Alphabet City

She asked if I would please come down from the parade,
home from the water where hope flows slower than time,
back to where it all began to all begin, to be all in
one final moment momentarily lapsed. And each passing
day is a cedilla underscoring existence like LaFaro’s
thick bass one summer under Evans at the Vanguard.
Apart from all living things, everyone is fine,
at least that’s what they tell me. I get lost in my
search and then look for a way to return to the search
above me; sky is potentially below so to fall is to fly.

© Chagall ∞

No wind
still arbors
living trees
in repose

Docile shaggy creatures
unwashed but scented
deeply of Mother
breathing

Absorb light
emit air
knee-deep
vernal pools

I am the sound
of the haze that’s risen
each morning heat cast
in winter chill

I am hope
pervasive

Chagall 2015

Today, a red-tail hawk took off
from its high perch in the white birch,
with enough downward thrust to break
the limb free from the tree’s body.

The heavy timber in free fall
shatters boughs jagged at the trunk,
crisp splintered pops, thick bones breaking.
hurled to the ground like body-slams.

Old sunlight beams through the new gap,
illuminating fine sawdust
left to hover in afterglow,
to float as do mists of passing.

I sit on pines’ dried-out needles,
last year’s vintage, weathered copper,
matted thick and aromatic;
when I was younger, I’d sleep here.

Stars then dominated the sky,
speckled cutouts of hydrogen,
strewn across space more void than black,
echoing sight as well as sound.

I howled and yelped at the night’s souls,
my own peculiar assertion
to the panoply of creatures,
that I also wept among them.

Then the rhythms were always prime
numbers of beats in…