Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme–
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

- Robert Lowell

Tweet for Freedom

tell me lies, clean world.
wrap me in a consciousness of blindness, eyes turned away from the imprint


of a face in the mud.

strange night

we met in the gilt shadows of chandeliers and potted ficus. we fit into the cracks together. while everyone else drank clear liquors, we spoke of Chatterley and broke off into a night young and ripe like our expectations. we ran through the wide streets of Columbus Circle, pointed at oil paintings on the tiny screen you carried in your pocket. upstairs, while I waited for the pressure to release from the secret place you hid too easily, right on your shirtsleeve, we pretended to love. but we were strangers. strange night.

Hunting

Seed, spew, spill,
seminal
gradual
intercontinental drifting with the dharma bums.

Last night I started reading the book my grandfather wrote, a novella-length project titled Under the Horror of the Swastika and of the Red Star: Recollections of War and Post-War Times in the Polish Resistance Movement.

The war broke out mere weeks after the completion of his Master's in Law. He was a barely a man. What civility, what reason was there to study?

(I found his book by Googling; no idea he'd written a piece that, it turns out, answers the questions my father cannot. I purchased it from Amazon, a river of ones and zeros that, when coaxed with precision, led to his own hand at my doorstep (the inscription of the book made out to some long long student lives and light years in the future and now past).)

Relic

of someone else's youth

humming

with bated breathe, I'd ask you.   has it been long enough.   for us to embrace without the static electricity that at one time burned with the intensity of the sun and melted the wings of youth?

to the unnamed man who, without knowing the meaning of his own words, stole my breath six years too early

God, do you remember when I asked if I was 
b u l l e t p r o o f ?


Love, you should have asked if you needed me.

and so we said,
while staring in the mirror,

you & I,

grass on a porcupine.

finally

finally


we crept towards each other,
I the sun,
you the night turned always at an axis
and to a degree,

hiding your face.

let me kiss you,
brush the hair from your wide and unlined forehead

not like a lover,
but a friend. we've met before, the yous and Is
on the subway,
the stairs,
on the ropes plaited in the 16th century,

in the river,
on the shore.

You and I have held hands, held breath
(both to swim and hide from him). We've seen it all before

and yet, each time I see your face,

the thousand times a day in iterations
countless as the stars

we stare back like strangers,
reflections in glass,
pools of quicksilver revolving in an orbit or elemental universe.

Rain clouds dump, oil pumps, spills, splashes, recedes.
Emails send and are received, scribes pass along papyrus scrolls.
We watch as seasons evolve, tulips in spring, fowl and Arab uprising.
Pyramids, monuments, excursions into space
uninhabited by landmarks, scratches on the surface visible from the 21st vantage point.

we brush forearms in the hallway.
intergalactic middle school flirtation, our atoms humming, buzzing like a flock of teenage of girls
or flamingos, skinny legs held taut, in repose but
ready
instantly for flight.

What means the most to you?

Poetry, the miniature musings and exhalations of the soul that see no editor.

the poet acts.

The Status of Affairs

Franny Glass wonders (in third person) whether we've become advertisements of ourselves, billboards
drilling an image,
pro-jection,
a sense of self purchased for the low, low price of a low cut sweater handwoven by tiny metal fingers,
into the pliable face of digital reality.
(One that smiles back,
two-way glass.)