It is right
that the day is gray
that the sun is not prying
No one should see me
mourning

If I didn't love you
What are these tears
in free fall

Luis was lured from the chicken coup
by a cold lunch meat sandwich
Luis who knew nothing of clothes or care
nor when to eat  
nor what to do
nor who to love
Nor how to plead
nor what to say

Where does love go...

Sweet love...?

...for the boy
...become man
"mentally deficient"
of a Mom
"mentally deficient"

confined to the scraps...
in that hospital
of days...
such as they were
of cold and lack
of anything approaching care
____

At a group home at last
with what was allotted, allowed
in a room of his own
A record by Patsy
played over and over and over again--

“Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy, crazy for feeling so blue”

Why might-- your little heart be so broken?
Till the Sunlight came
in the woman
"The Mommy "
of dinners
and Christmas
and music
and showers and bedtime
Dropping your pants in the bank for attention of--
"Mommy"
whose scoldings you craved
whose lap was a pillow
for flicking your ear lobe
to smiles and giggles and singing
so desperately missed as she washed the dishes--

"Mommy"

of part time and sometime
of someone
who loved you
a while
while she could
in the aching of life

For what it meant for a minute
to Luis--
a lifetime of love in your voice
that the angels of heaven could never replace
so they envy
so you go
so she comes
to you Luis
a gift
of the God
who could never forget you

“I'm crazy for trying and crazy for crying
And I'm crazy for loving you”  


To my daughter Phoebe, the bright and shiny one, for the time she gave in this group home.

Lyrics by Patsy Cline

House feels damp
in between
seasons of life
where I try to start a fire
Sky tonight was an amethyst fan
on a ruby line
the sun an ember
rolling golden years  
down the Hills of Scranton
to the city's lights
Across the town
toward that bend in the river

a driving dusk

Why talk about it--
as one
is breaking down
in loveless lessons of alone
rumbling 'cross the sky
running lightning's fury
into ground
as if a voice could shake a soul
so softly form its leaping dance
Could call the world
to ground itself
so softly
among the words
to make a landing in the difference...

be enough...

to turn back time
from last, its mission
To tell its vision
like it was
the way it went
to tell the truth
of what it truly is
the way it had to be
to call it down from heaven
Just this once
to say--

I love you

I could not recall the lyrics to the songs
Except for maybe one
“Que sera, sera...”
had no meaning besides its fun
Swing set in the yard
where I learned to fly
to overcome
my fear of
music in the trees
to sing to leaves
to green and blue of sky

Que sera sera
and back and forth before the rain
Que sera
of all this reckoning and rocking back and forth
Que sera...sera
What will be,  will be
the future's not ours to see...

Que sera sera

...In honor of my red maple, cut down yesterday
and one from my childhood
________

My father had the tree cut down
Drought finished it... after a couple years of blight

A hundred seasons
Spreading sweetness
commanding grace

Mom took pictures of it
coming down
Neighbors with lawn chairs
Ring-side seats
for the aerial gymnastics
this circus of snarling saws
Dad joked about selling selling tickets
backyard picnics-- a Red Sox game

While silent photos watch
she surrenders her shadows
to the terms of light
stumps, dust
stages of death
the good-bye of a friend

What must that Yard look like now?
A shadeless glaring lot

Excuse a few silly moments to mourn a tree
to remember lying on flagstone
after sweeping them off
(They must have circled her trunk once
kept finding more as I worked with a broom)
building a sweat, a fort, my private place
under the tree that offered shelter

My father worked too
Trimming, raking, mowing, cursing her keys...
Maple keys...
that when you stamped
had that satisfying snap
of plastic bubble packing

Says he's gonna buy a new one
...sterile, hybrid, keyless kind
...so I was tired and lay down to watch
white clouds float in the bluest sky
I can remember...
...daydreams...interrupted... Air Raid Warning...
..Noon...
Then clouds again
...and I was with them

She talked in leaf language
and had much to tell
When her song part came, I slept somehow...
Since then years of singing in my head

At the end of the world
when the young man left
I lay on a hammock under her

When music turned...Savage
Hers?   The same...
presence... yearning...rooted... direction

this letter says. “She's fallen”
a slab of trunk for family members
A neighbor will have firewood for years

Her memorial?
...in my front room
to set coffee on...
to lay magazines....

But I will find the rings that belong to us!
Cut her song from tangled voices
in anxious traffic
on clearer days— when clouds won't float
but grasp, instead
a sky attempting a silvery-blue
...the cooler shades of memory

From the lawn chairs—groans, apology!
“ Not many trees like that one!”

Not many lives have majesty....

I used to think the wind was born in her arms
...then spread to all the other trees

Keep trying to remember what she said...
but there's only her hush

...and the rings that belong to us

Not Quite Ourselves

In whispers
“Cousin Tommy--  
is passing among us--”
a photo

… at my father's funeral
We, dressed up to honor Dad
Spread the pall along his coffin

“The last thing you can do
for your father”
Mom whispered
to her daughters

There is never a last thing
that women do

...Then to her--
the folded flag
__

Not quite ourselves --
that grief
that echos across decades
Memory is handed round--
that photo
of my Cousin Tommy
__

His eyes gasp!
Grasp!
at me
desperate
in the sudden need for my knowing

that photo--

That this was all....

I would ever know of

you

In that instant
you pass on--

nothing--

but fear

You, paint for war like Mohawks
or something...
not quite yourselves

You guys
must've laughed
like hysterical fools
Half-shaving your heads
Painting each other's faces

And I don't remember
of course
Never met you

Not in my lifetime
_

That War
Not mine!
__

Germany
behind
the lines
of you
long since dead

at 18 years in '45

But I saw the photo!
RIP
the cord!
to slow descent!

Not quite yourself

Your head thrown back
against the terminal velocity
of your life
A war dance

that I had yet to know...
...your face reaches out
across the decades

for one last plea

“Tell them, Lizzy
Tell them 'bout me!”

Not quite myself

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swainsons_Thrush/

I used to run in Nay Aug Park
A natural spot in Scranton
On the road below my feet
Was painted two feet tall
"Free Bobby Sands"
My heart bounced off the words
To know
how he died
Didn't know I could care
that much for anything
I was to learn
Learn how to care
about despair

I imagine there is no place that I could go
where you haven't imagined me
Something, someone
that I am not

Before 18
Never smoked, never kissed, never dated
Never touched, never danced, nor wanted
“Below average student”
Unsuccessful in every way

Vaguely plain
probably poor
as things go
From undistinguished family
Big name
Wrong branch
Below budget
"You can always spot the clothes
the wanna-be's
the losers linger last-- hoping
to be chosen

Mercifully not

under-performers
hangers-on
The underside
So outside
til only now....

Somewhat silly
Too ready to do whatever it took
to be even liked-- a little

But too deeply shy
wandering away
to be loved another day

Probably not--

Not about all this....

Never!
Never look strength
straight in the eye
It must be born of something... someone... somewhere

Halloween at Camp LeJuene

So those storage tanks
the ads of late-night-- all talkin' about
some thirty-five years a-leaking like...
some aplastic benzene-apocryphal river

Horror!
tastes like chemo Kool Aide
forever in the mouth
washing over parade route
seeping into boots and wombs
of cadets who can't hear the music
over a child's laughter-- ever

over failing livers
lined up like lawyers marching
onto glyphosate green
to Parkinsonian cheers
to Taps-solos echoeimg off the stone-
of mind and memory

Flags!
Flapping-angry!

“No (wo)man left behind
on the multiple ways to myeloma
Miscarriages
of justice!

A silence waiting

an eternity
of tiny infant cries
emptying....
into Love Canal

There will be...
NO JUSTICE!

Only billions set aside
for funeral-ic devastation

“Significant compensation”
--being read in a woman's face
in a woman's voice

“...suffering from any of these....
after drinking the water at Camp Le Juene”

at the hands-down
heads-turned
greased palms of

     silence

being owned
by military-corpporate
“channels”
of secrecy

...of Pharma-to-government
medical-backwaters
laundered to-governments
of banana republics

Mercenery chemicals
Medicine with missile launchers
strewn
among military over-runs of...
…of high power rifles,
night goggles, and F-15s

What am I missing here?

...about the rubbery clots and myocarditis?
Has it finally come round to us?

How could I not see!

not recall?
How many years ago--
since I could hear?

the rapid fire!
“The toxic Leaks!”

“...suffered from any of these...”
...feeding tube terrors
Time's tumors
downgrade to errors
deferred...
Now beside the grief as amputees
--take the field of parade
While Misplaced Rage
pages through abortions of blame
in the chemical caldron
where they ****, shower, and shave

...then towel-dry their babies

or not....

Where are the rapid-fire rats and bats
when we need 'em?

Semper Fi!

Images tattooed in two dimensions:
Oswald's gutted fatal gape
Ruby's black hat (as seen from behind)
Black horror
in the sheriff's eyes.

I have gone nowhere.

I climbed a hill
to watch it flow
along below
Too pained to partake
Just to lie here
quietly
beside it all

for now

The sky glides through peach
settles in
to the gray...
I look away

Night

...what I don't understand--
what seems a sudden unexplained cultural shift
related to who can afford it.

Whenever money is in the agenda,
my back hairs stand up

It is only by asking questions that others can grow to understand.
I have been following the news on Transexuality since it first appeared on TV and magazines.  It was a story about a little child feeling misgendered.  I was sympathetic to her predicament.

I Was Under the Impression that The First Amendment Was Important Here!

The Poem Knows

Where its spine is
How with sinews to the bone
its muscles do attach
Where
its finger and its toes goes

How its eyes have seen
and ears have heard
will recognize the voice
that strikes the soul
like latter rain
The poet knows....

The poet
in the secret of the earth
with all the creatures signs her name

Out of last light
to be called
with all her failings
to forgiveness wrought
for her
The love designed
A salve
for love denied
through all those springs

To finally
in God's call
to hear her name
to know him

About 3:00 AM, 

I wrote to someone here
on waking
from a dream
of waking-- into a death
of darkness and dread
A nuclear winter's night
without the hope
of light or heat again
We fumbled to be in each other's arms
beneath the quilt and blanket
to weave our warmth
for this last time
trying to comfort
Waiting for that moment
of knowing by the silence...
of the other’s breath
who would  truly be

alone
and the last….
_

In the dream, something had gone terribly wrong worldwide, with origins of the problem out-of-sight on the moon?  Dreams do not make the best of sense, but I’ve had variations of this one multiple times.  

Nuclear winter is the hypothesis that suggests the sun could be totally obscured for years by the ash of global nuclear war or debris from a massive volcanic eruption.  It could also be caused by an asteroid striking the earth. 
Those on the coast would be wiped out first.  Those inland would experience the poem above.



Consciousness of being utterly alone is the most horrifying state my soul can conjure, and I believe we were not meant to ever be that way.  We will always seek the other— the one whose image we bare.

“For now we see in a glass darkly-- but then face to face…I will know even as I am known.” —James

On waking, shaken, I reached for my phone, knowing someone, somewhere is always awake here on HP.  To the person who answered, thank you— though I know you did not really understand.  Your living presence was a comfort. I stayed awake till the sky turned first-light gray.

You returned from the harvest?
I uncovered your feet
to the night's cold
As I was told
to lie by them
in the chill?
To hope?

Yet another mistake?

A miscommunication?
An error in our ways?
You are the wrong man?
The wrong time?
Yet again?
Can this be true?

In my old age?

What now
will I do?

Flowers by a dumster

You will have to ask this now.

The rain is touching everything
In the light over a doorway
I can see it
The street is gleaming with it
It sinks cold
Alone

My eyes closed on you
and you went away

I believe only
what I see and feel
My mouth against yours?
Warmth of breath
Most tenuous contact of desire
for you
You--
odd cloud in blue
a dream Untrue...
...it is of you
to Lie this way--
Our bodies touch along our lengths, our lives
and curves
and angles
You so curled around me
Your arm across my chest
Possession
of your hand
opened
upon the neck-- of my universe
to unnerve
deceive

My knowing
heart
left
to believe
you were ever here
You would be

ever

The snow has a hand in it
as it gently covers all
the russet cheek of fall
With its myriad of hands

Snow opens up a place
among the covering leaves
Rests its palm
along the warmth of earth
sinks its fingers into heaves
and waits a moment

Winter is an expert
at November's need for lenient fondlings  
He remembers
edging for surrender
of a dying spring
His touches linger
as the earth quails at the gate
with shivering cries
she tries
to pull away

Cold desire overwhelms her
Cold insists
His swelling frosted fingers
force into the earth
in every way of water--
freezing crystals can desire
They imagine how to dilate
crevasse
to winter max

She tries not to--  
Heaves up her hills to block his way
He stops her  
with his white-fist wind
his frozen grip  
Depths so patiently insist
Such weight smothers all
With drifting swirling tongue
He fills her once-warm mouth
Settles into empty nest of limbs
and lets the wind drive him
ever deeper

into the need of winter
love

...or I will not be
I will not beg for love again!
I am worthy of you
or I am not!

I know how to love
I know how to be alone

A storm swept through
with wind enough to tear the trees out
by their roots
whip the rain in sideways
streaks of darkness –
enough...

enough

Enough!

Sirens and the engines roar
to underscore by thunder
some emergency

The wailing
dives and sinks and sets by decibels
in the miles of impossible...

In those jewels
of distance from you
have I been set?
In gold
of eventide?
A masterpiece of sorrow

Am I
to live another day without you?

Scuffing to where you lay in the sand
on your back on a blanket
eyes closed in sleep far behind
Not looking for me

I look out to the sky fading white
agitation of breeze
I sense it
Change coming

Settle beside you
watching the afternoon
as it leaves the shore lost
in my thoughts

I don't notice but feel
the warmth of you
curl in against me
my legs now
exposed, soft
with your arm thrown behind
to reach around hips
as if to ask
for something you cannot....

Tossing a glance with my hair's
nonchalance
Checking our camouflage
among beach-goers

We could be anyone
just anyone—right?

Turn from the world
from its judgement
Lean in close
Stroking silver of hair
with comb of my fingers
Feel your arm brush my chest
Noting the scent of you--
like caramel to melt
in the closing of distance
my mouth to your temple tastes

Unendurable
moment
surrendered to kiss

Fever too high
Doze
hallucinate
doze...

...into the blue sky
and watch the tracer upward
tip
hesitate
and turn toward earth
Split apart
in the widening billows of a scream
One that took the whole world down with it

“You-- who have mounted to the sky
will be cast down
with great violence
You, the golden cup”
set down

I am burning up at 103
Toss in the arid sheets
Chafed flushed cheeks and lips
against this living pillow
Desert
Hallucinate
Can't get a GPS on where I am
or a decent read on what's the time
But most of all – what just happened?

I toss and wake to slivered light
coming from another room
Hear the whispers
See their vacant faces
Must have walked into the den
Feel their shivers hush
my questions

Between the aisles of candlelight
and murmured prayers
I'm walking
Still in my right mind

“It's on the screen”
for all to see
without electricity

I have a fever of 103
--and the main question

Why everyone's transfixed
Everyone

but me
__


1-28-86

9-11-01

"****** of crows"
Yes, that too~
The dysmorphia of an aging body
struggling to try on dresses
struggling for some semblance
of age-appropriate beauty
has-seen-a-better-day

Mother-of-the-bride
captured
for a photo
hugged by lycra
Arthritis crying from every joint

More like carcass-by-the-road

The infantile moon
With its smile of mischief
just short of malice
among the waves she drags along behind
A single diamond
glittering
in her navel
below

The rest of her
left
to the black sky
of my imagination

Raking Under Forsythia

Who knows what stops the heart of a song
I take note

of tiny thud—
robin in the wheel well of my car

the limp head
of a cat’s prey

Sigh of wings
defrocked by power lines

Baby starling’s fledgling flight
falling short of a pond’s edge

That slate morsel unearthed
by the tines of my rake

…and the world is vacant for a moment

Grief ***** a womb of air
but how it lives— I cannot say
Upended creature of us

Stops the throbs that herald life

I know where I put them        
that small pile of lovely
underthings
in the back of a drawer
Stuffed away
from my every day
not fit nor fitting
anymore
for an evening
or...

Can't bring myself
to throw them out
Hope is something
you just don't...

'Cause ya never know
when life might pick you up
spin ya round
where it left off
so long ago--

or something like...
that

But anyway--
I came across them

...on that first  
truly warm day of spring
splayed across the mountains
of New York on my way back to PA

Driving through those
Scalloped edges not quite yellow
shy of green
Lace in layers
close to shedding heaven
or from storm's
oblique winds shredding 
that sheen on the foothills
from the humid cool
of earlier that day

Spring knows
right
where she put them

Spring knows exactly what to do
with golden light
...and songs'...
preposterous possibilities
of bloom

Frothy silver
creeps amid the white
reflecting light
in every threaded islet
between the mountains' stream
of silk voile
sheer
and overlain mauve and pink
Those French knots and ribbons
thrill the edges of the road
reaching through the heated veil
longing for the gauzy air
Dogwood hands
sooth the swelling
clouds
above—so pleading—

Please...

to touch that dark
of naked woods
below

...where I left them

...apparently

“Indian burn?
Let me show ya”
He
assaulted my arm, my mind
at once

Cannot protest
or change the scream

of blinding stairwell-

Double-cross

Descent 
of knowing

I will avenge 

will take revenge

at my first… 

blinded spurt of rage
Rebirth as renegade



No age

ever!
forgets!

My apologies to the individual(s) I rather fell for.  I'm sure he thought he was getting somewhere.  I kept trying to dismiss it as nothing, hoping maybe we could find a way., but something was wrong, and I was wrong to even entertain "love in the background."  
I have probably misled.  I was wrong and I'm sorry.  I can leave you only with The Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world and His blood for you to bathe, left below the Mercy Seat in Heaven.  His resurrection was entirely physical and mine will be the same.

John:  20 and 21
Luke: 24

The angel tried to show me
'bout the button on the bottom
of my phone
that if I pressed
could talk to her again
and she to me
Suddenly
Momentary static and
It was her again!
Like we never stopped
our goodnight calls
Her conversation still
strewn about in her dementia
But I understood it all
her love, I mean
Asked her
"Can you feel me hug you?"
She could, she said
But then my cell slipped off the bed
with our connection
broken
Tears of sleep

I rolled over in bed and saw the letter
from mom
written 2004
Postage was 37 cents
Surely one of her last
Dug it out clearing through an old dresser
Must have blown from a pile of “keepers”
out onto the floor
My sleepy eyes still recognize
her writing anywhere
even as it faded...

She believed in me always
sent that letter with St Theresa's prayer
to say hope blooms with roses
every Tuesday
Her day to ask
for special needs and people
she believed in
...that someone will see
the roses in what I wrote
Maybe Saint Theresa
“The little Flower”
I tuck her away
with my Mom
in the drawer of my heart

A ball of blue fell from the sky
to indifferent grass

I fly into panic
along with Henny Penny
trying to save it
Because I've always known

she wasn't crazy

...And with the passing of the Solstice
I'm left to wonder...
winter...

Birds do not yet have the news
singing as if it all goes on forever

But the wind has told the chimes
who whisper it to the trees

Why do we go back to our saddest moments
when we need comfort
Maybe to bathe in tears...
a baptism
of rage
to blow the sides out of sorrow
to come to terms
with helplessness?

To get someone
to hear
maybe to listen
to loss?

The deepest reaches of my life
and love and loss --
across the time of one breathing soul
I will harm no one
but my hopeless self
hoping lonely
for an interlude
in the end
A quiet exploration
of you
and maybe me
after loss so long
could we be?
Life and love and loss

I will not say what you beg me to say.
You will never love me-- nor I you.

When I have been most happy
time stands –  
still

yet races far beyond me  
Those memories become
the pebble jewels the bits of shell
glistening wet
from sun and sea

My pockets hold them deep
I walk along the sand
hear the waves--
I choose to keep

Eternity
The jewels of memory

Reached over, grabbed my phone
to read
He had died
not having seen her--
His daughter
with her eyes black like his
Night in hair and features
He could never deny
Their voices
both carved
from ballad and timbre of oak

Ireland
hung
harps
in the beauty
between them

Bound to Downward
___
Trickle--
bound to downward
  faceted presence of light
   weedling its yielded way
    to a lower level
     Smoothly pouring payment
      to tributary
Now creek is bludgeoned
by sudden stones
Stone remains....
Water is stunned plunder
     carried off
      toward hammering bastions

She pulled the tie from her hair
releasing the avalanche of gray
Handfuls of snow and mud
tumbled from her tangled
Tired
like the end of day
curtaining
restive eyes
Beside quivering lips
and over her shoulder
as the earth's unforgiving boulders

Called her to fall again
and again....

Good Friday 2020
_____

The wind groans with reluctance
Sends April snow in squalls—
a tossed and careless shawl
worn long and tired with this Day
No glimpse of sun
A dirge of snow surrenders on the grass
Winter making one more pass
among us
gray with grief

Due east of Rat Island

alone

Appropriate in name
Appropriate to this, the day

surrounded only
by the jealous surf
with hateful waves
surrounded by the howls of “crucify!”
“He is not ours!

They are not ours!
We are not ours!”

Send them all away
They belong to the island
to the ground
from which they came
Not for us to cry and claim

Their abandonment

Wooden boxes fill the
trench—
A Babi Yar
of our own doing
so it seems
and yet again...
Golgotha

In the bitterness
of heart there is

an island--

Hart—I think they call it
Both a prison and a graveyard
of NYC

A place “despised and rejected”

rejected of men
an island of sorrows...
and acquainted with grief....”

      “...I see myself an ancient Israelite.
       I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
      And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
      And even now, I bear the marks of nails....”
                                   --Yevgeni Yevtushenko

...inscribed on the palms of His hands....

Again—

There is an island
where scores of the forgotten lie
He knows them all by name

Today it binds my tongue
with bonds of sadness
It has traveled in the tides
of time to find us

Our Babi Yar has come for us
to take us to Hart Island

Unmarked
Unloved
Unclaimed
_____

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BabiJarravijn.jpg…

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged that more people are being buried at the city's potter's field, but stressed that only the bodies of the unclaimed would be buried there.

He stills himself
inside me
and I don't understand
Waiting beneath his weight
I fully sense him
filled with him
as I am
the purpose
His warmth, his heart
his breathing
I feel him all along my length

His sudden motion
startles at the edge of sleep
shoving me further
into his deep
as if to rend me
like the river does the land
as if to sift me
as the water does the sand
Crying out
In the pain
Crying out for more of me
Pounding
Searching
Cleaving
Clinging to the child in me

The only moment
I am truly less
Than I am

You may own my water
but you can't drink my distance
I brew my coffee
far too bitter
Makes mornings
Mellows the litter
blowing along a curb
in the shadows
of houses
worn
by winter

I see you off--
in some warm cottage
Watching
plantations grow the beans
for all the world it seems
has been a subsidiary of
some agglomeration

Little brown people busy
owning nothing
work the soil
while I die without
moving the earth

Lost with you
Lost without you

Friends talk to each other
Really talk!
They care enough
to survive the mundane

They get *******
Act like *** holes
with each other
Break bread together
argue
forgive
argue
forgive
argue
forgive
Share a glass of wine
even over the phone
if that's the only way...

Never knowing how much time they got
to be
together

The sturdy dandelion
rosette of the grass
Gold of the green
Of spring, the queen
Every part-- good for food
and roots, a coffee
Dandelion, good for food
and pleasure to nose and eye

Dandelion-- a provident of God.

When I am sad
I get quiet

simple

Shake a little
on the inside
leaking to my hands

I get sad a lot
Hands shaking so I can barely write
Off somewhere inside
to some distraction
computer, ****, sleep, TV

There are no veins to open
words to fight
drugs to fix

Dying has a long-term contract

When I get sad
I get quiet

simple

Cardinal Attack

Beating heart!
outside my body?
In the bushes outside!

God!

Clutch my chest!
and look again...
Yup!
It’s out there alright—
eating seeds no less!
and flicking its blood-red aorta!



https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MaleNorthernCardinal-Manhasset,NY02.jpg#/media/File:MaleNorthernCardinal-Manhasset,NY02.jpg