looking back in the mirror through which he gazes,
moon-eyed and at odds with himself, he presses
his palms, but the nightmare doesn’t stop.
The sky turns and nothing this moment matters.
Not even the cold thorns of the blind wind
blowing hellward, not even the poisoned rainbow
that lights his prayers can give meaning to doubt.
The sullen belladonna that pricks his mind
will not comfort him in this final hour
and no guardian angel will come to touch his brow.
as Saint Francis of Bryant Park. It washe who fed pigeons, from compassion orcompulsion? Alternating current had,no doubt, already touched his brilliant mind.The father of the wireless connection,he’d reach into his bag, half-idiot,half-genius, whispering in tender coos.Having towered over both Marconiand Edison, he’d toss the creatures crumbsas part of some hermetic ritual.Then he’d hightail it…
watching the world wake on the horizon.In the brush I hear the tangerine talkof blackbirds, and, in a crumbling wall’s nooks,the tumult of thrushes halving a bun.And I see the first cart of dawn turningthe corner, see its owner’s toothless grinamid a pile of leaves lit by the sun.And I smell the scent of something…
I wonder what appeasing light, if any,may have eased your pain and strengthened youas blind and bleeding underneath the manywinding caverns of the hellish earth,your starved lungs gasping for a final breath,you prayed for some miraculous rebirthto justify the agony of death.But what your friends could rescue from the groundresembled only contours of a man.And…
of Zeppelins that flew abovethe Kaiser’s sky of soldat grey,his tome forgotten in the atticof 13 Wilhelmstrasse, dustthick on its cover like the staticof yellowed years? Or did he thrusthimself into a muddy trenchas salvos burst near the latrine,filling his nostrils with the stenchof urine, feces and gangrene?No matter now. He lies beneathunconquered soil, aloof…
The underside of the iron bridgespans both the water and the glade.Rusty as a pipe or kettle,ghost trains traverse rails to a ridgewhere folks set in their ways age cheese,keg beer and eat perpetual stew.The milk and malt stored in wood vats,the deep bowls of brown broth and rue,the honey and the combs of bees,are…
neighs of horses headed homefrom a market where smoked eelsglimmer in the October sun.As merchants hawk their sundry waresan English poet, squire John Donne,stands by a basket full of pears.Clad in a purple gown, a tartstraight out of Caravaggiooffers smiles for the sake of art,and rubenesquely curtsies low.She is the virgin mother of Christ,albeit in…
