twists, turns
Hard rains and assessing
hard losses--
there's so much wrong!
Yet I love, at least,
these quick, easy routes,
studied out twists and turns
I keep making up
to find my way
in this new city
in search of things I treasure,
things I need.
So few are impressed!--
The others are, alas,
in such a rush;
I learn these elessons--
yet how much I've risked
and how much I've confessed
just hoping for more!
DISTRACTED SUMMER
These sad, hungry days
find no magic solitudes
in hot gusts, sweet blooms;
distracted from centered truth,
how I miss... being in love?
RACE-WALKING SUMMER
Great, deep gasps, sobs-like:
Breath-in, one step--breathe-out, five;
hard, mindfully hard
miles: To make my heart wide
for all our lives' brokenness...
STILLED
Do sages realy believe
desire confounds joy
yes stray searchingly
from notebook, Thai tea
to saddled, festooned elephants
stilled in brassy parade
Did such wonders ever exsist?
ON PICKING UP THE PHONE ON SATURDAY...
SO WHAT ARE you going to do on your B'day, Dad? OH NOT much, I told her--have vegetarian lunch with the vegetarian group.. I FORGOT to mention the morning discussion on Taoism I'm going to try to chase down a woman I had a nice chat with last week but was too shy to ask out at the time; I didn't mention the other woman I'm hoping to meet again at the vegetarian lunch--or the inappropriate woman still on my crush list at the pantheism/Taoism discussion... MY DAUGHTER ALSO WISHED ME a happy mothers day, because, she says she now realizes, I've been both her mother and father as a single parent from when she was a kid, a rcognition I'd been waiting for without ever saying so, for a long time...AND STILL I'M SOMETIMES TOO SHY, I've just let her find out, sometimes too shy on first meeting to ask an eligible single woman for a date after 69 years, and she, my daughter, doesn't even blink; how well she knows me, I'm realizing, how well she knows me...
ALL JAZZ ALL THE TIME
My precious wondrous acuity...
part of some indescribably stunning, stupendous, giddy, gawking awareness
barely hinted at in glimpses?
...and my tepidly humdrum, ardouslu grasped, meandering ratiocinations
considerations--
pieces of a grand, benificently fiendish, fireballish, meralgactic, shudderingly
timpani-charged, shrewdly nuanced, conspiratorial cusation
that the mightiest
or even the very tiniest exdrescence anywhere
just can't effervece without?
...And my excrucitatingly, poignantly heart-rendering emptiness
splinter of some sparking, hrutloing all pervasive, blustering, spontaneous spatiality
and mine the freedom to say: Belive all this--or not?
What are these ruminations, fulminations, speculations, imaginations?
What elese can they be?
WHat else can it all be?
But some bursting, startling dream -riff music inside some plucking, percussing,
tootling, trumpetimg, tune-doodling, trembenling somebody somewhere
that just had to get out?
SUNDAY AT TERILLI'S (for Merchel, Hope and Gloria)
I always remember the familiar
shooting--star toning--vibrating,
in sight of somber green
awning, yellow lettering,
against quiet reds and greys
across Greenville Avenue
framed here in this huge window
and me looking, wondering:
What ever on earth did I do
before--after so many
great and lesser disasters--
What ever on earth did I do
Before I found
the three of you
creating the universe
here in this old place
(as well as otherwheres
I can't even remember)--
What ever on earh did I do
Before I found you
To bring life
To my eyes?
MARCHEL IVERY
A friend--a best freind
to me, toothers--
dying Tuesday,
his body breaking down,
as I built mine up. unknowing,
jogging heartily.
also on Tuesday.
after restless sleeps--
remembering we chatted
Friday at the deli
where he was getting food to go
with his four-year-old.
" daddy, look who's here. " she said
and he shook my hand,
his eyes bright, telling me
about chances for new gigs
with his reconfigured
be-bop quartets-
now gone, gone from everywhere,
best friend bop-gone, sax-gone, song-gone,
and everything else I know
a stranger in the house.--
Who will hear this?
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