From Embrace

Time Out

The second he steps onto the shaky porch
    branches point fingers at him,
call him slacker.
         The leaky roof threatens
a flash flood, 
        overgrown grass spreads rumor
of neglect. He would have mowed
yesterday, but they were locked 
     in another skirmish.
                Worry, goading a mob of debt,
jimmies a window, the side door,
whispers Delays can’t repair the roof,
won’t buy the gazebo you want to give her.
            He doesn’t notice nandina berries on fire,
doesn’t hear the woodpecker 
    drumming jazz on a loblolly.
                        Twilit sky begins to trickle stars.
He moves back in, reaches for her.


From Landscapes of Longing

Attendance Check

 
Swapping cigarettes, jabs, chips,
they drift like Rockaway waves
from the boys home into the classroom,
ninth graders no one would bet on,
discarded by split parents.

The deck of misfortune they inherited
keeps shoving them to grow up
the hard way, hustles them
to hazardous fringes,
rips off their blooming.
A hot tide of easy dope
has begun to nettle attitudes,
submerge questioning minds.

And yet their feisty, undefeated spirits
grapple with prison sentences
of poverty; shirtless torsos
flaunt scars, coded storylines
of tested identity,
graffiti pledges of belonging.
Their dicey hands are mauled,
notched, and zigzagged from brutal
battles to breach a barbed-wire fate.

Jumpy after all-night scuffles
with gangs prowling Times Square,
they dodge and gamble to exist,
smell like a crowded gym, fists ready
for fast money, to get over
on teachers, settle scores,
stay afloat in the system chiseling them.


(First published in the Humanist)


Agrigento, Sicily (July 17, 1943) 

Shells of scorched buildings
in the wake of invasion, their doorways arched
like vultures in vacant shadow flank the street.
Out of a window an unhinged shutter leans
like a coffin for Montagues and Capulets
onto one of the empty balconies barred as jail.

Men are scarcer than nylons,
no church bells ring through neighborhoods
swamped with exploded apartments. 

The heat is malarial, sunlight
glares on an old woman in shawl
and long black dress, her sorrow fruitless.
Her hand extends onto a building’s water pipe
for balance, like the blessing of a priest;
the other clutches a loaf of bread as she gazes
down into wreckage, uncovers
a dead body next to her black shoes. 

Another survivor, a young woman nearly
camouflaged in shadow of walls,
scavenges for a meal, wanders off
carrying her fiancé’s photo.

In back of them, the shadow of a Sherman tank
edges along chalky street, a shard of sky
beaches against a distant roof.

(First published in Against Agamemnon: War Poems)



Our Own Blood

The generals deliberate on the climate of war,
insulted that some harebrained foreigners
might beat them at seizing the capital.

The generals read barometers of insiders,
tally missiles and unmanned drones.
Their temperatures escalate as the budget deficit
dives and the foreigners move forward.

The Supreme Commanders would like nothing better
than to turn the tide, reduce the expense of casualties
to zero, risk only what’s necessary,
leave nothing to accident.

Fingers like rolls of million-dollar bills
toying with the buttons of boom,
the generals reckon lives,
plot exact targets via satellite surveillance.

The security of our native land hovers
like Apache helicopters
on a do-or-die sortie. 

The generals know it has always been
us or the enemy, the battle between
alien blood and our own.

(First published in New York Quarterly)

 
Catching Shadows

Knowing she doesn’t want to miss
a second of the nature program
when she goes out to forage, he calls ooh, ooh,
you’ve got to see these spectacular shots, hurry
as a male wildcat stalks a female in heat,
though leopard and lion prowl savannah grass.
Hurrying from the kitchen, she appears
in the Serengeti living-room, balancing a tray
loaded with dark chocolate, jam, bread, popcorn,
and he rubs it in about the rare footage: A caracal
leaped over twelve feet high,
snared a stork taking flight. 
     In the cut to a commercial
he grabs pajamas, changes while they watch
and she whistles at him, ribs how he missed
the clever killer whales that lurk
like shadows in breakers, till the tide rises
and they spring out of the surf
               on heedless seals--
     A few in the pod
toy with their catches, she says, throwing
couch pillows and cushions on the carpet,
tumbling him down        they fling the bodies
around in sport           and tail-smack them
like volley balls           arching over a net
                    before they swallow.

(First published in .Cent Magazine)


From Discovering Mortality 


Wait Till You’re Twenty-One

All day down in the salt mine basement his clients visit,
lodge brothers he embraces with the gift of gab,
as if it’s been ages since the nights
they kibitzed pinochle, gin rummy,
and bridge. He loves them more than me,
his number-one trophy. At last,
they’ve gone, but he’s busy together
with unending work and classical music
as friends. He needs the debit
of this no-account, disrespectful teen
like mortgage payments. He swishes
a glass of Lipton, smokes another Camel,
plots the maps of their fiscal lives,
saving them taxes. He brags the balance
is a happy medium like Mendelssohn’s
Italian Symphony playing. It vexes him
that I sulk so much, when he’s providing
the time to myself he didn’t have.

(First published in Poetry)


In the World Series of Jazz

 The pitcher walks straight ahead to the mound,
taps his foot in front of the stand,
licks the reed a taste or two
looks in for a sign and
before breathing a sound
lets the rhythm grab him,
gets into a groove.

The monster in the lineup
points the club, ready to swing the charts
like Bechet, Prez, and Benny,
or hard bop the ball out of the park
like Bird, sensing vibes the hurler phrases
from his medley of instant surprises

but the dot blows by, a goose egg of smoke
burning the catcher’s mitt,
and then a Kansas City slider
side-slips the plate, explodes runs of blues.

The joint of eighty thousand plus
jumps like grasshoppers in a field of butterflies,
logic laid out,
as the cat tempts a half-speed change,
a curve bridged above his wheelhouse
like a slow boat to China, but the batter,
cool as Monk, Gerry, and Chet,
doesn’t chase the quote.

(First published in The Listening Eye)


Murder in the Dunes

They didn’t dream the dead horse
omened dissolution of their marriage.
They looked for footprints
of coyotes who had hounded
the marrow out of those rifted remains
unfaithful as dunes of strewn
emotions that shift with weather
and tides, but rippling sand
concealed evidence of attackers
like burrowed voles, hares
hiding in brambles, wind over
lake surfaces where tern, loon
and kingfisher dive.

A handful of minutes
would have buried the splotches
of blood in Oceano sand,
finished submerging the unbridled
carcass gnarled as driftwood
sifted down windblown furrows,
but they, infatuated with dunes
higher than tsunamis under spindrift
wings of cirrus were drawn to the hawk
revolving maelstrom sky.

He pointed to the killer whale,
she, a woman dressed in shadows;
neither wanted to think of their
love in ruins, the war that lurked
like an owl keen to swoop
their dens of separate silence,
leave them stranded in estranged night.

(First published in New York Quarterly)



From Buoy on the Water (chapbook)

Behold

I am real,
and separate

A mirror needs light,
I do not.

Instead
I reserve the right
not to shed my soul
as one might
remove one's clothes
before a shower,
or at the respective hour
kneel.


How Life

How life
I love

how it
at those times

when it hits you
Oh hits you between

         Love

How it can
shake everything

and you up so.


Music and the Birds

The way
     everything
            returns

The music
     and the birds

Grace notes
     riding down
            a rift of wind

                          . . . a bird's
                soaring
     slant

Wrinkles
     woven
into hoary brow of sky

. . . The                          of years . . .
              twisted trails
 
         razored into mind