Passing

You ask your wife,
"Why must it always be
about perceptions?”
“Well," she replies, "they say
perception is nine tenths
of the law.”

“No,” you correct her,
“That’s possession.
Possession is nine tenths of the law.”
“You must be right,” she sighs.
“You always have to be right.”

Touche’

This week you wrote villanelles
so that at tonight's party
you could pass yourself off
as a lyricist.
“A song writer? That explains
the black turtleneck.”
chortled your host.
“Thank God, I thought
you might be a poet.”

That’s how others think.

But you are lying
on your bed now,
comparing your life
to an obscure French movie,
one where the English comes
only in subtitles.

You resolve to write
an epic narrative
about the whole sordid thing.

Next weekend you will wear
a crew neck, and pass
yourself off as a film critic.

You are always passing;
it’s forever about perceptions

Published by Stimulus Respond

Tapestry

Sunbeam bullion greets
ivy covered brick.
New day’s dew freshens
night weary life.
This was a promise yesterday broken
but believed anew each dawn.
A finch sings melodious chirps
to her mate, notes that are noticed

by the cat on the corner.
The butcher’s wife hoses off
her sidewalk, speaks Italian
to the grocer next door while
Dominicans stop to buy jerk chicken
from the Jamaican vendor in the park.
Their children play on swings with
a Korean couple’s son, singing

songs from Sesame Street.
Two blocks down
a crew is raising steel to build
a new tower, a testament
to great people
making a great country

and a better world.
A teamster drives his garbage truck
down a snarled avenue.
Horns blare and fumes spew
while a policeman’s whistle screams.
Tired yellow taxis with worn shocks

bob like ducks as they swim downstream.
A tugboat is guiding a ship out to sea,
the horn moans like a disagreeable ghost.
Gulls squawk and cry,
chastising escorts,
never satisfied,

never making their desires known.
Now the sun has warmed the air beyond comfort
and the morning dew has become humidity.
The garbage truck grows ripe, flies buzz
around filthy bundles. Freshness
has been replaced by eye searing smog.
This is a promise again today broken.
But a promise to hope for tomorrow.

(published by Stimulus Respond)

Self Anointed

Lately, you’ve been scouring the dark
using your eyes like the nimble paws
of some Egyptian-cat-goddess-in-residence

clawing a clutch of stars from the sky
hiding them under a Persian carpet
someplace south of Lansing or Blue Island
someplace where the liquor’s cheaper
and the bars still let you smoke.

You’ve temporarily replaced the constellations
with plasma sparks and rail dust but
the ghosts of those ancient Greek goat-fuckers
are going to be pissed
when they can’t spy Aries or Orion’s Belt tonight.

You say you’re just cleaning up around here.

Well, that’s ambitious, but I can still find grit
out among the gaseous nebula.

You say you’re going to re-name the heavenly bodies
before putting them back, one by one.

Well, maybe you could call the North Star Plath
or Whitman, but before re-inventing the villanelle

why not listen to the voices of readers and writers
not to be born for a hundred more years, asking

Who?

(Publsihed in Arsenic Lobster)

Child

your name is Energy:
the result of sun
breeding with earth
in-between the cosmic bedclothes
of time without beginning.

You thought your people hailed
from the old sod
and you were assuredly right.
Solar heat broods in the dirt
below the crust. Plants send their tendrils
to test these depths, scouring nourishment
from such an improbable combination of parents.
Sun, the bastard child of heat and light,
your virgin mother, of water and soil.

You are immortal.
Energy cannot be destroyed,
and time is illusory.
Reduced to but an atom, you will still join
some new incarnation of powerful life,
the remainder of you perhaps buried
as dust motes drift into a dune
across the top of some deserted windowsill.

The feathery precipitation builds up
layer after layer
accounting for time through accumulation.
Neither time for beginning,
nor time for the end. But time to continue,
time to replay,
time to remember your noble lineage.

Your name is Energy.

(appears in A Gift of Wings, published by
Perspectives in memory of Kristen Biss)