-the old-timer-

The old-timer lives upstairs,

Has a wife there, has framed pictures
Of smiling family tacked on the walls

And propped-up on the end-tables. 

He tinkers with tools in the basement.

This man is older than I am.

His sight is slipping into darkness.

He walks with hesitating carefulness

And one of his hands is seen to shake

Involuntarily.

I don’t now what he’s attempting to assemble,

Fix or ruin in the basement.

He will die soon enough.

He has informed me that his niece

Has been willed his belongings including
The new cable ready television sitting
In the living room.  

When asked what his wife of nearly

Sixty years of marriage, of being there,
Of daily knick-knack dusting, 
Of nagging, bed-making, straightening-up
And years of dispassionate silence while sitting
Nightly at the side of his Lazyboy
Five feet from the face of the screen
Will be left with during the lonely, 

Singular days of her remaining life— 
He simply grunted, walking deliberately
Down the stairs to the basement to all
His dark and secret things.




                      Bedford and Eddy / Fall River

                                      

-Ohio slow dancing-

Let’s not roll the dice.

What else is there to lose?

Somebody in another room

Slates the take

But it’s us

Beating time to the song.

Let the others dance their way through

The same way we use to

Before stepping on each others

Shoes.

I remember that dance from a dream:

Sinatra showed up at the mic with a five
Dollar haircut 

Pencil-thin bow tie hanging off the collar by one
Side of the clip,

Scotch from the watery rack.

Let’s ease into it,
The song of "you and me".

There’s nothing left to break.

I remember the dance in my dream:

"Goodnight my love,—

Pleasant dreams
And sleep tight my love,
May tomorrow be sunny and bright.."

Only to watch the others

Dance the tune through.

                      

-interior-
 beach scene #2

On an agitated winter 
rectangle of beach,

scene-setting so typically extraordinary

I lay the beach down easily
tern and plover conscious 

to the floor in my studio

so that it’s called-up,

that the salt of it sticks in my nostrils

shakes to my wisp of hair

dust-globs turned sand-

grains grimacing inside the spaces,

the twisted angles of my toes

mouth-dried like a sailor

lip-skin chapped in the windface,—

the interior brightening through

like ice-light dropping in 

from the horizon, moon-balloon  

waiting my decision as to tides

eastbound coast at my frontside
traffic heavy street hums

and the local 

city bus breaks and squeals

when it makes the pick-up stop

out my window,
and the walls tighten their grip

just at the right time for the water's
ebb-tide and the dust to circulate.


                                   Fall River

-Salt Lake City-

Forgive this intrusion but I confess 

that having survived the strains 
in the fabric of mad adulthood, 

have had through the years,
warm thoughts of our lives—

the sum of our swift-lived days and why,

with mysteries before us now we sometimes run   

from our sweetest dreams.

Once sewn of fire, once reaped of fire,

with stars of fire our burning companions—– 

we came to the kettle who formed liquid water,

we came to water, then moved as quickly, 
out from water.

Now this journey paints
the plane of sky its blood of stars,

whose restless behavior cast us once
across the reaching 
flame of its burning veil.

As we drown  

we welcome ghosts—

         

once formed at the kettle, once born of the water, 
once lost to the fire of a crashing car in Salt 

Lake City.

     

                                     Two deaths in Utah, 1968
                                    The girls of Colorado 17. Denver / Boulder

                                    Fall River, 2007

                                                     

                                                      

-education 101-

1.

standing cast-

metal still

yet moving

flowing through substance

as if in motion

like bronzed

Boccioni.

2.

who would agonize

so fiercely a sunflower's 

intent?

who would speak to bars in silent

nickel sweetly?

                        

-schoenberg’s romance-

Before he drove head-long into it

sticking his neck out to the twelve-

tone row, 
Schoenberg turned a tonal phrase.

Schoenberg was young when they lined the walls

waiting their chance to dance with him, 

and dance with him they did.

The spine of the cactus was later to pierce

the wall-flowers through their ears.

But earlier, Tovelille listened to all of it.

Schoenberg danced with Tove,

whether bramble-thicket 

or meadow's sweep— both

dancing the one-way road, one to the twelve-

tone row.






                                    Fall River / 2011

                         

-the old woman from Kentucky-




the old man was licked by his dog

in the dark, on the bed, at the heels of his feet.


the old woman didn’t like his chawin' in bed
from the old man's mail-pouch, 

mustardbrown clung to the mouth's edge,

tucked in the fleshy wall of his cheek.

but then

with those loose teeth


pages of her years
fan fast —

rock-grey 

loneliness stays that way a long time.

she crawls underneath the bedsheet at night

dog licking the heels of her feet sticking out

says it’s OK in the dark——
her old man missed it that night,

against the dark-sharpness of the mine-wall. 

her old man dropped-dead sitting like that —

missed the canary's belly-up attitude in the firedamp. 

but the dog’s lickin' away,

don’t know the difference one foot from th'other.

salty heelskin

tastes good at the tongue-board,

long as the silence of the dark moves the old- 
woman's loneliness — 
finds its comfort on the road to home that way.




                                      for Frieda / Wellston, Ohio

                                  

-what his daughters might have said-

when we were little,

unopened,—

knickknacks like glassy Mary

not Mary Madonna beautiful,

but beautiful—

not beautiful like the smokey 

girls downtown

who knew everything.

we don’t like it

when the petals are touched—

when they’re not ready—

when they never could be

when bloodless

fingertips at the piano

oddly knew where discordant

chords are struck.

we don’t like it

when you tell us to kiss

your mouth.

that closeness

brings us to the stink of your hair.

we don’t like it.

we don’t like it.

we don’t like it.

                     the 3 Browns

-the seagull-

the seagull was white-

breasted with feathers laying fold over fold.

its wings were valued in silver-

grey, and rested quietly at its sides.
it was black-backed.

somehow, it braced itself against
the whip of the southerlies which swept
the drenched, laminated shale of the bluing

Newport coastline.

others of its kind painted low-lying clouds

in open-winged performance, 
as the indiscriminate  
polyethylene fishing-line cut deeply

into the soft scale of the standing gull's leg, 
constricting in its biting fatality.

the wound paralyzed and tortured, 
pushed the agonized leg upward into the warm 
density of underbelly,
offering no outward sign of relief as the gull 
stood-fast against the wind, the bite of salt, 
once knowing the freedom of gulls, austere 
in its truth of life.

In the midst of the building 
southerlies aggravating the distance,

and under the weave of the wounded gull's brethren 
gliding in concert within columns of air, 
I walked to my car and there, with but
a swift glance backward,—

drove northbound and homeward.

                                                    Newport

                                          

   

-a dream's passage-

As I stepped away

from the mocha-metallic

Porsche 911 Turbo

arriving at a black-

tie function 

celebrating 

the accomplishments

of a Nobel prized

bio-geneticist

accompanied by her younger sister

an instant lottery- 

ticket winner

in turn, accompanied by her girlfriend

a somber-looking 

teenager clothed in a frayed 

high school cheerleading jacket

with “Sherri” sewn into the sleeve

whose dark eyes could slice 
lesser flesh with a glance

like the barbs strung at Bergen-Belsen,    

and who, 
the day before, stood convicted 

of multiple thrill-seeking, rural

Gas Station robberies
while hot-rodding through Kansas

near-senselessly murdering

the jerky attendants

as her boyfriend, (not in attendance
at the formal ceremonies)

a real whack-off with pimples

who once told me

that he enjoyed the scent of his grandmother
smirked in the background,—

and my bow-tie tightened its grip

into the apple-like lump of my neck

as if the love-whipped Adam 
wanted it for his own dry throat 

but across the street, the Burger King's
neon brightened and the faded-blue

1998 Volkswagen Jetta, well, it sits impatiently
in the parking lot with its missing grille

and a rust-hole just below

the trunk the size of a closed fist
anticipating my return
like a frantic, tail-wagging schnauzer at the door

reminding me that the Sun is up and everything

was the way it was the day before the night of the dream.

city