How's Jack?

How's Jack, I dream, I walk a-dazed,
I gather circumstance,
I gather courage to approach you,
one who said I wasn't whom she thought.

I, aye, eye, am, is, are, tangled
in your special wonder.
The you who took me for
the ultimate lover, more, I thought, I guess,
but whose world extended far beyond
your realization, even though
you thought you knew,
the one you actualized every day;
the one with whom I traveled, never questioned, never asked
your special friends and places more than names.

Are you my Athena,
the one whose gifted silk and fashioned clothes I wear,
whose travel shared and with whom witnessed wonder, space,
the greatest city in the world, from another hemisphere,
yet with doggie Jack in your one-room gallaried art
living with a host who huddles darkened in her room,
in a constant, tv-lit cloud of weed?

No, you are your own no matter where. You are
the one I wanted and I the one
you imagined wanted you.
Too far away from wonderland
you fantasized us in a cloister,
and I imagined ecstasy there between us
measured in between your many paths.

Is anyone there
who has yet better met your test,
are you the object of my desire
and I of yours? In whom these words bring
out some electric spirit we both can share
Are you the one, electric magic paradise
Or are you my electric chair?

Conniesbirth Address

Four score and eight years ago her parents brought forth on this continent a new humanist, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and deserve equal justice.

She has engaged in a great civil life, proving that she, or any person so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met at a familiar, nearby restaurant to celebrate her birth date and that life. We have come to celebrate a personal friend and universal wonder who has continued to bring dance, music, children, justice, joy, honor, peace and delight to a world of friends, family, causes, practices, WESPAC, The Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action at Manhattanville College and emails. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this person. Her brave, gentle and powerful life has consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what she has accomplished here. It is for us, the dining, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from her, our honored friend and spirit, we take increased devotion to the causes for which she continues giving her full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that we friends, under whatever god, universe, humanist or spiritual belief, shall have a new birth of enthusiasm -- and that Connie Hogarth shall be celebrated forever.

Fiction

There is fiction, a lifelong fiction I created in spite of myself ...
love from a storybook created simply by desire, desire to satisfy,
desire to escape, desire to give another her idea of love
and inevitably to find the giving empty.
Then I desired you.

Mockingbird

The crow settles out of the grey-clouded sky
that frames a peaked shingled roof, its brick chimney capped with tile.
Wings beat a gentle twice, slowing, then lifting
so the feet spread a toe's width above the roof peak,
then settle as if there were no flight
the crow stands, and with a shudder shakes the muscles out
then scouts the street and neighbors with quick, full-headed glances all around.

Across the street a mockingbird sits atop the tile atop its chimney
cheater cheater churning turning into female-stopping
sweet jagged rhythms and piercing cluster chords that may even impress a crow
and certainly humiliate a poet trying awfully hard to learn his secret.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Working)

Venus came to me poised on a shell emerging from the ocean, her eyes on mine, defining my definition of ultimate beauty.

An invitation and a need to bring our sense of self to each alone had brought us to a promise of enlightenment from Buddha

Parabolic Curves

How I love telephone poles and wires in the fall. The mellowing browns and blacks are extraordinary. The looping, parabolic curves bring me to my knees. The cross bars, insulators, joint-boxes and transformers -- all natural -- share my rapt attention. I barely see the no parking signs and streets of asphalt and cement. Somehow they represent life eternal while the trees and flowers discolor, die and fall behind them, barely noticed.

Lillian

In memory my home is not home without Lillian.

A Vision

We lie naked face to face in semidarkness,
your body's profile an exquisite, timeless curve ...

We touch, explore each other gently, somehow not erotic,
looking, seeing, exposing to each other
a wonder that is eternal, yes, erotic, yes, ours alone.

I don't know

Once I asked a new friend, "How old are you?"
She answered appropriately, "I don't know."

At a 50th anniversary reunion,
I fell in love with a bunch of old people
with whom I had fallen in love many times before,
each time a wonder, each time anew,
each one unique, each a surprise,
each one so deep I never knew.
I'm astonished, in awe, in a stew:
how can I love, how renew,
how can I thank, how can I be in love so much
with you and you and you?
Brothers and sisters, lovers and friends,
I love you ... it never ends.

Mom

And now wacky am I, I thank you, mother, for 

the days I take no pill;

the oak table that folds upon itself,

a hinge, a turn, a hidden box 

containing nothing, a silence left to me alone;

the vaporous song echoing here from the 

dusty floor of a small house

in a village like so many.

I thank you that I somehow sing 

though rhythmns and their verses 

keep note and meaning but to me, 

through the doubt that song to my self 

in silence be song at all.

Vackra Svenska Flickor

Observing you, two beautiful Swedish girls called Ingrid and a friend at the Deutches Museum,
we engaged in human physics,
two college friends denying the existence of god
and senseless domestic inhibitions on a mission abroad.

We studied history, science, art and Svenska tullar,
and vackra Svenskar flickor won.

We later bought and unabashedly named an old Volksbug, 'Ingrid',
fondled her brazenly, drove our passions reckless
through luscious Europa's unquenchable body by day,
slept with the Ingrid who carried us and dreamed of embracing you.

Sue

Made explicit still, her wide brimmed hat and lovely dress
one afternoon in May,
captured in a mutual, unexpected wave goodbye,
never never understood, never sans regret.

Ginna

Ginna spinning delight somewhere between cotton and blonde;
gentle, sweet, complicit in a prom or two,
we shared an assassination, a post-grad fraternity or two,
a sister's indiscretion, respected in cautions both observed.
Love, then hurt turned ruin by an innocent but uncommunicated choice
found to be the basic globe, cartography finite, to explore for my life.

June

Summer fare and crested day is only made by wintering spring
Growing red till slow magic, supple leaves and heat begin;
The pictures drawn in May, conceived in March, sprouted in A-pril
Bring gawky birds alive, dancers in the woods, streams and party life
pour through abstraction to reality we know and share.
A life creating family, art and home from painted canvas, skin and bone .

Tess

Tess is a female, fiercely alone,
spawning allure and irresistible desire,
a juggler of men, fueling their fire.
Tossing gifts toward their ends,
tossing flowers and fancy,
tossing caresses and perfume,
tossing their way to her, they aspire
to presume their dreams of her wanting for them were hers,
Men too often and their women, too,
realize her power and deceit too late;
Tess tossed her own.