A Kind of Curse

The resolute stroller
runs ever into resistance
from the birds and the trees and the eyes
—always looking, always absorbing—
something lost on either side:
the self the shells can't provide,
the life the eyes can't ride.

Trevor Arrives

The cat sees what to us is only shadow.
The squeakings in the wall are to him like thunderbolts.
He feels the river flow in air that seems to us invisible.
For him, the moon time glow is lucid with ghosts.

Still, the objects he'd befriended with his scent
In one day disappeared — and he was taken away
To strange after strange place, only to find
At the last one — all his stuff — materialized.

Miraculous, it seems, what we've done here, the work of gods,
How we hurl away his world with just the power of our minds.
The actual cat, meanwhile, love rubs a chair and fans his tail
Before demanding that his food dish go back on top of his rug.

Epic Road Trip #12

With apologies to Jean Shepherd

New York wasn't hoping
for the bigger kids to pick it
when they chose up teams for kickball;
it was doing the picking.

Epic Road Trip #11

We've seen the mighty rivers flow
from one end of the country to the other:
the Gila, Salt, San Juan, Green and Colorado,
the Plattes, Raccoons, Skunk, Sioux and Missouri,
the Mackinaw, Vermillion, Illinois and Mississippi,
the Eel and Wabash, Allegheny and Ohio,
the Monongahela and Youghiogheny, Juniata and Lackawanna,
the Delaware, Schuylkill and Susquehanna.

All of them now seem like prelude
to this blinding torrential rain,
these wild shaking trees,
the Passaic flooding its banks.

We drive from the desert to remind us of the simplest things:
water just forces itself to a sea.

Epic Road Trip #10

With apologies to Mark Twain

There are things one learns driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike
that can only be learned driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Epic Road Trip #9

Thistle seeds
fly through the air
without any need to be touched.
The bee swarm veers near
as natural as the breeze,
as smooth as the whirring of the river.
But one look at this Motel in Wheeling
with its slab sides and steel blue doors,
where people have to smoke and drink to survive,
and I realize how humans just resist it all.

Epic Road Trip #8

The place that I was born
could have been my home;
instead of leaving to seek
the solace of the lonely
I could be living their artful lunacy
engineering friendly words
and repairing broken mains
with an accent rounded on the ends
somewhere south of Dayton.

Epic Road Trip #7

Not far from Spoon River
I'm here at Wabash College
where Ezra left a curse
on the folks of Crawfordsville.

Poor upright Indianans
laboring under the vengeful jujitsu
of an occult classicist
with candles to burn.

Epic Road Trip #6

There is still a touch of softness
left in Illinois:
it echoes in the names
La Moille, Du Quoin, Papineau...
Down mad rivers and blue creeks
are deep woods where philosophy flourishes
and love is still a secret.

Epic Road Trip #5

Iowa is a female
whose beauty appears natural, stunning,
but is carefully manufactured—
as if every inch has to have men jump to their deaths.

Epic Road Trip #4

The endless merging of people like rivers
and the corn always falling down the waterfall—
then a break for a walleye with Clamato and bud
at the Depot on Jeffers Street
where one guy talks with a smile
about how every man's thoughts at one point turn to suicide
and two other men converse about
that perfect afternoon spent mixing for Elton John.
You can see the bobbins spin in the Ideal Uniform store
across the street,
and a man come out with a roll of asbestos
from the Nebraska Safety and Fire Equipment building
with the rusted window frames.
They're carefully taking tar off a roof
without leaving a trace of debris.
The North Platte grain elevators are full.

Epic Road Trip #3

for T, a Sun Prairie farm girl with the eyes of a hawk

We drive through Colorado in a May blizzard:
The jaw-dropping gorges are white,
the rivers and pines are diamond encrusted,
the peaks incandescent in white sky.

The pelicans at 10,000 feet fly through realms of frosted light.

All has been purified: the Rifle Baptist Church,
the Parachute Optimists Club, the Silt Chamber of Commerce,
the Glenwood Vapor Caves, the log cabins in the town of No Name,
the A frames on the other side of the abyss,
the Vail golf courses, the falling Breckenridge lakes,
the tin roofs and coal chutes,
the back 40 cedar outhouses in once-black dirt,
the trees growing out from the top of a silo,
the tires laid on tarps that keep the hay dry,
the cow pens with mounds where milking mothers stand.

It's white from Fruita to Frisco, Gypsum to Brush,
as far east as Yuma, Akron and Amherst.
We watch in Ovid some round baled alfalfa
melt into wet golden light.

Epic Road Trip #2

The history of the Earth
is in these red rock cliffs,
the faces, beasts and eyes
dance across the skies with robes and veils
the wars and transformations:
the crowns, stripes and epaulets,
the sacred hieroglyphs exposed,
the fortresses torn into wounds
still wrinkled towers;
the dramas and discoveries:
the pedestals and jowls,
the crevasses of torqued tongues,
the stacked beaks fit to patterns,
the rock weights balanced, about to take wing.
There are secrets, in the drippings,
of the civilizations before humans
but my heart cannot conceive them,
she sees it all as pain -
she can't imagine anything
beyond her own convolutions
in the stone's peaceful tableau.

Red canyons, red rivers, red tablelands
and now the sky
is a sirocco of smoke,
a red wall of silt brought by gale force winds
obscuring all and dissolving like flash powder,
turning the stone forms into phantoms,
leaving a fiery wake of red road and red dune shoulders.

The raindrops, when they come, seem like blood.

Epic Road Trip #1

Another Sunday evening,
kids nestled towards TVs,
parents sneaking trips to distant lands
before their dreams and commute routines.

Only a few stray gusts of wind
give any indication that for us
the voyage is one way.

The shimmering mountains,
Sajuaros unique as people
in stunning silhouette
against a purple sky.
The harsh yellow flowers,
the tears goodbye.

Flowers Leaning Toward the Candle

Evie Paquette Boyd 1917-2010

She dressed up special for Mother's Day
'cos she heard her husband was on his way
to take her home to her three kids there already.
But six are on the ground here still, her peaches and her prizes;
parenthood is nothing but a string of compromises.

Children almost listen to their mother,
as mothers almost listen to the moon.

She burst with all the glamour and wit of a lost world
preserved in moving pictures whose charms are still unfurled.
She collected her first rooster when West Hills was orange groves
and La Cienega was a dirt road.
She called every bishop by his first name, not his rank.
She supervised her grandkids like a general in a tank.

The willow she planted might remember her,
as there might have been in the end time enough together.

While birds careen and flowers bloom
we pray for rest under the sheet of earth—
we only seem to die because
we need to feel the pangs of birth.

I've been in so many families now, it's a blur;
so many have been called back home, so many re-emerged.
The seeds and ashes swirl, our past and present run,
it's all a rising spiral now, indissolubly one.

Commencement

The sand is patterned now with blooms.
The phallic cactus holds still for pictures
on voluptuous hillsܔjust married
toilet paper on its sides. Quails trill
their plumed heads bobbing. I wave
a snake skin that casts forms across the sky.
It's magick but it's only the wind.

Leaving Gram Behind

Photograph by Dominique Tarlé

There was nothing of yourself you showed us, after all—
the dimmest refraction was all it took
to make my world go away
and that of the rare bird suddenly singing
appear from nowhere—
so little came, but that was all, in the end, that I could take.

For innocence needs no defense
but occasionally it seems we need a whispered hint
that the words of the corrupted are not the whole truth.
But to say a word in return that's not
as inarticulate as the wind
is an equal crime.

The suggestion there's a soul beneath
the Jeshua Tree, fighting, even crying
still shows that shameful glow
of Earth, of sin, of mortality's weight.
Angelic eyes have no mouth
and lizards voice the sacred from the mud.

Some babies never can stop crying,
they never learn to cultivate
the space inside their heads.

777 - #30

30 days in Manhattan in the 777 apartment

Kwabena hands me my phone
and I go out alone
on the red elevator with the Fragonard sky
to a night that brings out the New Jersey.
New York is a bulldog, a Hebrew song.
The cat in the window is gone, but the face
of Emily Dickinson still promotes her garden.

777 - #29

We argue like two red-winged blackbirds.
All conflict returns to the one.
Look, now, at what all our thoughts have become
that crabapple bloom in the pond
still, but it moves forever on.
We can't fault the water for falling.
Two ducks stand as still now as stones.

777 - #28

On the streets of Chelsea a vision

It's for the eye - as long as it's not seen,
the human stone, constructed pine and sunbeam.
It's for the ear - as far as it's attuned
to sounds of love, that weren't attended to.
And so we roam - make every heaven home
and never know how far we've had to come
to reckon our reflection with hello.

777 - #27

A homeless poet chants his silence
at the Greenwich Village carnival
where well-lit diners douse with grease the alcohol
and mini-skirts are hitched within a heel-inch of life.
The heroes are all dead - inside the galleries,
no agit-prop or indie-rock announced on vacant factories.
The revolution will not be visible.

777 - #26

There are the eyes of envy, yes
and countless furtive movements
and one can never see what stays their hands,
yet I can see a traffic cop screaming
at the ipod of a standing pedestrian—
a Marine instructor who has lost all his friends in the war
really has nothing on her.

777 - #25

The sun rises to neon signs
and cleaning crews coming off shift.
There isn't a soul here not working a deal,
or serving a meal, or running the streets with a spreadsheet.
It all seems as natural as breathing, the way
the living stay moving. I come back home to
last pitches in bars, past steel and graffiti curtains.

777 - #24

Life is larger than these larger than life people
who fling like grecian gods the puzzle pieces
like dice rolls from their thrones at The Blind Pig
to corners where the homeless with their cardboard signs
almost are not seen. Too large for what is
they must create a what is not.
The normal have contempt for them, but fools like me can only sigh.

777 - #23

You're never a New Yorker
'til you buy that black umbrella
and maneuver those wind tunnels
as the streets all turn to glass.
The whooshing of the taxis
as the night turns on its beauties
and the must comes up from underneath like jazz.

777 - #22

The courts fill with skateboards, scraping the asphalt like flint
as face-painted urchins running for sausage
blur out the sun rays in chalk.
Merengue's compressed in a transistor radio
from a Jacob Riis window behind a sheer.
The shockingly gorgeous have the sharpest of tongues here
while giants wear braids and giggle to no one in particular.

777 - #21

A yellow tugboat swagging, a trawler's rooster tail,
plastic orange coconuts and palms...
the slurry peaks of river move
with the electro-hypnotic industrial groove
grinding out its juice at the "solar-powered" festival,
and one can see on the other side, through the hulks of factory frames
the sky, the dead, somnolent cranes by Huxley Envelope.

777 - #20

How did I end up in the Bellevue Sobriety Garden?
So many movies: mahjong in the park, orange turbans, blue ukulele.
From Westville East past Avenue D it's chased me
one step ahead of the vortex slip.
"My sister's a wreck and I can't help her, you know."
Art, like crime, 'sbeen removed from the streets.
Pieter Stuyvesant gazes at the tulips. They blush.

777 - #19

It's almost as if I'm in China: the tables pulled out to the streets,
the carriages bicycle-driven, the hanzi in neon green,
the sequined scarves and handbags, the human hair and beads,
glass necklaces and fresh water pearls, toys, fragrance, novelties
in shrinkwrap with strange lettering, Qi Gong and chakara cleansing...
Then a bus with a poster of the Dalai Lama smiling.
I guess I'm not in China anymore.

777 - #18

It's Earth Day in Manhattan,
the most man-made place on Earth -
computer hybrid sprouts are on a tray for the occasion,
100 brands of olive oil on sale.
Late at night mysterious heroes come and lift prodigious weights
black sack by black sack into machines.
Whoever controls the trash controls the city.

777 - #17

The street swarms with Yankees caps!
The standard issue dark, dark blue
and red, green, beige, pink, yellow, too,
corduroy and pinstripe, tennis white and tough black leather,
GI or Mao style, the NY white on white, black on black, red on red.
Like birds of spring they carry news of ghosts remembered.
They go with wings to ride the curls of Hermes' head.

777 - #16

An artist with portfolio and beret
lifts up the stroller with her wide-eyed baby
who's new in town and wants something to say.
Dogs leave the elevator in their sweaters.
A man walks by in jacket, tie and boxers.
100 nuns in blue emerge from corners.
The old man's eyes shine: nothing you can say.

777 - #15

There's a practical value
it turns out, in physics, for
instance, that penny we thought
would split our skulls open if it dropped
from the top of the Empire State Building
doesn't weigh enough really.
I can walk without fear of falling money!

777 - #14

Old man Manhattan
slowly rolls his clothes across the street.
You'd never know his dreams are those of young men.
You'd never guess he was the wizard of the whole experiment
where freedom leads inevitably to oneness.
He watches the sluices open from his roost on some steel nest
forever patient, beyond hoping.

777 - #13

No one is cooperating with the nonexistent plans,
they just stagger on an inch above the ground
and slur like sails into the canyons,
where windblown petals laugh with them
below the emerald moon of the Empire State Building.
The illicit voice of Carmen Bradford settles in
as hungry eyes have found their harlequin.

777 - #12

The Church of the Transfiguration
in the center of town is deserted.
On the sign by the Baptist door
Gautama Buddha is quoted.
The Jesuit corporate President
sighs for the young, how they no longer turn
violent to end violence.

777 - #11

America the pamphlet
is posted in the entrance
of diners gone Arabic,
Korean wallet-makers,
Lithuanian bakeries,
taxis of every language
—translation's left to the birds.

777 - #10

Imagine William Sigler
for the first time hit this place:
the mirrors from the windows,
the fragrant model's gaze.
The tour bus like an open tin,
heads peer down on the sidewalk—
Oh no! They have noticed him!

777 - #9

Somewhere along Crosby Street
the Gods kindly turned away
so that demons could devour
the blood of the young - haunt them
with art, its darkness, martyrs.
Elsewhere all things blend and blur;
here, the unwanted resists.

777 - #8

Squirrels come out of the daffodils
to pose like humans for pictures
at a whistle, yet they unlike us leap
to the grass through the slats in the fence.
We can't even cross the dirty side of Fifth
without feeling the terror longing
how the other half lives.

777 - #7

For R.A.

The richest men in the world deserve our compassion
much more than any bum exposing nullity; the only ones
allowed among them love live through the pain with heroin,
the rest proceed with a mission so strange and solitary,
like the proper hobo, black horsehair layers on the hottest days,
a pacifier hung around his neck, a force field all around him,
pushing his cart with a purpose more than human.

777 - #6

Friday night at work with Yolanta, the cleaning lady,
no Thursday at 3:30 jaunts to LA on East Coast time.
She prays every day to return again to Poland.
She had a house, a washing machine, real books to read.
She had a job, what I do here, but I, she said
would never understand that kind of world,
the normal one, where living life mattered.

777 - #5

The sadness, like the smell here, is unique:
major ninths, a bass concerto,
a cry that one can never be invisible.
It's the urge to complete a thought
that has already dissolved, as the lights
across the way reveal their lives
when they go off.

777 - #4

Money changes hands
but the only currency is words
and even then it doesn't matter
whether they're remembered or even heard;
they create what's real all on their own.
We watch them fly like milkweed floss
away to dance in the babble of honks.

777 - #3

I notice a poignancy:
empty hatracks in the power deli,
and, suddenly, the stores are full of hats.
Black men, as we speak, are wearing them,
and those who only wear black soon will join.
The truth resolves from discord into harmony automatically.
In the future, only bankers will not wear hats.

777 - #2

Around Park's darkened temples
a lightbulb shimmers on stainless steel,
fresh kofta cooks in the street meat wagon
where a socialite with purple eyes tells me
she'll soon kneel mystery-school style at Giza's portals;
you must go to Alexandria, I said, not knowing why.
The vendor who, it turns out, is from there, nods between slices.

777 - #1

The Masonic Lodge in neon blue;
cool is the way every move gets included
in this chess scape vision: it is heaven, real
and hidden in plain view, on this centre isle
of the electric universe. I ask a blessing from the chief
of the Mannahatta wigwam, who laughs like sirens' music,
says "we are all one family. That's a secret."

Easter

He has risen
As a Phoenix
To a new home in the sky:
New York City

The Poetry of License Plates, Volume 3

A final installment of found phrases from Arizona's highways

HOPEY
YIPEEE
RLXDUDE

CHEDDAR
CHEEEKS
BAD HBT

INVERT
TONETGR
ARTWERX

LUKNUP
CHIKEET
OVERNOUT

Another Six Degrees of Separation Moment in Rock History

Sting
played in The Police with
Stewart Copeland
son of
Miles Copeland
CIA agent, who hired
"Messiah" Billy Graham
to create the Islamic puppet
Sheik Abdullah Yusuf Azzam
who recruited and trained
Usama bin Laden