TWO GIANT MEN IN NEW YORK –
one smokes Camels on a billboard
incessantly puffing circles of smoke
to float over Times Square.
The other giant – my father –
points to the billboard with one hand,
the other steering our ’40 Pontiac coupe
down Broadway – Watch! Watch!
Here it comes again! – he shouts
as he flicks ash and sparks
from the tip of his Lucky
out the car window
into the New York night.
Another New York night –
the lights of Times Square out,
the headlamps of our Pontiac painted
black except for thin slits
that guide us over the dark bridge
to our home in Brooklyn.
Air raid sirens scream
as an unidentified plane circles the city.
My father smokes in our closet
lest the Germans see the small red dot
I watch as it moves through the dark
from his side up to his giant’s mouth
and back again incessantly.
Connections: New York City Bridges in Poetry, 2012
JUST A TASTE OF FRIENDSHIP
Down rows of espaliered vines now
in this season cut back
almost to stumps
past oak barrels stamped “Beaune”
to wood planks set on sawhorses –
makeshift tables for momentary friends
who like as not will never meet again.
We sit like lifelong pals and watch circles
of California sun float in our glasses.
Our laughter grows like our friendship.
The Cabernets are fun,
but then the Pinot Noirs become really funny
and make way for knee-slapping Chardonnays
followed by hysterical Zinfandels.
Our new-found friends become wittier
till, the sun low, we vow to stay in touch
then go back down those rows
of vines and leave, forgetting
to exchange e-mail addresses.
Wine, Cheese & Chocolate, 2014
THREE HAIKU
silent flakes fall
wild turkey’s red feet
crunch the snow’s crust
fragile feather beats
against an adobe wall
driven by the wind
blue juniper bush
springs from a bed of rocks
keeping its foothold
Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, 2013
EXCESS IN PARIS
where after sex we wrapped ourselves
in Porthault robes, ate gift basket pears,
and stepped through French doors onto the balcony
where we could look into that designer’s atelier
and down on the Rue de la Tremoille where
someone was always playing “La Vie en Rose”
while we watered geraniums
with little green bottles of Perrier,
an excess, yes,
but you had to be there, I guess.
It seemed to make sense at the time.
There was so much of Paris,
and we didn’t want to waste a drop of it,
wanted, instead, to use it up,
and order every morning
those little melons with heart-shaped tops
and piles and piles of fraises du bois,
then at night suck powdered cocoa
off fistfuls of those almonds from Les Princes
before making love again.
The Way to My Heart, 2017
THE SAND WOMEN
The sand women of Mali
practice their trade in Araouane.
Six days by camel north of Timbuktu,
they bear bowl after bowl of encroaching
sand away from doorsteps, lest homes and
mosques be buried under a constantly shifting
Sahara. But as swiftly as they clear away the portals,
the wind brings back the contents of their bowls. The
women grit their teeth and pit themselves against the desert
relentlessly battling it with wooden bowls whose surfaces are
sanded as smooth as the women’s skin, constantly abraded by the
same grains that sift into their nostrils and lips and form rows of ridges
on the desert floor down which continually trickle small pieces of the desert
in their inexorable trek toward the doors of the sand women, one hundred sixty miles north of Timbuktu. “Poor primitive women,” say their sisters in their cities, “doomed forever to perform tasks that will only need repeating. Why don’t they just give up?”
Inkwell, Winter 2000
TRANSFIGURATION AT TANGLEWOOD
Ozawa’s mighty arms spread out like wings
to bring a symphony across the lawn.
The orchestra’s broad brass and sustained strings
fling out gold stars that light the sky like dawn.
Mahler echoes out across the hills
and drops like rain from Berkshires’ massive pines
down on my ears until my whole soul fills
and makes me feel as drunk as though from wine.
Our picnics packed so carefully lie shut
lest opening them would break the music’s spell,
and stop the train of Mahler’s powerful thought.
While in my heart the music starts to swell
like a balloon too large for me to hold.
It bursts and I become those stars of gold.
Prism, 2007
Music in the Air, 2013
THEY HAVE THIS THEORY
They have this theory that
the universe is all tied up,
a colossal, celestial parcel, bound
round with some sort of strings
no one’s ever even seen,
the only proof that they exist,
the strings of formulae
as fragile as chalk dust
laid logically in patterns
on boards in an attempt to prove
that if this be true, then that.
One false step in logic,
one misplaced ergo,
and the strung-together theory
unravels. Its conclusions
fall as flakes into a chalktray.
O Cocheiro De Tchecov, Translated into Portuguese
ELES TÊM ESTA TEORIA
Eles têm esta teoria de que
O universo está todo atado,
um embrulho celestial e colossal,
com um tipo de cordas à volta
que nunca ninguém viu,
a única prova da sua existência,
as fiadas de fórmulas
tão frágeis como pó de giz
escritas com lógica em padrões
nos quadros num esforço para provar
que se isto é verdadeiro então temos aquilo.
Um passo em falso na lógica,
um ergo fora do sítio,
e a teoria ligada por cordas
desfaz-se. As suas conclusões
caem como focos num tabuleiro de giz.
translated by Francisco Jose de Carvalho
AT ARLINGTON: THE COLDEST SOUNDS
Fired salutes echo
off Virginia hills
like sad thunder.
With smart snaps
gloved hands fold silent
flags into triangles
for women who cry
through Taps
that signal the end
so we go to the cold kitchen
where we eat ham sandwiches
with the crying women
while his skinny-legged dog
with a graying muzzle
clicks sharp toenails
across the linoleum floor.
Tidal Basin Review, Summer, 2010
LISTENING TO CHOPIN'S BALLADES
1839
Lit by candles
flickering on wall sconces
reflected in mirrors
dripping wax onto table tops
and even his precious Pleyl piano,
a small circle of friends and patrons
sits in his Paris apartment.
Women settle into semi-circled chairs
with a rustle of peau de soie skirts.
Candle flames send sparks
from jewels circling necks and wrists
and dangling from eager ears.
In a corner Sand sits in a halo of smoke,
comfortably-trousered legs crossed.
His hands hover over the keys.
No one dares cough.
His friends exhale only after he strikes
the opening two-octave C's in F major.
1959
Lit by the greenish glow from the stereo dial,
we lie on the floor of your apartment,
watching the record circle the turntable,
listening to the tweeter and woofer balancing
the sound of your prized LP –
Horowitz playing the Ballades.
Your arm pillows my head.
The album cover reads:
“a quiver of excitement runs through”
the third and “the main theme...
recaptures happiness...every time it reappears.”
2009
The dimly lit memory reappears.
I see us, I hear the Chopin,
and I quiver with happiness.
Chopin with Cherries, 2010
ISLAND COLORS
Back to the heat
of summer, let’s go back
and be girls again
when all the island’s technicolors
pulsed hot – except for the cool
dampness in your father’s greenhouse
that gave us shade to hide under
and share our brilliant whispers
behind his sprays of Vanda orchids.
You tell me again
your most cerise secrets,
and I’ll splash you with my yellows
oranges and tangerines.
Our stories will once again fly
through the hot air between us
like the squawking green parrots
in the ficus trees above us.
The incessant scraping of cicadas
in the black-green casuarinas
will keep our stories
just between us girls.
A Bird in the Hand, Risk and Flight, 2011
First Place Winner
DEEP SLEEP
I dive deep into briny sleep,
a semblance of the salty sea
I swam in before I was washed
onto the shore of life. There, where
time marches on without chronology
things not yet experienced
are forgotten
and things already in existence
can be created.
Submerged, I explore wrecks
lying long-forgotten on the bottom,
now crusted over with a calcified patina.
Just ghost forms of the originals,
they lie oddly juxtaposed
with phylum-less creatures that swim in
and out of hulls and bulkheads.
Their jewel bodies flash past
in the murkiness, and I strain my eyes
in vain to see them again.
Their movements defy Newton's laws;
their forms negate Darwin's theory.
These depths are governed by their own rules.
I hold my breath and buy into the chaotic
order of the place. I'm only passing through,
after all, and will resurface at length.
Deep Waters, 2012
FISHING WITH MY FATHER
The memory flickers like a film
continually projected on a wall –
my father and I are baiting hooks.
We cast our lines and set our reels.
Continually projected on a wall
I see us now as we were then –
we cast our lines and set our reels
and settle down to wait for bites.
I see us now as we were then –
my father and his only “son” – a girl –
we settle down and wait for bites
and talk of God and space and time.
My father and his only “son” – a girl –
separated only by our age and sex –
we talk of God and space and time.
The images run as off a movie reel.
Separated by our age and sex,
we bait our hooks and wait for bites.
The images run as off a movie reel.
The memory flickers like a film.
Tigertail, A South Florida Poetry Annual, 2005
FISHING
It all starts with a line
whisked from behind
the head, flung far out
across the shoulder to hover
over a pregnant stream
before breaking the suspense
of its surface and sinking,
sinking till thumb-stopped
and set with a backward crank.
Then down there in that black world
a midge-sized feather of an idea
goes to work, looking,
looking for something to hook –
something to use –
some prism-scaled trout, perhaps,
that will land flapping at our feet,
gasping our air with vermilion gills.
Even some ancient algae-d boot
will do, home to worms and leeches,
trailing long, untied strings
and strands of water weeds.
Then the process starts
all over with the casting,
casting about for something
to write, line after line,
to the last line.
Poetry as Spiritual Practice, 2008
9/12/01
Now to poets falls the chore
of weeping onto pages the words
of those who can only stand agape,
frozen in silent, Munch-like screams.
“Oh, woe,” the poets cry.
“Oh, woe.” And, “Oh, no.”
Poets must now wrench new words
from their guts, gagging on similes,
as they cough up dust-choked metaphors
too deep for others to utter.
“Oh, woe,” they say.
“Oh, woe.” And, “Oh, no.”
Poets now search through thesauri,
Bartlett’s, and their memory banks
for words by poets of an older order,
but they find no words for the scream.
So, “Oh, no,” they write.
“Oh, no.” And, “Oh, woe.”
There are no fresh images for the stale
stench of deathly dust that stifles words.
So this poet now resorts to the remembered
sing-song words of childhood.
“Ashes, ashes,” I write.
“We all fall down.”
Echoes from the Heart, An Anthology of Poetry for Peace
BRAIDING
I stood between her knees,
locked into place so I couldn’t squirm
as she pulled each triple-strand hank
eye-wateringly tight, lest wayward wisps
work their way out of the proscribed pattern.
Left over center, right over center,
always the outside coming across
to become itself the center. With each crossing
she wove into my head with Germanic precision
a preference for order over chaos, then added
the incongruity of bright, ironed, grosgrain ribbons.
At length, released from the prison of her legs,
I went, braided, into the world, bound
to her as strongly as though by ropes
or that severed cord that once made us one.
Family Pictures, 2007
THE DAY THE KING DIED
We went to the City in heat
too hot for my long-sleeved dress –
my sister-in-law and I –
to celebrate my birthday.
August 16, 1977,
we rode the bus up Fifth Avenue,
the brightness of my day
dimmed by city haze. We looked
at golden breastplates
fit for Scythian kings
and drank iced tea
in the Metropolitan’s café
then came back to our husbands
swimming in the Jersey suburbs
who said – Did you hear the news?
Did you hear? Elvis died today. –
To think: on my big day!
And then I was sorry I hadn’t gone
to see him when he came to town.
That was before he was The King.
To think: he died on my big day!
– Does anybody want a drink? –
my brother-in-law called as Scampy
jumped into the pool after a tennis ball.
Sincerely Elvis, 2005
COMING OF AGE IN THE TROPICS
How’s a teenage girl to feel
when the sticky, thick scents
of gardenias, frangipani,
and night-blooming jasmine
come through her bedroom window,
and the night’s so hot
it makes her sheets wet
so she takes her pillow outside
and sleeps on the prickly zoyzia
grass blades under the palm tree
where the fronds filter moonlight
into stripes on her face?
How’s a teenage girl to feel
as she squashes the ripe red flesh
of fallen Surinam cherries
with bare, tanned feet
or when she halves a fallen avocado
and squirts onto its velvety yellow meat
the tangy juice of a Key lime
she found in the white sand?
How’s she to feel
when she breaks star-shaped flowers
from the ixora hedge and sucks
drops of nectar from their long stems?
How’s she to feel
when everything’s blooming or in bud
and her backyard’s full
of alamandas, oleander,
bougainvillea and hibiscus,
with only ficus and banyan trees
to shade her from the heat,
and the names of other trees,
Australian pines and Brazilian pepper,
sound like places to run away to?
How’s a teenage girl to feel
coming of age in the tropics?
The Chattahoochee Review, Spring 2001
The South Atlantic Coast and Piedmont, 2006
MEMENTO MYSTERIUM:
A LITANY FOR LOST REVERENCE
For the Kyrie and Agnus Dei
sung by young boys
For antiphonal notes
reverberating off marble floors
and rising to balconies
I mourn
For hosts of angels dancing on pins
and that other Host on the silver paten
with its accompanying chalice
For the belief that it is
what it doesn’t appear to be
I mourn
For prayers that soar dome-ward
through dust motes in sun streaks
stained the colors of the windows’ glass
For incense rising from silver censers
to carry those prayers heavenward
I mourn
For faith upheld by flying buttresses
For awe in the presence of mystery
lying behind a dossal curtain
For smoke from snuffed candles
joining the scent of lilies
I mourn
For droning litanies recited by rote
For dogma accepted without question
For devotion proclaimed without thought
For sworn allegiance now betrayed
I mourn
Quiddity, Spring/Summer 2008