Alphabet City

I like to imagine 
she smiled, even laughed, 
her folly, rolling, the gentle hill,
shoulder o’er shoulder to rest 
where azalea meets lawn, face-up, 
the warm sun.

A bird sings,
pretty pretty pretty

The voice 
of the wind,
alluring, contralto.

Light brushes
on the canopy,
like cymbals,
keep time.

A damsel and a dragon-
fly flit away, stutter-step, near-
collision mid-air.

She unfolds,
blossom and pulse,
at the center, the source:

The aroma of grass
newly mown, pink buds open
against the blue.

And the clouds.

cc: Chagall 2025

Hummingbird,
I love you.

Flitting at the feeder, 
sipping sugar-water. 

A long quenching draft. 

You hover high, low,
left.  Right in front of me. 

Then lift-off — 
I watch you ascend;

I trace your zigzag, 
emerald and scarlet 
against shadowed pine,

until you meld 
with the sky and I 
see you no more. 

Away 
to southern clime. 

One full night, alone in flight…

Will you remember me,
the lilac, the holly left behind?

Someday I will 
fly beside you.

Under new constellations. 

Never more alive than
when in the warm updraft with you,
the moon on the gulf below,

and plentiful nectar near. 

cc: Chagall 2025

I should
sketch this rather
than write it.

Paint or sculpt it
even; 

odd…the music leaves
no trace, like a lyric and a score do,

I’d sing it,
not unlike a tree.

A sky is all
I need; a bright
wash of light,
sweet lemon near
the edges where
the senses and color
bleed.

I can always paint
this poem, this page, 
this book in my hand,
in my mind looking down
at these steps, 

gazing up
from this world, this pen, 
this brush, this bow, and
I live on.

cc: Chagall 2025

This is the morning of the long shadow,

the prelude to high noon, the evening of the banshee,

the dulcet pour of tears.

Around and ‘round, and when it’s dawn,

does the spirit rise?

The rain-trodden smile of Hope

peeks above her upturned collar,

below crinkled eyes along the crooked path,

searches for home, a quest for the hearth,

an urn for the soul…a table for two.

A one-way journey to an earlier moment,

and the one before that, the cascade of regret;

a sweater held up to the face, an inhale,

a longing.

How many pins can you stab

in the heart of a dancing angel?

See the cherubim flail on the lance,

run through when the light is lost,

when the end-day sirens blow,

and time runs down on slow dancers.

This is the melody of the canopy: the brush and bristle

of leaves and the wind’s whistles. I am enthralled

by the vigor of the spry zephyrs found here,

the overhead murmur of starlings. I dance a jig

on the head of a pine, atop its thistles.

From this vantage, silly and giddy,

I see all of creation.

At last, something to have died for.

So many objects in my life that I can no longer arrange or make right:

a knife, a bag, a clip, a tin, a half of this, a vial of that. 

Thrown here, about and there: a case, a  wire, an envelope, an unpaid bill…

crumbs. 

I fail to align these, to order them, to impart symmetry or pattern, only random strewn clutter,

the haphazard descent of things that fall where they may, where they might, when they can.

When all is said and done, after all is unspoken, when all is naught . 

Nary a pair or a trio or a quartet of anything anywhere any longer. 

The brevity of the silence rambles on, stalks my meandering, a dark figure in an alley, in the shadows beneath the muffled scream. 

The howl of a rooftop banshee, dulcet and wet in the downpour. 

This is the coming of the age, the upturned eye, the rain-trodden smile of hope. 

To sky, always dreaming, to a star never shone, to a universe, despite its eternal course, yet to collide. 

At the top, there is no friction, only free fall, where the Earth rushes to meet us

A failed glider knows, the last drop’s hardest, but such a sweet kiss touching ground. 

cc: CC 2025

I’d rather die at home,
before the picture frames,
the thirsty plants,
the unequivocal candlelight,
fade away.

The slanted ray of morning sun
lights my tree, the garden rake
and dripping hose,

the self-seeding blossom
that comes every year,
tall and straight since
the youngest stalk took hold,

in the earth,
deep and firm.

cc: CC 2024

My Christmas tree stays up until the spirit of the season leaves me. There are years my tree doesn’t come down.

cc: CC ‘24

How wonderful that
should anything stain,
‘twould be a berry

cc: CC ‘24