One night, not long after the disaster,
as our train was passing Astor,
the car door opened with a shudder
and a girl came flying down the aisle,
hair that looked to be all feathers
and a half-moon smile
making open air of our small car.
The…
Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
Sing me
Sour me
Secrete dark matter’s sheen
on our smarting skin
Rise and shine
In puddle shallows
under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd
somnambulists and sleepyheads
Wake us
Speak to us
Bless what you’ve nurtured…
My story’s told in the mis-dial’s
hesitance & anonyms of crank calls,
in the wires’ electric elegy
& glass expanded by the moth
flicker of filament. I call a past
that believes I’m dead. On the concrete
here, you can see where
I stood in rust, lashed…
The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.
For view there are the houses opposite
Cutting the sky with one long line of wall
Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch
Monotony of surface & of form
Without…
Women’s tears are but water;
The tears of men are blood.
He sits alone in the firelight
And on either side drifts by
Sleep, like a torrent whirling,
Profound, wrinkled and dumb.
Circuitously, stealthily,
Dawn occupies the city;
As if the seasons knew of his grief
Spring has suddenly…
In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and…
My crown.
My room.
Surrounding snow.
These are not my
hands, my winter shoes
carried off by uncertain music.
There was a meadow
behind my house
and if I should see myself there
she would tell me
there was never a meadow
and then walk through me
as if through a cloud
and…
Airport bus from JFK
cruising through Queens
passing huge endless cemetery
by Long Island’s old expressway
(once a dirt path for wheelless Indians)
myriad small tombstones tilted up
gesturing statues on parapets
stone arms or wings upraised
lost among illegible inscriptions
And the setting yellow sun
painting all of them
on…
Retired ballerinas on winter afternoons
walking their dogs
in Central Park West
(or their cats on leashes—
the cats themselves old highwire artists)
The ballerinas
leap and pirouette
through Columbus Circle
while winos on park benches
(laid back like drunken Goudonovs)
hear the taxis trumpet…
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in…
A monstrosity in the alley.
A many-bodied movement grouped
for terror, their flights’ brief shadows
on the kitchen curtains, on the street’s
reliquaries of loose squares and hustle.
Some minds are groomed for defiance. The youngest
calls out his territory with muscular vowels
where street light spills…
