return
imagine

your
voice

again

Moved around a lot
-Cockle-jocked kid
plastic with newness
Trailers dusty
roses blousy with thorns and white
pecked leaves mottled.
Resist these yards’ allure
avoid the
crackers’ friendly waves
Pedal to the Haven
piles of fill, construction
reduced tombs of left over
concrete
bricks mounds of playtimes
trenches in which to ****
off.
Trenches in which
mosquito larvae swim
skeezle-legged and
willow branches are
whips
pieces of drywall
soaked grenades and
wooden
are the guns.  
Summer haircut flat nest of
stubble
face and scalp burnt.   Enough
pieces of bikes to Frankenstein
one fine ride.
From the top of the hill
mawed youth
rumbles down to barrel
roll crescendo’d
stops.  Let the
good
times.
Close out the day draw its
petty dread adrenalined
Panting cuz you are
late and he said
six.
Sectioned eight
pink stucco flakes and
sweetened lead.
Tatty shades
shriven.
He’s a tar cracked heel
small white dot
white
blink
blot
thinks about a
lot, these yards
landscapes drifted, curled with
feet to face, conserve his
heat.

Wallace Stevens
Wazzup?
With the widows and the maidens?
The name
dropping
the distancing vocabulary that
we scurry to look up
look up
train our eyes
train.
If I came into your office, in downtown
Hartford a city
I knew framed - as my father grew up in
Wethersfield always said
be careful –
downtown Hartford is
not a good place to be alone.
So I saunter, prink, and
perambulate
plonk myself
past your receptionist.
A widow?
And she’d holler:
-Mr. Wallace I asked her to stop!
And your desk which you requested almost 15 years ago
already looks out of date in too heavy oak is
caught between us, a horizontal surface filled
with paper.
There will be one sentence.
And one exclamatory remark.
-Wallace, you’re only human -  you put your pants on
one leg at a time.
-No!
he says, jumping up from his desk,
-Watch!
He undoes his belt, he drops his trousers
he steps out of them –
He steps out one leg at a time.
BUT
Wallace Stevens, god bless him,
arranges his pants carefully on the floor of the
Hartford Accident
and
Indemnity Company
just so.
And grinning,
hops into both puddled legs
at the same time.
Then bends over and hoists the waistband
the belt dangling
in triumph.
Lesson learned.
Learned, schooled like
St. Ursule with her radishes
Just another lady
Just another confabulist
Just another story.

A routine that hints at
outline
of endeavor:
The tea, the clothes
the washing
up.
The sit, the write
the sit some
more.
The stretch.

Petty theft of pretty poetry so
taut like my buttocks when I was twenty
and did not appreciate the ripeness of my
flesh.
Or this – about an orange peel –
the white is bitter the spits of oil
not iridescent as oil might be
lazed
in a parking lot puddle.
Try for size the heavy fur of
winter cottages, blah except for
holiday wreaths and the silent exhalation of
smokes snaking from their
top.
Translate this grapefruit that is both
sour and sweet
and fulminates
loss.

I shred the beets.
Heads of red flicks in the bowl
parged of white now rosé, blushes.
To say the word properly is to nestle the
tongue in the church of the mouth the nave
of clucks tucked under the roof of the palate to
squeeze conjoined shushes and birch noises.
To steam to steep
with the lazy roil of the soup.
Do you recall the crunch of the snow outside our dacha?
The days where ice coated crusts cut
galoshes
sloshed.
The tureen beckons with its fractures.
To predict the future merely gaze into the soup.
How is this to see
a winter of bread and shavings
of fibers sewn rough
of tough, tough coughs that spray rose
petals in the dawn?

I took a knee to my right kidney and
kid you not –
thought
it should not
have come to this.  
My daughter had asked me
to be careful
to set my protest distant
on the periphery.
I recognized two neighbors
and three teachers
from our school.
Familiarity
made me oblivious
to distance
drew me to them.
I’ve always been fascinated by ahahs
when you look at a picture
and first it’s two vases
and then two faces.
Why didn’t I see that before?
Ah!  Hah! To learn
pain that sudden
makes my legs collapse.
No control.
To see my neighbor run.
Ah.
Hah.