I like long walks on the beach,
Total enlightenment,
Licorice, and whisky
I am one with the universe
In tossing the old bocce ball
Through the long stretch of crab grass
Knocked the kingpin off its hinges
The horse shoe head landing in the dirt
A sign of the times, reducing earth and god
And us to
Everything

Scotch Plains, New Jersey
Scotch indeed! Or was it wine
That spilled over and into the street
Like rain rattling and trailing in residual little
Momentary lines through leaf and dirt and
Into the gutters gurgling and glistening and

Crying out to the long-dead lights,
“I am here! I am here now!”
The stars, they say, hear even the muffled
Screams of water and earth and man and
Time, even the mean tabby cat that glides along
The carpet in the twilight

We played horseshoes and bocce and sometimes chess
We watched old family tapes
And walked on the beach, and I hated licorice
Never had whisky

But **** me if it’s no different now
Between the times and signs and then
Sitting in the crab grass, drinking and dying and seeing and
Being and living and lying and I
Imagine the fine engraving
Left by a horse shoe head

Four on the fold;
Turned within:

Coil and Pyramid

An eye for an eye makes
No world deaf
No love held
No life had

Not a moment here
Or a road in sight

[...]

Once upon a time, when
you, like him along the Rhine
Thought of your reflection,
Mutable in the current

You too grasped that chance for
No representation, no reality
Beyond that weariness

Yet
Your pain, you didn’t know
Became the king’s austerity

[...]

Cloak and Dagger, a dove came
In the night like a thief on the hour arrived
Unexpectedly, inexplicable as
A sickness or sage or words to tell why

Why?
Why?
Why me?

She too stole that power from,
Usurping the crown from above
Reason, elevated unto
—Passed down from—
Hand in hand in the Court of the heart
And here yet again

Yet again you’re here!

Who said I was inside?
Oh! I wish it wasn’t
Put it in the tree
Or on the clothing line

Hang it up to dry with tears
In sweltering Hanoi

If it can’t make it in light
We’ll do it otherwise
Permeate, waxing

Those mosquitoes hover in the moonlight
A void where half a whole
World kissed God

cigarettes drowned
with two phones
glasses snapped
girl’s gone
everyone’s off to Brooklyn
beat off in bed
and a bottle of wine
Ha!

Two mirrors stand
Adjacent, opposed
Staring into the infinity
They strive to approach

Becoming
But never being

crossing from
the park
to the bank,
stepping over
the remains
of a grackle
on the grass
that glides
into the sidewalk
and

suddenly

dissolves
at the verge
of the

road