Finding Giverny Off A Sand Road In Rural FL
Monet painted our pond: wind slurring the water, lily pads blurred with white lights against green swirls, the eye of a cataract sky awash with Van Gogh’s iris. Heat Wave Contents
Read MoreLate Night with a Seasoned Poet
after reading Mary Oliver I cannot reach you at five a.m. when you spring awake to watch a summer rose fall into a pink-petaled lake where fishes bloom. I’m not a morning person unless a winter less night yawns & stretches into dawn with jarring songs of owls & whippoorwills and the charming squeak of a bat. Outlined at dusk, its soaring silhouette intersects the evening sky, circling insects and other small...
Read MoreSunday Evening
A man throws away trash and meanders about A woman takes bags from her car The sun is gone People on stoops smoke cigarettes There is communal anticipation The air is thick There is forethought The breeze is slight Heat Wave Contents
Read MoreRun Down by a Dune Buggy on Fire Island
for Frank O’Hara (1926 – 1966) All his funny witty wordy jazz stopped that morning with the sun burning in his eyes so he didn’t realize the danger from a crazy dune buggy yes it was July 24, 1966 and no one knows now who drove too fast or what careless drunk hit him because maybe his nose was in a book of poems by Verlaine or some Ghana poets or the art News puffing a Gauloise or a Picayune thinking about de Kooning or Kline or Pollock throwing sand in the blaze of sun as there roared close fate’s dune buggy forever framing Frank’s own...
Read MoreWhat We Do Not Say
I do not know what led to this, or when it began. Of course I have changed since we first unpacked our book bags on Divinity Avenue, cracking our history texts open to ancient Rome in Widener Library. Fifteen years later you sit on a wicker chair across the porch, arms crossing your chest. The dog watches us from his bed. Two hawks skirmish in midflight, dropping to the meadow nearby. When we look away through the tangle of trees, I look to the past, to those days living on Hampshire Street. I would like to speak to you of that memory. Your sun...
Read MoreBallad of the Skylight Diner
Frank O’Hara sat down in the booth at the Skylight Diner at 34th and 9th and Slid over to the wall At first I was not sure it was him, alive again After all these decades but It was, I could tell from the way The city radiated from his fingertips as he Scribbled on a pad at the lunch hour I was happy for him receiving a chance to Write the things that remained When that dune buggy ran him down on Fire Island back in ’66 Imamu Amiri Baraka joined him before the Waitress came to take down orders Baraka was still Leroi Jones When O’Hara died though...
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