microbes

breath

breath


breathe

love

Upstream, Uptown

On a lark I pressed reply. With the way we're plugged into email through devices and dings, it seemed unlikely that within twenty minutes no one else would write back. I gave it a chance and sent my name back to the staff member sitting behind the address @92ndStreetY. Within minutes, a response: "Congratulations! You have won two free tickets to Monday's reading."

I went from work and met the evening with anticipation. Authors Francisco Goldman and Roger Rosenblatt sat on the legs of the X that marked my night's plans. Up the East Side I traveled, past the Whitney and just below the butterfly garden, to a solid brick building on the corner of Lexington. Up the stairs beneath painted ceilings, the walls paneled in honey wood, I sat.

What loss they spoke of: A lover, a love. The muse that evening a woman of thirty lost to this world. Transform your grief. Think of the one that sent it to you, she professed to Rosenblatt. His daughter was taken, Goldman, his wife. Both mourned their separate losses to a crowd, mostly female. What loss is not shared? "I feel as though I pollute others with my sorrow," Rosenblatt confessed.

What emotion does not travel? For years, I rode on its currents, was swept by its gales, and all that I felt rung loudly, pierced the void of silence as if I were an instrument played by the gods of fate and time and consequence, their child.

And now, on windy afternoons, they ask for improvised song. I trade lullabies for safety. In every heartbreak, beauty intrudes, Rosenblatt promised.

You know that feeling you get, a rush, a literal surge of energy and the feeling of possibility from hearing new music? Or walking down a street you realize you've never seen before?

GOD
if I could travel with musicians
wandering up and down for all eternity.

I dreamt of finding a silver spoon


made of tinfoil. It was beautiful nonetheless,
though it crumbled easily.

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.