Curiously, I thought of Frank O’Hara
the day after the day I did not get
run over by a truck on Franklin Avenue.
I guess it’s just that story—how he did
get run over and did die. Out on Fire Island.
How he wrote, You just go on your nerve…
You don’t turn around and shout,
‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’
Or maybe it’s because Frank and my father were
the same age, and today is the day my father died
five years ago. Imagine if you could go through life
celebrating the day you were born and the day
you were going to die, that you knew.
I’m sixty-three today.
Happy Birthday!
And I’m going to live X more years.
Happy Deathday!
(No, I’m not going to
fill in the blank on that X.
We don’t tempt those gods.)
Poor Carol. I’m going to her funeral today.
I can’t even say I let her down. She was my neighbor.
I can say this, though.
If someone’s chasing you down the block,
you just run, Carol. Just run.
That would be Frank’s advice anyway
if he was still alive.

A person must suffer to breathe the air—
which she did not.

I still remember wrinkled, rosy skin—
a life at its most sacred.

I was ten when she was born as if in clouds of words,
too high to touch  the earth,
trans-planet tied to

this planet, not her earth, my mother.

The words were ours; my un-named sister died,
as if in a half-spoon, as if I could
have too many sisters.

We found the words
EL SAVIOR bleached into the bottom of
the basin where they’d baptized her; where she
had ‘cleansed her tears’;
where the baby’s blood had run.

She had slept on a pillow of words…

I still think of her wrinkled, rosy skin.

—Sister Rose Theresa, in the year of our Lord, 2010

where the cicada crawl the grass and where

the remnant sounds they scratch  
are something to be kept preserved
and un-shouted, and yet

must last the summer’s eerie evening air—

this rigorous and grandiose  
stupidity
that has educated the spirit,

which is Nietzsche’s idea, if not his words…
  
for far too much of the world’s illusions
are now confused by ancient hay,
by corn stalks blown too dry to form a seed.
  
The mystery must be what lightning bugs

must do each day when hidden in
the earth, so they can make
the grass come back to life. Just as

their photoluminescence

can be another site for the release
of heat, as when the lightning lights
the summer sky

and brings no rain, nor a god power, one

who can hurl electrons
from cloud to ground far
too fast for us to dodge

much less to see. Even his breath has ceased.

It seems as Mr. Sun kneels down to pray
each night the earth below responds—a ray
of light, across a pool of shade, tired earth
at rest in night’s still arc. Thus the earth’s worth,
all its gracious growing, is a topic
for admiration, a philanthropic
metaphor, a formal language, found fierce,
found daunting—like armor no light can pierce.
Still, Mr. Sun looks down. Is gravity
his slave? All night his informality
will keep less certain syllogisms fun.
Cogito, ergo sum. It thinks. The sun,
so startling to man—its violets,
its rose—will be enough. Thus, it forgets.

those crisp empty boxes have
been left there for the imagination to
fill up with mind stuff

for that kid in the park,
alone with a soccer ball, a good one,
one his grandma bought for him

for the World Cup
he gets past Maradona, yes, Diego
Maradona. Horton is ahead of him,

Tim Horton, in goal
charging hard, forcing his shot wide
for the goal of a minimalist poem

could be donuts, for Grammy
to take the whole team out for donuts
filled with mind stuff

It’s evening. Isaac walks to the beach as if he’s lost.
He climbs through artificial dunes, through false ramparts
pushed hard against the ocean’s erosion—cliffs of sand.
So let’s call him Clement Cliff and let’s say that he’s
an actor and distant cousin of Montgomery Cliff—
that he’s a stage of sand, a progression of the beach.
Blind, he walks to the beach each evening now
because I make him walk. He hates the water’s soul.
He feels its fear. He goes because I make him go.
He does this now (we do this now), so I can walk;
walking, it seems, is very bio-mechanical.
So-bio, so-mechanical: the brain’s music.  

We call this beach Pangaea, for it looks to be
a map of early earth; it looks a plan for earth cut by
the tides before the continents were torn  
asunder. (My, how Biblical, my dear, ‘asunder’.)
It looks that way when I stand on the cliffs—
like lands formed in jest. I love the air up here.
I love it that these cliffs are not a place
for sacrifice or suicide. Jump and you will
take a tumble. Jack fell down and broke his crown
and Jill will land on the soft sand of Pangaea.
Pretending flight, they fall.  Don’t cry, honey. It’s just
a bruise. Give it a kiss. Isaac, he laughs.

It was right that he should die before me.
Every night we stand right here among the cliffs.
(Prominent among the bluffs.)
We watch and listen as the ocean sings.
The ocean is alive. Pangaea is where sun and sea
must meet. Pangaea, the sea, the soliloquy.  
We go down to the sea in ships.
A thousand must set sail every day.
(All launched by your face, my dear.)
Tonight we sit and listen.
The ocean makes its music.
I leave on a singing ship.

You ask no questions; I provide the answers.
Greetings, my friend! We have moved on from Hell.
Today I stand in surf up to my knees.
Imagine: liquid rock, a steaming sea,
the battle of fire with water, land
like iron being forged, the earth refreshed.
We must make this moment a postcard from
infinity. My friend, I need your help.
This message, like our hope for life itself,
must be left unattributed. It must
be left an unresolved antecedent.
Think of Empedocles poised at the mouth
of that volcano, Etna’s edge. He is
about to enter this world’s soul. He is about
to die. We are all thrown into the world.
Empedocles, the poet philosopher,
must hear a  voice from far into
the future, a voice from today that will
insure his resurrection, one
to clarify his immortality.
Write something in the sand for him to see.
'There was something more,
                 something more divine,
more *******…'
Write that. Leave it unsigned.
'For I have been ere now a boy and a girl,
a bush and a bird and a dumb fish in the sea.'
Write that. Knowledge will come.