Alphabet City

The breadcrumbs I drop today
help me to find my way home
many years from now.

Chagall 2018

Tiniest spider inside the bud,
a mite – no more than that,
scurrying about atop my palm,
a partially stoned arachnid.

Chagall 2018

A quiet place, this long hall,
a proscenium, this pleated space
before the blank page, the curtain arch
ahead of acts, beyond the music,
below the loge, on stage: soliloquy

Set about pinholes of stars,
golden ages peek through a vast sky adorned
in cold-air, brushed blue, velvet night unwritten,
each moment implicate order, now
implying then, such is light

I can dance but I’m better in rain,
shake my shoulders and stomp, puddles
erupt to wash slow waterfalls
away

I love my galoshes, twirling topsy like a
dervish gone turvy, along slick walks I slide

I waltz in warm rain –
One-two-three SPLASH!-two-three!

With face upturned, the storm runs over me,
the seep of the Holy Ghost runs as a warm shock
from the top of my head down my spine to my toes

Aqueous, I am reborn in the moment yet to come,
the then

Chagall 2018

Her poetry is a ransom note,
an invite to an egg hunt

Obstacles in course while
she’s outside harm’s way

Her language is elliptical hedgerow
I sidle along, groping for opening

A search for gulps of air,
oblige me

I’ve got to come up
when I sink

Afloat I yearn
to dive down

My time is in the hold,
the capacity of lungs underwater

My capricious whim:
to let go and breathe

Chagall 2018

assumed poignant,
after all she’d written it

this one conceived
in evening dress

it was her
to don black tie

I loved her best
sans anything

without time
or place

easy
in orbit

sleek along
sharp lines

Chagall 2018

Where have all the hummingbirds gone,
they’ve left behind sweet nectar,
nothing where their hearts beat madly once in hover!

away to the treetops, backwards dizzy
spiral to earth in a flash

in a beat the wink of an eye

I wonder where hummingbirds go when they disappear,
eyes awash with honey dreams, moonbeams,
clover, the scent of love

the smallest atop time
beats more than ever, the vibrant heart upside-down

thirteen licks from a tongue each second

Ruby-throated, sips balm, salvia,
honeysuckle, snapdragon, a body
run hot with a need for feed

with speed comes predisposition to leave, to migrate,
urged from deep in calls to another day

alee entwined in lichen, amid gossamer
lost high in treetops

aerially alive

Chagall 2018

She asked could I validate her stone,
a nocturnal perspective

I told her I would,
“I would,” she echoed

Ballast is a thing
to discard, baggage on the trek

A one-track trick
she’d endeavor to remember
when hearts held fast in amber
ere embers

“All too many.”

She said,
“…it’s a crime to rhyme.”

“Maybe,” I pondered
“Maybe next time?” she lilted
quizzingly lyrical

I roll her around
in my mind, my mouth
my blood a roil

Viscera expands
to engulf the whole plain

“I’m thirsty. You thirsty?” she asks
and pours cool water from a blue clay ewer

She sees I am confused by
the sudden appearance of sky and wind

“You knew all along!”
“Wrong. Not all along.”

Well, just recently then
I succumb to her engulf

Swept windblown in dramatic arc
stretching tendon to body

En pointe
and flex

She and I are all the world
after all

Chagall 2018

Since it was so similar to that,
they chose to call it that,
and so fulfilled
the prophecy.

Chagall 2018

I sense now
we are all on an orb-ride.

Slow down, dance
the waltz in space with our star.

I was old before I knew that
these were suns too.

We are near in light or
dark from far away.

Somewhere it’s forever morning
while elsewhere twilight forms.

We fall more than we orbit,
than we bargain for.

Like a coin comes to rest
in the dying throe of its wobble.

Chagall 2018

I can’t stay awake
Lord don’t let me sleep

I mustn’t fall helpless
shut lids under wraps

In a world alee
not really happening

The wanton
ways of the night poacher

Who seeks
tusk and scrimshaw

At the cusp
where thought concedes

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
life is so surreal

Chagall 2018