Some cloudy, steel-white gray September day

When cold calms the music of kids at play,

The stoops dwindle of old men, young mothers,

And teen Romeos shouting up lovers,

Leaning out windows of old railroad flats,

Cool cats cease chewing fat, speaking through hats.

Summer's gone; street philosophers scatter

Leaving pigeons to confuse the matter.

Now the sentinels of significance,

Garbage cans behind cast iron fences,

Call you to rethink the empty streets,

This theater of life with window seats,

A future wintering hollow surprise

'Till rooms of noise next spring externalize.

It was late one August
and the yellow light was failing
slowly filtering rust through the kitchen window
and I could see into the valley below
through the magnified hallucination of glass
wild horses eating small gnarled green apples
lifting and tossing their heads with each small bight
--when was the windfall
that brought these creatures to my feet? --
and in the dream I called you on the telephone
pressing the phone to my ear until the ear felt fever red
pressing my forehead on the cool pane of glass looking
at the stamping horses below
as I listened to the metallic abstraction of your voice
we talked of the dead of threads of flesh
of wives husbands sons friends
even streets and benches that once connected us
-- how did you know my thoughts? --
once we shared nightmares as two
would share love then I remembered
I don't have your number
or even know where you live
and the sound of your voice crumbled to static
and the horses scattered

The walls are ruined
Pieces of stone fallen
From parapets; cracked concrete,
Rope burns on marble columns, statues
Broken and tipped, the temples stripped,
The altars overgrown with vines,
The heights nested by birds,
(These, at least, were signs of hope,
Before there was no one left to hope)
The aqueducts collapsed, water flows no more.
The stones of the streets torn,
And put to other uses, now useless –
Crumbling hearths of primitive huts,
Defensive walls of family compounds,
An old stone oven,
all gone…


No one imagines even the ghosts
Of the great dead
The generals and emperors
The self-righteous priests and politicians,
the captains of industry,
the self-proclaimed masters of the universe;
Or the small Joe and Josephine
Rotting in their shallow graves,
The little company men with their hobbies,
The giggling children, the starving mothers,
The dirt farmer covered with dust,
The soldiers who kicked the dead peasants into trenches….
The peasants themselves,
Those no one ever wanted to remember.
No one now imagines the great or the small,
Because ants and beetles have no imagination
For the dead of that exalted species.


Once long ago
The barbarian hordes were blamed,
The weather was blamed,
Volcanoes, earthquakes, flood and fire
All took their blame, among those
Who were left to place blame.
“The gods are to blame,” said some,
Those who took their pick among the gods,
While others took their pick
Among the people who picked the wrong gods.
History too, is to blame, of course.
And morality must also be blamed,
The whole great gluttony of life must be blamed,
Along with poverty and scarcity and want
Cruelty, disease, oppression, greed;
Freedom and slavery, dictatorship, democracy,
All these were blamed.


No one blamed themselves.
How could they?
Some blamed their fathers.
In this they were correct.
But so were all the others.

A white cotton and silk angel
levitating above the floor
on a wooden hanger
in her mother’s closet;
I imagine it there still
though the man she
wore it for is absent.
In the photos

She is serious in ritualized passage
a face made of stone, no
cracks for a smile.
(Think of the photographer's
frustration!)

Does she view her
life in diminishing perspective,
a mirror reflected infinitely,
on her waning reasons for wanting
her willfully girly dream of a wedding
sans marriage?

“I married not for him
but for the wedding.”
She said to me
In tears....
(Tears being a fine emblem
for my oh so sublime lust.)

This is the heart’s small treason
confusing, “I am in love”
with “I love him"
(or my lust for compassion...)

She married for the angel
Hovering in the closet
I suppose –
(A thought to deflate desire.)

He was the fair
excuse for domestic delusions.
She remains blind, of course,
to her own power
to make her men enjoy
the possession of her illusions.

Does she know now
What she should have known then?
Her one talent to give
self-deception a place to live
in others
and rid it from herself.

-1-

The chipped bowl in the cabinet,
The cracked mirror above the sink,
The knife's missing handle
stuffed back in the drawer,


The frayed rope, the rusty
razor blade, a loose leg on a wobbly chair,
The rotted, squeaky floorboard, flaking
and falling plaster, and tangled metal


of a broken marriage,
A lifeless body the wreck
on the road faded friends,
burnt books melted music
water drenched journals


all of those lost words,
dangling names, scattered papers,
torn, cut and folded photos,
families disowned, tears spilt, blood shed,
wounds unhealed, bones shattered,
lovers rejected; funerals, births, weddings
avoided, unthorned theories discarded.


-2-

I have seen famine fire flood war
in another country; bullets
lodged in shrapnel pocked walls,
limbless men women children
and I know all is not equal.

But this morning I awake from
dreams of my sub-tropical forest
in a season of rain -- I am afraid lost
pursued; I am tangled and cut
by vines and branches --
and now, to chase memories away,


an emblem of living is made concrete
in this chipped breakfast bowl I set
before me on the old scratched kitchen
table and that rotted floorboard my
bare foot scraped as I rose
from the sagging bed of sweated sleep.