Tonight while you prepare dinner,
consider the potatoes,
this year’s harvest,
as you brush away clay
baked on skins
of your own sowing.
Sacrifice every 8th potato
to seed.
Store the keepers dry
give them room in which not-to-rot
– in an airy place,
a room-to-breathe space.
Keep your ovens hot
and your pans well-oiled
– and hot.
Sizzle a spud
in sea-salt and oil,
thyme perhaps,
or oregano.
© Chagall, 2013
Today, this morning after
we left you alone
in your bronze home
aside the dirt-mound,
cordoned off
by rope and flowers,
I expected to wake
to the incredible weightlessness
of cold and sorrow,
but instead
I rise to nothing
but extreme desire
and eternal yearning
to perform spectacular acts
of radical kindness.
© Chagall, 2013
On this day of noble confession,
I admit to committing all there is
on the grand list.
Though a noble owns up to only a few . . .
sins, that is.
To plainly assert, cry out to Pilate,
that which I am, and decry
the state of the state:
my ultimate
immanent confession.
© Chagall, 2013
It was all new back then,
just the heavens and me,
and of course
the Void
I was getting ready to sink the valleys,
when Everest – who mistakenly must have thought I was trying to hit on her – said
But you’re old enough to be my Mother!
and I said
I am
Earth
I am
your Mother,
now come here and give Mommy
a kiss
© Chagall, 2013
Esther this morning
long distance says she likes me
et je l’aime aussi
🙂
© Chagall, 2013
An inner voice prompts me
with a line or a couplet
and insists I finish the job.
In a fluster I strive
to remember the words,
repeating them over again.
When you passed I imagined
the eulogy, exactly what I’d say.
The world is vast,
you traveled its corners,
as you did the rooms of the heart;
you were best though
in a timeless place,
unbounded, untethered, unleashed.
As death anchored these words
to my soul and my being
there was no need to remember:
they were you wherever I was.
I discovered truth in your passing,
forgive me that it came so late.
© Chagall, 2013
Who knew the gnome was real?
Dancing in the garden
like some common elf,
beside herself with glee
and wanton magic,
curly pirouettes ’round beanpoles,
a small exotic dancer
with pointed shoes,
red velvet vest, not much else,
in morning mist,
gleeful and billowed
heart that she has,
allows her to glide
without missed step
and trample of the fruits
that lie there.
© Chagall, 2013
Children should never die,
but we all do.
© Chagall, 2013
I greet you as you would me
and kiss you as I would the other.
It’s how I distinguish
love from lust, what lasts
from what rises and falls,
forms and crumbles,
lives, then withers, and dies.
I hale you as you would
the almighty reach of sky:
expanse, curved, keeps us
on the ground lest we float away.
It’s how I declare
my love for you, its reach
exceeds horizons, and wraps around
like garland, silver on a gift.
I tuck you in as you would a child,
nestled in down, deep in warmth.
That’s how I assure
you are safe and forever within reach,
your cheek, your lips,
your essential being inside me.
© Chagall, 2013
Around here we don’t bet
We put good money on a sure thing
Until we lose
And then we feel less certain
© Chagall, 2013
Alphabet City 