I found the city a pitiless thing.
It smelled of steel, concrete and the bay.
I use to sit on the sea wall that edged
my old college condo, the one I shared
with a black cat, and sing Otis Redding-
skipping the whistling part of his song
because my lips could never purse the
right tune- and watch the tide roll in
catching rainbows in the sun’s glint.

It  was the inhabitants I couldn’t take,
all rude and loud, smelling of salt
and stale fish scales and crab shells,
so snared in tiny toils, frail and idle,
their itching needs thirsty and *****.  
I lost my wonder in the traffic dust,
the night haze and starless nights.
I avoided touching that life less
it should defile me in its lost light,
night terrors and phantasms.

Then, in the small church in
the out of the way corner,
I found her, a strange vision
trembling, ready to emerge
just past the reach of my mind
and the urge of my will. She existed
beyond all jaded aims and
drab  dissemblements,
something unfounded, unbuilt
but ready, waiting to be built on.

On my birthday she bought me
a lounge chair to grace my
unfurnished balcony, on the
very day I purchased my own.
And there we sat (my desire),
watching the city unseal itself
across from me in a sweltering love,
constantly revealed, being
forever built and rebuilt on
in pain and unfathomable will.

The ramshackled town falls quiet
to the artist’s eye in the retreating light.
The old houses will truce their aged lumber,
antiquity, for the invading dark beauty of his creation.

He lived here once as a boy, in the sadness of his angels,
held hostage (he thought), by the catechism of  church
and steeple, becoming  a refugee from sawdust and faith,
believing being an exile will open his eyes to the truth.

He had returned from his long sojourn in the East
after seeing and experiencing the freedom of the world,
determined to posses this tract, once green space,the mountain beyond— to surrender it all, to the truth he  knew.


The canvas submitted to his violence.  The brushes
knew again, the small wars between mind and nature.
The hunger, the hunger, the hunger of eternal creation  
that rises from the wanderlust in every artist and poet.    

He did not listen to their prayers for mercy.
He wailed in his starvation “Come! Come!”
The shades of town, mountain, flower, deer, came.
And, as he must, he destroyed and devoured it all.

Time’s diminishments adds its own beauty
in gratitude for moments that are not ours:

the child tiptoes into the mother’s bedroom
and silently witnesses her comb her hair,

later listens to her snore, transferring to
them the transient lyrics of the song of life-

the lines that survive  the well of nights,
the rose thorns to bloom in their mouths

until it’s stamped in their bodies—
this trapped time to live all over again.

My mother’s name is lost
to everyone beyond her children.

“She was beautiful.
What was her name?”,
others would say to me  
when shown her image
hanging silently on the wall.

In the chanting of it—their wind
echoes my death back in a cloud
of disinterested kindness
and muttered miseries.
  
They know only their faces,  
the renamed mountains and rivers,
the new language of their exile.

Not that—
she was wind born—
knew her better name.

In that living moment
the bullet goes right by me—
and in between all my prayers
and my eternal gratitude —
the child behind me dies.  
“Why did it  spare
me and not him?”,
I think over and over again—
counting the lifetime of wishes
that now will never
come true for him.—

It goes right by me—
penetrating present and future—
—dreams and nightmares—
I will sleep an hour more tonight—
—tomorrow, an hour less—
less—less until the end of my lifeline.
Out of all the others who’ve died
I will remember this child— little boy
in the depth of my veins and
the light rain that continuously falls—
even as the bullet goes by and bye.—
pass the fence to his grave.—

The bullet goes by me—
cutting through my words—
my sad attempt of an elegy for him—
all the grief that my soul strives to forget—
It goes right by me—
chance— unsmiling me for a lifetime.—

When the fence was finished
and properly white washed
he wrote TRUTH
all in large block white.
on his side
that faced the street.

The next day, his neighbor
of many years,
of which he knew
only through casual hellos,
painted (in bleeding red)
TREASON on his.  

“God Save America,” the first thought ,
“from this POS” as he drove  his  EV to work,
content knowing he had his neighbor all figured out.
The neighbor thought the same as he passed him
in his POS  Ford— the one he inherited from his father-
the one with the  fender cracks held  together
with $ store American. flag  bumper stickers.

Under the bardo of the sheltering sky
mist and fog cleave earth from heaven.
The green  liminal land  abscission’s itself-
shivering swallows from boughs,
causing the wiltering river reed
to bend away from the first frazil ice—
and the grazing horse to return to hay by
following the frosting road back to the barn.

The fifth season has arrived,
sneaking in between summer and fall,
changing everything green to yellow,
then to fire and ash—
suspending earth and air until
nature decides the next breath.


bardo:  (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.

Liminal:  Liminal space is the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically.

abscission:   the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit.

Frazil:  soft or amorphous ice formed by the accumulation of ice crystals in water that is too turbulent to freeze solid.

I wander through this secret city
mapped in the words we only know,
and we can only define.
I am the citizen of you
and you of me.

Everyone we know drives bye,
their cars filled
with everything we own
flying out the window.

The next vanishes
into the mist
beyond  the curb
of what we once were.
Or, is it, will be?

Where they went,
we know.
Where they’re going,
we know.

Our eyes and ears
want to follow,
it’s so bright and loud
and hard to hold inside,
even in all the shooting.

She remembers
when the light
was filled
with silent ghosts.  
They would flicker in and out
in the cigarette smoke  
of the theater,  
each frame
an ashy wisp,
a burnt offering.
The story spooling out
in the air
was a familiar one.
The  sentiment
caught in her heart
and  made her cry.  
  
Years later,  
she went back,
after the smoke
was banned
and only the light
was permitted to filter.
The ghosts  
talked to her, now-
but it was no longer
a sacred thing.
There were profane words
and the noise hurt her ears.
In this night  light  
there were no  
familiar family faces.
Everything was clear,  
startling new and strange
and all the colors
too bright  for her eyes
to bear.
And it was then
she knew
she would die
in this nightmare dream.

When I was a child light shone
angels through my fingers
crowning my parents’ faces,
blessing the simple tasks of theirs:
table setting, pouring water—
how it lit the world in my upturned smile
and flowed through as I grew
and how it followed me home
and stayed, even in the dark.

Light was the water, earth,
reflecting off every animal,
every street, everything I touched—
the light always ahead,
the darkness, just softly behind
—doubts, questions, thoughts—
light, enlightening the dark words
of my mind and mouth.

And when the darkness caught up,  
and I watched my parents fall behind,
my body/smile down-turn to groan
and my thoughts and words
turn to memories— I realized how
the past was always near and how
grief turned everything to light.

Its leaves fold,curl in
Their grip yields to the cold wind
The elm knows their loss

He knows how to observe the heron
in the twilight’s lonely inclusion-
this blue dream that could vanish
in flight if drawn too near—
head, eyes, ears pulled forward
following the flow of fish ahead
until it vanishes from his sight
behind a screen of slender reeds.

My mother got married in a hand stitched dress
that each of her four sisters contributed a  
piece of their souls into the embroidered lace:
a skein of swans in perfect v formation
flew up her left sleeve, doves fluttered down
her right, peacock trains fanned cardioid eyes
of the most luminous white across her torso and
bluebirds hermitaged in the ivory lines of her back.
And since, they knew from experience that men  
are fickle- each secretly sewed coins and jewels
into the hem, for the inevitable day when her
children would scream too loud in his ears and he
will see only her fat and leave like a wolf in the night.

On my father’s house
three slaves and six horses
died when the old stable blazed
a  century and a half ago,
and three union and
two confederate soldiers
slayed each other
in a forgotten skirmish
a few years later.
Their skeletons were found
two years after the war
under an uprooted white pine.
The county let the field return to forest,
except for the old stable.

My father, a nonresident,
cut a dirt road through
the upper quarter,
built a cottage house
over the old stable,
a gate house fifty yards leeward
with a pond in back
and a large windowed manor
that cut a wing between
earth and sky
just beyond
at the edge
of the rocky wrack line to the bay.

Until the houses settled in,
the earth screeched its pain
and revealed its ossified sorrows.
After years this plot
finally  accepted his tranquility.  

My father died and was cremated
far away from this adopted place,
He  returned only because
his will demanded
his celebration of life
take place here.

Except for the family,
who undutifully held
onto their allotted share
of his ashes, the attending
mutes, sobers, wailers and criers
faithfully flung
his cremains in the breeze.
They watched, cried,
bemoaned and wailed
as every speck
refused to settle
and blew out to the bay.

Death has left its imprint on me so much I
don’t know who is touching me inside anymore.

Certainly it’s another presence,
a voice apart from God.

Or is God the sum total of
all my known deaths?

My soul is an oarless canoe
afloat a lake of tears

seeking both initiation
and response to steer it.

Every death is almost next to me
entered gradually,  disappeared,

not gone. Internalized.  
Just almost next to me-

done being themselves,
but not being part of me.

Sometimes the separation,
the loneliness is so extreme

that I am moved
by almost everything,

the body of life not
touching against me,

just moving the canoe
along.

Because I can not bury my father in the sky
I burn him and spread his ashes on the ground.

He loved birds yet did not feed them crumbs—
just  caught them in the color of their being.

He would watch the mower plow the field,
watch the hand fill  the feeders with seed

feeling the tranquility of the man-made pond
drift towards him as he pulled the blanket from

his chin and felt the breeze ruffle his baldness,
the bed as high to the trees as a house allows—

all the doors open to the day
                                  the night

the house receiving guest after guest,
the tables inside-outside spread for feasts,

until the last smoke of him singes my nostrils
settles in my lungs (this strange son of his),

floats above the branches into every nest,
leaving behind the clock spring in the fire

this nonparent of the future, this fruit
of his, leaving no seeds of his own.

I don’t get the feminine luxury of being
twenty-five  again every birthday past fifty.
For a year I must live with the snide joke  that
my actual age is a congress of crows position
illustrated in the karma sutra  (page 69).
Biologically I feel ten years older.  
Facially I look fifteen years younger.  
Every year there will be a different  joke
for the new number and another birthday.
But they say age is just a number .
You just  live with  the joke until
that final one comes up.

I thank life
by living
by praying

in stitches in the
midst of evergreens
aggravates- water

This crippled world
my every payer
of me— of you

It’s simple- how to live, that is:
live and die each day.

Strive to live each morning
as if it was the first:

pull the colors around you
to something that lives
beyond the eyes.  

Treat the world not as Adam:
something to be touched,
named, collected, defined—

but as Eve:
the sun as an ingenue
something young, innocent
not to be defiled but protected.

Live each night as
if it were your last:

set the table for the next
person who eats after you

clear the roar of your mind,
shroud the alarm clock,
deaden the tablet of light,
glance out the window and
see the light beyond the dark.

and before you take that long sleep
praise every surface,  
baptize every living thing.

It wasn’t a river  
just a pool,
more of a hotub,
set off from the sanctuary—
and when I was eased
into  the water
I didn’t see God
in the streams above.

And I didn’t see her
lost in the thunder
of the racetrack
just beyond the church.

She was beyond
my line of sight,
soaking up congratulations
from the congregation.

The pastor gave me
a gentle pat on my back,
shook my hand, three times,
handed me a towel
and welcomed me to the flock.

I was just another sinner saved
and left to go his own way,
certain in the faith
that God will provide.

She said she would meet
me back at her place
after the potluck.

I wrang the towel
of every last drop
and  handed it
back to her.

I walked back to
my old white Civic,
turned it over
and felt the
cool Jesus breeze
of the A/C hit my face.

The voice inside
told me to do the
first thing I heard
on the radio.

I heard Ray Charles
in his blindness
croon to me:

“Hit the road Jack
and don't you come back
No more, no more, no more, no more.

Hit the road Jack
and don't you come back
No more.”

I am married to this earth,
this field, this silence,
even as the ocean offers itself.

I walk  it with my dog on his leash
pulling restlessly ahead,
biting at the frenzy scent trail
he knows exists in the air.

The woods beyond are gray.
So is the sky.  

I hear— the echo of
a  trickling brook.  
My dog, inhales—
the last traces of  
dying greens, the odors
of tantalizing blues yielding
to the coming season.

The horizon reels away
until my eyes can no longer
take it in and the sky matches
the coming night—
contains itself in the field,
in every thing.  

Drops of rain splash
and  fall off my nose
onto my tongue.
The taste is bittersweet.
The scent, silences  
my dog’s barking
with the promise of petrichor.

The hidden brook silently turning
breathes in the renourishment—
the earth, the field,
praise the distant blessing
of a dying Hurricane Debby
bequeathing its last bits
for this life.

In my *******,
I feel the grace
of an unseen promise.
In the walk back home,
I am aware that each
foot thud is full of mud—
the marriage of ocean and land.

Before it was lowered over
the broken city grid and
became my second house
it was a meadow where
the grasses grew tall.

I watched the top shell of earth
being moved and hauled away,
saw everything leveled to sand,
except a thick, distant  forest with a
thin stream that bled to the city park—

and did not shed a single tear.
All I knew that this was  my reward
for surviving sickness and storms,    
my final place to rest and settle my bones,
a place without a history of battles.

After the house’s first shudder and mud
had splashed my face did I know that the
soil always tasted of the slow dying of birds
who lived a long time in the air and bequeathed
their bones to the sky- flesh, blood to the dirt.
.

The white light of my bathroom  
reaches down through the steam,
breaks yellow through the shower door.
I scrub my skin, try to scratch loose
all the sour, stinging memories inside,
hope the grime would disappear
in the porous mat under my feet.
The steam flows like a host of ghosts
into the vent fan-  leaves behind
only  the face of tomorrow
in my  mirror’s reflection.

I’m getting giddy
as the summer fades
into  yellow fall,
and the sky father
grants me the comfort
of storing his favor
on my tongue-
enough to close my eyes
and know that it will last  
for the coming snow,
the clean pure white that
will eventually evaporate as one
in the hibernating warmth
always underneath.

The young can not write about dust.
They know only it accumulations
on floors, shelves, ***** panes.
Only the old know its subtle contours,
the futility that comes with just moving it around.
They know that the sun and stars are dust,
schools of ash that follow all life’s currents and
that blossom the new fields under Grandfather Mountain.
They bend with the promise of the long, wavering grasses,
and flowers with their variegated indigos,
everything pursuing joyously their singular futures,
swearing testimony to the power of dust’s bounty.

Again, today,
the cowboy will close
his eyes
and listen to the hooves
of wild horses
all around him

knowing that
his well-trained palomino
will take him home
like a lover
who knows
what his lust wants—

knows the way to him,
through the black covers
of that dark room—

even as the returning
creates and then destroys the
greening prairie, the chambray wind.

As I get older I don’t dread death coming closer.
It is closer.
It will come as a newborn:
seeding so long in me,
that I would chide it for taking its time.
I will not scream when it head comes out my body.
I won’t even be amused by such a Hollywood trick.
And when its held before my eyes
trickling with all my blood
I will simply reach out and hold it close
to my chest,
run my fingers over its head
until it stops wailing,
grows silent-
and there is nothing left for me to say to it,
nothing left to do
but  kiss this  life of mine,
shed a joyful yet mournful tear
and wait for it and myself
to fall asleep.

After forty years the brownstones
still seemed the same except
for the newer cars and the people
in fashionable clothes walking
golden dogs in chic comfort vests,
all living in houses he couldn’t afford.

He couldn’t believe he grew up here
when the streets were lively
with black live matter
and Gerald every summer
out there  with his roller
painting fatsfix’s store front red.

Now there sits Wray’s fancy drink café,
his name in a stylish white font
outcropping from a charcoal awning,
a cocktail glass replacing the Y, a large
BLACKLIVESMATTER banner out front,
proudly put there by its white owner.

The old El Diamantet is now
Castro’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine  
sharing space with a Dunkin’ Donuts
with expensive bicycles racked
to the declining handicap ramp.
The Mobil on Fuller- a Citgo Market.

The Meats and Greens turned Bamboo’s
and the farmacia now just  a pharmacy,
and the biggest insult of them all,
New Murken’s Restaurant which
served the best corn-beef sandwhiches
is an “eat big, leave happy” Mega  Bites.

The homebuds  had split, vanished
to memories of stinging high fives,
basketball jams and feeling up
Zoe on a fine Friday night,  the smell
of her  lingering in forty years  of regret.
There’ll be no bros coming from  these doors.

His heart  felt the sting of going home to a home
that was no longer his and no longer wanted him.
That past was a meat offering to this new block-
as if his blood and flesh had been scrubbed away
in the white wash of neatly trimmed roses behind
spiked  fences-  as if that there of his never happened.

“What was here before we came?” he imagined
the children asking the parents behind the doors.
“Nothing of note,” they would reply using the
same line the real estate agent routinely recited
to anyone who inquired about what existed
before the abattoir came and moved  on.

I  play with the sand,
crush it to a globe of
sun dried golden particles,

until the thing in me
that is the ocean calls to
release it to the tide

so full of  the incessant
sorrow  upon sorrow of other’s  tears
forced daily to kiss the shore-

its roar constantly reminding me-
the ocean hates the land-
the ocean does not love the land.

He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib,
so he  assembled it from a wordless diagram,
an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-
tightening it just enough, until the memory
of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past
the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it,  
the 30 years of lying unassembled in attic dust,
its existence cradled, tightened and retightened,
in lullaby and bedtime rhyme- until the child
reached his Jesus year, and needing a
second-hand cradle for his soon to be first born,
noticed it in the growing dawn and dust and
thought “Dad, I know I have the screws for that.”

My mother was always a better singer
                                than she was a cook.

She may have burnt a lot of things but
                              never missed a note,
         especially when Harry Belafonte
came on the transistor kitchen radio-
a voice so pure it made her cry with joy.

“There’s a hole in the bucket dear Liza,
                                                     dear Liza,”
                         he sang echoing her past,
                                                 the divorce,
                         her humbling present life.

The duet had the reply she wanted to say
to everything and sing it like Odetta--
                             “Well fix it, dear Henry
                                                 dear Henry,
                                                          fix it.”

It was her kitchen cooking song and
           and we would sing it together
            when Harry wasn’t on the air.

We sang it so often,
                                  switching voices.
                                      that I believed
                         she could fix anything
                                     and I could too.    

When we got to the fortieth line
                the meatloaf was burnt
                                              on top.

I ate it all with a lot of ketchup.
She just cut off the burnt part
                and fed it to the dog.

My sister,
                             two brothers
                              and stepdad
                             ate it quietly,
                        building up a lot
                                         of bad
                 meatloaf memories.

All the other kids had
                          their own songs
                that she sang to them
                                but she sang
                                               only
                         Belafonte to me.  

“Daylight come and me wan' go home,”
                    she sang to me in a whisper
                   before kissing me goodnight.

Calypso more than Salsa echoed
                            her Boricua pride,
                 the youngest of thirteen,
            yet never born to the island.

“Midnight come  and she wan’ go home,”
I sang to her open casket 22 years later,
                              kissing her on the head,
                      taking the hole in the bucket,
                                     along with Belafonte
                                                   to the future.

The drought has made July linger.  The air smells of sewer *****, sweetgum, sassafras, fescue, concrete and asphalt.  

On this long summer day when the light and heat decide to linger— parents let their children play well into the night on the community’s green.  

Their laughter and the croaking of frogs in the rention pond, just beyond, overgrown with cattails,
has my dog thinking the sound of fireworks and wanting to go back home.  I see the flickerings of the early late night news peeping through the half-drawn curtains as we head back.  

I imagine the children dreaming dream after dream in the hot mist of sleep after the last door has shut.


In that moment I see the first lines of my new poem, full  of that living hurting nostalgia that everyone likes to star and comment on— a poem, that I imagine, might be found after my death by my executor.  It would be one of those critically disdained viral odes charming and popular enough to be embroidered on sofa pillows that comfort the aching backside of old widows. A poem with a hint of despair but not written in despair.   One that knows the substance of July summer nights.

The pond was a quarry first,
a blast furnace to the colonies
where trains ran across its field.
“Iron Ore Bed” map points called it.
It was left to the rain when it dried up.

When his parents bought the land
twenty- five years before he was born,
the field was overgrown and the pond
was weedy and inaccessible.

Over the next few decades,
they cleared the area all around it,
diverted a nearby brook
to flow through it.  
It became the center of their life.

It was sixty feet deep with water
that was clear and warm.
It teamed with small trout, pickerel
and bass, shoals of gentleness that
passed by him and his cousins as they swam.  

Great blue herons, snowy egrets
would feast their briefly before
their Souh American migration,
always mindful of the need
for even quick hellos and goodbyes.

In his presence they would dip their wings
and then rise majestically over the pond
above the beech, birch and ash,
vanishing from his sight, beyond the horizon.

And then, always the rain would come,
the pond shimmering in the downpour
washing the pond mud and silt
from his arms and legs, the last
streaks of it from his hair.  

Afraid he would be struck by lightning,
he retreated to the screened in porch,
with everyone, out of the rain, playing
Monopoly in the coming firefly night.

Man


I don’t know if I am a practical person.

I don’t obsess over the uses of a watch.
It’s enough that it tick and the hands
move forward, even if I don’t.

When my dog paces in front of the door
I know I must walk him.  When he paws
my lap, I must feed him. He knows himself.

Today, I took him to the beach and
let him romp the shore, content like him,
to not know why the tides moves forward.

The tides are tireless and they go up and down
endlessly with a purpose  I’m not privy to.
My winding down bones know to let things be.

Today, the current matters. Tomorrow it won’t.
All that matters, this moment, is that my dog
returns the stick I’ve thrown and not run away.

Yet, nothing we accomplished in that time,
in all its impracticability, will matter
to all this ceaseless renewal all around.

Tomorrow the future will pull me from
my past even if my feet  don’t move,
even if my ashes are urned

I come to the creek path near my house, the one my wife doesn’t like me to walk alone, for fear I might fall.

I see mountain bikes riding through, a leashed  triplets of dogs of Goldilock sizes their caregiver behind, struggling to contain their strides.

My husky-chi barks at them, underneath a low growl  in the back of  his throat threatens to come out.  

He pulls me to the path. I pull him back.  

The evening concert of cicadas and toads in the overgrown retention pond between is just starting its clicks and croaks.  


Hours  later, on my beast’s last brief walk of the night, while most life is asleep and the path is still dangerous, I hear their deafening crescendo.

The creek is a gray smear cutting through the golden moon, the canopies of the night.  


Only the streetlights, the head lamps of a car turning the corner, show me the way home— but I think, know, only want the path.

A chill rolls in, so to the first drops of  predicted rain, of  the morning  fog and mist to come.

I unleash my dog and he vanishes into the path.  I hear the splash of water, the snap of twigs and crunch of leaves that lets me know he had crossed to the other side.  

There’s a small squeal, two long beats, and with it, the concert stops, then restarts in a softer refrain.  

My  beast proudly returns, dropping a field mouse at my feet.  I am disgusted, but being gracious, I pat my dog’s brindle head, tell him he’s a good boy. This is his nature and I am helpless to restrain it.

I stuff the creature into a dog waste bag, think of walking to the path, just to where the concrete and forest separate, and pitching it as far as I can, but then realize my dog would just retrieve it again.          

My dog snuggles against my leg. I put the mouse in my pocket, pet my dog’s heaving stomach.  

The path calls him- calls me. I clip the leash to his harness, prepare for him to tug me onto the path.  

Instead, he spins around without a snarl,  and starts to follow the scent trail of home, pulling until the leash tells him that I want to say.

I sit down at the end of the concrete path, my dog obeying my motion, but facing home. My fingers create a lazy trail in the muddy earth.  

When it’s deep enough for a small grave, I drop the mouse in, covering the hole over quickly before my dog notices the rejected offering— the present I can not keep or even explain to my waiting wife.  

A sadness wells in me- not for the mouse but for steps I will never take- the knowledge that I will fall and never get back home- the knowledge that I will not know the wild path forward, just the hard, white one behind.

My grandmother was my oracle,
speaking stained insights in a Spanish
I hardly understood at the time.  

My offerings were small but true:
kisses, hugs, “I love you” on paper scraps
translated by my mother for her knowing.

It was as if I had written them in blood and
it became a forever tattoo of her heart,  
a pumping cross, always giving and forgiving.

The yield was quarters, dimes, pennies
doled out from a repurposed wide-mouth
banderilla jar for the corner candy store tour.

She lived in a temple of rust seeping down walls, paint cracks, peeling checkerboard linoleum,
chipped ceramics, relics broken and glued back-

an unsanctified housing of brittle bones and
striations of hands and feet, sweet blood,
passed from thirteenth child to second son.

As my Spanish improved I was able to praise
the oracle with all the many spoken and
scribbled ways of Latin gratitude and adoration

under the watchful eye of my mother and
the care of twelve others who still lived
within the realm of her unwritten wisdom.  

When her vision stopped and her blood
no longer flowed she was relocated with
all solemnity to rest under a Boricua tree.

My mother doled out her oracular inheritance
whenever I stumbled, wandered, questioned,
encouraging me to write it all down.

Now, she is mere dust in the echoing wind
and I am a childless prophet who appreciates
all the oracles that came before my time.

The trick is to love life,
even when you have
no stomach for it-

even when your life
crumbles to burnt paper
in your hands-

your throat choking in its ashes,
embers turned tearing diamonds,
weighing you down in grief’s obesity.

“How can a body withstand this?”
you will ask, cradling your face
in your palms- your ordinary face

now, no dark smile, no deep black eyes,
just your ”yes, yes, ” uttering in
the rebirthing dawn “I will love you, again.”

After his deep illness
was over he laid
his body on hers—
the length of his body on hers—
all the sleepings, awakenings,
fights, teacup and coffee mornings,
their talks about everything and nothing,
the plummets, the joyous-awkward silences—

and with a tear, she beared his weight—
until it was gone.

This old house painted in faded  pride
knows me well.  I did not learn to walk here,
but I did learn to leap- and do it mightily.

The old dishes have been broken or thrown away,
replaced by new ones with new owners. The taps
stiff with old age and rust, surely have been replaced.

The comfortable chairs, the linoleum, the tile,
the **** rugs, the step up altar where my
mother was married, are probably leveled flat.

I can only see your outside and imagine your
many renovations in the sawdust of time,  
atticless, cribless,  old beds churning  to new beds.

While I lived there, you were a good soul
who kindly accepted all bidding, and I can see, donated your good bones to other’s  futures.

Other places I have lived have been less generous, tumbling into disarray, illness,  nature’s destruction before I could even build a future in them.  

I can feel the ill winds blow and know that this new abode will be more of the same, filled with unfated things never settling down into their rightful places.

I thank you, dear old thing, for your graceful love.

The pain is gone and
I am ready to write about
everything beyond the fear,

ready to bite into the
muscle and bone
of the world,

to put away the dagger phrase,
all the losses of my life,
ready to live in hope’s recesses.

I am poet enough to
make you taste
this hidden fruit,

see beyond all
the sutured sunsets
of existence.

It will not be all
kisses and music, but  
it will be terribly beautiful!

The birds sing of hunger
through the pillars of lights  
that render the sky into being

the great crease of  You stumbling
through onto my bedclothes
kindling the room once more

with the face of peace found-out
satiating my starvation with
the lamb’s diminutive thorn

a whole world
waiting for Your
                     Yes

My wife hears the **** man outside spraying  the lawn.
The next day it’s the pest control guy doing the foundation.

He doesn’t come into the house to spray each room anymore.  Just doing the outside is enough to keep the bugs away,
says the pamphlet he leaves at the top of the steps.

My wife comes from the grocery store
and  immediately complains about the smell.

She gives me the long receipt for the thirteen bags
of freshly ground and harvested death
that will feeds us for the next few weeks.

I look it over, go into my office, shut the door.
I file it away. Next, I pay the quarterly bills for
                  those who do my killing.

I hate mowing the lawn,
hate the way it sends chinch bugs
flying to the stars after the rain.

In my dreams, however,  I have lots of land,
and delight in sculpting neat parallel rows
with my tractor- over and over, on and on,

aerating the start of warrens and burrows
for rabbits and woodchucks to finish their
tunnels, for deer to graze my flowers, weeds.

In the morning the milkweed blossoms,
bringing supping butterflies. At night,
the fireflies rise painting the darkness.

When the grass grows high and it’s time
to mow again, I will close my  eyes,
and feel the biting bugs and buzzing flies

mating dreamscapes in the coming dusk.

The Hudson sleeps
and the clouds sweep
over the moon.

I promise little dear
with this small  tear
I will always love you.

Sleep, sleep, sleep
peace, peace, peace
the promise I grant you.

This song is the fact
that your star remains intact
in my heart, steady and true.

The river’s lull,
the moons’s full glow
will always pull us through.

The path will be rough.
The road back tough.
Yet, my cloak will  surround you.

Startle not, this wet drop,
is but my love pulled tight and true,
My love pulled tight and true.

Around me, within me,
within you, around you
sings the song of just us two.

The song I sing
is but the sad  tune of this night.
It will not be the story of you!

My life has been rapture,
rupture and strife
like all others in life.  

But you shall be more than my sorrow,
more than my wants,
more than my sad thoughts.  

You will be the moon song.
The one that everyone sings
to overcome the night!

It’s just a matter of just time,
of just time, just  time,
time, time, time…
,

i like to cling to the grime

the small grit of my father’s ashes
underneath my fingernails,
the part of him that refused
to fall to the rocks in the scattering

my mother’s scented oil in her hair,
her burning fat seasoning in the skillet
stinging my nostrils and eyes leaving me
seeing smelling less than my faultering ears

his ash sticks in the wall of my lungs
trying to pressure my air to diamonds
cutting me to his symmetry trying
always to rinse my blood of her tears

When I look at the sky its blueness mixes
and cycles with thunder, lightning and rain.

I notice, the  vulture, content to feast on leftovers of once
beautiful things, fly  with the same majesty of the hawk.

At night, I see the stars burn bright and smell the rain’s petrichor snake off the worn sides of Racoon Mountain.

Yet, I the only thing that is neither sky, bird, mountain nor star,
wonder, spend so much time wondering, if this is peace or joy.

Gray wolves howl invisible
on the granite shoreline
waiting for the sea’s answer-

standing tall on the headland,
against a wind that allows no trees,
signatures the stones with ageless storms—

howling to know why this once lush place
where endless fields of poppy intertwined with pine
is now defaced with crops of suburban homes.

Above, a falcon startled from its rocky perch soars
in its time- seeing in the shadows withdrawing
from clouds- the last glint of  beautiful stones.

I’m gentle with the spaces
I know and walk through.

Every door knobs has fingerprints.
The dust and air is full of ghosts,

I make them free not by removing them but
tidying them up into their own wandering space,

letting them tell their stories so I can joyously
tell mine in the right place, time and words.  

I free myself to the opportunity they provide me.
I am loyal to them and they to me.  

The other day I heard my mother speak to
me in a frame of film, a pixel flashing by.

”I love it.  Love, love, love it!”, she said
to everything she touched and adored.  

My wife was wondering why I was just
sitting there smiling and writing.  

“I don’t care. I love it! I love it, too!” I replied
to the life that created me and lives I will create.

I have done the work of gathering, curating, loving.
I am close, closer to finally  getting it right!

When her maman died
Marie flew ten hours to
the ancient French village
where the houses
steepled the church,
their mansard roofs
brown from neglect.  
The Weeping Willow
in front of maman’s
weathered hovel
did not match
Marie’s feelings.  
It never did.

Inside the furniture
had aged into antiques.
The handmade chaises
with ladder backs and
unadorned ticking,
French oak dinning table,
the vaisellier darker from
decades of hearth ash.

The rose print wallpaper had
faded to shadow bands,
the town print on the mantle
now almost sepia,
her first crib picture a fading
black and  white dream.

Maman’s single bed existed
pushed into the corner
of a windowless chambre,
almost a frenzied fever
blue room delusion of
Van Gogh’s last dying days.

Hanging alone in the closet was
maman’s noir widow’s dress,
the one Marie imagined maman
would be buried in.  That was
until Claire, the old neighbor next
door, gave Marie maman’s ashes
in a simple wooden box
with a gold filigreed clasp.
Pinned to the dress was Maman’s
will written in her eloquent hand
on unlined French folio.

These cinders, this shuddering land,
this dress with all its memories,
and grief would be her inheritance.  

Marie held the dress to her as
she returned to the archway
of the still open door.
The lace sleeves were  shorter
than she remembered,
but it would fit her very well.
Just beyond her, the country road
with its oaks grasping for union
stubbornly remained a horse trail.

Her mother’s tale of the red string
foretold that Miko and Makoto
would be together,
tied little finger to little finger
by a taut invisible  blood line.
What she didn’t tell her
was that the line would fray,
break, need to be
retied over and over.

In their wedding photos
Makoto would stand stiff,
sincere in his white suit,
chrysanthemum in lapel,
hands by his sides,
close to her but
never really touching.
Miko in her red-white kimono
was almost a shrine
with butterfly ribbons,
a sigh more than a smile
adorning her face.

She imagined years
of ritual devotion
turning the gown gray,
the white high heels into
black sensible pumps.
Her gaze would eventually
never match Makoto,
it would rest on her feet,
turn inward until
she saw only herself
alone on the shore.

Makoto would spend
long hours in his cubicle,
drawing house after house
for others to live and work in.
At home the drawings would
fall into an exhausted heap
on the living room sofa
forming a charcoal pillow
for his weary head.  

Miko would put away
the uneaten food,
separating half  
into a bento box for
Makoto’s next day’s lunch,
the other half reserved cold
for her own silent noon meals.
She would dry her hands
on the old never worn
yellow girl’s onesie cleverly
repurposed to a dish rag.

Her mind drifted back to the time
they visited the Snow Monkeys of
Jigokudani bathing in their hot spring.
She would watch a mother macaque
and infant slipping their fingers
in and out of each other forming
rose strings in the slow rippling splash
until the last echo almost touched her womb.
She listlessly gazed at her feet as she
listened to Makato denounce
the silly animal antics she delighted in,
how he snarled out without regret
“Akachan wa noroidesu”
(Babies are a curse.)
Nevertheless he gladly purchased
the commemorative photo of them,
taken at the park’s entrance,
of them posing stiffly because
it echoed their wedding one.

On the bullet train back to Tokyo
she felt sick and rushed to the toilet.
There, Miko knew the yellow secret  
bought at Akachan  Honpo the
day before and hiding in her purse
would become a dish rag.
In the hygienic blue flushing water.
her hope turned to grief
and her grief became a silent wail
that emptied out, a crimson string.

Seated in her assigned chair
she glared at Makoto
staring out the train window
searching the darkening horizon.
He never turned his face to her.
He didn’t even know she was next to him.
Miko stared at the walls, stifling a sigh.

Inside her the red string
shriveled, then broke.
Her sky rearranged
to a desert. Her precious
water evaporated.

She awoke to Makoto,
saying not a word,
entering and shuffling
to the sofa.  

The gas stove hissed.
The yellow dish rag
laid close to the flame.
Another uneaten meal
existed unwanted on
the dining room table.

Miko, this one time,
never bothered to
awaken Makoto.
She walked to the
balcony searching
hard for but neither
finding sky nor horizon—
only houses,
some which Makoto drew,
surrounded her.
She put little finger
to little finger together
then pulled them apart.
Looking down,
Miko knew she
was destined to fall.