Dora! People with big noses are beautiful!
Anyway, Dora of the Noble Nose
as a single rose
as a solitary diamond
so brilliantly in love with Gilbert!
Married
and years later...

She kept the paper folded
in her jewelry drawer...
the paper from the hospital
that said...
she was pregnant!
With you!
in her jewelry drawer!
Joan, My friend
It was you
she kept as folded treasure
till her death at 82

I read your Kaddish, Dora
I watch the shovels fly
as stones collect like children of the prayers
upon your grave

Thank God, Joanie!
You have no heir

At grief’s end
there’s no one left...
to die of love’s enfolding
leaving everything
to...
Joanie Treasure!
Joanie Only!


To my friend, her mother, and father

I shall internalize to the point where i rise
Like a grey misty ash through sullen harbour skies
To descend on these eyes who never danced with ambition
Nor once sought to covet nor hold executive position
Sweeping through parochial house to office building
I consume this room as a deathly prison warden
Where time passes and falls in a desperate eerie sigh
Unable to cry in an endless stare of just getting by

I shall crawl through the past of these city streets
Retracing my footsteps as the years they recoil
The red terraced housing of old Hungry Hill
A young boy in his room sitting there still
Head full of dreams waiting for his moment to shine
Such foolish naivety of a dreamer in his prime
He would never tie his shoelaces anything but straight
Just getting by, the sole manifestation of a solemn fate

I shall leave as a mist to cover these countryside hills
As a wandering soul, a veil rolling down as early dew
Comes upon a house where children asleep in their beds
Let it be them that carry the dreams of lives better led
So that I may finally relent and lay myself down to rest
Not for deaths cold embrace but a warmer peace instead
In a world of all or nothing we have this life of you and I
Where it shall be enough to get by, by just getting by