Alphabet City

…so many little big bangs…

Chagall 2019

Years have passed, you’re still beautiful,
age brings deep rich hue to the wood,
the lathed curves of tender fingers,
delicious lines along the lithe
supple runs, breasts to abdomen

Inside of you – an Escher curve,
I traverse this rapture alone,
endure ice-blue twists, dip your soul,
to arrive at a lava melt
that cools and hardens, conceals you

To break through I let out a long bellow,
deep and rich resonance massages us,
you gradually soften to engulf me,
a warm blanket against fierce tempest wind
that will repel and expel me again

Once again,
yet again

In time droplets gather
Fine dew along the seam

A teardrop trapped in a lash
eventually falls

Chagall 2019

she repeated over and over
…three points cut a line, three points cut a line…
as if in delirium – orgasm’s throe

and I’d say to her that two points determine a line,
every middle-schooler knows

only for the Euclidean
she’d tease, her eyes rolling back

Chagall 2019

There – along the crease!

Incriminating evidence.

Chagall 2019

they asked could I help to get her out,
she – prone fetal within a cocoon under blankets,
deep beneath ground in the cave’s recess

(how far can the heart burrow?)

I excavate a deep and long core,
slowing as I near her, for fear
I will damage her, close there
to the edge

(an onion-skin of spun-silk separates us)

poke through and breathe, I say
taste the air and the light…

(…or let it collapse behind you, I think I hear her say)

so near there, just on the other side,
I ascend to gain foothold, I yell Stand back!
and I kick through

silver fragments of cocoon float into the core of light
exposed through the portal beneath my foot

she is covered in a fine dust, a cowl of rebirth,
I extend my hand to her, she takes it, and we ascend
slowly to the surface

Chagall 2019

…yet another place
where I did not remain
long enough to have mattered

always just before fair wind,
timed so imperfectly flawed
despite my constant chatter

I had a premonition I would see this coming,
twice removed – this not to matter

Chagall 2019

The dead butterfly,
I recognize her as
the swallowtail caterpillar
I’d protected last autumn

May she rest
in the peace
of eternal erratic
flight, forever
upward into
sunlight

Chagall 2019

on the thirty-six-thousand
five-hundred-fifteenth day,
roughly 2-weeks after my
one-hundredth birthday,
she told me we were
through

Chagall 2019