poems
I slipped a tick
into a plastic bag
and watched it
seek escape
swaying to the top
of the zip slide track
persistent a I
who with mighty thumb
and intelligence
tried to kill it
I failed
It was
in the corner
of its transparent world
ALIVE
trapped by mighty me
queen for a day
I used to get up at the crack of dawn
and do a tap dance
On the street the men were loading crates
or emptying garbage barrels
and I’d saunter along
with a song in my heart
voicing to the pavement
when no one could hear
I was shy
Sleep is interrupted these days
a cat jumps to my back
eager for attention
The radio never is on
to keep hell out
which it filters in when I drive
expecting music
or renouncing it
I’m not a slave
Though it’s noon and I slough along
as if time were infinite
That’s my gift to the god of waste
It’s my freedom
I even complain
Meanwhile, over there, I know
starvation proceeds
that Killer is King
that Nightmare is no longer a word
in the language..that it’s only background
the wall paper of existence
where some of us eat
May 13, 2012
Mother marveled
as she listened to Dad read the want ads
in the New York Review of Books,
someone in braces seeking
a mid-day rendez-vous on Wall Street,
another into good looks, money ,
with a knowledge of Turkish and
Buxtehuede’s Magnificat
…God!
What they want! mother exclaimed
raising her shoulders
with a gasp of amzement,
knowing compromise well
not married to a Hollywood star
or a saint
I’d picked up the publication on the subway
not knowing romance was advertised
on the back pages,
pondering with some measure of success
the meaning of its brilliant theories
and disquisitions
which followed the cover’s bright headlines
My friend Judy subscribed to it
but I was not focused as she
a bit nervous like my father
I gave it a try anyhow
Fnding it was a sign
I brought it home
not thinking Dad would read it,
he with just a grade school education
though fast with numbers like the Chinese with abacus
I’ll say no more about my parents
how their marriage was not made in heaven
with nothing exotic, forbidden , no pre-barroque music,
but how it got me here, I who am not an angel,
I who brought laughter’s revelation into their home
I Saw Them
(L’Uomo che Verra… Director: Giorgio Diritti )
It was another massacre of the innocent
minding their business living,
they with peasant clothes
not neatly pressed like the Nazis’
who gunned them down near an empty building
and the church. all 700 of them.
I knew what they‘d do didn’t need another enactment
how the crime would enfold in the filmic telling
It wasn’t artistic curiosity that held me
or the wonders of a new language
Bolognese which I barely understood
but the desire not to abandon them
to know and retell it though they were only actors
not the ones who were really murdered
the tots and the infants, the five year olds who were crying
the mothers holding them, the panic and screaming
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The MARZABOTTO massacre was a World War II mass murder of at least 770 civilians by Germans, which took place in the territory around the small village of Marzabotto, in the mountainous area south of Bologna. It was the worst massacre of civilians committed by the Waffen SS in Italy during the war.
First Maple Leaves
Clustered like a cupped hand’s fingers
they hang from
twig shoots
Sudden as a nest of bird mouths
they begin the month tiny and definite
Like litters of limp kittens
wherever the gaze lights
they seem ready to wander
though they are going nowhere
Each, with three others inverted,
forms a half open umbrella
dangles delicate there
before grown separate and stiff
they spread themselves flat
on invisible perches
receive all the sun they can get
and shelter us
Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man – 1/6 – YouTube
This blog is in progress. Procede with caution.
Sue’s Painting
The blue arch over fire’s horizon
blood and ocean
as complete as clouds allow
reaches Sue
and is affixed to the canvass
Is that smoke ascending
to the south, billowing purple?
And the parrots watching
are they yellow bibbed warriors
or simply her imagination, yours
and mine?
We lost a treasure of a poet on Wednesday. The depth and simplicity of Wislawa Symborska’s work reflect a great soul who has left us and who will be missed.
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. TRUE LOVE True love. Is it normal, Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, Look at the happy couple. It’s hard even to guess how far things might go True love. Is it really necessary? Let the people who never find true love Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die. |
No greater than the sum
of cancer’s brigade
advanced over the border
at 57th Street
to your skin
Smaller than the gem
on you thumb
pointing strontium
to flee from
(half-a-life)
Oh tiny
as the pretext for war
all gadgetry’s required
to inflate
A few piranha at your feet
One fine anopheles
The little tse tse
Pretty grains of wheat missing
Seeds
minute still
ripped from terraced hill
in deluge down to wayside ditch
and swelling up and splitting
Published Synaesthesia