IMG_7361The novel Clio’s Mobile Home is a facet of my creative work. Several characters in my novel write poems; I am serious about writing poetry. I also work on short shorts, and short stories. They are all modes of thinking about identity, transcendence and beauty in contemporary life. Art keeps us aloft, but it is more than decoration. Its force can be astounding. The artist becomes an instrument, and art lives to tell the tale.

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The Executive Restores Plastic Straws

I’m a stowaway on a cold rubber boat. 

My desires and old love letters are the sails,
I paddle with spoons and old New Yorkers.  

From a surge of waves comes a sleek head,
a piercing in its nose –

A seal with a straw of plastic.

And birds fly, gone as my thoughts
to have remembered

what some once called “the other” –

small wonder; the Captain is burning
crotches with cigars; praising trench 

warfare with swigs of Coca-Cola, 
shooting maggots. A rhinoceros in pink tutu dances.  

With belt and surveillance cameras,
he tramples a dozen bouquets of white roses.

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Lost in the Narrative

The cabin is clapboard white, its slanted roof white, 
drifts of snow are white.  
If not for the sun’s glitter, all would disappear.  
No one has written the story, as of yet no black letters. 

There comes the old woman, bent like a comma.
She is dragging a line of black text,
a large black seal, the kind that often loll
on beaches when tired of swimming.

It slides along the ice from left to right, 
an opening sentence, then halfway back
and back again. So many fragments… she is struggling
to maintain connection with a small moment of time

and it happens every day, small and 
ephemeral.  The seal may be her snow shovel. 
Love conquers all.  Wreckless cruelty will not win.
If only she could find the topic sentence.

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ER & DJT

Some will look for a way out, an end to history; 
the woman who swallowed pills,
was rushed to the ER with an inked note
pinned to her sad, sallow blouse: 

DO NOT RESUSCITATE if Donald Trump wins.  
That was November, 2016. My doctor-friend had 
his orders: she won; she doesn’t have to relive 
the second debacle. Mother, who flirted with 

The Donald as cream to hot coffee,
as pretzels are drawn to bloody Mary.
He hit on a babysitter brought to her party – 
snubbed Mother when she quit his club.

Lothario of the quivering ego— he never spoke 
to her again. What would she, acid commentator 
of petty tyrants and babies – i.e., men’s totality – 
now say?  She too is spared the indignity.  

My letter carrier’s card-carrying union father kicked 
before Nov. 5th.  Spared again.  

No reason to leave this beautiful world just yet.  
The deep processes of awareness unfinished.
The blanks & pits & recommitment. 
Painful radiance will survive. 

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Hot Damn

If I keep my doors open –
propped with a shoe or block – 
everything pours in 

A city licked, hot rage, 
a pit of immolation, a mess of
humanity tempted to leap,

grieving for lost secrets,
trinkets, old diaries, ardencies,
hot notes of love and pain

to fend off the evil eye, the rage 
of a tyrant who wields his baby rattle
like a gavel, his inner 

chambers nonexistent, his fire
and wind toxic. 

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Play It Again, Sam

Once thought it a white man’s thing –
righteous poems lamenting time –
when fingertips that steady the fruit knife
scrape garlic, soothe kids know truth.

Now end of day, end of year 
silver threads of dusk 
hover on short hours.

Family that made the water
less leaden are gone.

Mirrors gang up, opalescent 
as oysters, staring – the tide, 
soft as zinc, washes and rises. 

And resolutions, renewal 
of renewal – exhausting!

Body will do what it wants. 
Already destined. Mad dance. 
Diamond.  Apple.  Meaning. 
The one thing we can’t see clearly 

and beg the angels for.
They, in their discipling act, 
laugh pity whisper, So be it, mortal, 
long, long on.

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The Holidays as 1001 Nights

The holidays are so full and strange, how do you put your finger on them?  (They’re like angels, amorphous, without gender, age, bodily materiality.)   Not knowing how to celebrate – what do Santa Claus and Jesus have to do with each other? – we languish, spin longrunning sentences over tea, segue from the faux pas of old racist boss at the holiday party to best of Wicked to why a mother didn’t keep her kid from eating cake off a slip of paper on the Penn Station floor.  The thin veneer of civilization mentioned – it rubs off in uncivilized holiday travel –then we languish more, ferret out a few gray hairs among sisters, watch a tear form and magnify a gorgeous eye, then silently make its lonely trace down a soft cheek to the corner of a lip.  Wonder again about that baby Jesú.  Some of us run out to see the only positive connection, plump infants, bully infants in gold leaf on Italian medieval paintings – then come back to languish, it now obvious it is one very long sentence where the gossip keeps getting sharper, tarter – and the bonds of love more velvet.  Keep talking, lest we lose our values and become self-branded products, milk and makeup brands ourselves.  As a new world begs to be born but can’t figure out how the hell to do it.  We keep talking, we’ve read 1001 Nights; as long as we don’t use the word “broken” — the most broken word ever –we’ll be spellbound together. 

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Bright Rim of Ear Lyric

Asterisks and diamond drops
and the cold, so cold,
Lording-over-us blue 

and the rose chill – 
sky’s bright rim of ear, 
so cold, asking to be nibbled

this renegade that escaped,
a maraschino cherry
a cocktail on ice

so raw and beloved
the song’s song be-
longing in our mortal ear. 

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Broadcast Moon

The misted moon as variety of black and white TV—
backdrop, desk and headshot
of nightly news in the 60s – 

stern, nervy, full of filament

unfed, unfulfilled  
it speaks, never clearly, across light years

inkling of a vaster meaning
than petty characters preening

it pleads our plight
conveys only questions:

Is it real snow? Is un-
certainty only certain? 

(It’s hard to hear 
when someone in the back room 
is popping bubbles) 

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The Art (a)Part

So many forebodings in the dark, so much dark. 

The dark of the cinema spared by fire and bombs 
of a World War – my mom, that little redhead, 

her Jersey drugstore, Fords, Astaire?  
Now I understand the world so various –

still question the art (a)part, as the world turns
like dice, still inscrutable –

I’m wearing a darker shade of lipstick 
deep red, black rose, my double and I taking pleasure

in the mirror we sing – à la Brecht — about the dark times. 

Questions sift to a close. The cat left a gift
of a dead rabbit on the doorstep.  The wind whips.  
I drift into sleep. 

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A Brief Encounter

Stark, a shock, magenta tree intensity matched, 
Briefly, against a sky darkening periwinkle
Swirled with black, call it dream this carriage
Of color held in its passage, these leaves red
When day-dressed, now in evening glamour, 
Black-rose, killer berry, two energies
Paired married two shades of somber beauty
Brief, eclipsed, as this one’s marriage, that one’s 
Country, sometimes handed on a silver platter
To a bully, sometimes just the music of the spheres

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