Category: poetry alive

Waiting on the train platform in thicksoled
winter boots and a scarf made by a friend
in the middle of an Argentinean reunion,

I find myself whistling the chorus of “If I Only
Had A Brain.” Today, shapes of water towers
and the palisades are very dear to me: one

a private chamber from a mechanized fairtytale,
the other a snow-ruled wall announcing
New Jersey. I’m on my way to see a dancer,

a music writer (red-headed), and a friend
whom I once informed was unphotogenic
and with whom I could sit on a bench

forever (and very nearly have). I’m in love
and in love and in love all at the same time
though it’s rare for a person to believe this

without use of their eyebrows. There are places
in Ohio I will never touch. There is an image
of a father vomiting into the outdoor aisle

of a baseball game that has yet to reach
its date of expiration. Perhaps we speak
with the verbs that grew us: awake, embrace,

record, replay. Perhaps the technology
of the VCR more accurately suits our human
love of angles holding time. Somewhere

in America, someone I have yet to meet
is halted in the walkable night, suctioned
to two conflicting ideas at once. I may be both

of these ideas. I may thieve one of these notions
like a gift I was owed as a child and permit myself
no remorse. The Hudson River was clean, then filthy.

Now it’s swimmable. This is only the beginning
of trains today, only  the first  gesticulation away
from coal and its misbehaved mythology.

for Colin

He’s the historian he’s
got tallies stitched behind

the floorboards of every
lore he spins, nick names

& scoreboard shame
punches thrown

& homegames blown
up until the dirtiest

of mismatched details
quits its job in mall store

retail and hightails it
out his mouth like proof

of some uncouth and not
quite legal brand

of smalltown microscope.
But blue eyes, there is hope

for you the joke’s of course
on whom your brain

elects to memorize and you
my cornered friend are

slightly borrowed, slightly
prized and altogether

heedless of the tonnage
of your fulltime occupation

you’re just a new york boy
with piss poor circulation

On one of the shortest days of the year,

fuel
a savory pastry (goat cheese & figs)
two porcelain mugs of coffee beside an old blue stove
and travel plans for March of twenty-twelve

found
not the scarf
not the one brown glove (god dammit)
the photographic nose for street level Manhattan
a doll-sized shopping bag on the partitioned wood of the subway station

forgiven
the six months in between (immediately)
8th Avenue for calling itself Hudson
the scrape of winter through hand-me-down stockings

formative
the sung August revival on a rooftop
the making of the song itself (on central grass, of course at night)

filibustered
no cabs on 14th and All I want
is one Yuletide Bullet is that so much to ask!

formalism
Edward Hopper painted Paris & some humans
though he was awkward with his French & missed America
and it not the patrons of the small café that had the grace
it was the trees

fortune
is like Formica
and we call it
passé

finally
In the middle of the night Sam awoke
to find us faced in to each other, almost
fetal, like two seahorses defending
their tiniest of spines & snouts from the current
of a larger fish’s tail: four hands clasped
together as if holding to the railing of a ship
whose lower decks are full and we
(above & not protected from the sea)
must bare the spit & throttle of the hours
until dawn. And in retaliation we spit ourselves
back at the black & grip until our knuckles
denounce blood though the swill of Sunday’s face
is fast to call us shameful, call us rash.

Between two and three am we go
upside down: his feet flat

on the ground in a splay
of yogic yes as my mismatched

socks slide farther down my ankles,
heels for all to see. From between

my legs, I watch him rise
into a slow headstand, hands

at his ears, elbows two points
of a triangle. It looks like he’s swimming

and he looks straight ahead. The speed
at which he lowers down is like

the pace at which my grandfather,
eighty-six years old, eases himself

into the pool. Later, much later,
near nine am, I dream he gives me

unremarkable objects that hide
inside their seams three hundred gifts,

accompanied by a letter in his capitalized
scrawl. I awake without having read it,

though I trust it is inscribed in the air
between the headstand and the floor.