Hey you chasing wisps tonight, so lucky the clouds hang low
in bitterwarm air so easy to fly when it’s like this.
You see me there, hover just over
the rooftop, below you I wave in wan moonlight.
I was once on a sea that was lit like this,
so many moons and just enough time to crest every one.
I love you, you know.
© Chagall 2015
The doctor says she sees Q-Waves
there on my EKG, usually a sign
something bad has happened
to one’s heart. I tell her that
they’re probably there to say hello
to that day you went away. Now may I
put my blouse on?
© Chagall 2015
A kiss is a probe, isn’t it? Tell me . . .
Wait! First, meet me in the shallows
where the echoes go, or atop the tree
where we’ll find our self
in selfish longing,
won’t you?
© Chagall 2015
She said she’d return as a small light,
one I would see should sadness surround me.
No need to search, just open your heart
I’ll guide you out of the dark
© Chagall 2015
The songs are ancient
Sung by birds who’ll soon perish
Sunlit empty branch
© Chagall 2015
Her love reached me in fragments
until I was whole, except for fine fissures
where sometimes I cry at the seams
© Chagall 2015
How creative the moment it constellates
like stars in time set off little flares
I’m awake I’m awake I’m alive!
against real sky in reel time. Let’s!
you and I do jigs on the dance floor
wave our flames high in the air
We’re awake, we’re alive!
© Chagall 2015
I remember now – once as a child
I had devised a way to forget.
Did I really spring from that?
© Chagall 2015
She said she liked to trace her heart
against sparser white tufts, her etched lines
of cursive flues, hollowed deep and grooved
tight tucks over moguls, small drops to earth
each time gravity curves she bends molten streams
over time embossed so apropos of moments come, but not
whether she’s gone – she’s no time for that.
© Chagall 2015
She’s on a stage with the world on her arm,
a tiny warm whisper in spring, always so far away,
high in the pine on the outskirts of mind where night falls
merely once a day I would find her atop low points,
arms outstretched perhaps breaking her fall – I’d never break her fall,
I’d never ask why only. It’s an effect she had on others,
this effect she had on me, precise – so fluently bewitched,
maybe a little bit bothered by the largesse of charms
I’d heard her recite at least one time, had felt so blessed,
so suddenly whole, too alive to hope to survive anything but liftoff,
everything riding on time, yet so irretrievably late.
© Chagall 2015
Alphabet City 