Category: Poetry

 When the water glints like onyx shushing the dock, empty sailboats huddle and rock, when a red-winged blackbird tricks
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They call it zero entry, the way the surround leans into the water and becomes the bottom of the pool,
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His phrase “starry lice” just stopped me cold.
My lice looked coal-black or, if contemplated
in damp fluorescence, tick-like
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Fear equals fear plus
the square root of consequences
divided by time alone.
That’s before factoring in
imaginary numbers

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Our dormant crabs skip
Nor'easters. Whole bushels
play hooky under estuaries.
Hunker us down, Mister
Savory.  Follow obelisked
bellies beneath silt and
sediment, only
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Home from the produce section with scaly
hides of Jackfruit, the host had snubbed

the
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after Fernand Léger's painting Animated Landscape

Even in modern cities,
where the buildings overlap
with metal-tinted façades,
there's always
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Even though my dad’s distant relative –
mine, too, of course – was buried 
in the only Jewish military cemetery 
in the
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Puberty’s passé when a gila out-dappers
your scene, ball python flubbing
a bearded dragon’s take.

You should
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Marry that man mama says so I say soon as he gets outta prison mama, then mama goes and
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Father’s nasty-proud, Mother’s vain,
Sonny’s an alcoholic, and Sis is a flirt
who teases the chauffeur. She’s long engaged
to a weak-chinned
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Those who have died—
their roots still spread,
their fires still spread, smoking underground.

They emerge as tree roots
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Like livestock, we walk the steel maze
to our impersonal deaths, admit design

is a murderer; there
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The sidewalk is sterilized white.
I could eat off its sunlight.
People creep along it like spiders

who could
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Down to the rotting
forest floor, little shocks
of sun, panty-pink,

slip below crowns
of simple-leaved trees.

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Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted
was to paint sunlight on the side of a house. —Edward
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Elegant scraps of blue satin,
channels meander through meadows,
In the shadows, violet spills into pools.
 
          The
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Always I overhear the overbearing neighbors fail to wince where I would fall back on my store of tiptoe.
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How strange to have come all this way
on the path toward perfect ignorance
& to have stopped here, a man
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The alchemist experiments
and repeats. See his bench:
alembics and crucibles,
tubes and mortars, bottles of
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It has to be Johnny Hartman
with Trane framing that
voice that flows smooth
and rich like a river
of barrel proof bourbon
rippling
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