Not Yet

These days I regret less. There are questions of memory, acts of forgetfulness.

When Odysseus went underground to meet his mother who was a shade, he tried to hug her.

He embraced a fleshless remembrance.

Mandelstam wrote his poems in his head walking around St. Petersburg and Moscow.

When he got home, he inscribed his poems.

What more could he do in lying times?

He had Homer and Russian orioles in his head.

There is a species of human beings who read ten pages of prose, often regretfully, can’t help remember every word.

Britten wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before he set down a note. Inexplicable music and opera are the father and mother, the lyrics a child who plays with vowels, slides and swings, until the composer mother calls her child to supper, where they say grace.

Memory is thankful, I regret my unthankfulness.

I’ve walked into an ocean. In D minor Bach wrote a Concerto for 3 piano keyboards.

I want to speak like a concerto for 3 pianos to green readers in D minor, and readers who know they will die soon.

They deserve attention.

A Smiling Understanding

There is an understanding, a smiling understanding, between orchards and orchestras.

Jazz and Bach are fertilizers, something extra. Trees are much older than music and poetry. They have bodies and souls, godlike identities. Trees are choirs, basso profundos, coloraturas, mezzo sopranos.

I live with music and trees, orchards of music, woodwinds and sextets. I sing the “I don’t lie to myself” blues.

I learn from my suffering to understand the suffering of others. I climb musical scales.

Trees have an embouchure. I’m a sapling.

Breath and wind blow through me.

This winter is a coda of falling leaves, sequoias and maples Louis Armstrong.

I have a band of tree brothers and sisters, we are not melancholy babies.

I age like a rock, not a rocking chair.

A rock does not wear spectacles, hearing aids, or use a walking stick. It is dangerous for anyone to call me “young fellow.”

Today is Yesterday, Tomorrow and Now

Sitting alone, having my morning coffee, I have a young body, one foot on the table, to make it easy for my heart to pump blood throughout me to my brain.

I am convinced I have a young body.

A beautiful red-headed Irish lady is coming Wednesday to discover her literary future.

She has a passion for Irish poetry.

She’s forty, has not written a poem.

There’s a future for her body and soul, mine too. How does she smell and feel, touched intellectually, then by a hand?

I’m sure I have a long, sinful future.

I’m sinful as an apple tree I love that I planted ten years ago, close to my back porch where I lie half-naked.

I think my thoughts clean up millimeters of smog from the air the world is breathing.

I live in an always, always land, where just as hummingbird wings flutter a hundred times a second, I visit, I’m there, soon as I name someplace I don’t have to pronounce in my head, I’m at Piazza di Spagna, Place des Vosges, the temple of the vestigial virgins, Delphi, St. Martin In The Fields. I’ve seen a beautiful bird for every heartbeat I’ve had.

What will a beautiful Irish lady think of that?

She came, most of her Irish accent gone.

What a pity. For 20 minutes there were smiles and thank yous for information and teaching.

Her voice was American Catskill plain.

In minutes she was gone.

Mad Ireland, I want to have you, know you.

I’m cultivated as a glass of water.

I’m tempted to say out loud to myself,

“I feel pretty good: silly and stupid.”

Today is yesterday, tomorrow and now.

I’m immortal as a squirrel who thinks I am a bystander, sometimes an enemy.

Life everlasting is possible, look at the sun and a clouded sky. If there aren’t dogs in the afterlife, I’ll stay here.

Dog Sonnet

My dogs won’t let anyone sit in my chair when I’m away a few days for business or medical reasons. When I am 10 miles away, coming home, they run to the back door and wait for me. They know I belong to them.

Truth is, Margie doesn’t understand prose.

She wants me to bark back at her for fun and love.

I wish the word “bark” had the sound of barking.

The word “rough” sounds like a bark.

Rough, rough, rough, rough, rough.

The truth is, I do bark and growl at Margie, as I do at my readers.

Could I write a growling sonnet?

I love you, growl, is an affectionate line.

After Receiving a Letter

At home now with his wife Prue, hoping, the armada Covid-19 will shipwreck, the poet John Fuller spends valuable time washing and ironing stains and wrinkles out of sheets, shirts, and blouses, intimate cloth not just collars and cuffs.

He knows English wool, not Irish linen, shrinks in dangerous hot water, once the English insisted the anointed Irish shroud their dead in English wool, not Irish linen.

The oceans have been doing our washing since the beginning, the sun does the ironing.

Oceans must clean up, mop the coastlines with water we dirty with human waste, bilge: plastics, bottles, and petroleum.

“No crabs and eels in my washing machine,” some politicians are proud to say.

Lovingly, poets can wash and iron a sonnet, its feet and rhymes, hear and count each line fourteen times. Finding truth is not ironing around buttons. The truth cut off by an iron is not a button, cannot be sewed back on.

A fact can be cut off, sewed back on.

A button of truth is never a zipper.

I’d bet my life the Fullers’ garden and house smells to high heaven of love and poetry.

I Write to Be Read Out Loud

You will never find the word moon placed high right on my page as if a page is sky and earth, below halfway down circles of Hell.

I write to be read out loud by someone alone, or in a theater with standing room only.

No page is a field with sheep grazing no skyscrapers, no bridges.

There is the history of punctuation, sometimes punctuation murders the dead with colons and semi-colons. I draw in my notebook weeping willows, flowers, faces next to poems.

My mother told me the sun sleeps close to me.

I will die with the speed of light.

I’m in the wrong lane

I crash, slam on the emergency brake.

I have four flat tires, good health. I’m out of ink.

I write with my index finger on stone.

You think stone is a blank page; it’s not.

There’s a moon on my swollen left foot that is a corn on my pinky toe.

I have high arches, not flat feet, two triumphant arches, still I limp.

Now I’m almost at the bottom of the page.

Fireworks, music, celebrating life.

I can make a face in a rage at death with full stops.

I Miss Naomi Étienne

I miss Naomi Étienne.

She’s back on St. Lucia to claim her inheritance 10 years late, an angel in flight, she needs to escape my devilish demands that she wear a mask.

I ache to hear the beautiful music her highly intelligent patois, her lively ungrammatical English speech.

She thinks according to the Bible, “God made Covid-19.”

Her superstition is a work of art.

Her church in Brooklyn has a congregation six nurses domestic workers, their Sabbath is Friday and Saturday until sunset.

Her pastor supports his family and others by his labors in construction.

Lord, why are job and Job spelled the same in English — surely not in Greek or Hebrew.

Naomi doesn’t celebrate Christmas on the 25th of December because “Jesus wasn’t born on a Roman holiday,” but the Roman emperor Augustus’ mother found Christ’s grave in 300 A.D where the church of the resurrection stands.

What the hell, that’s not in the Hebrew Bible, if all the world’s a bar and not a stage, Naomi prefers with her salmon’s head, margaritas.

I’ll take rum from St Lucia.

We dance together at weddings.

I’m Sorry

To W.H. Auden

I’m sorry, exhausted, except for funds.

I wrote a check, the date October 18 without the year, to Theresa Monrose for a hundred dollars, I did not write the amount longhand.

My conversation with friends is something like the way I wrote that check when I try to tell what I owe them.

I don’t get it right, I leave off years, the everyday debt made clear by saying something like thank you, in a handwritten letter.

Yes, I believe everyone’s time of day or night is different.

I’m sure a poet I love, who demanded punctuality, never bounced a check.

When he died, age 66, at the Altenburgerhof Hotel, he did not pay his bill.

I guarantee the world will pay for his empty zimmer a hundred years.

I can’t get Siegfried’s Funeral March out of my ears.

Looney Tune

I’ll see you soon is a looney tune friends and lovers are far away shaking hands is a no no shake your head yes or no instead.

It’s deathly to love a stranger close enough to hear her or him masked and speaking to you.

A year of this loneliness is like a thirty years war, the religious and atheists are on a sorrow go round.

Walking alone on Madison Avenue, in Harlem or Washington Heights, or any country Main Street everything closed, boarded up.

For company I hear myself whistle a looney tune: I’ll see you soon.

Passing a nailed shut art gallery I think of Di Chirico’s town squares with a distant statue, but no people, ancient Rome in the wee hours.

If the ocean floods a graveyard the dead are salty; they may set sail out of their graves into the branches, the open arms of a tree.

I would be pleased to be embraced by a tree.

I’m singing my looney tune.

I’ll salt tax you again, I somersault, it pleases me.

I am a naked clown, I ring your music hall doorbell.

you ask “who’s there?”, afraid I will assault you, when I want to exalt you.

Yesterday was the last day of summer, 600,000 died in the USA unnecessarily, while friends in the sunset far west battle in a no man’s land of forest fires. Wildlife animals, insects, and human beings burn alive with masked firemen and women, 160 million trees ashes, songbirds are screaming, ashes everywhere. It’s ash Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.

Choking on smoke from fires 3,000 miles away. I take one word from the arithmetic of disaster, multiply and square root it, I learn the mathematics of a sentence. I add up and divide, I read and write. Outside my locked door and windows is my three thousand mile fire escape. I want to see you soon, perhaps I’ll see you when 10 times 10 is not 100, because no number one is equal to another one, except when one plus one makes a happy two.

*    *    *

Today I saw a life loving grasshopper among my Buddhist flowers, far from the totalitarian locusts that devour cultivated fields, winter and summer wheat, corn, living greenery, red strawberries, black and blue berries, sunflowers.

Every locust has a formal education: laurel is a bush not a tree.

Like father like son, the apple does not fall far from the tree except if the tree is on a hill, the apple may roll downhill into the sea or river.

A wise carp eats that apple. I hope a vegetarian carp will read to me.

Looney?

I was brought up in a madhouse.

Anything brought up in the ocean is salty.

The living brought up in a happy home may know happiness without ever being happy.

He or she may simply be a passenger not part of the ship’s crew.

I was a farmer in the city, far from a farm.

There are church women and men who never go to church.

I consider there are male and female giants,

John Keats was five foot three.

Inside my wine glass there may be sand.

In a giant coffin I’ve seen a murdered infant buried, a black baby in a white adult coffin.

Summer ended two days ago. On my farm there was a frost last night. The seasons think...

I give human characteristics to time and space, who are grandparents of mother nature.

I am reasonable, I love beauty that happened: Pope Julius II hired Raphael to paint time and space as people, men and women who go to mass, the Church triumphant.

Further back the Greeks wrote of Corinthian, Doric, Ionic columns as a “family.”

I choose to give I’ll see you soon toothpicks to the moon that has no teeth.

On a dark night I heard the moon sing

I’ll see you soon, a song without music or words.

I want to be buried in song without music or words, with ashes I saved eight loved dogs at my feet.

There is Secret Meaning in Rhymes

There’s a secret meaning in rhymes, a wish to discover the unknown sometimes: robin, sin, bird, word, absurd, repent, serpent, disobedient.

Such rhymes make a flock, they don’t make a poem in London, Paris, or Rome, reason is a key that does not fit a lock.

I’m out of season, the reason I sigh: rhyme is a way of saying goodbye.

I know my summer heart’s becoming winter ice, laughter or weeping is not a choice, it’s all in what’s called the heart and the voice.

No may mean yes, everybody’s no may mean yes.

Every rhyme welcomes a good friend, English prosody has no likeness.

Some rhymes are forced, raped in the end, by a liar who lies to himself and other liars.

Give them sandwiches wrapped in barbed wire.

A forced rhyme is a lie, a libel, a crime, the Gods and my friends offended, a poet’s hand is always on a Bible, or another sacred Godly scribble.

The earth is harmonious, two-thirds musical saltwater.

W. B. Yeats had a beautiful daughter.

Everyday I’m thankful, not jealous, of his vital life, a house ceremonious, disgraced by his love for dictatorial slaughter.

I am secular, pagan and religious.

Saint Teresa of Avila married Jesus and the poet San Juan de la Cruz.

Not telling the truth, rhyme may tell the truth.

There’s music in every word, a secret there’s a secret in every rhyme, a duet a Liebestod, a Romeo and Juliet.

Contra Goya

Traveler sleep, take your Time, you have never been where skeletons have dominion.

Given war, plagues, old age and accidents, the boatmen never sleeps.

Even the most experienced gondoliers − after weddings, funerals, the Feast of the Epiphany, Easter − are drowsy.

They sleep, protected from weather under a bridge of thundering feet.

After a revolution anywhere “Time is,”

I heard the boatman sing, “The dream, the sleep of reason, produces angels.”

A Rum Cocktail

I’m in France, happily a little drunk in Nice.

The barman mixes rum with lime strained through cracked ice.

He says he’s an actor most of the time, he has 20 lines in a verse play, The Absurd.

He fills my glass, some thoughts die, some endure, he scratches what I’m not supposed to notice, challenging the actor is a poet’s pleasure, lives change for the better, for good measure, if the play is great...I, Stanley, give you my word, my heroes will not repent a theatrical truth, an upstage truth. I drink “to life,”

I don’t applaud Mary in a confession booth.

The barges and cafes along the Rhone are far from the Bateau Ivre. This apéritif is a call to my arms on a telephone.

The poem of self is undone and done,

I’ve made a lock without a key. Whatever I do I’m locked into what’s new, a necessary pebble, not a granite rock in my shoe.

Infancy is very slow, old age is fast.

Not manneristic, I had porridge for breakfast, my memory is like a Cubist fresco in chambre 10 at the Hotel Negresco.

My continuing joy since I was young Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, my friendship and love for Miró and Rothko.

However beautiful the day, there’s sorrow, I leave for España Negra tomorrow, mis amores, on the Ramblas de Las Flores.

The Inconsequential, a Paper Napkin

These days we are expelled into the world, naked from a life of dreams, or a life where the living never sleep, into a world we will in time recognize.

Everything since the Virus seems inconsequential: what is, was, or might once have been beloved or despised, the enchanting, the always, the never, the occasional, the singular, the most extraordinary, the commonplace, the boring, the least and most suffering at great distances and differences, are now or are becoming inconsequential.

Still there is breathing in and out, plus other necessities, the luxury of concerns: our loves, the sink, faucets, and drains, the lost, found, and misplaced, the streets shut down or almost empty, windows boarded up. The afterlife desired by most of us is a given.

I’m willing to have faith that bacteria fighting for life have equivalent churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, monasteries, nunneries.

A microbe has laws, but no holy books.

Why don’t I write a fable: Twice Upon a Time, there will be a democratic election.

May the election lights shine on those who think truth and kindness matter. I see a wonderland, I can’t watch the Republican Convention on TV.

I choose Olivier’s Lear, Henry V, Othello thanks to CDs. For the fun of it, I boast.

I can hold my silence longer than Iago.

This verse is a handkerchief that was my mother’s gift to me.

She thought it was a paper napkin to wipe my mouth, keep it clean.

I tighten both my fists. I won’t let go.

I’ll write a leaflet of last words.

I cough and spit blood,

I take my finger and make a flower of blood and spit: a howling wild rose.

I undress the statue of liberty.

Now she stands naked in the harbor, requesting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.

The Legend of Self 2021

to Louise Glück

The poem of the imagined self, Kunitz’s “legend of self,” the unimaginable self, the poem of who you are, were. The poem of self, singular, plural, still exists.

You invented an eight year old brother.

I had 3 brothers. Father traveled, promoting history books he and others wrote, translated into half a dozen languages.

So I have a Mexican-American brother who writes poetry, literary history, novels, translations. He’s a don at Cambridge.

No place, no place in the world, does he love more than Oaxaca.

He knows languages better than rivers and railway stations.

Thanks to DNA he’s straight and gay, never crooked. His ID is books.

“All the world’s a stage,” sometimes a written page, a bad joke. Life is a bad joke, painful as crucifixion.

An Anglican, I’m not sure if he believes in resurrection.

He respects Christopher Wren, architectural erections, the other kind he salutes.

A margarita for your thoughts, margaritas are daisies in Rome.

I’m getting hoarse, it’s hard for me to speak.

I close my mouth, take a deep breath, think of poetry in English, French, Spanish, German, Portugese, without translation.

I miss the boat in several languages so I fall into the ocean of poetry.

I can swim.

My other brother I speak to on the phone every week, hours, these sixty years.

I read my poems, the senseless, the bad, the good, the inconsequential, musical grub played on.

God forgive me, I once read him a poem when he was on a dentist’s chair.

He has children, part Chinese, part Greek, part Jewish, 2 parts French, 2 parts Spanish. He’s a salad.

Every day is a salad day to him.

His children have a Greek mother, he has a Corinthian architect son, a Doric poet daughter. He has a son who is a broken mirror of his father, put together with Delphic crazy glue, roses, lilac, a little honey.

The word honey makes me remember my dog, Honey, a sweetheart beyond words.

If I could bark like her, my poetry would be close to truth.

Truth doesn’t seem a good name for a dog, but Honey never lied. She loved to be kissed by me.

She loved what and whom she loved, had a way of ignoring, or being absolutely indifferent to the rest. She appreciated human conversation, the wonderful bitch, Mother Nature, poetry read out loud, music, the smell of cooking, raw meat.

Truth is, we’re not body and soul we are soul and raw meat. I don’t sell raw meat.

Embrace my raw meat, cook me a little if you like.

I am yours, underdone.

Leave some of me for tomorrow and the day after. Smell me, touch my raw meat. I have a voice, I’ll sing to you. Raw meat is naked, doesn’t wear bedroom slippers.

I am my own brother, father, mother, and sister.

Hello there, and goodbye here and there.

Truth is, I am an unpaid worker, I wander.

On pay day, I die.

Cake Mistake

Jane made a little mistake: taken by a Mozart serenade, she dropped her hearing aid in a leftover chocolate cake.

She couldn’t find it for five days.

The cake couldn’t hear, it has no ear.

A cake has a life no husband or wife, A cake has its ways on birthdays and holidays.

Who else bleeds chocolate when cut with a knife, avoids conversation with a cantaloupe in the fridge with leftover soup?

Is there more angel food cake or devil’s food cake? Peace on earth is a piece of cake.

The Lord is never deaf to prayers, He hears reasons without rhyme, you have your God, I’ll have mine.

He’s having a heavenly hell of a time, He’s a good sport, He blesses poor players for His own sake. He allows, he forgets.

Some sins are deadly, some silhouettes, He forgives mistakes that are just wishes.

A question may shoot, and it fishes.

Do cakes have bodies and souls?

Hearing aids are God’s trolls who hear “you’re guilty” as “innocent.”

He is a landlord, we must pay rent.

Saint Donald of Trump was president.

Soon I believe he’ll be in Trump hell, permanently under a waterfall of golf balls.

Some Words for T.R. Hummer

Masked, I send my vulgar sympathy, ignorant gossip.

My friend had a No Thanks, No Thanks, Thanksgiving.

His mother at 96 died alone in Texas, quarantined 2,000 miles away, hopefully comforted by a kind stranger.

His wife, Elizabeth, broke a world record, for a hasty, fourth stage, hard to say, breast cancer.

His wife and my wife are thankful for infusions, we’re dancing cheek to cheek in virus time.

I don’t know what’s doing, his ‘I’ a significant presence, with his early wife’s nearby daughter.

My friend writes poetry for every body and soul in the world.

Yes, he has a distant son at a long table.

It’s a familiar story, the ghosts of twelve fishermen have supper with him, the conversation about good times, music, the past, Bad Joke.

Once Bad Joke was the name of a revolutionary slave.

Time passes on a looney calendar, he obeyed the commandment “music in the park.” His writing hints, does not say, “Soon I’ll dine to music in silence, alone.

I’ll walk down the street in peace, 20 or 30 ghosts walk with me.

I take a bath with 20 or 30 ghosts.”

There’s something unsanitary about death.

Most of us want a clean death with an ashtray in our coffin.

Terry planted 10 roses in memory of his mother, and two autumn ferns. Still, there was a garbage can full of his old life: Terry had to throw away his bottles, breasts, vaginas, motherlove, married life.

Now he’s a teetotaler, a toddler-adolescent, a 70 year old beginner. He will get through kindergarten and grammar school again, skip through high school.

He must raise his hand to leave the room, to be given new teeth, new eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, except when he looks in the mirror, mirrors in Mississippi others in Gambier Ohio, Coldspring.

He has a house of books and music, closed books and open books like his heart.

Outside the window, Mother Nature, Father, Brother, Sister, Son, and Daughter Nature.

Keeping up appearances, he acts as if every living thing was God who created him, the blues, water, and stones created him.

His mother did not die. The herbivorous and carnivorous eat dead souls, eat your life, the automobiles of your life.

Your tears are horseless carriages, there are ticking handless watches.

Terry will not write artificial intelligence prose, in an age of computer music, hip hop, first and last dances and chances.

An orchestra is not a rubber band imprisoning a deck of cards, the population of every town and city, deuces and jack republicans, kings and queens are Biblical. Jehovah, holy Mary, no one ever wasted time working in a garden.

His life is a memorial service for his mother.

He dials Mother 4-5-6 on the telephone.

Voicemail just beeps. I bet my life he’ll refuse to spend the rest of his life writing elegies, singing scat hymns, after his No Thanks, No Thanks, Thanksgiving.

Terry will still celebrate Christmas.

Jesus works for a federal minimum wage of seven dollars and fifty cents an hour.

Whim

There are works of God, like Transubstantiation.

There is no common-mode current, alternating-current God.

I think every living thing anywhere sings, buzzes, bubbles, rustles, something like amour, roses and briars. Is this sip of thought a frivolous introspection?

A zero plus a zero plus a zero is not a naught. Galileo said, “Sad is a country that needs a hero.”

Many a word is thrown away with all its frills upon it. Syllables, beats, rhymes can make a loveless sonnet.

A Prayer to No God for Ilhan Comak

Almighty, please give some pleasure to a Kurdish poet, prisoner, student of geography, locked in a Turkish cell for 27 years.

I hope his cell has a window so he can see birds, trees of some kind, occasionally a human being, the beauty of the world.

Does he know in English, God and prison guard sound the same? Does Allah, a prison guard, whip him?

I bless you, Lord, I’ll hear your confession.

May Ilhan tell stories with happy endings to himself. He remembers very well the smell of good cooking. He knows a man can be locked in his cell with his love locked out, still the good ghost of his love lies with him on the toilet cell floor decorated with flowery dead defecation.

I hope he can pretend he’s having good times swimming across the Bosphorus to Asia.

Savior, give him hope if he has no hope, give him children, a dog, a cat, toys, the world, an imaginary toy he can play with.

Erdogan’s gang is against it, but the poet retains the freedom to speak to himself, play with himself, sing to himself, argue with himself in Kurdish.

If giving up his principles freed him, I think he’d refuse dirty silence.

After 27 years in a cell, would I shut up?

In prison without hearing loved music or new music, except your own songs and whistles, is torture, an upside down crucifixion.

I wish hell were a real place for Erdogan’s mob a place where they are all equals, so they have the pleasure of living with themselves.

Can Ilhan read books, the Quran, now?

In the Kurdish geography of his cell, there is Syria, the Red and Black Seas.

From my farm in Rhinebeck, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, near the Hudson, across the world, a man who never prays writes this prayer for him.

I’m his friend he never met, a Jew he will never meet.

Free, I believe Ilhan would fight to the death for his countrymen, Kurds without a country, live for the right to tell and write the truth, sometimes called kindness, sometimes poetry.

Disappearance

Madrileño with native King’s English, Christopher González-Aller, very darling friend for half my life, disappeared for three years. I did everything 21st century possible to touch him, to speak to him, to see him face to face or on my stupid phone, till the other day, out of the blue, the bluest of blues, he sent email Christmas greetings, a painting of roses, a Christ child and a lamb.

I emailed back a happy “what’s up” letter. No reply, he disappeared again.

Christopher, are you playing hide and seek?

Come out, come out, wherever you are.

I suspect something painful has happened, so painful you won’t share your pain except with Christ or a darling girl or boyfriend or both, in romantic bondage.

I risk thinking you’ve cloistered yourself, taken a vow of silence in a monastery, nunnery, or mosque, you’ve granted yourself an indulgence despite your rules, allowed thyself to send a card one ecumenical Christmas day.

Your Christmas card celebrates not a garden, but flowers and Christ. Flowers do not have virgin mothers, bees and wind pollinate their stigmas.

Wild roses search for a rosary, a holy father.

I offer love to you now, not nosiness.

Life is seasonal, are you a man or woman or both, a goat, a pussycat, or hippopotamus?

I’m all of these. I’m not ashamed. Like roses, I pollinate, you understand, I bloom. I’m a wildflower, my dog, Margie, smells me, understands how many identities I have.

I’m a wild nameless flower in a forest, on a railroad track, insulted in a pot.

Don Christopher, on a mystical Christmas card you sing Noel, Noel so softly and sweetly no one can hear you, you are alone in the snow.

For reasons some call Quixotadas, you spent years relaxing from Spanish taxation at the Minzah Hotel in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment with a bedroom stage where blind musicians played for lovers.

When last we spoke you were in Marrakesh with snake charmers, listening to a redhead lady soothsaying, predicting the future.

When I was in Marrakesh, foreigners dressed for dinner. There was dancing, drums and death rattles.

Do you have Winston Churchill’s “black dog,” do you reread Tory Dent’s wise poems, HIV Mon Amor? Christopher,

I can still cook. I invite you and four friends in love to a feast of the imagination.

I’ll say grace, ask Pope Francis to make Saint Christopher a Saint again.

Happy 55th Birthday to Angel, From Stanley

Dearest mortal archangel, I throw you a happy birthday kiss 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

I know you are loved enough to catch my kiss in your heart or hat.

I catch your smile you throw back to me, it tastes good, I feed it to my dog, Margie.

I owe you a birthday cake with 56 candles, one for the hell of it.

I am 40 candles older than you.

Jesus taught us to forgive our debtors.

I hope and wish, I hope and wish, I hope and wish, until it becomes music, a hymn: Abide with Michael.

Love is not a drink, although most of the world is thirsty for it.

Love is sheep or goat’s milk to many, for others, the milk of human kindness.

Some say love is a margarita, silly lovers think it is alcoholic rum and coca-cola. Love is a god, Eros, who will leap from your back to Michael’s and back to you again. Weeping Aphrodite, Orpheus, Selene, Eurydice, Poseidon, you both are all of these gods and goddesses.

I wish you and Eros a happy birthday.

I wish I knew your favorite song, I’d sing it.

In the meantime, I clear my throat and sing:

Everyone says I love you, the cop on the corner and the burglar too, the preacher in the pulpit, the man in the pew, says I love you.

When a lion roars, there’s another lion who knows just what he’s roaring for...

Love,

Stanley

A Show

The character of people shows in how they swim, some original strokes, crawls, backstrokes, sometimes burlesque, butterfly strokes with a dolphin kick.

There are boys who make a living diving for coins off cliffs.

Babies are born swimmers after a couple years you have to teach them to swim again or they’ll sink.

Another Birthday Poem, Written When Angel was Almost a Day Older

Sometimes I think of Angel as a Mexican guitarist who is a Manchester florist, who will sell Chrysanthemums with tortillas and rum.

When someone, perhaps Osiris, sent the virus, Angel closed the shop, the truth you will adore, he locked the angel of death in the store.

Suddenly death produces laughter, I told him man to man I’m climbing the ladder of poetry after you, stop devouring every living thing with eyes, arms, private parts, antennae, wings.

Once we were the angel of death’s lollipop, now he’s locked in Angel’s flower shop forever, or until every acorn is a tree.

In Hebrew, the angry angel of death yanks out one by one the eye and tongue the very nearby and far flung as the population of the earth.

There’s the promised land, but no Christmas tree.

He wants everything undone, Psalms unsung.

* * *

Angel, in 50 years you’ll be 105, I might be celibate, more dead than alive.

When mountains are pebbles, I’ll be 145.

Michael will have turned over a new leaf.

But it’s still Angel, pudding and roast beef.

In Westminster roses will still bloom, Trump is a poisonous mushroom.

I’ll sing when I can’t ride a stationary bicycle

I’ll sing until my spit is an icicle.

* * *

Everyday is somebody’s birthday.

Light-years from now rhyme will not be over, as long as there is gravity, we can lean toward music, we can jump with joy and then come down.

This is not a poem, it’s a shout:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

I could do this all day, the year is still a pup until March 3rd, someday in the year of our Lord I don’t know.

The years are scrambled eggs with bangers and bacon, no sweets, until the earth is covered with ocean and fire.

Still as long as there is desire, the sublime, death is here or there, there will always be love somewhere with a Mexican guitar, the reason for the universe.

La vida es un sueño, when mankind tears up the calendar life will be eternal as a urinal.

Truth or Consequences

1.

Today I’m alive in the Catskill Mountains.

I went to test my blood so I can avoid clots, I crossed the Hudson, the Rhinecliff bridge.

I know it is written in the Quran that man was “created from clots of blood.”

Mohammed’s great-great-great grandmother was Jewish.

I drove my automobile, a blue Odyssey, with my dog Margie, named after my mother.

My mother would think it was sweet of me.

Margie plays games, retrieves my slippers, chases groundhogs, deer, a fox.

She once caught a baby duck, spit it out alive.

She plays Truth or Consequences.

I know in New Mexico there’s a town named Truth or Consequences.

I’m far from Istanbul, but I jumped off the Rhinecliff bridge, landed on the bridge that crosses between Europe and Asia.

My father on sabbatical, we went to Turkey.

Shoes off, I explored the mosque of Santa Sophia, I saw a miracle I tried to understand. On Ancient streets we bargained in English for hassocks and rugs that I still have, not my fez that disappeared when I went to war.

I will not bother you with ancient details: nine years old, I was shot in my right leg by a ricocheting bullet in Corfu, in a celebration after a Greek revolution.

Back in the states, we drove to California.

We headed South: I saw chain gangs, Jim Crow, ‘Whites Only’ churches.

African Americans, forbidden sidewalks, diners, white bathrooms.

I knew nothing about the poll tax.

We crossed the continent at 45 miles per hour, stopped at Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest.

I can recall Reno, the Badwater Basin 260 feet below sea level, lots of flat tires, dirt highways to Los Angeles.

A man, I flew, did not sail to Byzantium, driving a Citroën Elysee, I found my way to Troy, then to Ephesus and the Goddess Artemis.

I saw for the first and last time, the goddess of the moon, the hunt, vegetation, and chastity with her many breasts without nipples that I see as bull’s testicles.

I jumped up on a stage where she reigned.

With unwashed hands I touched her sacred front, then her back few have seen: half naked marble with a long delightful braid.

Thirty hands away on her sacred stage Aphrodite, who has protected me all my life.

I met her for the first time, I prayed in my New York City state Greek: efcharistó, efcharistó, thank you, thank you.

Then a short walk away, I visited the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist’s graves.

There was a first, there is a second, perhaps a third coming.

Traveling and kisses have consequences.

Time and consequence are identical twins.

In my house there is a grandfather clock of consequences, back to the wall, near a mirror and books, time. I state a brave similarity: if time is bread, every crumb, stale or fresh, has consequences, especially if the bread is the body of Christ.

2.

Translations have consequences. The time is Christmas.

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, the carol loses truth for me when they sing O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree.

I’ve heard “lug off the guts” translated in Italian as “take away the tripe.”

I don’t know what crocodile tears are anymore.

Sunshine and rain have consequences, still there are flowers that are night bloomers.

A consequence is a result, a lie is a falsehood.

There is the truth, no other word means truth.

A fact is not the truth. Hurray! I’m somewhere: a metaphor may be the truth, a poem may be the truth.

I leap out of the standing room in the balcony to the stage. I eat a sun and moon sandwich.

I’m all cheered up. The sun and moon may be bread, clouds the ham and fromage. With Chianti I prefer infidel sandwiches.

I refuse to eat God, that holy wafer.

That’s the truth. I’ll risk the consequences.

A Charming Story

Who is that creature in deep snow, a question in the night, on all fours, two knees and two gloved hands, dragging behind two feet in grey woolen socks? It was almost dark, 4 pm in late December. I am that creature dancing the deep snow waltz, not the cakewalk, The Make Believe Ballroom is forgotten.

I missed my luncheon, Today’s Special: snow and ice topped with pine needles like chocolate sprinkles. What follows: “my life shall have no dominion.”

On my way to feed my donkeys carrots, after half a mile in my blue Odyssey the road was black ice, my wheels spinning.

I couldn’t drive forward or in reverse.

Stepping out of the vehicle, I slipped on ice. I caught onto my side-view mirror that kept me from falling down hard.

No parachute, no “Mayday, Mayday, S.O.S or Save Our Souls.”

I chose to crawl on my hands and knees, into darkness, I saw blood in the snow a handshake before my head, neck and shoulders.

I couldn’t tell if I was heading right for the highway or straight to my backdoor.

I knew the trees I loved would lend me a helping hand, a branch if they could. I thought my trees know I don’t want to freeze my sap.

That’s common sense.

I am a 95-year-old child, all the world’s a stage of snow.

I have some teeth, one good right eye, the left sees a page in sunlight, half in darkness.

I marched, left knee first, then the right, my hands kept my face out of the snow.

I lived the pun: I had a running nose.

I remembered I asked physician friends how long they thought I’d live.

In free translation they said, “Half a cup of good years, if you don’t fall down.”

I reached three steps, my back door altar.

On my knees, I climbed the blue rocks.

I never heard of a God of snow or ice.

He is. He is a God without a face, these days, the only God I believe in.

I am home, sitting shivering, I am not sitting shiva for myself.

Ask your wandering neighbor what that means.

To Hebrews, sitting shiva is a wake.

Sitting shivering is a sacrilegious pun, or perhaps I stumbled on an eighth type of ambiguity.

I Don’t Trust Alarm Clocks

1.

I see, look, observe, I clock, stand watch with my thoughts while my wristwatch is ticking.

Twelfth Night time pleases, tickles me. Watches, like actors, may tickle me or make me trickle tears in a comedy, tragedy, or farce.

In sharp meter, syllabic or free verse, a line will not scythe or beat me down.

In autumn I am not wheat or dry grass.

I watch out, time may tickle me to death.

I can laugh without stopping.

I was escorted out of the theater.

For saying “three tomorrows creeping in their petty pace are not enough.” Half a second and eternity are invisible, cruel.

I sound the alarm. Time is a lover.

There are many kinds of lovers, minutes, years: time’s a lover that fathers and mothers.

Make a child with time. Take care of your children.

Teach them music, to read and write. I suggest the prelude and postlude to Corelli’s Pastorale and Bach’s The Sheep May Safely Graze, a final hymn, Do Not Be Afraid.

Time is a wonderful truth that stops with a timeless kiss.

I write this posthumously in the early morning of my life.

2.

I’m ashamed I spent the day writing

I Don’t Trust Alarm Clocks, horrified by an evil to the tenth power filthy soul.

Today there was insurrection, murder in the capitol building: confederate flags, lynch mobs, pro Auschwitz, anti gay, anti women’s rights, anti Latino, anti Muslim, foaming at the mouth, anti trans, anti Jesus motherfuckers, served their United States of America.

I set my American flag at half mast today and for ever, as Celan suggested.

I used to think I could change the world.

Now I know I can change my socks and underwear, wash my face. I still think a poet who writes a poem, whatever the shape of it, makes the place where the poet sits, the world a little better.

Long as a dog licks a wound, a cat purrs, the planet is still young.

It’s my dinner time, January the ninth, 2021. The date’s my heavy date.

I call the world to dinner.

It’s a different time now. Parsley eats bread.

All the names of the Bible are fasting.

I look, observe, watch the world.

Teeth are a better invention than the computer.

I’ll keep time, I’ll never, never trust an alarm clock.

Eye

While I ponder political uncertainty while I hold on to my life raft floating down the Potomac, the Seine, the Tiber, simultaneously in a chapel, a kitchen temple of confusion, a snail passes me by.

I want to get my way, have others do things my way.

I try to do things their way. Lady we will run away, elope to a hideaway that’s still hidden from us.

I tell myself what’s new: another lady, Chloe, her Greek Christian name, followed by Garcia Roberts, wrote me half an hour ago.

She translates classical Chinese poetry.

I asked her to send me her poems.

Curiosity killed the cat and butterfly.

Saint Teresa of Avila was wary of curious novitiates, but uncertainty makes my heart beat faster.

I run after the snail with my bound feet in red slippers, wet from my dog’s spit.

I ask the snail what’s your name?

The same question Moses asked God.

I remember Moses was soon to marry a dark skinned Nubian beauty. A snail won’t have 44 names like the God of Exodus.

The snail does not answer me, waves its horns in sign language.

To the snail I am an evil giant. I pick up my rival, a frightened eye in my hand retracts into living darkness. I put him or her down on a safe path, back in the race. How long does a snail live?

Will that snail outlive me?

Fish, grasshoppers, frogs are rivals of my watch, not my sister. When I was six and she was ten, I wrestled her gently, got on top of her, pinned Lilly’s arms to the rug-less floor in Kew Gardens. It was the first war I won.

Years later Louise Nevelson remarked after I told her I fought in World War II, “Yes and you won the war.”

Now heart of hearts, I’m part snail.

I pass by myself, I try to be better than I am.

My voice and my soul pass my body, I say this: I’ve stood on top of Mount Etna and Vesuvius, in a nightmare I was a 6 feet 4 index finger, my head was a fingernail. What was I good for, born to pick the hot snot nose of volcanoes.

I believe a dream God dwells in his paradise with sleep walking and dancing angels.

Lord, grant me sweet dreams. Am I sane, meshuga?

These days I often dream I am myself.

Yes my tongue was split in half,

I have more than a lot of broken bones knitted together, scarred flesh that may please a lady in my mind’s eye.

An eye, I steal Leonardo’s words: who would believe that so small a space could contain the images of all the universe?

Abortion

There is fantasy, invention, daydreams metaphor, art and distant thoughts within eyesight of one another.

A poet, a lady, wrote a poem recalling an abortion she did not have, perhaps out of sympathy, premeditation.

Later she married, had a much-loved son, and three abortions. Her son fathered a child.

Whatever an abortion may be, it refuses wonderful, unknowable possibilities.

To some it’s murder and sin, whatever it is it’s not a walk in the country.

I shall consider: can a man have an abortion?

Is there a fetus within him, that he could give birth to, pull out of himself?

Does he bury it, throw it in the garbage or waste bin with food, not cans or newspapers?

If you start a poem with good lines then cross them out, is that an abortion?

No, just ink, a pity, no blood, eyes closed, no umbilical cord. Is a love affair broken up for moral or financial reasons an abortion?

No, just a pity. So far if a man becomes a woman he can’t get pregnant. This poem is aborting now, it’s just an undeveloped metaphor, an image that will not come out between my thighs.

Was my poet friend pro or anti conception? She certainly doesn’t believe in immaculate conception, that Saint Anne was born without original sin.

It seems abortion gives birth to questions.

What I’m writing is a hunt, a shooting, a fishing trip, nothing is shot, nothing is hooked.

Perhaps Failure has come to life bluntly.

I can nurse Failure, give him or her porridge, meat, chicken when he or she has first teeth.

My Failure is the name of a new species, I live in a metropolis of failures.

It’s just like me to kiss my abortion goodbye, possible child, never given a name, for the hell of it, I’ll call it Stan.

Zoopie

I bought an abused dog in Canada, a golden retriever.

I renamed him Zeus, I kissed him.

After a day he fell off the dock to the bottom of Lake Corry.

I dived down twenty feet, brought him up by the collar.

Eventually he learned to swim. The day he first swam he barked to come into the house after chasing squirrels and deer in the woods.

I kissed Zoopie, for God’s luck.

A Scream

Since Covid-19, there’s World War III, a higher percentage of black than white casualties, I scream my country ‘tis of thee: a masked face is not a motherly face, naked faces may be death threats, demand another Civil War.

Still, the Lord is a giver and taker.

The virus is a medieval 21st century golem, he makes rivers of death flow down and upstream.

I’ve earned my right not to sing, I cough I’ve earned my civil right to scream, to love, to look. There is a fifth column, fascists hiding, often policing round the world.

My memory is out of order, I remember the French King gave Fleur-de-lis Catholic money to pay for our Deist American Revolution.

Countrymen, the king went broke, caused starvation, the French Revolution, lost his head.

I recall Kristallnacht, hundreds murdered, November 9th, 1938, when Nazi’s broke synagogue and thousands of store windows: the SS waltzing to the Horst-Wessel song.

Yesterday, our time, seditionists attached by an umbilical cord to immortal hatred, murdered on United States Capitol Hill.

I salute honest troops marching toward everywhere in no-man’s-land, empty streets, a merry-go-round, Hiroshimas, a World’s Fair, roller coaster cars, going up and down, around and around with the unnecessary dead.

My Heart’s Cousin

My tongue is gentle, my heart’s cousin.

I am a family of one.

My eyes are my uncles, my ears my aunts, mother is my mouth, father my penis.

I did not say he was a prick.

Because of my mouth and my penis, I must honor myself.

I steal from my myself, words, a poem, a pulled tooth with a gold filling.

Today it’s 5:07 post meridian.

I must respect the time of Diana.

I can say anything I want to myself.

I say quickly: thanks to Frederick II,

Dante found terza rima in Sicily.

The king was excommunicated twice by Pope Gregory IX.

I was excommunicated three times by myself, once because I wrote, Rope Stanley first.

I did not say Pope Stanley the first.

I confess, I can only be forgiven by myself. Sorry, Stanley.

You must discover what part of your body your father is.

Numbers

I believe I understand why, others disagree,

Li Shangyin’s poem: Poem of Ten Lines, has nine lines. Li was showing, in his Tang way, counting’s never accurate. It’s human nature to count.

“She has three children.” Really?

One boy is half a man.

A good woman had three hundred and sixty five painful days mourning her dead mother.

Hurrah for busy lovers whatever their sexual persuasion!

They make love twice a day, every day of the year.

In this lunar year that is also a year of our Lord there should be at least three calendars: one for pain, one for joy, another timetable for those who have orgasms because of missing trains, nothing to do with Amtrak stations or airports.

I do not have necessary information nailed to my kitchen wall. I refuse to count years.

I know during the tragic years of mad Ireland’s potato famine, there was an abundance of Gaelic and English poetry, in Dublin three kinds of potatoes were served on every English restaurant table.

I look back at my confused years and forward to a mirage of years.

Now, this minute, I’m not confused. I can see something, someone who lived before I was born: I have reason to love my grandfather Lewis who died before my mother gave birth to me.

Why was I named Stanley, not Lewis?

She said, “I named your sister Lillian after him.”

My mother, born in Philadelphia, only needed one letter and she knew the word.

Perhaps I was named Stanley because the Athenians lost the battle of Syracuse.

I’m thankful my parents, my uncles, aunts, and cousins told me I should be grateful to my grandfather. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the Ocean that was an unexactly, unexactly, unexactly place. My grandfather died age fifty-five, of rheumatic fever in nineteen hundred and twenty-four, exactly one year before I was born.

My aunt Molly remembers the very day, not that he used to swim across the Dudypta to kiss my young grandmother.

Trick

You may trick a mother camel or goat to feed on hay stuffed in the skin of her offspring so she will give milk to serve her master to an orphaned camel or kid.

In my tradition one of the 44 names of God is breast.

I must find tricks to give the milk of my love to the dead. I will have to do more than show you my breast, a fistful of my cut hair with the smell of me.

A Butterfly With Child

I discovered I was within a butterfly.

I wept for joy, my mother is a butterfly flying to Mexico, inside of her and me I flutter with anticipation: soon I’ll see sunlight and darkness.

I had a dream, I only dream the truth, even when I was inside a chrysalis I had come into my own, although my mother cannot speak English or Mexican. I have an intuition, (I have more intuition than an elephant).

My mother was searching through the clouds for her husband for more than a butterfly year.

He was chasing a young butterfly, another wife.

It came to me like lightning I’ve never seen.

When he found her, got close to her, he saw she was a Christian moth who when she alights, he tastes rabbits and mice.

We are Buddhists, Daoists, I will become a patriotic butterfly. No, no, no, no.

My mother is a butterfly fighting with a moth, who is more beautiful.

I’ve never seen the color red, but blood red pollen covers me.

My mother miscarries. I am born.

I need a savior. I am a fly!

Not a hero or heroine.

I am anonymous. I pray to Buddha, make me a firefly.

I, Stanley, have written two poems today because the theaters are closed, something like a play outside the play.

Carefully and carelessly I am caught inside my own Mousetrap.

Wherever I was, I am an armed guard fighting evil. Do not say I died, place me among the fallen with soldiers, sailors, and butterflies.

A Cup of Tea

How do you know you’re getting older?

Boil water for a Hu-Kwa cup of tea, go to your study, read and write a few minutes.

If an hour later you smell smoke, the kettle out of water is blazing.

Do this twice a year, you’re getting older.

You can buy a third kettle of the year or you can boil water in a frying pan.

Why did they name that cookery a pan?

Proof the great God Pan is dead.

Reflections

There are incisions in the body of truth, reality subject to surgery.

The truth has a useless appendix, a lie cut out.

I won’t cut away visions poets saw and see.

A voice is a babbling tongue until a poet makes you believe he or she saw that vision.

A devil generalizing has just spoken, he’s not the devil of death.

I ask specific angels, Michael, Gabriel, to come to supper. They talk about sacred visions, visits by Christ, the Virgin Mother, and Elijah.

On a hillside near Sienna, I’ve seen the Magi on their way to to Jerusalem and Bethlehem with a flute, cithara, and gifts.

There are schizophrenic visions, the visionary may see herself or himself as anyone who ever was. I have never seen myself as anyone else, except when I am represented in a dream in which I don’t carry an identity card.

I’ve never heard of any poet who saw himself as a plate of spaghetti, some of him wound around a fork put in the mouth of a beautiful lady.

There are misreadings, wrong words read aloud, the word summer seen as some of her.

I’ve misread words all my life. In the second grade, I was marked down for misreading. I loved reading.

Bad grades for misreading knocked me down, I got up, saved from knock out by reading poems.

Perhaps there is something profane in my misreading.

I want something, someone I don’t know.

I did not know what I wanted.

At a launch in a London bookshop

I misread a word, I improved the poem.

Alas my imagination causes misreadings.

My one good eye sees something at a distance and deep within me — a sight for my sore eyes.

In Long Island, walking toward the Montauk Highway, I thought I saw a wounded swan runover on Seven Ponds Road, trying to get up and fly.

When I was close to the white, struggling, not living thing, I saw it was a white linen pillowcase, half in a puddle on a tar road.

How did it get there, one hundred yards from the nearest clothesline or pillow?

How far did the Atlantic ocean wind make it fly?

My vision was a fancy mistake that cut away the truth.

I am capricious, evanescent, that does not mean I cannot tell good from evil.

Murder is evil, love is good. I don’t murder.

An honest hangman and poet insists, “Each man kills the thing he loves, needs a vulgar sometimes,” I recite again a Spanish proverb, “Do not talk of rope in a hangman’s house.”

When my lady totally ignores me, is it murder?

The child is rival to the husband.

I study husbandry, I obey a law opposite primogeniture. Only ladies can inherit me.

Who else, what else might I be?

I consider that I am not human, I’m carved out of a Redwood tree, I might be a canoe.

Anyone can paddle me westward on the St. Lawrence river, paddle me near a waterfall, against a wild current, toward a thousand islands, not Niagara Falls. I could say it another away, still my way:

I am a crocodile eating reflections of fish.

Gods of Snow, It’s Been Snowing All Day

It’s a beautiful January day.

It’s been snowing all day, I’ve been reading beautiful books, listening to beautiful music all day.

I’m snowed in. Beautiful snow on the roads so deep cranky automobiles are blocked.

I don’t know how to make a rejoicing snowman.

So much pleasure for part of today, I denied death’s existence.

There is Biblical snow. In parts of Africa there was snow before there was light.

It’s been snowing two beautiful days.

Notice the words on this page are somewhat like snowflakes.

I put on my Deist snowshoes, walk into the valley of snow, past all the notices of private property, into the snowstorms: trespassing history, philosophy and geometry.

I find myself in ancient Greece.

I reach Delphi, I ask questions.

I find it is common knowledge Chione is the goddess of snow, daughter of Boreas, the North wind who abducted Orithyia, child of the King of Athens.

Free Greeks, not the oracles, tell me Chione is the mother of Poseiden’s son.

With trepidation, I climb Parnassus, I stop. It’s night, I see an unknown moon.

I never reach the top peak of Parnassus.

The Gods do not see me, Chione is asleep.

She sleeps in a bed of ice with her dog who looks like my golden retriever, Margie.

I slide down Parnassus on my ass, all the way down, down to Aztec Mexico.

I get up with the help of a straw broom, a symbol of work done by Itztlacoliuhqui, the wintery death God who clears the way for new life to emerge thereafter.

I know Gods are everywhere.

I bow and walk on.

Be certain, if I pray, I pray standing.

I am a hypocrite, respectfully

I walk and bow on and on.

I row on in my Catskill Mountain rowboat.

I reach the islands of Japan.

I dock then stand before Okami, dragon and Shinto God of snow and rain.

Within his name in Japanese is dark, darkness, closed.

Okami reached Japan from the South, many centuries before the coming of Buddha.

Who are these Gods of destiny and snow?

In China the dragon brings good luck, in Japan the snake often manifests itself as a God of the sea, melted snow.

The Japanese sea Gods are often female water snakes.

It’s almost dinnertime. I don’t have time to go to ancient Norway or Iceland.

By chance I land at Shannon.

I keen, weep without words, because in my travels I have seen the world on this beautiful day where the snow is still falling. I go to dinner.

All my appointments are entrances from stage right or stage left.

The Ferryman

I wanted to speak to the Ferryman.

I called directory inquiry, information, on my smartphone. I was given a number, a revelation. I swore to Hermes, Gods’ messenger, not to show or share that sacred number with any human, king or serf.

I called, digital ladies’ voices answered:

“He’s busy.” “Unavailable.” “Occupied.”

I remember the bloody and high voltage occasions when the Ferryman was so close I could smell and taste his breath.

After he came close to me cat scans of my head showed I had an artifact, a souvenir, a presence in an inoperable place, camped under my hippocampus.

I’ve seen the Ferryman in paintings and poetry, but never man’s face to man’s face.

Yes, I’ve known him all my life.

Death fathers everyone. I am his child.

Many in my neighborhood thought I was an arrogant “black prince” and bugger.

Arrogant? I’m ashamed to tell the truth.

After World War II, I often wore black, I limped like Richard III. Talk about the Styx, my heart called for a horse, a horse.

I try to sing a hymn made out of holy facts.

Every sparrow knows Christ walked on water.

The Ferryman poled his ferry on dry land.

Dead drunk, I’ve seen him and his ferry in the sky along the shoreline of Paradise.

Right now I see his ferry in the pond below my window, the Ferryman in a rocking chair is bored with me.

He’s waiting, yawning, smoking a cigar.

He blows clouds of smoke rings across the lawn over a great red oak.

I call him respectfully. He won’t speak to me.

Margie, my last dog, barks, “Get the hell out of here!”

Does he ever ferry dogs, loving cats?

Rocking seems to entertain him.

I’m caught not saved, even though I praise King David, Santa Teresa de Ávila San Juan de la Cruz, the Ferryman who has no name I know will eventually take me by pole and his demon wings, to an island where skeletons dance.

Now I think his accented Greek voice is loud and clear. He’s poling. He shouts my name, I’m hiding. Clear across the Hudson Valley I hear “Repent, repent.” He’s the double of the statue of the murdered Commendatore in Don Giovanni. I answer, “Your excellence, Ferryman, statue, I invite you to dinner.”

I’ve set the table with wine glasses, New York State, Dutchess County red wine, Hudson blue linen napkins, knives, knives, knives, knives, no forks or spoons.

I know in a little while the Ferryman will take me across the Styx in the company of the four seasons, made human: winter, spring, summer and autumn.

Summer wears a wreath of roses crowned with laurel, Spring wears a waistcoat of budding dandelions, Autumn, a coat of fallen maple leaves and grapevines, wrinkled Winter has snowflakes in his hair and beard.

He wears ice snowshoes. I pretend to sleep.

I Don’t Celebrate the Body Today

I don’t celebrate the body today.

I want to celebrate guides of the soul to the afterlife, to romp awhile with psychopomps.

They don’t judge the deceased souls they guide.

I’ve seen them as birds gather in flocks outside a house, waiting for someone to die.

In Christianity,
Saint Peter, the angel Michael and Jesus himself lead the dead to Heaven.

Peter admits them through the gates.

For a thousand years fleas, rats were sidekicks of the Reaper, a skeleton with scythe, he led half the world to the afterlife.

Soul music is Gospel with secular words. America here is a parable: Jesus loves soul, Gospel, jazz. He returns to Earth, he plays cornet and trumpet in a jazz band outside an all-white church. Jesus is lynched, not crucified. He sings Amazing Grace with a rope around his neck.

Jews believe in arguments, sacred, secular.

They’re occupied by the present, Torah, and other holy, metaphoric books, by their imaginations, profane and sublime.

Their magic is to make the unknown knowable.

They pay little heed to the waiting room, Gehenna.

Azrail is one of four angels in the Muslim world. He is all seeing, he keeps his eye on the Lote Tree of the End, which grows in Paradise. When a person is born, a new leaf appears on the tree with a name on it.

When it is time to die, the leaf falls, which is Azrail’s signal to come, to collect a soul.

Axmen, hangmen, those who work the guillotine and garrote are babes in the wood.

I have no doubt
there are many nameless guides to the afterlife, hundreds lit the inquisition fires.

With vulgar, sacrilegious haste, I send you to the Ferryman, Charon, to Hindu, Buddhist and Janist texts in Sanskrit. Confused, I light a Chinese lantern: Mercury saved the Romans, Aztec Xolotl, Black and white Heibai and Yuchang, impermanence, two Chinese deities.

No God watching, Greek Hermes conducts dead Myrrhine, priestess of Athena, to Hades.

I point a finger, broken by a Spalding baseball, at Virgil guiding Dante.

There are some who believe that soul does not exist, it’s just a hole in the wall with a mouse trap on the other side of the wall that catches nothing.

As far from Eden as I can get, where the dove and the leopard wrestle, I pass under the arch of Lorca’s Duende. I adore his poetry, plays, his soul, lovers and politics, the gypsy girl frightened by the wind chasing her, offered gin by the English counsel.

The rest is death and death alone.

Joyce, Yeats, Lorca, and Seamus in the balcony, I refuse to play my Gilbert and Sullivan music.

Some guides confuse me.

Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants.

The Japanese guide to the afterlife is a name that describes a life.

God is dangerous to humans.

The Japanese Shinigami was a death with double suicides, someone possessed by a God of death was selling paper.

The character who confronted death wrote “paper.”

Joseph, the Virgin, and their infant found their way to Egypt on a clear-eyed donkey.

The flight from Bethlehem to the Valley of the Kings, 500 miles of infants slaughtered behind them.

I’m writing a sinking ship’s log, not a catalog. I pity equally the sheep who leads and the sheep who follow him or her to the slaughterhouse, I write for the second time: the Lord is my shepherd, I want, I want, I want.

It’s round and round I go on death’s merry-go-round, looking forward and back. The Norse Valkyries are beautiful, horseback riding battle virgins on a merry-go-round.

They collect dead warriors from the battlefield, carry their dead to Valhalla where they continue their favorite pastimes: fighting and feasting.

Some of the past is past among the Ancient Egyptians.

The god Anubis had a jackal’s head.

He presided over mummifications. Eventually Anubis led kings to the scales of judgement.

He weighed the heart against a feather. When the scales tipped, in favor of the deceased they were granted immortality, access to the afterlife.

Spirits traditionally wait at the foot of the deathbed.

A shaman accompanies souls of the dead, helps birth, has another title: midwife to the dead.

Forever is a sorbet melting to la nada, 95 flavors, rainy days and nights wash away until there are no storm clouds, no rainy days, no sunny days, just centuries.

Centuries disappear like falling stars.

Something shrieks, a wolf, perhaps a newborn child, a last laugh, a giggle, another laugh then everything is over or under.

I follow poets most days and after conquests through Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody, through castles, towers, and mud-huts.

They lead my body and soul through tradition.

I remember when I first studied arithmetic, Auden saying to Cal Lowell, “I’m afraid that poem was two poems, a mistake.”

I remember the look on Auden’s face as if it were yesterday. He complimented Cal.

I could tell by his face, Wystan knew his place, body and soul.

I Speak While Others Sleep

I speak while others sleep, not in a classroom or theater.

I write my dreams down before I dream.

I dream that I am and I am not, that is a good beginning.

I have evidence there is someone who knows me well, I don’t know at all.

I have arrogant and evil dreams.

I put a bit of soil in the crevice of a granite boulder, a little dew, a little rain, some sunshine, a miracle.

The rock abides. Now the rock holds a new life, weeps when others weep, laughs, but granite does not laugh when people on crutches dance on it or when a donkey is born who can’t bray or hee-haw. When the roads or paths are frozen under deep snow, my donkeys want to see me.

I don’t crawl now to feed them carrots or apples, although I’ve crawled before.

It’s petty of me, I pay a Mexican to give them hay. I pay little attention to those starving. No one makes soup of boiling grass. It’s something like cabbage.

It’s a dream. I’ve written my dream down before I dreamed it, the opposite: no ecstasy, a little joy, no happiness in this speaking while others sleep

Today I Play Ring Around the Rosie

Because I’ve had a painful day, can I get away with a poem that begins with irrelevant arithmetic?

How many people have I seen alive?

Millions. I sat in a ten dollar seat in Yankee Stadium on Memorial day with 80,000 fans. I shouted “Olé!” with aficionados in Seville and Madrid.

I’ve sung “God Save the King and Queen” at the Old Vic. I’m fallible, naming English theaters brings tears to my eyes.

Yes, I’ve been on crowded trains in China, Times Square on a couple of New Year’s Eves.

How many ladies and gentlemen have I seen naked?

I’m pleased to tell you charming lies, Greek gods came to supper at my house.

They ate my pasta and fish soup with pleasure.

Pan asked for a recipe.

He said he loved my “dish”, whatever it was.

It was spaghetti carbonara.

My heartbreak is my own business.

How many people have I seen dead?

Not as many as a gravedigger, but I’ve seen a generous number with any part of the body I can identify, gone. Why is it that those who believe they’re going to Heaven don’t die with more pleasure than dogs eat bones?

“Thou shalt honor thy father and mother.”

Point of honor: I never saw my father dead.

I visited when he was in his final coma, but I didn’t want to look into his coffin.

I saw the soiled sheets torn off his deathbed.

I saw my mother dead, her traditional open mouth.

At least three women about to die, my mother, my wife’s mother, and another, threw off their blankets lifted their nightgowns up to their necks.

A few days before she died, my mother said, “I’m wounded.” I told my mother, “You showed me your wound yesterday.”

She said, “I must have been crazy.”

How many just borns have I seen proudly held up in the air smacked on the back for encouragement? Just two.

Why do I dial wrong numbers so often?

I can’t help but hit a single number two or three times instead of once because my hands shake essentially.

I often shake hands with my strong grip.

How many fish and lambs have I eaten?

How many dying have I attended to?

A few. How many clouds have I adored?

Truth is, I don’t know. Have I spent more time in my automobiles than on sandy beaches?

You, who have also been kissed by a lake or river (I don’t care if you don’t believe me), the Atlantic loved me more than the Mediterranean.

By chance, in a notebook I opened, I found that I had written a demand that endless numbers of human beings insist upon — for all I know, endless numbers of creatures and trees: ecstasy, I won’t settle for joy or happiness.

Barbershop Conversation

This is barbershop conversation: speakers have different histories, different colors, palettes of thinking.

Working on a poem, painting with a brush, calligraphy, is very different from saying, “had a brush with the Red Guard in Beijing in Red August.” In the barbershop mirror, I saw there were Aztec and hieroglyphic painted words. In the old days, ladies and gentlemen had servants comb or brush their hair, indicating rank.

I have not forgotten wigs and snuff.

Whenever a word rhymes with a word, both words have the other word as part of meanings, however distant. Mark Twain wrote, “History does not repeat itself, it rhymes.” Counting syllables and beats is more like counting children than counting money.

With an endless need to brush up and shave I want my poems to be news on the Rialto, news of old and unanswered questions.

I work in a shop. You’ll find me, much of the time, beside a painted, ancient red and white circling barber pole.

I offer leeches, surgery, conversation, bleeding, I cut and brush beards.

The truth is not shampooed in my sinks.

The word “brush” is Today’s Special.

I remember deer that ran into the brush, to escape the hunter, I brush the stars, my feathers brushed against the king’s crown, I never took the brush from a killed fox.

This is the way I speak in American.

I’ve cut myself shaving. I wanted to give friends something to keep in their breast pocket, a handkerchief, a fountain pen that’s out of style.

Out of petrol, a French street cleaner with a broom knows the difference between a stylo and a plume. Before the waltz, Frederick Barbarossa was coronated, he had a red beard. When I was a child, they played Largo al Factotum from Il Barbiere to stop me from crying. Then they laughed.

I Praise Scientists

I praise scientists who have stuck tiny waterproof microphones, womb deep. Fetuses can’t make out a mother’s words inside her womb.

Fetuses can hear prosody, inflections, accents a pause, the rising and dips in a sentence.

We exit the womb with a scaffolding of language well in place. French two-day-olds cry, wail on a rising pitch contour, mirroring the melodic patterns of spoken French.

A Fable: Christ’s Eagle Fathered Eagles

In Granada, I heard a basso sing while an altar boy played a blue guitar that belonged to a wandering half Jewish, half Gypsy girl. Rita cried out an offer to Christ’s Eagle: if he alighted on her bare forearm (she knew her arm would bleed), she would give the raptor a manicure, and scratch its back. It was common knowledge her father drank Anis de Chinchón, a blood thinner so he would not get a blood clot that might blow out the candlelight, switch off the electric light in his brain.

It was five o’ clock in the afternoon of my life.

Gypsy Christ changed from Jew lily to Spanish sunflower.

Most women dressed in black, mourned five years when a benighted family member died.

For many gentlemen, it was customary: mass Sunday morning, bullfights at five o’clock, a house of whores at night.

A Dominican friar who had a dog with a flaming candle in his mouth, told everyone who would listen, “Everything, with a heart bleeds a little of Christ’s blood — thanks to the poor who give to others much that they receive in charity.

I hear silence:
some are praying, no one is singing.

From a lectern with a carved Eagle, I speak to the congregation.

Rivers and oceans have no blood, anybody floating who speaks or sings with an open mouth, a person who has bleeding gums, bleeds Christ’s blood.

Human teeth are made of the same ivory as elephant tusks, they do not bleed.

It follows whoever, perhaps an angel, invented blood, invented the heart, the first heartbeat, the first little bang.

Why did Jesus choose to visit the world?

He invented pebbles, wouldn’t that have been enough? A child interrupted, “Before there were pebbles there had to be rock.”

Another lad shouted, “There was light, water, and urine.”

I explain in a louder voice, so those washing their hands in holy water, can hear:
First there was nothing. Nothing comes of nothing.

If you want to contradict me, leave the room, keep to your house of worship, or turn on your tv.

There were innumerable storms, weather without elements clouds without intelligence, disagreements, arguments, before there were laws, before there were words, principles, evidence, long before creation there was self evidence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter, “United we fall, divided we stand.”

Among Ancient Greeks, Eros was an explorer.

He had misadventures. What cities could he construct with a broken wing? Still, Eros wanted love and sex.

He made the sexes one by one, then two by two.

Brothers and sisters,
the universe is an umbrella. I see more umbrellas than at Jones Beach, Lido, Shanghai, Dover Beach.

Because it’s raining galaxies, dark holes, quarks, protons, I crawl under the periodic table, I look under the skirt of physics, between her legs.

Flights of light years are operatic.

I translate what I hear, remember my purpose is to write a poem, personal pronouns and adjectives are falling stars — stars are cow dung in the pasture that is the firmament.

I’ve been scratching the back of Christ’s Eagle.

The Eagle just brought me a gift of a deer mouse. To show affection the Eagle puts its head in my neck.

I try to kiss the Eagle on the mouth.

Christ’s Eagle flies away from me.

To kiss an Eagle on the mouth was my folly.

Never for a moment in my life did I think my follies did not make sense. I add for good luck, I know in France, une folie is also a mansion of pleasure.

Once I thought I was an individual.

I look out from my farmhouse window, I see part of me is that and that and that, those and those and those.

Ode to Opposites

1

Every day I’m getting younger, not older.

I like talking in opposites.

It doesn’t really make a difference now if the compass in my head points south or north.

I grow on the north side of a tree.

Lovers, my no may mean yes. My good eye helplessly shows what I love. I fight to kill everlasting death mano a mano but I want to lie alone in my grave with the ashes of my dogs at my feet, the ashes of thirty two paws at my feet.

I’m getting younger not older, my mind has changed except about good and bad.

I believe in opposites. The opposite of chance, the uncertainty of good soup, borscht and minestrone.

Bread and wine are transubstantial possibilities.

I sometimes spit out certainty.

I’m writing this as proof I’m getting younger.

My poetry can jump rope with your dog or cat for a long life. I tell you I knew Walt Melon, I didn’t say watermelon.

He swam backstrokes from old lakes to old rivers.

One afternoon Walter fell off a waterfall.

In these words there’s a sliver of poetry, crows exist by eating my run over, dead words.

2

Young, I desecrate a Psalm.

I’m old enough to vote.

I’ll turn right side up for fresh air.

I do not love my neighbor who wants polling stations fifty miles from where black folks live, get them off white sidewalks, imprison them with the insane, the sick, throw away the key. I spend useful time looking for the key to unlock prisons.

My soul is jailed by my body, chained to a nest of iron bars, fires melted together.

I live in an iron basket filled with the fruits of my labor.

I don’t eat fruit except blueberry pie.

My three donkeys are believers, I have an agnostic horse, a farm full of massacres, born, reborn and unborn wildlife, silent and multilingual trees, flying snakes, humming birds whose wings beat a hundred times a second on my watch that stopped long ago.

I feed and I’m fed upon by the unlisted passengers on Noah’s Ark, they travel steerage as my ancestors and I did.

Eros is a stowaway on the Ark.

Ares, god of war, and Eirene, goddess of peace, despise their faint hearted armies.

Aphrodite, dancing on water, follows us with her ways of making mainsails and jibs proud to be what they are. I had the fortune, to swim with half naked Aphrodite all my life in the Hudson, Meander, the Tiber, the Sligo, in the rapids and monosyllabic creeks that dry up in hot summers, but are always water again when the ice breaks up in the spring.

Whatever the weather, I’m growing younger, not older.

I was born on June 21st, the first day of winter in Australia down under.

Spring 2021

An American Corinthian Column supports the roof of my house, where swallows nested ten years.

They came last spring despite twenty inches of snow.

They’re not here this spring. It’s a kind April day.

I wish I knew how to call my swallows.

They are privates like me, my buddies, male and female in a war against ugliness and evil.

They may have fallen.

It’s a foolish April day. My swallows were never interested in conversations on my porch under their nest. I protected their eggs in the nest from racoons, snakes and eagles.

They made me feel safe, not lonely, despite my lover, close friends, music and books.

Did my swallows die when a great Polish poet died?

I don’t think they’ve gone to Poland to build their nest.

Father swallows are heroes. If the proud sitting mother and nest of eggs are attacked by a raptor the handsome male bird swoops, dives down then up, leads eagles away. If our father swallow survives he brings horseflies, worms to the nest.

Lonely chaos, my mind is scattered. Desperate, I throw sacks of mixed seeds that grow tall in the fields where my happy donkeys graze.

* * *

I cannot make a swallow’s nest. I bought a bat house I tied to an oak tree’s crotch.

I search the sky. The poor ones who live highest on earth are jumping spiders with eight eyes.

They live in ice atop Mount Everest.

Come what may or June, I am ready to throw away this discourse.

I need some days not to write anything but letters, sign checks, and protests.

I have found a Chinese bronze horse with one foot poised on a flying swallow.

I’m up most of the night, listening for swallows, I hear Canada geese innuendo.

I follow sparrow politics. Compañeros, I’m for giving every living thing a vote, the just born and dead the vote.

The dead
are patriotic. They’ve got death, they want liberty.

They fly a flag, an unwrapped shroud or prayer shawl half mast on a flag pole.

Holy rivers get ashes and flowers, most Chinese mourn their dead, foreheads on earth. I pity those who choose to be entombed with unfortunate live dogs, a pipe and tobacco. Enough.

If I had to choose what day I wanted to be born I’d choose the first day of summer.

The farthest One gave me my wish.

This winter, I was snowed in by ice. One night I dreamed I stood beside a six-foot dandelion.

I’ve shrunk. Now I’m only two inches taller than the dandelion.

The kind sun wakes me wishes me good morning. The first dandelion of spring appears on my lawn.

In a dandelion world, I ache for swallows.

Swallows, citizens, dreamers, have our evil politicians and climate change murdered you?

I chatter, I’m lost and frightened.

Who am I to teach swallows I don’t feed?

Poetry is not a secret voting booth, an absentee ballot.

Prose is opinionated. In my other early life, I voted for cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Nahuatl in Mexico.

I’ll vote, sing again in a band.

To sing the blues is patriotic.

Today is election day. Today is today.

Tomorrow is a world away.

Humans look like the farthest One and alike.

I have some resemblance to a male evergreen.

Everything in the world rejoices, everything is left with a broken heart.

There are stars on Earth, but I’m informed by what is light years away, and by ants that found their way into my desk drawers.

I hunt beauty. I accept the gift.

I once wrote, “I must make my death handsome.”

I have hands and fingers, like wings, feathers.

I have a knapped heart and a calling, my outspoken interruptions are something like a weathervane on the roof of my house.

Of course I’m out of style, I’m north south, east, and west.

In a canoe in Canada, I was blown around and around by a tornado, a 200 mile per hour wind that blackened the sun on a July afternoon.

I would prefer to be knocked over by the wind of a passing butterfly.

Today I believe

I would never welcome that butterfly.

I sign my letters faithfully, much love, not sincerely or yours truly, or my best.

I would consider, Yours still standing, once rooted, Stanley

*See Swallow poem, page 90

Little Song

There are little songs, syllables counted, rhymed, disappointing loveless sonnets. Look, look at our bodies we are made to love and work.

There is loveless work, there is no loveless love.

There are Lordly oceans not crossed or loved by everyone.

Creeks and rivers flood dry up.

Rivers may experience an undressing, an expolio, a crucifixion, a transubstantiation.

There are lovable floods.

Rivers may become Lordly.

The Nile, the Mississippi have alluvial deltas.

There are delta sonnets full of mud, gravel and love.

Year

What are years? In early Chinese waters there was a monster named Year, she came to harass womankind and mankind at a fixed date at the beginning of Spring. Later a wise man taught people to explode fireworks to scare the monster away. It became the custom to explode fireworks on New Year’s Day.

Now there is a frightened monster, nothing like a dragon that brings good luck to the worthy.

I don’t have words to say what Year looks like.

Yes, Year has eyes of many colors, donkey ears for music, webbed warrior feet, an anus for disapproved holidays.

Year holds public property that is not hers.

In short, to the God fearing, Year looks like history, has several deceiving eyes. Still, for a month’s sake, Year modestly hides in the forest and in kind waters. All years are rare. A few of us believe

Year has children. I think there is a continuing.

Born in Winter, there are premature years.

Forest fires are incubators.

There are so many wildfires in California, Mother Year and Father Year often made love under sequoias. It’s a long swim for Year from San Francisco Bay to Shanghai.

Year rests in Hawaii. Twenty summers ago, Year swam in the Grand Canal to the Biennale, her tail splashing laughter at the biannual that had nothing to do with Year.

What did opinionated paintings, painted for beauty and money, have to do with the monster?

No one painted mortality, eternity for nothing.

A happy few saw Year on Loch Lomond’s bonnie banks.

An Irishman near the Sligo told me in a pub he saw Year fighting with a minute, and minute won. Dead drunk, I told him when I swim in the Hudson River, backstroke, freestyle, and kicking with my one good leg, sooner or later I know Year will devour me. Till then, I molest Year in Januarys, try to capture her.

Year understands languages. All languages, including Chinese, have ancient African roots.

There are 46 Aboriginal dialects in Mexico alone.

Year survived the 1520 genocide in Mexico.

Year after year, she is amused at the toast in Polish, “A hundred years.”

Year struggles, aristocratic Time says “Year has a Cockney accent.”

The loneliest fisherman in the world, I try to spearfish an extra Year for me, as if it were a whale.

There are years of many colors, black, white, purple, green years.

I don’t forget a year that looked like a sparrow, flew like an eagle. She flies forever like some waterbirds, never touching water.

Year is a clean word, a bullet shot in the temple of the head.

Forever and always are dirty words.

“Words have no word for words that are not true.”

Year holds open his or her mouth, fills it with ocean and spits Time in my face.

Year spits salty wrinkles on my face.

I don’t lie, I write on the way to Truth so you believe what I say. Year isn’t a metaphor, a Bible story. I laugh and say, “Leap year is not an extra day in February, or a leap over a tennis net of days.” I don’t want to waste words.

I kiss Year the monster with her many tongues, I make good use of my tongue that is guilty and innocent.

Preface II

Now Preface is not fired or homeless, but it is a poem looking for a job.

I let Preface sleep in a spare room.

It walks in its sleep, mumbles, Once I was necessary, now I’m like an old prayer preface put in a Western wall crevice. But I’m not a prayer, I’m an old bearded, grey-haired preface looking for work. I found it. I’m not an echo, I refuse to close the door of a book.

My refusal to close a poem is another proof, I’ll die refusing to die. I don’t believe it, but I’ll say “Death is a preface.”

I will not change the title of my old Preface.

Carve Preface on my gravestone.

I consider a preface is just a little foreplay.

Fact Song

I don’t walk the streets with a sign: Poetry Not for Sale.

Why, how, did I do the harm I’ve done?

I’ve eaten whale meat in Barcelona.

The worst thing I ever did was something I should have done:

I never told my mother she had a bastard grandson. I was trembling and afraid my always angry father, “God’s angry man,” would blow his stack at me.

It would be hard for my mother to see the son she loved ever again except in secret.

When my mother was cremated, I planted her ashes under her favorite flowers, Montauk daisies, father was at a home for senior citizens.

He needed around the clock nursing.

I introduced my son to father and sister.

Father told my sister to see that my son got a full grandchild’s share in his will.

My sister, with her husband, who “moved the arsenal to the atomic age,” he miniaturized the atom bomb, (worked with Wernher von Braun after Hiroshima).

All our rockets are still pushed up by what he thought and did.

My heroic brother-in-law and sister were my father’s executors.

My sister disobeyed. My son got nothing.

My share was the same as a grandchild.

In my mother’s album of family photos, I appear on page 13. Reader, I wrote some useless words, some of this before.

Now I’ve twisted, not a meal, a merienda I cooked on a wood and would not stove.

I’m 95 years old plus ten difficult months.

If Someone Makes Love Anywhere on Earth

1.

Hatred begets climate change.

Hatred is proud and microscopic, hatred has a tailpipe of smoke, coal fires, gas burning evil air.

Iago and Esso sound alike, put money in thy purse.

If someone makes love anywhere on earth, love is like climate change, lovemaking in China cleans the air in London, Los Angeles, and Beijing.

A great wall of solar libido protects us from barbarian hatred.

Such circumstance is not a butterfly effect.

Love carries grief on his or her shoulders, as if grief were a child. Grief is a foundling, love sometimes is a birth father or mother.

“The present is pregnant with the future.”

In time, the oceans will dry up, the deserts will become oceans.

Please become a lover, sooner the better.

I hear idle readers say, “There he goes again.

He thinks the dead are dancing skeletons.”

Yes, I think every maggot is a detective.

There is an honorable thing to do: be a thief, steal beauty, spend it, give it to the poor, to any passer by.

Hot news: if music is the food of love, play on.

If I live long enough, I’ll have a bookship that sails around the world, unloading my cargo.

If I were the north wind, or just a breeze, I’d blow Johann Sebastian Bach notes to Asia.

2.

I write, it is the 6th of May, summer is just around the corner.

This year is next year.

Clouds or cloudless days predict the future.

I’m something like a cloud flying by.

Life and death, love and hate are clouds flying by.

I’m a cloud who can’t stop wishing. I’m spinning.

I know that scientists proved time is made of nanoparticles that rotate beyond three-hundred billion revolutions per minute.

3.

I’m sitting at my desk with my feet on a chair.

Rights and wrongs differ from country to country, street to street. Sooner or later gravity may become unconstitutional.

Of course there are many nameless places in the universe without gravity, silence perhaps, with unpredictable election lights.

What I write is informed, is a freight train, cattle cars once occupied by Jews, homosexuals, do gooders, gypsies on their way to death camps, slaves escaping on the underground railroad north to Canada, south to Mexico.

Even my love poems are informed by what I just said. For truth’s sake, I’ll change the climate of this poem.

Here is a chilling, dangling, political metaphor: when in 1938, Byron’s tomb was opened for examination, his right foot had been cut off, lay at the bottom of the coffin.

The world is getting colder and warmer, countries will drown, books will swim.

Detour

For God and country’s sake, I’ll sink the ship Not Yet.

I pretend to carry some truth in the hold.

The truth is sweet un-American: rather than Pennsylvania Hershey bars, I prefer churros con chocolate in Madrid, gnocchi to Idaho potatoes.

Confusion, Confucius, what’s the difference?

I’ve got the hots for Homer snoring in the pines. My favorite saints are Christopher, who no longer is a saint, Julian, who murdered his mother and father.

I prefer rhyming transubstantiation, not with the stations of the cross, but with Washington D.C. Union Station, where I sat down and wept.

I believe in my own preoccupations, Gods and dogs.

I’ve spent more time in Catholic churches than synagogues.

I have no memory of ever wetting the bed until I was ninety. Often I don’t recognize names I know and lines I know by heart, or my face in a mirror. I’d rather walk into the British Museum, the Prado than a Museum of Modern Art.

But I cut high school when I was thirteen to see Matisse, Modigliani, Pollock, Picasso’s Guernica on 53rd Street, Russian movies. I met ladies who mixed up their love of art and me.

I read Lorca, Rimbaud, Valéry and Hart Crane before Whitman. I enjoy telling my history: age nine I was shot in my left leg by a ricocheted bullet in a celebration after a Greek revolution. Until I was four or five I thought World War I was just a fairytale.

At six I knew about babies killed in bombings, dogs fighting over delicious baby legs.

I never took a class in art history, I was taught by museums, artists, Zeri, K. Clark, Milicua, who liked to eat with me, my free verse conversation, my unaccountable eyes for quality.

Life was mostly pleasure, I didn’t like pop art, for surrealist fun I painted punctuation, multicolored question marks, sexy nuns.

French artists know how to remember ladies.

If I ever teach gallantry at the Courtauld, I’d teach the world’s students to paint their own experience, what was Courbet’s Origin of the World, their naked woman they see in bed neck down to beautiful thighs above her knees.

If I teach the Psalms, I’ll give special attention to Psalm 38, King David’s misbehaving.

If Not Yet isn’t a sinking ship it’s not a highway, it’s a single lane with someone holding a sign: STOP then GO SLOW, or a road completely blocked with a sign, an arrow to the left that says DETOUR.

The grounded ship Not Yet sinks.

My body swims ashore, a guest who knows the hospitality of beaches and sunlight.

My soul swims out to sea, towards Tsunamis and doldrums, a host of ocean waves.

What’s the difference?

The Gods murder all their guests.

I kissed Margie goodbye dead, her eyes wide open.

Next morning, she looked peaceful, I kissed her right front paw.

Haiku

Margie died, my pubic hair fell out, I’m covered with lice.

It’s worse than that.

A Little Afternoon Music

In cement playgrounds there are 8-year-olds who will be mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers (years equal to six, seven or eight dog lives).

I see grandmothers and grandfathers in swings and slides, some jumping rope.

In a tree playhouse, three canes, candy, crutches, walkers with wheels and brakes.

This year’s violets outside the playground fence have come again. They are religious.

Without vanity, a congregation of wildflowers bloom and are blown away from baptism to last rites, from circumcision to Kaddish.

The 8-year-olds in the schoolyard play catch with balls, images of the globe.

Soon, they shout with a mouth of pulled teeth they have swallowed one by one, with blood of bleeding gums, their Beaujolais.

Opera pleased my dog, she smiled at my Zoroastro.

For her I played on a washboard a little afternoon music.

She liked that, she jumped in my lap, licked my mouth.

For Margie I scrubbed and scrubbed notes Until my knuckles bled.

This is a little afternoon bleeding music.

There are so many poems on the deaths of animals.

Margie died three days ago.

I’ve nothing to do but write this, out-of-key growl, at a cruel, disobedient God and my good dog who liked me to growl at her, one of our games.

My dog sat, came to me when I called her.

Holy, Holy, Holy, dog amen.

No God comes to sit at my table at my invitation − call it prayer.

God doesn’t smile when I scrub hymns on a washboard − my knuckles bleed.

I know differences between dogs and humans.

Holy, Holy, Holy, dog amen.

the great god IS

Holy, holy, holy without a God.

Was ist, won’t be, there is life expectancy, there are subjects, citizens of a nest, a flower, cared for, attended by a gardener.

There is no King in a garden.

I’m offended by the Lord, “King” in the Bible.

The Nile is not the King of rivers.

The Rose of Sharon appears in the Song of Songs and in my garden where sunlight and rain are words of the Preacher.

What rank is a hurricane, not Pope or Dalai Lama.

When they curse each other forever, Arab and Israeli, do it in the other’s language.

There is the god IS.

I don’t know who sits at the right hand of IS.

Was ist, IS, isn’t a communist, capitalist, socialist, or anarchist.

IS kissed me. There IS design.

IS created the universe.

I said “No thanks,” yesterday to IS.

I plant my vote for trillium for any office, waterlilies are my constituents.

Was ist? I vote for a flower, FREEDOM, I wear that flower in my hair in or out of bed.

The winds are not anarchists, there is an anarchist in me, I’m King of the Chair I sit in this morning.

My subjects are books.

I’m also a commoner.

I’m an unnamed character in a book, a passerby, a pronoun.

I am not what I eat.

I am not a man of my table cloth.

Really? I dine on myself.

I still eat a poem of myself.

Now I’m my dog who finishes my oatmeal in the morning.

Yes, I bark at myself, “do some good.”

IS is not my shepherd.

I am God forsaken, I praise IS, the maple tree nearest me.

I am saved by trees that give me breath.

If I get what I’m writing into a construction I have a religion.

I have a religion, belief that is holy.

Holy, holy, holy without a God.

These are the last lines I write, I make them first.

“In my end is my beginning.”

Holy, holy, holy without a God.