Cape
of Good Hope you find
yourself in Paris
backing The Hot Five.
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum.
As you ascend
the crescendo,
please help us touch what remains
most human. Your absence
brings us one step closer
to the whole cloth
& full measure.
We’re under the orange trees again, as you work life
back into the double-headed
drumskin with a spasm
of fingertips
till a chant leaps
into the dreamer’s mouth.
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum, always
coming back to opera & baseball.
A constellation of blood-tuned
notes shake against the night
forest bowed to the ground
by snow & ice. Yes,
this kind of solitude
can lift you up
between two thieves.
You can do a drumroll
that rattles slavechains
on the sea floor.
What wrong makes you
loop that silent knot
& step up on the gallows-
chair? What reminds you of the wounded paradise
we stumbled out of?
You try to beat loneliness
out of a drum,
searching for a note
of kindness here at the edge
of this grab-wheel,
with little or no dragline
beyond the flowering trees
where only ghosts live—
no grip to clutch the truth
under a facade of skylarks.
—in memory of Richard Johnson
Double Limbo
A sun dog hurries a lover
home from a desk job
or a factory of noise.
Car horns & solstitial candlepower.
Another long day runs
with a pack of house-broken mutts
around the neighborhood, treeing
cats on fenceposts. The runt
which sprung into Cerberus
slinks beneath the moon’s mad
dogma, tamed when bloody feet
touch springy St. Augustine
grass where Ra & Shamash
linger at the timberline.
The winter sun is now Bessie’s
“Yellow Dog Blues”
given to you by a lover
who drove off with a friend
years ago. The shadows long,
& kisses too. A celestial claw
bluffs the last sprigs of wolfbane
into hush as “Yellow Submarine”
submerges in the hue of machines
where a good feeling goes before
it’s known. But there’s a dog-eared
season that never fails to be reborn
as Sirius beside the back door,
hungry for the sound of your VW.
NJ Transit
Penn Station
Images of the homeless
& pigeons on a third rail
roost in my bowed head.
Newark
An apartheid of snow
crowns itinerant ghosts inside
abandoned blue machines.
Elizabeth
“Careless Love”: She is
Athena’s re-flowering,
a rebirth of awe.
Linden
Couples kiss under
B-movie ads, the motion
nudging them on—on. …
Rahway
The Taj Mahal glows
through the out-of-season silk
of her composure.
Metropark
I daydream Ezra Pound
as faces cluster on night’s bough—
where did she come from?
