our moisture goes into a shoving match
With the dampness pushing in...
I remember Spring swims in days like this
When the lake was colder than it looked;
With no place close to change our bathing suits,
Which never seemed to dry...
Sometimes on days like this
I think about the lake;
On others I'm in a hospital
Thinking of the chance of showers;
Those which tend to squatter on through
Much of April,
With an all consuming sadness.
_____________________________________

The Lane

The sun breaks in like an unbandaged broken arm;
Withering in an uncoordinated dapple blur
As I wobble under pregnant saplings
In a whisk against my face...
Squirrels squirt in hops
And loop into the higher branches
Shadowed by the broom of twigs;
Erratic in a breezy dance
As they bundle into camouflage of grey and brown -
Grizzled with suspicion as if theyive come to see
Some long lost relatives;
Hesitating with a forthright greeting...
As Asian woman parasols in her laced black sandals
While she juts a brown umbrella with open fan designs
Of a tiger on the prowl for dragons, or the other way around.
There's a belt of moss and soaking leaves
As if the night showered in an intermittent mist.
On the bald spot of the curled and drying August leaves
The sun crisps on the outer edges.
At times there is a shadowed chill
Like the incubus of September
Which threatens to dash the lane in wilding grass
Poking through the cemetery gate;
Half a shovel of sauntering soil
On those dismembered memories
When summer coiled along this lane.
_____________________________________

Morgue Winter

The fire logs mossed out back,
Into grey lime piles,
As I thought of snakes who wriggled there
Inside the dark drizzled dew
When bone chill rain came and went, and poured again -
Abandoned in the late fall yard, edging into winter...
The squeaking swings and shouldered seasons,
Coated with a glaze of snow,
Melting when the kids remembered that the backyard slept
In the dazing lightness of later Fall
Suited for the wood chuck and hungry birds,
While cautious cats clawed the fence along the pines...
New York winters tingle coldest
When Christmas leaves,
And January frosts on sofas
Blanketed on quilted chairs...
Dogs curl round the fireplace;
Sooted when the guests have left;
They blink at the lanterns
As if in silent desperation;
Waiting for the man to whisk the fire place clean,
And set the kindling to a match
As the coldest part of winter settles in.
_____________________________________

Jersey Moods

There were those Jersey diners
Flat painted like old yellow school buses
Which hadn't heard children's voices
For a generation or more;
Elephanted on gray cinder blocks
Above clay soil purpled into anti freeze puddles.
Buxom waitresses in various stages of blonde
Wiped the tables clean with greasy rags
Each possessing its own special smell.
Heavy large ceramic plates
And weapon-pike knives and forks
Which never yielded to a bend
Clanked onto the checkered tables cloths:
Designs which looked both clean and dirty
Depending on your state of mind...
It was rare to see younger waitresses
Because they were mostly in beauty schools
Or pregnant at home...
At sunset the trucks were lined
In caravans pointing to New York;
The fires close to Elizabeth
Rages below like the blue burst
of an overfilled zippo lighter.
Vats of smoking acid
Bellowing like charcoal
Chested a probing finger on my lungs.
In the truck cabs we talked
About our families and home cooked meals
As if we were arriving back
From a tour of outer space.
Sometimes when I close my eyes
I still can see waitresses lighting cigarettes
In Jersey parking lots where nothing grows.
_____________________________________

Evangeline

In my father's day
Few raised a brow at progress
And fewer still at victories,
Needed to preserve our way of life
And a good part of the human race
From genocide and degradation...
He packed candy and extra cans of rations
Into pouches built for ammunition -
A soldier's work of comfort for families
Dazed in ant-like lines;
Displaced from all the smallest certainties
As the battle moved back and forth
And army medics had no time
To dress civilian wounds,
By passing children barely holding on to life...
He read Evangeline aloud when he came home.
I think he felt like Longfellow
Who sensed the tragedy of the uprooted and displaced,
Whose only memories are carried
In the streams and winds
And in the birds they heard
When they were young;
Never to be heard again.
_____________________________________

Circling Elephants

This winding southern trail
Looms the anonymity of a tree or two left standing
Just to decorate the road,
Like a poor man's Christmas tree
Where all the holes are filled with tufts of tinsel...
Children cartwheel in anticipation of the circus
Which tents in August every year;
Headlined in the local press
With photographs of elephants
Walking head to trunk in circles;
As if the men in boots with whips
Were loved by every elephant
And by children who believed that elephants
Always wish to talk that way...
A passing hearse florals with a full month's wage,
And slows like some old wagon train,
Moving through the snow;
Those who drive behind,
Keep their lights on bright
Through the grueling Alabama sun;
Thinking of the circus that the dear departed
Will miss this year
And in all the years to come, -
Pulling at their neckties
Or patting down their skirts
In a silent gaze beyond the trees
To a place where the circus always comes;
Imagining the circling elephants
And children kicking up the dust
On this country road where nothing ever seems to change or grow.
_____________________________________

The E.R.

I've withstood the E.R.
By focusing on the balding hedges
Which come alive in later Spring.
And are trimmed to shoulder length
When summer greens them as if they'll stay
That way forever...
Sheeted patients seem to pillow into rest
Through Demerol and oxygen,
And gaze out of filmy windows which never open;
Air conditioned in the summer
Or sizzling in winter, -
Driving out a hint of seasons or changes in the weather...
It's a place where worry fills the air
Through smiles to keep some hope alive
In the deep breaths of those who care,
Taking turns at vigils well past visiting hours...
When we leave the hedges,
Heading to our cars,
We seem to loose our touch with summer
Along paths out of the E.R.
_____________________________________

The Wind

There are times when I'm convinced
I rule the wind;
Willing it to shift positions.
I raise my arm imagining myself
Like some primeval pharaoh of who lived before
The pyramids were built
And the sphinx smiled into sandstorms
Without the slightest fear of losing face
Through wrinkles blasting its decay...
I tilt my head to chase the crows
Away from sparrows,
Believing February's cats will forgo
Their stalking ways,
And leave the tiny birds at peace lie swallows...
The seasons soar through my soul,
When the only oracle I hear
Whispers through me like a faint voice
On the telephone I can't
Identify;
Teasing with my fears...
Everything and everyone can fool me
As much as I fool them;
Much like the wind blowing
Different answers
To all the questions that I think.
_____________________________________

Buried Dog

The farmer finger closed the eyes of his favorite dog,
Bounced, then dragged, into the taller grass
Along the roadside by a speeding car or truck;
Where just a festering of feeding flies booted him
To the spot where he had died...
Should he shovel him so close to where he drew his final breath?
Scarred in blood,
While roosters skipped into the fray to peck at his remains?
The tool shed with its canvas body bag,
Apexed with spades and shovels seemed so far away,
And he had no heart to leave him there;
Shuddering at what he'd see when he returned again...
He palmed the carrion, and brushed and pulled and picked
The clay soul from his loins -
Crying as he dug a hole close to home
Where he'd always played inside the shaded elms,
When by later afternoon he'd looked just like a pup;
Oh, those wrinkled eyes he made before he learned to bark...
He did not know what to say,
When he covered him in this deep black soil
In which he loved to paw and dig
When he was just a lively dog.
_____________________________________

Sparrows

Even on these silky mildewed mornings
When the Spring light hesitates to glint off shiny cars,
Sparrows flipping through the yard in puddles from
Last night's rainfall seem jittery like prey...
I finger tip away the curtains in my bedroom
And sense contagious synergy
As if they somehow frighten me about the day ahead...
The flickering lights on the crowded subway
Chase reluctant pigeons, as I wonder
If one or two or several made their way to safety,
While I watch their bulging breasts
Play chicken with the "F" train
As it jerks into the local stops...
There's nothing in the wilting April trees that startle me
Which hammock as if bent on oversleeping
Long after I am dressed and gone...
The sky mottles cirrus clouds
Gauzing what the later morning sun
Would hope, but fails to find by later afternoon...
Yet, the sparrows fall to silence
And shroud into the misty twilight
Edging in by quitting time,
When brighter warmer days ahead
Keep them watchful like the things I fear
But find so difficult to say.
_____________________________________

City Kills

July salts the Brooklyn sidewalks with a hundred
Mangled torsos,
Which if fallen on the shoulder of a country path
Would look like road kill spilled inside a rusted skillet;
Puffing mist in decay of bowels and fur
And twisted feathers glued into a crushed and boneless
Bloated form.
They push inside the fleeting thoughts
Of passing drivers blinded by unsettling thoughts
In the momentary glance...
In the shadows of the elevated subway train
Where grating iron wheels oxidize on cold steel rails,
The fallen birds and crippled cats
Snake their way into the darker shade,
As the thunder overhead drowns out the pain
The feel or felt -
Wriggling into the obscurity of those not taken
In to mend, or even lifted to a cleaner spot to
Meet their end...
In the dusk they seem to disappear
Streamed into the sewer's cemetery
While all we hear is a mirage of rain
Hosed along the peddled concrete
Boating them, enmeshed like treaded monstrosities.
Cafée men bristle them with long wired brooms
To greet the coffee patrons
With a soapy street
That never seemed to witness death.
_____________________________________

After Thoughts

Just as an after thought,
He felt that the dripping leaves sponging sods off the night porch
Where he sat, might chill into a January sleet;
Thickening it to snow as he bundled in a woolen quilt
And woke out of a half-sleep to find the winter
He had longed for since November would blanket him in inner peace -
The initial pulse of gratitude to be left alone,
Before the older tapes were spliced with boredom settling in...
How enticing those imagined mornings when thinner branches
Creaked like families of mice burrowing in the pile of soaking wood
Bundled in a nearby shed...
In the strangest way it was like soupy summer days
With visuals from clouded bubbled windows of
Shadowed men who jerked their dogs along a muddy path
With the will to make the dogs relieve themselves
Before heading back into their air conditioned shacks...
Nothing and everything comes to pass
Like squatters moving in at night, or leaving by the dawn...
The curdled slippery leaves in Fall
And the brightest flowers edging toward the light in Spring
Were as much an after thought to him
As seasons crawling through the days
Until what came his way
Was embraced for just an hour or two
before they also passed away.
_____________________________________

Ripple Soles

I grew up in the ripple sole generation
Where cuffed and pleated slacks never really matched;
Mothers who walleted the cash insisted
That their young boys wear them,
Readying for school and Fall...
They blamed them for dragging in the soaking leaves
And dog poop camouflaged and intertwined
Between the curb and foliage
Where the change of climate seemed to loosen dog stool
Whose excrement looked invisible,
As if they somehow understood that no one could
Clearly see them from across the street
Or even window peepers staring right in front of them...
Perhaps, it was a penchant in The Cold War uncertainties
To more firmly grip the concrete and the asphalt
Which seemed so fleeting and precarious
When "THEY" also got the bomb?
It always seemed to me
That mothers subconsciously dressed
Their boys that way
In preparation for a coming war.
_____________________________________

The Maze

How curious it seemed to him
That puzzled wilding hedges by late July
Calmed thoughts that other's felt
When stepping through a maze
Where being lost was just a temporary turn for
them;
Deadened in the way real life never seemed to be -
Back stepping, while tilting to another path,
While hearing voices from outside;
Sometimes for away or near,
But never out of earshot...
The long hallways of his youth with its slowly swinging doors
Kept his father's growling voice as indistinct as wild young
boys
Pushing one another out on the streets when school was ended
for the weekend.
In the worm stretched house,
Where normal voices mimicked whispers,
His father's scolding misery
Made it easy to establish selective hearing,
While the darkened closets and cluttered bric-a-brac
Helped to keep him virtually invisible...
The old man snapped his suspenders like a razor's strap
About to welt
And he learned the facsimile of freezing still
While slowly breathing through his mouth -
It made him dream of a garden maze
He'd plant when he grew up.
_____________________________________

The Barren Yard

There were no gardens in my father's heart;
Everything was seen as weeds
Wilding in the way unkempt graves
Disturbed him in the Spring
And angered him by summer...
Mother feared bees and other flying things
As so we raked the soil
Which looked like tiger claws across the yard.
It puddled in the rain
And hardened into rock on sunny days...
And when he walked outside
To smoke his morning cigarette,
He leered across the yard
To catch a sprout
And bent to pull it out;
Calling me to get the rake
In a preemptive strike
Against nature closing in.
_____________________________________

Mud Slides

There were tides of mudslides in Southern Staten Island
In the Spring;
On all fours we clawed defiance of gravity
And the pukey syrup spilling to the sea,
To reach a summit overlooking brushed green trees,
Poking through crops of shale and shells
With reeds latticed through the shades of barren space...
Mounds magically misted much like hills
And gullies into valleys
In the certain stillness when the louder birds stopped chirping.
I wondered if my mother even said goodbye
Or kissed me when she left?
Did she curse these muddy roads,
Penguining on high heels
While straightening her nylon seams
Flirting, as a passing thought,
That she gave me two saint's name.
As the stamina I'd need
To combat gravity and slides?
_____________________________________

Ghost Hunter

As an adult, he'd given up on opening doors
In strange homes where the pencil light glowed through
keyholes
Always looking much more sinister than any question
He dreamed about while tossing in his sleep.
They curled like an undefined invasion of some privacy
And that some malevolence awaited him inside;
Twisting the knob with child-like hesitation,
Or palming it ajar to keep his fingers safe in places
Where he'd never found an answer there
To put his mind at peace...
The dampened odor of flattened bedspreads
And draped furniture was a harbinger of all rooms jamming
tight,
Like those he knew he wasn't welcomed in as a child...
Secretly, he thanked the fates for his one blind eye
Where rats appeared as cats;
An advantage he learned early on
When background music in the cinema told him that gruesome
Sights would soon appear up on the screen...
His dropped wide-brimmed fedora hat seemed to hold
His fears at bay, as few, if any, caught his fright
And the lines across his face.
In this obtuse camouflage they thought him brave,
When he only listened to their fears in silence.
While he tip-toed to those sealed up doors
As if the truth would spell relief.
_____________________________________

No-Man

Forgive those like me
Whose memories are myopic blurs;
Who built vendettas in those empty holes
When left into the care of judges, courts and wardens -
Erased by a countless change in names
Where like the greatest details etched by Homer,
he led us to believe that all Cyclopes
Were called Polyphemus...
We, who never tasted human flesh,
But were devoured by those instead,
Who margined everyone of us
Inside the periphery of lined and dotted documents -
Denied to us like the secrets of forgotten sires
Who saw the forest through the eyes of wolves,
And forget when they evolved as dogs...
Forgive us if we bay at the noon,
As if the moon was full,
For there is neither time nor space,
For us to settle down as fools.
_____________________________________

Digging Embankments

I always thought the heavy rains in May
Cascaded more deceptively in a fluffed concealment
On my side of our adjoining property...
During March and April, I remember seeing him
Spade in a tireless hunching rhythm;
Trenching out a mystery with sweaty arms
Below his rolled up sleeves
And a soaked bandanna headband,
Filling in the gaps around his baseball cap...
I'm sure the mixture of deciduous trees,
Entwined in a silent brotherhood,
Didn't mind our even understand what he did-
But I took a spiteful edge;
Vendettaed in my stomach
And tightening in my head...
I picknicked through the summer
Further in my property,
As if he were a swarm of bees
Best left to hive embitterment
And wall himself away from me...
In the tissue white of naked February,
When wind and ice and blowing snow
Sloed our eyes to blindness,
I never really saw or understood
The issues that had stood between us.
_____________________________________

Road Kill

On his trip home, when the sun set in an orange glaze.
He steered into the right lane in a purposeful attempt
To focus off the road kill he remembered while heading to that
Placid blue-green pool where fountains rain bowed relief
And a painter's dream of toweling off in a pristine grass
That always filled the morning air as if it had been freshly
cut...
Adults and children giggled much the same as they carried
Sheltered thermoses and foiled sandwiches which promised to
remain
As succulent at lunch and by later afternoon...
Perhaps, some panicked dog or cat miscalculated weekend
traffic;
Building up so quickly, and rushing drivers determined to
reach
Their favorite spot, propelled by their memories of other
weekends
When no cloud or humidity threatened Saturday with early
showers by Sunday;
Mist filling in when twilight cast its spell on them...
Who had set dogs off their leash
Or allowed a cat through thoughtlessness and disregard
To saunter out where they mistimed their crossing.
To a place where no man willed to go?
Those who never entertained thoughts of blue-green pools
And rain bowed fountains-
Just the asphalt track they would have to cross
For reasons only cats and dogs would know.
_____________________________________

Stuck In A Blizzard

I am stamped by all the sadness in my life;
Enveloped in a closed off road
Like a winter traveler
Trapped inside the snow.
My cell phone works,
Yet all of those I used to know
Think of me as dead,
And in the strangest way,
Even through my panic,
I prefer they never heard from me again...
The voice mail on 911
Dims any sign of hope
As I blast the heater on
While running out of gas...
There are always firing squads
For t hose escaping from the hangman,
And lonely deaths of those purple white
White inside the woodlands,
Where the deer I never hit,
Live on to watch me
Frozen to the wheel.
_____________________________________

Taiwanese Dolls

Their faces seem to bulge
In that ivory, lifeless way
Imagined by those who set the molds
When pouring plastic in the masks
Of American embryos -
Perhaps, as they have always thought of us,
and we of them;
Pursed lips and wide eyed with bewilderment
Like lashless infants
Who will never speak...
Their foster stay in our families
Finds them wedged inside the armpits
Of our toddlers
Or grasped and dragged by their synthetic hair,
Stretched on high stitched foreheads
and tortured into sleep...
At months' end,
They seem worn into lazy lidded imbecility
with that half-closed drunken look
Of uncomfortability,
which lands them on the trash.
There the wind on New Year's Day
Boweries them while waiting as recyclables -
To mulch them into landfills
Where they become Americans at last.
_____________________________________

The Night Lake

Several yards out on the lake
The pitch night freckled with each jumping ember.
We bonfired on the shore...
Time, devoid of measurement
Pyred close to the circling pines;
Bloated with thistles that are resistant to fire...
There were no g-ds we could see
Which filled our late afternoon dreams,
Sparked by oaken trunks
Where gaunt eyes and demonic smiles
Embraced our thoughts that by twilight
The flames would dance deities into life...
The crickets clicked from a nearby farm
And mosquitoes feasted,
Hovering on our breath and sweat...
The oak kneed their crippled roots into dawn,
And the only incantations we heard
Were our oars dipping back
To our tents on shore.
_____________________________________

Oldest Beginnings

I wonder if it's more practice than the will,
To wait in an accommodating way,
For the flaking particles of growing older
On my face and itchy back?
Only the birthdays link me to some unforgiving past,
As I search in vain for those who might
Remember me by the name I had;
Before others coated over me in the dizzying turpentine paint,
Which dripped off peeling ceilings, and on the moldings
Of walks with differing memories, which for an instant,
Seemed to make time stand still...
If finger tipped like a curious child
While mother warned me it would take days to dry,
And she was never wrong...
The painter returned a few days later
To touch up and sand away my mark,
But he too never knew my name...
Only when I had taken ill, later on,
And discovered no one really cared about my origins,
And the first candle on my cake,
Did I write about these things
No one living thought about anymore -
When my vision failed, and I scratched my head
Thinking of that first birthday,
When I was first reconciled with death.
_____________________________________

Dying Dog

The dog lay on the shoulder of this one way road;
Bleaching like a dying person's skin
With shallow gasps as if he'd sun his final race.
He twitched one hind paw, every now and then
While his Spanish eyes teared in a gaze
As if he saw something well beyond;
Behind the clouded sun...
I whispered to him, as I bent upon one knee,
And I know it didn't matter what I said,
As long as another's voice reached out to him as company;
Not to hold him to this graveled naked grave
But to let him slip more easily
Into the place he had to go...
I toweled him with my shirt,
As much to comfort him
As I needed to be free
Of all my hit and runs
And the ones that waited up ahead for me.
_____________________________________

Broken Wooden Barrel

There was a broken wooden barrel
Splintered into shavings off the shoulder of this road.
Flies swarmed on it in summer,
And by the Fall it gestured for passerbys to curl a finger for a
taste;
Titillating senses at a time when syrup gooed on pancakes
In our breakfast mind...
I wondered if it had fallen off a truck
In the slippage that called this turn to give up what we loosely
bound?
It lambed itself in winter
Peaking from its rims like a mountain half hidden by the snow.
Strays pawed in it with the reserve we often have
When reaching out to touch things which might be dead,
Or as we jump away from what might just be
Our shaking hands...
It was scraped off of that road one day,
And all the earth around where it had been
Looked saddened by its loss;
Cemeteried with the souls of trees
Waiting patiently for the next passing truck.
_____________________________________

Corn-Hog Ratio

The broken shafts of porridged compost
Borderlined the geography where splintered shavings of once
proud wheat
Spoil after later summer's harvest
And the stalks of corn lime green
In the decay of mice and rats
Scurrying in what remains after the machetes and machines
Have had their way with them...
It's a time in Fall when children pull night crawlers
From the black pitch ground
To fish the lake at dawn,
Where cluttered leaves float and sink
With the imagination of fish-
Much larger than they've seen all summer...
There's little thought of black birds then
Pecking prices down,
While the wind wheels sing the tune
Of neglected scarecrows,
Waiting for hats and scarves
And corded limbs wrapped in straw
To watch the growing crops
With what they hope
Will bring them back again
When the corn-hog ratio
Is punched out on computers.
_____________________________________

Fish

The fantails swiveled through the camouflage of plants
In her living room;
Feasting on a shaking sibling bellying up at the bottom
Of the bulb-like bowel,
She had no net to scoop it out,
Resolved to feed the rest in ways she felt they did
In placid lily ponds through murky Asian water...
There, suffering always kept the tortured silent
Fearful of uttering a sound to drive sadists
Into ecstasy...
She prized a photograph of her son
In unsoiled Navy whites,
With this shoe tips on the verge of kicking
A tired old man who rickshawed him
Down narrow Asian alleys.
He was silent like all tortured prisoners are
Who sense the whip can easily be exchanged for chains
While their privates can be wired into electric shock...
If her other fish took ill,
She cursed the one they feasted on;
While she worried if her child was safe
At the far end of the world.
_____________________________________

Fish And Birds

Sparrows squawk brown predawn
On concrete cracks where last night's rain
Puddles into sinkholes before running off the curb
Into base drum sound through grated sewers flooring
Into the abyss of nowhere.
My open window screens the coldest tributaries,
And makes me think of gypsy fortune tellers nailing on my palm
Across tickling soaking lives drenched with pulmonary crevices
And the bloated excess of a laundry line
Drip in between my fingers;
Shriveled like a child who keeps his hands
Immersed too long along the beach...
Drowning men shoulder up on the waves
And float with dangling joints
While staring at the sea,
As if they've finally seen the sewers
Dark green silt the sparrows never see -
In the abyss where no sparrow sings;
A place where fish strip what they will,
In a feast beneath the sea.
_____________________________________

Carousels

The horses I remember as a child
Seemed to prance in pain
Impaled on carousels;
Grimaced in a silent frozen scream
Which made me look away
While my parents strapped me in,
Cautioning to foot the stirrups
I never quite could reach -
So I held the pike
That ran clear through their shoulders
And thought I heard the faintest screams
Seething just above the tinker music
And the motored gears that kept the horses
Galloping in pain...
And in dead center was a man
With greasy skin and rolled up sleeves
Who timed the rides by reading
Through a comic book
That never seemed to make him laugh...
And all the horses
I've seen since then
Who stare and stomp at my approach
Seem clairvoyant
As they pick through all my early thoughts
Of carousels.
_____________________________________

Drops Of Purple

Interlaced as molecules inside the prairie grass
Purple headed flies sting the dead
As viciously as those alive
Who glove off matted sheep nailed on barbwire
Close to where cattle fell with flat molars curling
Mine shafts into their swollen tongues;
Blistered in the search for an endless drink
Which failed to come while they bellied on the flattened grass...
Cholera spread in Fall
And whooping cough by winter
As fevers raised in pregnant women
Treated with cool rags in their foreheads
While traveling carriage doctors housed leeches
In medicine bottles;
Pincering them to marbled skin
Which already bled too much to feel the added pain...
In the swift brush strokes of Western artists
Softening the shafts of wheat
And thatched homesteader's roofs
None of this was seen -
Just an accidental drop of purple paint
Hinted at the sickness,
Which the tireless wind blew away.
_____________________________________

Clusters Of Lilies

I've walked away from from sinking elms
Where bees clustered in a zoom,
Before I turned to see their hive, looking back
While walking to an open field
Where crickets seemed to sound relief
As if I warded off the danger of lingering in that shade too
Long...
I thought about the blight of locust
Nibbling on whatever grew, gnawed into a ravaged scene,
And thought of all the burned out forests I read about
Where nothing of a living sound was heard
Except my boots crunching on half lit embers
With only thoughts of living things that were singed into the
waste,
or had escaped beyond my sight and hearing...
On a sweltering country roadside
A man in a wet stained shirt
Sells lilies rubber banded for graves
Where epitaphs are undecipherable;
Worn smooth by shoddy craftsmanship.
It's a place where bees hive and fester,
And visitors who'd like to read
Are satisfied just to stand aside
And watch the bees take dominion
Over what is dead and buried
If only for the time the lilies stay alive.
_____________________________________
_____________________________________