Swelleganza

Today I picked up a small dead bird. In the hustle of humans trying to get somewhere. Just like me. Cradled it in my palm. Still warm. So innocent. So small. To get here It may have flown a thousand miles.

I took it to a garden bed In the middle of Columbus Circle. Placed it among chrysanthemums. Under the pillar of a man whose hubris spelt our doom.

At the pillar of Man’s legacy of doom Spoke of a wheel I turned Round from Central Park to the glass Tower of Time Warner Deutsche Bank Center Its façade the killer of a thousand birds Each year, reflecting our disregard.

Our disregard. Where to start. Worried about a little bird? A dust speck On this mote of a planet. We boil it. The planet, that is, as we hustle to get somewhere. Feeling nothing as we charge ahead

Despite everything.

Can you see it? There in the window. Our hubris outpaces us our palms outstretched A small dead bird in hand.

He was a monk maybe

Hare krishna

Raiments of rags and plastic bags

Head shaved

Body acrid and

Gold from too much sun

A street angel?

Chain entangled in a leather strap

Keeping him in a reverse chokehold

Something I can’t explain

In distress

He stepped into my path and asked for help

Irritated when I offered it

It took some time to untangle him

Don’t worry about hurting me

He said

I’ve known so much pain

You can’t hurt me just do it

So I did and suddenly

Both of us were free

When I was four or five We’d wake, my brother sister and I To a quiet house our cinderblock shack In Opa Locka, Florida My father gone my mother in From the graveyard shift at Ranch House Sleeping now for an hour Before driving us to school.

These three days Our birthdays we’d wake To the cereal box Centered on the breakfast table Our places laid out around it The tarnished silver Spoons the almost- Translucent turquoise Tupperware bowls.

Our tambourines are striking The same thigh."

The Bereft? The Forgotten? Hollywood Royalty?

Remember how we laughed at that line? Played it over and over again like so many others while Faye-as-Joan chewed up the scenery?

             Jesus, I miss our movie nights, especially now when winter comes knocking the pipes the radiator whistling in the darkness, past the graveyard.

Who’s going to get up to change the channel poke at the ashes and stoke the fire?

--Richard Morrison

Sometimes roused by desires … but they’re desires of before—somehow anachronistic; they come from another shore, another country, the country of before.—Today is a flat, dreary country—virtually without water—and paltry.

Mourning: a cruel country where I am no longer afraid.

***

It is said … that Time soothes mourning—No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.

When suffering, when mourning goes into its cruising speed …

Emotion (emotivity) passes, suffering remains.

Seasons Change

Green blankets the corpse a field

awakens across the road

a white hearse aligns with the hedge

just about to bud a photogenic red

barn reassures us in the distance

that life goes on somehow in some

strange way tall bare trees

loom over two small men

with a stretcher they are humble

friendly warm and awkward

one in a borrowed jacket

they’ve come

to carry my man away.

“Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more . . .”  — Mark Doty

You arrived from a dream asking about the cats, the dog, and how are things up in the country?

Except that is where you are from where your presence emanates.

When I enter the house I speak to you Cardinals, fireflies, the scent of sage All things out of season All things of one season together here eternally.           It’s time to build a fire and move the TV from the other room.

When was the first time you really should have known

you were not welcome in your own home

when she hemmed and hawed and claimed she had no letters left to play

on the board game she gifted then swiftly and surely put down two tiles

with certainty and precision the old school librarian

in front of her son and son in law and spelled it out with a chuckle

FAG