Those fish that lie gasping on the strand,
Beyond nets and lost lust for waters far from land,
Are neither Shakespearean nor Romantic, but bland.

Were indifference and suffering to go,
Where'd our sad tradition be?
Drugged to sleep in an asylum, or
Muttering mad at a last bit of breakfast.
It was simply illogical to ignore
As a child, the things it seemed grown-ups should know:
Evil-doing is easy
And sorrow's solution isn't vast.

Thinking of our sad tradition is
Like watching a janitor far past
Retiring age struggle to take out
An employer's trash. His
Chest rasps and his bent spine heaves; the boss begins to shout
"You need to hurry, ******! I wanna get drunk before
Too long, and I need to stop by the store."

Sparse farmlands spread out below
scattered popcornish clouds;
a farmer's harrow;
his sun-baked, callous-caked hands;
two or three farmhands idling.

One hundred thousand rectangles:
property lines
from a 737's window.
West Illinois looks legal
from 30,000 feet.

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall
I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."
                    - Matthew the Apostle

I
Seventy-seven bottles of gin
lie in the guts of sensuous men;
seventy-seven *I forgive you's dissolve
in a fanatical mind's resolve.

II
What offence occurred under Saint Constantine's priggish eye?
Was it specious as a Samian's thigh?
Or Sumerians receiving alien diplomats?
Maybe somewhere far under Moscow Putin's massing cloning vats...

III
Whatever discursive and belligerent milieu
church authority finds most tried and true
seems to be the most important decider
in the future of things like the Large Hadron Collider.
Perhaps, unfoundedly, they find it funny that Higgs
(though it seems much like calling the Liberal Party "Whigs")
is a name shared by a man and a theoretical particle
(though it be libelous in any journalist's article),
and thus label similar advancements as "blasphemous".
I guess that this is what it is: believing just because.

IV
Who can know blasphemy from piousness?
Maybe all Luther did was obfuscate a prior mess.

V
Seventy-seven palm-branch-adorned, donkey-riding kings:
an automatic-ring-making-machine beleaguering proselyte rings.

The spidered light of a September night,
shallow and sparsely flung about the room,
reminisces the sound of a phoenix in flight,
while webs inside the rafters loom.
The phoenix song is like the pallid glow of a chandelier.
Waning, yet resilient,
it coos in mystic merriment
melodies in the key of a rattling nearby mirror.
Every so often the song completely stops,
filling me with a silent bit of despair.
Commonly this follows loud scores of pops
indicating the cycle residing in the flare:
into ashes the song bird bursts again.
It's Rudolphish nose begins to scrunch up ---
I see it even now as I fill my water-cup ---
a sort of reincarnation acumen.
But the bird isn't really real or here;
it's more of a half-truth or memory,
similar to tales of the origins of tea.
It sways, forgetful on my cerebral pier,
nearly falling into the waves of my brain,
dipping it's feather mid-refrain,
repeating it's song again and again,
and again.

The oddly abrupt crack; I turned to look,
Seeing a pigeon squirm in the driveway,
Crippled somewhat; terminally injured.

Unsure, I stared. Death -- for the first time -- seemed
Welcome; the better choice. Quickness is key
In difficult decisions. Scared, I gave

Chance control, putting the bird in the street.
A car passed, killing it. This conclusion
Appeared obvious, even at fourteen.

Maybe accepting this final release
Helps us help others pass away in ease.

The State is stitched into itself, crocheted
by two hooks of its own creation
into a multiform mirage; man obeyed
his design --- he flirts with devastation.
Despite the deathly brinks, he continues on,
blinded by an insatiable desire.
In West California, sprawled on a lawn,
a boy laughs at his power over fire;
cross-legged monks in Sansara's clasp
sit in bare caves while snows rage outside:
they boy's enamored with all he can clasp,
the monks yawn, meditate: endlessly they've died.

they told me
                      “poetry is dead”
in hope that when I found it I might leave it in the grave
in hope that a journey might not begin
in hope that I was

and, dying, I found poetry between
where the azalea knots its white crown and drops
between a hole in sunlight and the moon, where
between the living and the dead
a broken vase of its ashes sift

for Kenneth LaRosh*

"All are clear, I alone am clouded." -- Lao Tzu

Those definite days, when I still fooled
Myself into unnatural mind-states,
When I knew myself, but tricked
Others obliviously--
Those days be ******.
Now, my thoughts racked
With an equivocal polarity,
My heart uncertain to its very core,
I walk,
Reborn in ignorance,
Clouded, yet not unclear.

I’d be content to live it all again:
the two of us blind, falling,

hailing on the city, on each other’s avenues.
Both frostbitten with a beautiful rage,

universally connected but worlds away.
Your footprints ring round my thoughts –

paces that chipped my memory:
Divoted ideas, fictions too deep to fill.

On the steps outside your house,
I coughed up cracked earth.

The desert had taken residence in my chest.
Pale, clammy, I danced

an endless waltz through my ribs –
I lost my way.

Survival clung onto cactus-water and lizards,
I scarcely remembered the streets.

In doubt, I imagined asphalt and stop sign mirages,
glints of ghostly hopes till I felt the hail.

I laughed as it pounded,
lashing my back. Cool, frozen, deft.

I fell asleep, exhausted at your door.
The house lights went out, I dreamed

we could see. And that was what it was:
a dream, a slipping second between similar days,

a nightmare fresh with flowers,
two faint throbs on a deathbed.

I am content to live it all again.

"...if a way to the Better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the Worst." — Thomas Hardy

Union desires the ideal.
The ideal, being untenable, victimizes the real.
The real as victim is melancholia.
Melancholia, then, is the loss of the ideal.
The ideal, never being real, is the phantom,
The phantom that confers melancholia.
Lay the phantom? O, Buddhahood
In The Land of Ubiquitous Technology and Reason,
You yourself are now the phantom —
Laying the phantom becomes the phantom.

The stream
twists, slithers, binds
two banks to each other,
slinking ‘cross the dry gaunt gulley,
unpaired.

Under
the faded trees’
blinds, I sit on stone from
where riparian-paradise
explodes;
California’s stolen soil, air,
are logorrhea in
the toilets of
my ears.

I sit
stream-like, apart, meditative –
echoes of Kumeyaay
swirl inside
my head.

Intimate adventures: purple sunset;
Sabrina Elliott at her canvas;
My brother boarding some Utah-bound jet;
Easton Connell reciting tender lyrics,
Caught in a mad faith’s unwitting net:
“Daylight licked me into shape”; then night fell;
The city struggling with unheeded debt;
Lieberman and Sathyadev dying young;
Their mothers, a heart-wrenched duet.
James Howard humming, his guitar unstrung,
Paganini in that delicate hand:
The failed romantics; a thing to be forgotten again.

Say there’s a boy that has two dreams,
One concerns business, one fishing in streams;
But which is the more real my friend?

A wolf licked an Eskimo’s blood-covered knife,
Licked it till it cut-up and bled out its life;
But are wolves’ impulses wrong my friend?

I saw a terrible play with a terrible end
And horrid lines no writer could mend;
But do you think I missed the point my friend?

Upon a time a boy loved a girl,
Loved her like a casket locked upon a pearl;
But what is truest love my friend?

Someone opened a door and let a dog in,
Unaware of where most strays have been;
But what is real kindness my friend?

One hundred slaves wept at their fortune,
United, killed the tyrant, and began to run;
But don’t they still work for their livings my friend?

I found a pocket watch in a patch of tall grass,
Hoped selfishly, watched centuries pass;
But weren't we told time heals wounds my friend?

Say there’s a boy who has two dreams,
One concerns business, one fishing in streams;
But which is the more real my friend?

A wolf licked an Eskimo’s blood-covered knife,
Licked it till it cut-up and bled out its life;
But are wolves’ impulses wrong my friend?

I saw a terrible play with a terrible end
And horrid lines no writer could mend;
But do you think I missed the point my friend?

Someone opened a door and let a dog in,
Unaware of where most strays have been;
But what is real kindness my friend?

One hundred slaves wept at their fortune,
United, killed the tyrant—ultimately won ;
But don’t they still work for their livings my friend?

I found a pocket watch in a patch of tall grass,
Hoped selfishly, watched centuries pass;
But weren't we told time heals wounds my friend?

I have two scars on my face; neither one's very visible anymore. One I received at age three (late 1992), falling face-first into a dry riverbed on my first camping trip. I landed hard, my forehead colliding with a crescent-shaped rock. I remember my father turning me over, my vision going red, the blood flowing into my scleras and pupils. The rock missed my right eye by millimeters.  When J.K. Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997 my peers began calling me "Harry." Dark-haired, bespectacled, similar scar -- whole package. My comeback: "They should call Harry Potter 'Chris Gorrie', I had the scar first." Not until ten years later, when The Deathly Hallows was released, did I realize Harry was "born" in 1980.

There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. — Viktor Frankl

[T]here is no coming to consciousness without pain. — Carl Jung

Should the conflagration climb
Run till all the sages know — William Butler Yeats

Heart-injured in North London, he became
The Latin scholar of his generation. — W. H. Auden

It's urgent,
Imminent,
Fiercely non-communicable.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun
Secrets, secrets hurt someone

The secret, untranslatable, hurts the secret-holder:
Frustration disguises isolation.
Distilled isolation is pain.
Purified pain is meaning.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Secrets, secrets are no fun?
Secrets, secrets hurt someone?

O, only momently!
Heart-injury transfigured is salvation.
(Carry a firestorm in your veins.)

Her heart is cracked alabaster hidden in undergrowth.

Nobody notices the epigraph.

Even if someone did, it wouldn't matter much:

the lettering and filigree have entirely faded.

We rushed on glorious wings
that fed bombs into Baghdad soil
with feverous lust for a hollow dream.
Now nine long years later,
seventeen bodies lie on earth where oil
engenders a lust that’s even greater.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.

Three tours were far too many,
the fourth far more than he could take.
A sergeant who’d have given any-
thing for his wife and kids’ sake.
Seeing a good friend’s severe injury –
the last blow Sanity could handle.
Morality goes out – light from a candle
swaddled in smoke’s endless perjury.

Seventeen seconds of forethought
may perhaps have faltered his shot;
Seventeen centuries of ponder
and still the heart may have not grown fonder.
Seventeen lovers left alone,
or loves that’ll never come to pass,
seventeen graves of heavy bones
mark where a madman’s mind broke at last.

Seventeen skeletons innocent;
Seventeen bloodlines’ descent.
Karzai’s blank solace and Kandahar’s dead
seventeen lay heavier on the heart than lead.

was an aperitif to an aphorism,
an apothecary of aphrodisiacs,
an apiary of my ever-buzzing thoughts.

She slipped streamline as maraschinos
into a Manhattan, that strike of sugar
staining the most bitter days a color no chemical dispels.

She was an enigmatic row of beakers
shelved in an ancient pharmacy
at the base of the Janiculum.

Her shape was incense wisps, her
touch a song sung in 1940s noir,
her locking gaze acrophobia itself.

Alliteration ran thick through her blood,
she painted like Debussy composed.
No single organism in the universe could’ve imposed

anything on her – well, maybe.
Maybe she’s just a girl, the way that I’m a boy –
no air of denigration here.

She was intricate, but altogether simple. Empathetic-yet-
tangible, her character was incredible.
It was not the beauty of her face, the body

that held her mind and laughter,
not the dazed sting in my hand as it cupped
in hers – it was her autotelic way and her hope.

And now her imaginings hang,
framed in my house; little landscapes of the heart she left;
retreats that prove I’ve loved and been loved.

for M.S.

The blinds drawn, she vacated her life;
Through grieving lips she exists within the future,
Half-alive in an unconscious tongue
That allows paragon hopes to thrive:

She was whole.
No--

Blotched out and blurred,
She became a lacuna,
A Platonic *anamnesis;
Believed to have believed:
The conviction of faithful mourners,
Her expulsion from Honesty.

               .     .     .

The haunt of our occasions--
Ghost of my reflection! --
Brown eyes never shone so bright.

for Malani*

1.
The blinds drawn, she vacated her life.
Through grieving lips she survives our futures,
Being kept half-alive in an unconscious tongue

That allows a paragon of hope to thrive:
She was whole.
No—

Blotched out and blurred,
She became a lacuna,
A Platonic anamnesis.

"She is now in the company of angels":
The faithful mourners' conviction
And her integrity's fragmentation.

2.
Haunt of our occasions—
My musings' apparition!—
Brown eyes never shone so bright.

Was an aperitif to an aphorism,
An architect of aphrodisia,
An apiary of my ever-buzzing thought.

She slipped into me streamline: Maraschinos
Into a Manhattan. Oh strike of sugar,
Stain the bitterest days a red no chemical dispels.

She was a cryptic gallipot
Shelved in an apothecary
At the Caelian's base.

Her shape was incense wisps, her touch
A song sung in 1940s noir, her locking gaze
Eros himself.

Alliteration ran thick through the blood.
The paintings? Like Debussy composed.
Nothing in the universe could’ve imposed

Anything on her!— Quit it, you idiot...
The admiration, the visions that adorn her:
Subjectively supernatural—

Maybe she’s just a girl, the way that you're a boy—
No air of denigration.
She was intricate, but altogether simple.

I encountered her in stifled confessions.

It was not the beauty of her face, the body
That held her mind and laughter, not the dazed sting
In my hand as it cupped in hers—

It was her autotelism and her hope.

And now her imaginings hang,
Framed in my house; little landscapes of the heart she left;
Retreats that prove I’ve loved and been loved.

She stared into the glass,
Saw tears that were not there;
A cat hid in the grass,
Glimpsed a bird and snatched at air.

She brooded by the well,
Heard a sound that went unheard;
A fortress shuddered and fell,
In its ruins promise stirred.

She opened her necklace charm,
Kissed a photo no one could see;
Sailors escaped the storm,
But were captured by the sea.

She sang a silent song,
Said what everyone else saw:
A bird that was not wrong,
Caught in an alley cat's jaw.

Silent-
ly, at midnight,
the man, mugged and alone,
recalls boyish thoughts of wisdom
and weeps.

Sixteen
(at the day's end)
turns to seventy-six.
Don't scorn aging when so many
die young.

Sometimes marriage is like a molten sword
in that both personages continue
being slam-hammered by hammering toward
some vague perfection vaguer hopes pursue.

"If you wake up this morning believing that saying
a few Latin words over your pancakes will turn them
into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind."

He has often asserted that the thing is absurd:
that someone who does not (whether out of hatred, indifference,
lack of conviction, or frankly *whatever)
accept traditional dogmas
is still, for some reason, capable of wishing that they could.

I think he is right; I’ve heard a staunch atheist say “If only
I could, but I cannot.” So, this is why he aligns himself
as an anti-theist: he simply
was never properly convinced.
This position seems (at least to me) well-supported,

for anyone can quite readily (and easily)
accept what their father or their clergyman has said
(especially as a child, not knowing any better).
Thus, to be an atheist
one must have first acknowledged supernatural power

and then later, after a bit of thought, dismissed it. In light
of this, I propose a toast to the Real Skeptic,
the one who was never really convinced;
of it. The one who, when celebrating the Eucharist,
wondered why God wanted to be eaten,

who , when receiving Christ,
thought of the extreme certainty by which other faiths'
devotees (Islam, Heaven's Gate,
Mormonism, Bon,
Cargo Cults, Shinto, Falun Gong)

live and preach – some even delighted to die.
Thoughts like these always made me feel uneasy as a child
because how could I hope to keep my little mind
from accidentally discovering fallacy after fallacy? So, here is a toast
to the Unconvinced, who can’t possibly help but not believe.

A patch-work roof burns underneath
the sallow-white chill of a mid-winter moon.
Nearby a lake suffocates in ice;
an astronaut has lost his helmet.
Blood rushes to the eyes and tongue
as a ragged derelict loses his balance.
He topples into a dumpster;
the last pear drifts from the tree.
The firemen are enclosed in smoke.
One froze at the door,
the others melt into the haze;
a hand slips below quicksand.

The moon is doing all it can.
The spaceman is floating away.
The *** is asleep.
The roof is having the time of its life
and the pear grows into another pear-tree.

Lay simplistic in my nervous embrace,
though my fingers shake with your purity.
A great, gold-backed moon-palette for a face,
and mind acquiescent simplistically.
Your features, sharp and definite, are free,
and none may mumble a pedantic word
against you; let them talk --- they'll never see
or, blindly, feel what you afford:
a priceless truth beneath a thin veneer.
Incomplex, clear, manageable, and clean;
you, non-idealized and lying near,
are like the timbre of a tambourine.
No more rhapsodizing --- lie slowly down ---
be calm tonight; forget this specious town.

Spirits
circling my mind
fizzle into focus,
then vanish. I wake. *Tell me, were
they dreams?

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...*

Beyond the blackest cotton glove,
the compulsively edited manuscripts,
unmentionable lines untrained ears love;
beyond the satin lining of a human husk,
the failing engine or cooing soul
nightingales smuggled in the dusk;
beyond asking how giraffes like to die,
the moon's waxing through a kaleidoscope,
eyes hollowing before hearts tell a lie;
beyond the manifestation of a mental illness,
the coffee spoon having no coffee left to measure,
an overwhelming sense of an unseen presence;
beyond where the orchard truncates its blossoming
is renewal of equality like an unmapped sea
spilling its welcome to a choked wish.

Starbucks
should close some shops.
Only one every ten
miles would still be too much. *But...but,
coffee!

"When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die, his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding." — C. G. Jung

I loved away my youth,
Mistook passion for a truth
By which one's will is lead.
The journey of the "dead"
Replaced my singular life,
And Death became my wife.

Knocking on my door: Charlie Calgary is here!
His clothes in tatters, upper lip bleeding.
With tenderness my mother welcomes him. He looks
at me knowingly, pretending to tear.
Trickery! Always bluffing till they bring
Something free. He's among the youngest crooks.
She gives him dinner and one of my toys.
"Count your blessings", she counsels me. I frown,
flip Charlie the bird, get sent to my room.
This is the same game he often employs.
Later on, mother's in her evening gown,
Charlie's gone. I sweep the porch with a broom.
The day finishes. It's dark. Quite quickly
the starlight shows --- walking off carelessly, save
knowledge of wounding and cruel, fleeting thought ---
that sadistic boy Charlie Calgary,
whom my misled, well-meaning mother gave
stuffed-chicken dinners, new toys that she'd bought.

Starlit nights bring a sense of tininess.
The vast soot-stained cloak of the sky,
pierced with so many tiny scintillating
spots of vim opalescent flares, is a heavy
intoxicant. It contains a thing most panache.
A girlish teetotaler beside me says,
"We're like those stars, distantly inflamed,
lost in a void of what we cannot know."

She is most apt in her contrivance.
I wish to be castellated, terraced
with Byzantine buttresses and towers-tops.
I want a portcullis for my portico that is
made mostly out of gold, an inner bailey
where the stars can sleep and the wine may flow.
I want the wine most metaphysical,
the type that flows and churns, perning
inside the inner sanctum of the mind.

Yesterday folds our vital documents
into its briefcase and steps onto a busy street.
Busses lunge on asphalt, rolling
knotted muscles and emptied pockets deeper
into roads where dogs and paper
blur the lines between news and ****.
Lovers, condos, taxis, and sidewalks
pray to scrape up rent. Tomorrow crouches, ready to spring
and ****** us back into the boxing ring.

I sit at the Earth's end,
an old, fractured, water-worn dock
cradles me and fixes the scene.
Yellow sails swimming the jetstream
hang on to the red dinghy whose wake
sets my eye upon the far shore.

     Coney isle ‘cross the murk-warped sea
     holds ancient homes like a tapestry
     holds ancient threads that you can see
     in some museum for a fee.

For the residents at Rosses Point
this is no end –
                          wit starts their children’s dreams
and holds them to life,
roots them in communal grasses
that grow and will always grow.
                                                       I didn’t know
that where the ****-stalk masses
life’s abundances overflow.

But where are their riches?

Cast in ditches by roadsides
where three hundred years of smiles,
vein-pulsing beliefs, busy thinkers,
sweet upswept streets,
all put wealth –
                           the heaping of coin
upon coin till nothing can breathe –
aside and laugh. They live,
surviving as they happen.

Inside the crumbled watchtower
I fling passion onto thought
onto nerve onto pen onto page
and then am limp,
like the carelessly treaded sage:
a child’s footprint.

     What anguish did the watchers know
     looking through the barred stone walls,
     their travelers still gone?

In the swirling, swallowing night,
that drops like the judge’s gavel,
I write images of the sundry
numb-fingered seaside –
                                          the birds call through the salt-stained air.

Fly, fly till you reach my words
that are split among a thousand minds and cities.
Fly till the grass overcomes the tread,
till the sun succumbs to lead
poisoning and dawn’s jaw drops dead.

The lighthouse, the sprinkling showers
from the clouds that shroud and mask
the would-be sky, guide
the heart that falls inside my throat –
                                                                two hundred tons of blood
beat through its bulge –
                                         I’m alive
and live on, like this unhampered ground.
The sound of ripples and the rustle
of reeds bring me back
to the time-broken dock.

I sit and remember my friends –
                                                       calmness soaks in and through my bones –
I am and will always be;
and when memory fails and fades
I will float the channel of everything,
beach upon this shore
and will be the grass and nothing more,
till history becomes the future
and the first layer becomes the core.

1.
Late-spring's dilemma
Is unabridged and sweet;
Beardtongues and fuchsias peer through grass blades:
Blotches on the bristly canvas.

Camellias? Still in April.

2.
Slices of rye shift on my plate;
Miramar’s war machines whip overhead;
My mouth opens into the Gulf of Kuwait;

The toast becomes
Moldering lips of Pendleton.

3.
There’s a single-story house on a hill
That to helicopters
Looks like an easel.

Great canyons open
To the south and west; the street clings to time—

A pianist’s metronome
Waltzes crosswise on an eardrum.

4.
The eucalyptus bends the deafening breeze.

Are you still dredging Coronado's cradle?
(The tide
Disintegrates the illimitable skyline.)

5.
An unlit Anza-Borrego beats about my ears,
Stars piggybacking the horizon.

The cacti shrivel:
Glitter in a hurricane.

6.
End-of-spring guesses
Prey upon a betrayer’s conscience.
Stilted, they flash ephemerally.

Horace had already sung
when pearly gates envisioned
led a heathen to be hung.

All that's left of history
is (and will always be )
philosophical bankruptcy.

1.
Half-hearted pleas
Administer disease
To an accustomed sorrow;
The natural ease
May come tomorrow.

2.
A half-heart's built
Out of milk that's spilt;
In love no habit ends
When allotted like dividends;
What one intended
Is not often what one did.

3.
A satiated conscience
Rests almost entirely on nonsense.

All hail Strunk and White, supreme law on Word.
If I don't act in accordance with them
I'll be casted as the fool on a whim:
Idiosyncrasies stamped out by a herd.

for the students lost in World War II*

1.
Kids.
Could they have understood this "sacrifice"?

2.
Kids,
on the edge of living,
about to dip into life.

3.
Kids:
epitaphs, Sunday daydreams,
skeletons wrapped in flags.

4.
Kids
whose lives are packed into one plaque
near Hardy Tower, tucked
behind bushes by the biology labs.

5.
Kids
stop every so often,
linger a moment over the names,
mouthing one or two
before scooting off to class.

for Wallace Stevens*

1.
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make data, so the self-same sounds
Of a CEO’s fingers make me a data, too.

Thus it is the spirit that feels,
Here in this cubicle, desiring—through
Excel spreadsheets, email, a deadline—

Itself.

2.
In the pale glow of a Xerox machine
The body stood.
It sought
The hum of Nature,
But, finding only synthetics,
Sighed with demur,
So barren grew its mood.

3.
They wondered why the invisible child wept
In a security without which Death’s adept;
It could not say,
So convinced were they,
Safety was the dream of a Happiness that slept.

She vanished in the shadows
of a mid-March Sunday’s moon.
When I first heard the news
an orange leapt from its bough.
There were bees in the flowerbed.
Grass shattered under my feet;
the smell of soot and ash
clung lightly to the breeze;
her smile fell
from a Hong Kong orchid
off Market Street.

The news first came
dead-ended and one-way.
Eight years’ reflection on that day
have hoped it was a turn in life:
the harrowing left onto Texas
from Mulberry Drive –
the high-branch’s snap
in the old, ragged pine –
when I was lost
in an Irish poet’s mind.

Hearing her voice, years since passed,
among this phone’s old messages,
I hear myself the day I heard the news –
Christianity’s eternity
became eternally confused.

Her long, black-curtain-hair,
the books piled at her feet,
the way philosophy
rolled off of her physique…

All I hear now when I think of that day
is the frail rattle of

a noose’s sway: pebbles beneath the midnight train.

April 2012

Like the sound of a stream --
archaic and ruthless --
her voice flowed, and I dream
all voices were once like this.

"Like the gambler's eye
fixated
on a tumbling die
my mind fixes upon emptiness."

Beauty does dematerialize
like the effect of a childhood kiss;
your images anesthetize
thoughts that lead to this.

To my left a girl
spoke daftly of Charlotte Bronte,
to my right a boy
butchered cantos out of Dante.

I've offered these kids
pieces written to pass the time;
short, plotless fictions
and epigrams that  rhyme.

"Where's your sense of plot?",
cried a free-verse poet in black.
"Form can be a cage",
advised a boy whose eyes screamed Hack!

"My poems occur
cerebrally, " I explained;
"when reading my shorts
think opposites being strained."

They seemed unable
to deal in abstract thought. It was
incredibly sad.
This is what modernity does.

Through cold New England January's air
I saw him (Frost) squint,
                                          iconic
from across the East Portico,
                                                 culturally symbolic
on a platform above me (I was twenty-eight).

Years later I knew the paper
he held hard to read,
his hotel's old typewriter
running low on ink
                                 the night before.
The illegible poem a preface

to the one Kennedy requested -
the one he'd read years before (ca. 1942)
in the Virginia Quarterly Review,
                                                        e­yes watering.

Frost stood there, faltering
in the new-fallen snow's reflective light,
half-blinded,
and I was twenty-eight as I thought,
"Kennedy:
                  cultured man,
                                           sycophant, or...?"