Gravity

I write in longhand.
I do not know what gravity is.
Something draws us together.
It is not deep within or enveloping us.
Nor is it out there.
This drawing together is our doing,
yet we do not know it at all.

Snow and ash falling together
and dust in air
are simply distractions.
an energy, a physics unknown draws us together.
5/2008

A Night You Needed Me

I lay with you last night
asking why I want I want I've wanted you, you, yes, you,
and yet my only comfort is to hold you though I'm roused;
just to breathe in sync for hours while you sleep,
to think, to reminisce, to try to find my secret key
to your heart, my heart that now I realize is brass.

Your fox-rimmed, hooded leather costume mystifies me
till I walk behind you, your naughty womanhood,
costumed in a youth you do not need for me, for anyone:
your boots, your jeans, your darkened eyes
alluring to me and you, and yet so wanting wasted in allure.

You ask me only to be your friend, a friend, and I see it now:
I have never understood what I've had to offer you, you've seldom asked,
the you who've given me so much, so selfless, timing perfect in its edgy way,
and now it turns to this sleepless night, parsing breath and silence
holding my beating heart to yours, your electric anahata,
breathing in, breathing out while you finally sleep and breathe and sleep
baring my regrets, my endless negligence exposed, not just in dreams,
my loss so obvious yet not to me till now.

Chimera

The twins, the other voices roaming free in my brain ...
My whole wholly personal family
telling me I'm perfect
telling me I'm an idiot
telling me to share
telling me I'm wrong
telling me I'm bad
telling me the way ...

so often telling.

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.