Alphabet City

I feel it was just Monday,
I feel like it was,
though seven nights have come and gone,
I would swear it was just Monday

I feel it was just April,
I feel like it was,
but we’ve traveled around the sun one more time,
wasn’t it just Spring?

Monday through Friday, deep in the thick,
till the weekend rolls around,
June, July, august marches through years,
summer ends, autumn, and then…

I feel it was just lovely,
I feel like it was,
didn’t you feel life was lovely too?
I could swear that it was, just now

Chagall 2020

Raising her head and gazing about, she asks,
“How did we get here so quickly?”
Tearfully, she says to me,
“I thought getting old would take longer.”

Chagall 2020

Through the belvedere
breezes blow filled with moonlight
remnants of stardust

Chagall 2020

today’s sky is the same sky
into which my dad once threw
high fly balls, small pink
rubber dime-store buys – that I
would run under and cradle proudly
at the bottom of their descent

the same sky I gazed at over the ocean
when my mom rubbed lotion over my back
to protect me from the sun at the beach,
eating scrambled egg sandwiches tucked
in tin-foil, seasoned with salt and pepper
and finer grains of wind-blown sand

(how small I must have been to be standing upright
while she sat on her towel, still able to reach
my shoulders and neck)

the sky we saw when flat on our backs
on the big rocks of Central Park,
where kids still float boats on the reflecting pool,
not far from Alice, Mad Hatter, and White Rabbit, opposite
Hans Christian Andersen, bronzed, reading his tale

clear and blue as the dome over the southern tip of Manhattan,
where Liberty’s torch burned for those coming through Ellis Island,
pick a day, pick a year

I want this to be the prototype,
the model, the absolute reference,
for the last sky I ever see

Chagall 2020

here at this window, its pane pressed
by dying blossoms, I find the shapes
I design my words around

attempt to snare the wisp that is idea,
a hint of what could be, if only

held fast, it becomes slow, easier
to grasp, illusion made real
by alluding words

and yet so elusive – comprehension,
words – unlike music – create suspension
in a much different way

diminish the mood without sad sparkle,
suggest the tonic with more subtle drop

this morning the world unravels in beautiful extended harmonies,
tensions unleash bittersweet reminisces,
the higher partials of regret,
the intervals of near-misses

the parallel chords that ascend almost to heaven,
but stop short at the threshold for yet another verse

all without the benefit of time to provide a straight line,
cars piled up in queue, each rear-ended,
such is thought without time

a jumble, a swirl, a violent eddy,
a vortex that massages us into complacency,
incites us to roar against the drowning, the deluge,
water that quenches our thirst from the inside out,
pressure implodes us at large

and we are nought but fodder for little fishes
that swim about, wide-eyed gazing in at the remains

here at this glass, its pane pressed
by their gaping mouths and scaly fins, I find the shapes
I design my words around

Chagall 2020

I discovered again today that clouds are real,
not in the sense that they exist,
but as the things they purport
to be

one, a dancer with her back arched so,
her breasts thrust forward,
her face turned starward,
as she travels the sky
the wind dissolves her such that
her chest sprouts legs, her features mutate, and for a moment
she is a minotaur till she is overcome by stretch and breeze
and disproportion, ultimately to fade away

another a trio of ducks, I name them before, after and ever-after,
singular as a fluffy ball, suddenly they are turned
looking and waddling the other way, mashed to become a large white rabbit
for a moment, until they too are gone

now there is nothing but sky, a straight-shot of blue
to where the atmosphere of the earth ends,
where all of the gases press on heaven,
like glaucoma on a cornea, the inside
push of air I blow into a balloon

I discovered again today that I perhaps am also real,
not in the sense that I exist,
but maybe as the thing
I purport to be

Chagall 2020

and I have nothing to say today,
at least – my friend – nothing old

nothing to calm or sedate you,
no tried nor true bromide to take twice today

a new recurring thought
grinds its gears in my mind

ceaselessly whispers
there beneath the garden’s din

bids me to enter,
its finger to its lips to shush me

furtive glances about
to assure no one is watching

a doorman at a speakeasy,
the guard at the shooting gallery

an open mind is the password
that enables entry

once inside you find yourself
outside, everywhere

in every face,
every flower

oddly, there is a wind that blows even here,
at the speed of gale force, carries us away

erases us, despite any desire on our part
for it not to

Chagall 2020

love is a prime number,
divisible only by itself
and One

…security is implemented
through keys derived
from high order primes…

yet I feel so insecure
about love

that old dilemma
of loving versus being
in love

can one
love being
in love?

can two
be in love
with loving?

can one love
without knowing?

can two
ever know?

sometimes two never know,
fail to discover

love is also
divisible by zero

imagine that

Chagall 2020

Hear that?
The woeful harmony of the cognitively dissonant.

Chagall 2020

one needn’t be brave
to die a death of a thousand kisses

…once there was a heart,
there! I said sharply, jabbing
her breast with my finger
repeatedly, there!
that was where love once was…

is my sorrow for your future
the same as love?

love is in the eyes that lift skyward

the esteem of newfound hope
for those trodden down

the thought of sharing the road
– the sun-bleached endless morning road –
hand-in-hand, with so much day still ahead,
with you

with all the days still ahead,
though the first few in the queue
are all that are ever ours

a whirling eddy
of faces and feeling,
fleet until fled

life without us goes on,
a snow-globe we shake
then observe from afar

like an Escher hand we curve
about ourselves to hold ourselves:
we are nought but paradox

a pair of hearts we call our own
but never quite control
fully

nor understand
wholly

at the moment when your lips last part,
you will tell me if one need be brave

Chagall 2020