WAITING LIST

for a life like Poe
  and Baudelaire
    every love relapses
  only poetry expects
you to survive by a hair,

here a sky departing
  in rain
you both collapse
in your quatrain
   as birds in the air,

at your vocation
   you have been
on islands of isolation
it's time for no more

for hands up of desolation
 clothe your destiny
 as to gird for war,

 in every location
even in a life created
only for suffering,

    others have time
 for partying
     for outsmarting
 the city lawyer
 any local doctor
   a vocal Tom Sawyer
  every adventurer
 or donor yet like David
not yet a  poet-king
yet ready with a sling
to slay his enemies,
it's your hour to say
   a bon voyage,

 even when making a boner
 in secret or regret
 for being a loner,


poets regret the past


yet you cannot decide
from  this hour
to get up
from your poor flower's bed

or in surounded cupola
where the birds are
or in the water's splendor
 of your starry sunset

know your words will outlast
as paroles of
   what is beautiful in the past
      from all what has been nursed
even profoundly immersed
taken in your pride
 
when cursed or damned
you strive to be loving

 as immortality.
 

WATCHING OTHELLO

What clamoring for love
and saving justice
thinking of Paul Robeson
denied so much endeavor
yet your splendor
as an actor in Othello
changed us forever
in a future tomorrow
as you emerge
into our being as part
of a memory here
as your words verge past us
in Shakespeare.

WORK OUTS

You work out

on your own body 

with armor

     of l'amour

only love changes for

the good 

of language

here limping on the earth

until we reach like Orion

for our own sign or Sion

on our back benches

speaking in English

and French

like strangers

breaking our heart

on river or marriage beds

with a spell of acting

on the pages,stages

as acting Hamlet or Hal

in understudy outrages

from bourgeois appearances

of forsaking the chances

     in taking parts

of the immortal.

NO MORE

No more forced sausages
in language
landing on the ages
as Villon knew
the earth is messed up
already with two cups
of porridge's few dishes
with man's selfish wishes
of eating salmon
instead of tuna fish
sandwiched on toast
forget the food inspector
poets have their own director
and lie detector,
Villon,
let's just drink on!

THE SILENT MILE

Facing a Boston marathon
in memory
of your friend's passing
days fool you
like an embrace
of spring's procession
on a canvas of belts and jackets
lining up
by your running shoes
as a seagull cries and sings out
overhead for you
in a sun's hostage
resting for a moment
to tie your open laces.

WANTING TO BE ALIVE

The tombstone of a friend

in an image of the wounded

whispers breath

of the wind

with words returning back

a thousand years

in the sun's glances

of lamentation

the spring disquiets

dazzling the waters

of our tears.

SPEAKING

Speaking in the name
beyond all names
what is providential
of our full poet's
potential and material
as the word of language
upon the silence of a creche
when our god's fresh blood
made into our sun's flesh
from sling, skin and page
in the twisted body
of a conscience's rage
with the flame of heart
into a disciplined mind
running by to do our part
in our age's concave sin
of being unkind.

THE FIRST POEM

In nature
of a chord
and nomenclature
the grace of solitude
from a diluvian mood
of flood on the horizon
from the earth's denizens
of up and coming citizens
some east or west of Eden
like blessed Daniel
among the wild beasts
in the lion's den
he still heard from a loyal king
with a crown of Royal lineage
of Sion who saved him,
like the martyr St. Stephen
we listen to the son's word
with an absent question
in answer of a suggestion
we renounce the enemy
of our nature's soul
against all causes of bigotry
in the laws of liberty
from Babylon's sentry
in the Puritan's guessing ways
of unfriendly guests at Sodom
as in John Milton's entry
for a haven's kingdom
of heaven's press freedom.

THE LAST POEM

After all you have done
from your children's wrens
to your false gods
made as bird bird
or into sons of suns
and saint Anselm
and Ambrose
rose in Chelm
after or in the name
of a saint's sinner
getting in before dinner
after Pound pounding
on his gnostic table of laws
slain into pieces of flesh
from Pisces, Osiris and Isis
as Cain and honorable Abel
before the foundation's pause
along the world's tablets
and capsules in space
shot down for small minds
in a cast of large egos
offering eggs in fires foot warmed
burnt down in crystal nights shame
the cries and sirens
will never cease
not until world peace
is declared and learnt by heart
and one child's life spared
in a creche
without any Assyrian piety
Arian heresy or false Aryan pity
and time will not go off message
in Einstein's able formula
others will try to escape
embedded in a Vatican's charisma
in hidden fifth columns
of art and gold stolen watches
from the night's black air
in the second World War
and sold to king Arthur's
highest bidder's on round tables
we are snared in our middle ages
and sold as maximum profit
from Marx's marks of middle ages
on the last few material pages
of a prophet smuggled from Vienna
Dr. Freud, the id has made us annoyed,
and what of all the make-up
vain imaginations,
walking by fourteen stations
having rations, rationale, miracles pale
before fake mirrors of green horses
on twenty centurions of Siena earth
ready to mount for the last stages
of crucifixion and extinction
before the last poem
is read over nine floors
over Dante's circle of hell
by the last unopened doors of bourse
a cry rages in the wind and fosse
of all who have sinned
in the cross roads,of course
through precepts and concepts
of their own geometry
symmetry and idolatry
adding up to spotted loss from load
from the dots of Morse code.

BEFORE THE BODY

Before the body
of the world
before first light
of the sun
birds call out
for bread
and shelter,
are we any less.

SECRET LANGUAGE

Against the decline
of mystery
what secret language hides us
in pollen, blood vessels ,memory
marked in hand washing
like the scene of Pontius Pilate
or Lady Macbeth,
or in a Noh play
acting out our own explanations
not expecting
its treacherous dialogue
to reign us in lemony words
or as we pass ancient tombstones
hoping a pulse with miracles
will save our existence
yet how to ask for signs
for any spell of faith
in a Zen garden
as life begins in a yew leaf,
wishing to be on Odysseus' ship
over a convex sea to be beach blue
or at our canvas to show no madness
yet here we suspect former
atomic particles
may still sparkle the next day.

NUMBERS

Numbers on your arm
and as as boy
taking a haircut
ask him
what is germane
and he sings out to me
(as we were alone
in the shop)
a cantorial hymn
in ancient study
with the praise worthy voice
of an hallel angel
taken in earthy cruelty
from murderous fingers
admitting of death
from a profanity
unwilling to speak about.

TRAKL'S JOURNEY

Dowry of nature
  passes on and outside
  unyielding nature
   obscura of time passed
    when vetted
 in words from Romance
   languages on loan
  outside history's conviction
     opined as  discouraged paradoxes
  and your own
    phantom blood lines
  in disquiet compensation.

THE OPEN FRIEND

To envision its being here
enough we know
in a flash,
the crossroads into language
dated to the eye
of proverbial words
    in mixed company
        maxed out
 to the pronouns
   of injecting matters
of your own hand
  drawing in latitude circles
   of their own form
       in muted passages
from abandonment
  to muted tones
of communication's
concealment

never obscured
 by contemplative energy

  in pure sculpture's

body into gravity


 

MOTHERWELL'S SPAIN


You are our own memory

out of incognito voices

painting the earth's

graffiti wall

in a corsair's cry.

CLARK COOLIDGE'S LIPS

Abandoned speech

on training wheels

through features

in resinous contents

of a pioneer.

BRAQUE'S EYE

His world is our wound

a dialogue of  color

as crystal interpretation

whose shapes sing out

to the hanging gardens

and gaping icicles

of art's relativity.

PICASSO'S SHADOWS

Being so in vertiginous color

in this planet's alphabet

interrogates history

that no victim of fascism

is in language of art forgotten.

DUNCAN'S FRIENDS

Calculated progeny

your friends turn around

for your multiple themes

part of the past

believing in your life

beyond death

taking leave by

a tomb of a poet

from caves

of grit and tears.

CREELEY'S TIME

Injecting lines

from a dusk's magical wave

becomes the ink dreams

in a leaning flower

back of your hand

planting a minimal miracle

of a prodigal poetry

unseen before.

READING THE AUGUSTANS


Enjoying the Latin's
Ovid, Horace,
Virgil and Propertius
prepared in a Golden Age for us
we turn to the Norton anthology's
pages with vindicated hope
on Swift,Dryden, Samuel Johnson
and a chorus of Pope,
with a courageous voice of travel
God unravels to fire his chips
set on the Iliad and Odyssey's ships
venturing out to the Dunciad's satire
in a glad pattern on Augustan lips.

READING STENDAHL

Love is suffering in dogged circles

of a language verse and chapter

in a reconciled adolescent enthusiasm

covers a novel's portfolio,succumbing

from an image of a credulous recreation

each morning calls out to indifference

from our sorrows and captures

the dawn of a new felicity.

BACH CANTATA

Abandoned hope

with the Sunday newspaper

my lips gape

from smoke and circled shadows

at the horrors of man

choosing Abba over

the recognized Abaddon.

MONTALE'S JOURNEY

Jet lagged

to Milan

a good day

of a relief in summer

by compensating  art.

UMBERTO ECO'S PAST TIME

A century is today's

 reality from moving eyes

 on historical centers

  of a dirty face.

EDUARDO SANGUINETI'S MOMENT
(1930-2010)

Tears apart
  from her apartment
  love interferes
with your dogged night
   rain coming through
roses that had been held
  a moment ago by river beds
in delicate smaller hands

HOMAGE TO ALLEN TATE

Like his mentor Dante
consenting to the stillness
of faithless neglected voices
in unrequited words
from who by loyal clouds
and stones of home harbor
move the swimmer,
let the seas be transformed
by nature's compass located here
at summer's long shadows
of days among the last snow birds
in glances at Elm branches
when their whistled music
rolls over your lips
from March walks
holding your greensward breath
by veteran death in a memory's war
from rain lancing trees.

ODYSSEUS ELYTIS VOICE

In the adjacent shadow
of thunder
hearing the sirens
calling out
way beyond the quiet
doubts of waking birds
and you,Odysseus
by a becalmed Aegean
wait for the rain to stop.

ON BLUE LAKE

 Sunshine wakes
on my way to a cello lesson
in   the swarms
   of amicable  birds
   and one shapeless black swan
   among the lost voyages
feeling as a penitential young
   Baudelaire in meanderings
  from a renewed nature
   of a cosmic sorrow
in the singing honeycomb
   of morning's solitude.

AUSTRALIA'S DAVID CAMPBELL
(1915 - 1979)

By the cosmic sunshine
of elegies and rugby
you sail into an active life
casting away fright
for those who will witness
a celebration of markings.

ENDRE ADY'S PASSING
(1887-1919)


Hungarian  tongues flee

  in prophetic possession

moments in
 a poet's motionless moon

 over Budapest's spell
  as a tiny angel statue
  is carried in a cafe after a funeral

 a Roma child
with long hair
plays airs in G

  from a quarter violin.

FRIDAY DATE

near the cooler

   of the dive bar
 trying to make sense

 of a universe without
 slap happy endings

   wanting to be safe

frozen in a security suit
 given by the  recognized

bouncer
   with his whiskey core
 odor
   in exaction of my sax
      encased in riffs

with a force of musicians

one whose dad played
in the Cotton Club

demanding me to play
   sooth jazz

in a midnight  frieze

TARKOVSKY'S MISSION

A day tuned into a mission
by a young cold faun
laying in the snow
as the film director,
son of a poet who wrote to him
near the Volga's waters
searches for fellow partisans
fatiguing in long suffering
on a bridge by the riverbank.

FRIDAY'S DIARY

Through French windows
and Venetian glass
cooled in aromatic night air
that all black clouds leave us
for the moon's ribbon of stars
and we be assured of solitude.

PASOLINI'S LAST WALK

Not much

 for food stamps

or love available

 in advance
 except by the language

 of invention,

   who knew of an assassin's hand

   around the corner.

YANG LIAN'S STRUGGLE

Digging graves

  during a cultural
  revolution

such is the lot
 of a poet
  today

now flowers grow up too.

NANNI BALESTRINI'S DAY OUT


Descending hills

  of countenances
   in football

  found in bushes

by vertical cornices

  and  an old hummed tune

from the South's guitar festival

  played by day dreamers
   
comments snatched a chance

meeting in the arbors
 

DERRIDA AS POET

Back tracking

   words of content

  emerging under
  covering  air of night

uncertain of moment
 kept inquisitively

silence rises
   just like guilt
  in language's dissent.

DADA PERET'S DREAM

Mermaid, myrmidons
dreamers of a one eyed night
outside war rooms
awaiting bell chimes of memory
to sail again on water's peace
spring spies on brown twig nests
a bird opens to sign in
for an order of French bread
stretched out on the park bench
by an elderly soul with a walker
as the bushes quiver in the wind
a voice cries out by slow footprints
rain spouts along the Seine.

JEAN FREMON
(TRANSLATED BY SERGE GAVRONSKY)

Feather, palm,
hand out side
the sun's motionless
cloud,rain
strange bird cry
into a desolate void
resulting into summer painting
in a granite greensward dawn
as a funeral cortege passes by
drinking to mourn the unknown
in your exhibition to inhabit
a mortality of urban reads.

HYANNIS MARATHON PREPARATION

Trembling aerobics fill the air
on white flaked fields
among sunless villages
near the Cape's shore shouts
along wavering exasperated waves
hearing small birds on dockside
their sea voices bury us in memory
of our once compact foreign bodies
making us feel attached
with no slips over the starting line
needing bottles for our thirst
as staggering shadows will pass us by
with cameras checking the lists
of ruddy excitable runners.

WEDNESDAY WARM UP

Wanting marmalade
from the old samovar

 in a Russian tea glass 

   with baklava
    my shattering loneliness
   within a cross pieced
chess board
 among the death
of the foaling sunset,
putting my laughter
of sister's joke
between two cat's paws
while listening to Mozart's
"Turkish Concerto"
      my flesh spills out
 its solitary yet avid words
   in my new play's stimuli
in four acts:
love, art, poetry, expressionism
with soothed abandonment
to beat this frozen weather
watching the lobster ships
formation combed
with her baleful buckets
for storage to local restaurants
assaulted by foam and gales
as divers proceed in their trek
in my apparition's vast vista
by an ancient harbor.

TAKASHI MUTSUO'S EXPRESSION


Wave over the blowhards
 spring is almost here
viewing pictures of the beach
in  Tokyo's cafe mirror
        uncorking now empty bottles
by the winter's river running snow
usurping a celestial saki in a hunger
    for a sky glass in words
and you, Takashi Mutsuo
   with your silver lined expression
hand grips nature's observation
by the city slush
   on your  lost bicycle
cruising ,skidding
yet staying afloat.

 

DAVID MILLER'S WINDOW

Viewing in a British frame
     from clear horizontal hands
          out of the rain
         from the postman's expression
a letter rings
 of an acceptance
  in the mail's enclosure
  of    a collected verse to your fans
        in a caress of discipline
 the sky lark   sings out
 for the world's exposition.

ANTONIO PORTA'S QUEST
( 1935-1989)


Searching like a young Pasolini
   in a void for action
painting in language
  in alto estrangement
   from envelope's object' d'art
     dead at 54
       not  posthumous
still carrying in our arms
  his  enormous  poetry passion
     universal in its flame.

DOMINQUE FOURCADE'S NIGHT

In a political round table
    the impossible marks you
 from word signs
 debates  the universal
    in the moon's last night.

TURKISH COFFEE WITH ECE AYHAN

Accepting an age of men
  surrounded in a sweat
  bath housed spring
  excited by a flashlight
  of love letters
through petulant nights
parachuted words
by a cafe
with Turkish coffee
in muscle rippling shirt
cruising outside
near the bicycle ring
 by your lonely neighborhoods
   in rim sun glasses
   until you meet up
 with a fate's manner
of speaking by first lights
still getting younger
from a cleft of releasing
  back mirrors.
 

ARKADII DRAGOMOSCHENKO'S WALK


Making us alive
   in your millennial walk
  as a language poet
      of inexplicable casualties
  seeking like Ulysses
moving waves for us
in our ill fitting clothes
 (as ever youngish Rimbaud)
not knowing the avenue of unbelief
as doubt under girds your implanting
voyages of thunder

in a poster loneliness
   of  going away to the tundra
    in a far country
now you travel alone carrying

Volga's cabin fever
in your lumbar's back bone
    barring out the shame

 of a lost winter
    headlong from sun bellies
      and grey river waterfalls

past peaceful drones
   and sea gulls

shading in unbalanced hawks
   you sea flying upward
  by a Siberian husky

 who holds onto you

with hunger pains
 for conceptual   words in half miles
of shoreline whitened villages
in the pitch shadow darkness

of black grackles and starlings

   eating from Ukraine's
black bread basket
 by a dream   innovation
   the cirrus in focused cloud
  arrangements,
meaningless as sky lines and smoke
  from the childhood Sputnik.

 

HENRI DELUY'S DAWN

A sulfur sun's shuttle
     on the wounded
by the Seine lost
from a solitude of love's
water risen
 lost in the home harbor
her eyes among the chill
  and coals
not named as yet
by the wind swept trees
of night falls.

PIERRE ALFERI'S INSIGHT

Experimental strings broken up
     though understanding  heavy metal
   accompanies a leading French singer
in a free wheeling exercise
 from deduction's sorry laments
 in your younger philosophical ways
   collecting aromas light in seasoned
blushing active disconnected tones
  you remain by open studio windows
      filming your vigils
     without ashes of a corpse
of historical edited errors
      in a staggered pallid romp
   through new republics
     from your foreign tongues
  stuck out to wavering ghosts
  in tropics of eyeless gambits
  from tomes and laughter
     in a crush of scenes
with a velocity not matched
  from a Renaissance or Resistance
          era tomes and tombs
 in introduction.

ELIO PAGLIARANI"S NOTES

Sunshine
in     a trembling
  alphabet of music
 from wayward mirrors
of stone faced reaction
trembling notes from the balcony
knotted by an Italian upright
   playing Scarlotti
moving blinders toward
   the avant garde
an unbalanced painter
rises from his self portraits
in a ceremonial visionary
rising in scaled forces
  playing on  a death march
in the shade of myrtles
   by nettles of spring
blood oozes out
in the wounds of the young.

TOMAS ANHAVA'S LOVES

Over basalt and bitttern street walls
conned with pro gun bullets
in gassed or glassed arrangements
the murdered young speak out
on a May Day full of rain
just to hear Sibelius or Chopin
from a hospital bed
by shiftless eye droppers
by a clumsy open window
mending your time
without fanfare dreaming you are
on the top of mountain snow

THE DAYS OF SAARIKOSKI

War rippling straw memory
by destroyed trunks of green trees
rumors of death marches in April
from immaculate voices
soon bodies will as remainders
of library books will emerge
universal in its miracle forms
of icicles beyond measures
and choirs of sun in bereavement
under the rippling blankets
of spring fresh air.

HEARING HUIDOBRO

Quickly as if in sign language
this morning arouses the bravado
among nettles of yet unlined poems
in your roots and lexicon
coaxed by a love resolving
in memos of authentic explication
rushing for alienated mirrors
whispering from ears acts of life
from an angel telegraph
of wishful rememberance
operating in lookouts
not forgetting even meager images
in a carousel of birthmarks
without an expiration date
of voicing for your open destination.

BALLERINI'S KNOWING

Above a colorful tableau
of cloudy tombs
dying in splendor
at a young lover's radiance
in a velocity's piercing sounds
as wavering bells taper off
Romeo and Juliet
in throes of death
staring above at frescoes
toward a cathedral ceiling.

ALAIN VEINSTEIN'S BIRTHMARK

A running image
of silence as daily bread
right away
in a silver age
returning as an angel
from a Lazarus prayer.

JOSE MAZZOTI'S SPANISH DANCE

Surrendering in a dance

by your bashful screened in porch

overlooking evergreen bush walls

bonds like words are created
by navigating tea roses

at an outdoor jazz festival

your fanfare of poems

communicates to its angels

by aching posters of loneliness

on an overcast night

of your lover's impending return

pulling the crowds

toward early morning light.

EDUARDO CHIRINOS' MEMORY

Pressed African violets
in oblique ashes
of a book of your verse
the rain outside blind
windows of light
in all sea faring directions
playing on the past
in A tonal music clouds
of endless memory.

RENE CHAR'S SPRING

The rain captures
carnations pinned
in a curiosity
of memory's grassland
flowers are like
tourists who flash
by Paris
with the color of white.

Andre du Bouchet

LANGUAGE poem
   bids every book collection
  freeze in margin ability
     leaving me
in an open word space
 of unsuspecting overcast of mood
     swing into  resistance
  to enlightenment

 

CEES NOOTEBOOM's WORLD

Novella
on the card table

 orange sliced poem
geared for a revolver

 in time of precaution
 reclining at noon

in unfortunate
serial action.

OSCARINE BOSQUET

unrelated static
  in a state of mind's
 techniques in sandbagged
    sea of political statistics
of radical tic tac toe
 in an ellipsis from breakfast
from a girl's dreaming voice
of Rosa Luxembourg
profiling an intrusive prism
in release of a morning's bran
no longer able to count
the grams,
your sun glasses intending
an offer of falling in love
with a persona.

MARCELIN PLEYNET'S VOICE

A  chance
 for a canary on the boulevard
  changing blue boy
under your card table
  near the balcony steps
 a routine of grammar
    from the oblivion
of voice,passport and memory
in a friendless  jazz dream
of the follies.
 

JACQUES ROUBARD'S TIME

Having experienced time
though the detached
proverbs of trees
 dying in rebirth
 along the Seine
 remaining in limbo
    when someone reads
 you twice
in a Paris book stall
you gaze upward
 from a speaking vigil
your footsteps past
through winter's altitude
 striking down breezes of icons
watching oven birds in flight
   from your own iconic space,
 your beret falls to the ground
watching a blind pretty woman
snow packed for Grenoble
  with her St. Bernard for the Alps.

BENJAMIN PERET'S GHOST
(1889-1959)

SPHERES, GHOSTS
  APPARITIONS

COGNOCENTI
  VISIONS,
 spirits, elemental miracles
 of language
knowing the evil of FASCIST
insane speech therapy
under the Seine
  torture evaporates
 in porous star light
of your deportation yet words
     trickle out from the rain
 in theater's public and prolific
 streets seen of  the Milky Way
    HEARING IN MEMORY,
 "OUT OF VICHY
DRANCY"
 you as a surrealist emerge again.

BLAGA

Costumed classic drama
    in a Blaga mask
no Freudian human trait
   only a portrait done in Bucharest
  of a poetic replica of yourself
 certain of your schools
in recognition after the dictator
and wife
leave untutored for
his  three acts.

ROMANIA'A STEFAN DOINAS

The dawn offers a canary
when morning and sun
wait for your journey
to sing outside your cage
now the soldier
with a mustache sings
the little girl with flowers
holds her tune under water
and Bucharest has no regrets
when a Jewish doctor
saves a life
implants a new brain
which has only love inside
for an unprejudiced judge
who visits its graves to sing
prayers for the dead.

ISHIHARA YOSHIRO'S MEMORY

A city conditions you
engulfed by truth serum
to location
somewhere in childhood
ignoring hospice thoughts
the lights are out by kennels
of junkyard dogs
and lottery hopes fade
sighing by the Autumn yews
in the sunlit of your voyage.

AMELIA ROSSELI

Escaping through ropes
of Europe's fascists
set for you by the Axis terror
the forced marches on your mind
in Rome, Paris and London
studying violin and piano
meeting the poet
of the Resistance,Rocco Scotellaro
one dark day
watching dark triangles of sky
you jump from your high rise.

JORGE ANDRADE' S DREAM
      1902-1978

Cigarette butts
on QUITO
street cleaners brooms
a Tuesday hangover
from your complex diary
a run on of news
in an aristocratic soul
dissects his fiesta notes
on a hammock's grassland
opening impatient language
without any past guilt
   \of noonday leaves
  from soldiers
 on the march
  and a poet lighting up
  a nexus of soothed lovers
 you translated with them
  across a fence and globe
reaching realms higher
than the fingerprint
 of an original WITH FAINT
   DREAM VISIONS IN THE CITY
 overcast by trolley bells
of a funeral cortege goes by
you pour on your writing desk
red ink in a slanting glass bowl
a man with a beard knocks
on your door for food
 handing him a plate
he is tropical fruit punch drunk
but a poet offers what he has.

VICTOR TERAN'S UNIVERSE

Zapotec's wisdom
     seer of alchemy's language
     in a Mexican  singed life
  by fire burning out
    words of wind's   illumination uncovering
   old and new worlds sun
  of Maya , sea, and mountain
light  leaves of water and the immanent
    of calling our stems of flowering Judah
on the backs of  furious aztec SLAVES
with the capacity of the desert
in his own spiced cabala of genius.
 

ARTHUR SZE'S HOUR

Into the opal moon
 of gravity's loving
open heart surgical wound
  you have reached
for high ground
on the cemetery mounds
of snow surprising all of us
by tins of good fortune
in your night watch ear
like HAMLET you wait
for a day perchance
to meet your fate
in a bathing cookie
from green Chinese tea
 by running out of angel steam
     at dusk of rose lilac
hearing my alto sax
play a dirge
you do not humor us ,SZE
but from windshields of riffs
   along the gallery
  of lost souls and schools
you  can tell a minor chord
of an old Beat
in its compassionate time
of being an orphan in this hour.
 
 

ILYA KAMINSKY

grab his ear
   Van gogh,

he will make you dance
    and celebrate at a village
 outside Odessa a Bar Mitzvah dance
in Russian - Ukranian
 hand outs of deaf programs

   about pogroms on the steppes
and massacres of those little odes
 to BE DEAD be said Kaddish before
it happens with a reaction of humor
in versification codes of the Vistula
to an American audience
on the lecture circuit floor
ALL are memory blessed by a MONOTONY
and silence, not waiting for more violations

   such agony skids on ice
 over the Archangel forest,

in this last Dante circle

here at the last stop
of the nations, California.

RADICAL VICTOR KAMENSKY

(1884-1961)

Concrete poems

     OF Cubo- FUTURISM
   RADICALZED  TO THROW OUT
    THE OLD STUFF
   With Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky
   THOSE bitter muse trapped voices

needing to SCREAM POEMS

  OUTSIDE the IMPRISONED VOICES

WITHOUT FORTY rubles
in your heavy pocket verses

   sold on STREET CORNERS

WITHOUT  fashions NOT in the cards
   
on fire for a festival
for the wounded avant garde

without \rations OUTSIDE YOURSELF

   TO CREATE A BEYOND ALL
   ORDER  OBJECTIVE

OF an occasional less calculated moment

for ART.

BENEDICT LIVSHITS

Victim of the great purge
in 1939
when Stalin's conflict
got a message from Hell
traversing logic to build up
a new fascism,
and you BENEDICT LIVSHITS
the futurism of a hero
was also murdered
with great grief
for futurism
tossed into the city's ledge
for the crime OF BEING A POET
AND NOVELIST.

ALEXEI KRUCHENYKH'S WORD

no MORE
   SAMISDAT
return to first love
BULLETIN UNFOLDED
free under the stars
YOUR POWERS RETURNED
 NO IMPRISONMENT
         meant  inscribed
in surrounded phrases
   of love in the park.

HOLUB'S CAPRICE

Floated visage of colors
of free speech
before the Prague spring
peered into your garden
and consciousness
from the bittern frost
into the May Day celebration
steam bathing in memory
of fatigue and sadness
you jostle under branches
by a playground in green
holding an empty tin of beer
wanting to break iconic glasses
of every language barrier
agitating to open closets
of your blacklisted collections.

HIROAKI SATO'S ISLANDS

Islands
in light
round the earth
of hands in stone
on rocks of gravity.

GILBERT SORRENTINO'S TIME
(1929- 2006)

In the college library stacks
trying to relax,
read your innovative
poems, novels and essays
as letters of a connoisseur
in days of knowledge
from arbitrary schools of literature
in a cool cultural mileur.

TOMAS TRANSTROMER'S TIME

A geranium
on an open window library
alive as every word
turns every pale leaf
in your poetry collection
the lights are silently out
hearing a field sparrow
in the light March wind.

MUSICIAN

In a dim lighted cafe
my sax's outstretched arm
is heard outside
by a passer by on a motorcycle
with a ruddy cold faced smile
before his green eyes
appear through the window,
a foreign body who rushes in
to accompany me on keyboard.

TUESDAY DAWN

Sparkling snow flakes
for the future spring
on sea beds wishes
to wake us
on mirrors of white
that blind the earth
searching for signs
of frosty survival
a cat on the elm
is lifted up
in an absent sun.

PASOLINI THE SOMNAMBULIST

Negation transmitted
in neon red and green lights
embraces the city
saying no to a sailor
wanting a ride
on your motorcycle
with his James Dean
t shirt and sunglasses
watching kids play bocce
and drinking beer
from silvery canteens
as if an invisible Pasolini
was filming us.

THIS MONDAY

This Monday Eve
a poet standing down
with umbrella
in the emerging snow
drifts along
with an emerging
Cinderella climbing out
of our cab at midnight
looking at her veins, legs
and foreign body
as an outcast
with abandoned lips
by the sleepy fog
of a decaying city
offers the taxi man
and myself
a lift up to her balcony
for a vodka and eggs.

BACON AND FREUD

Selfish rivals yet close friends
one Irish, the other Jewish
toughened by a lens of survival,
no juicier gents of energy
than these painters of genius
as sunlight passes over them
isolated in their studio
these artistic disbarred dissidents
with portentous portraits
from linear art at the Tate,
both prudent in an innocuous state
as we view Bacon's "Van Gogh"
where his life abstracts secure
as foreboding photographs
covering a war and on going strife;
and unblushing Lucian Freud
with his Soho drawings
after Cezanne
brushing up his still life
making his critics annoyed
or unwillingly unemployed
taking in our own time to scan.

JEAN HELION

Your figurative paintings
drawn by way of Normandy
in lines of accented features
captured early as a boy
by poetry, rapt in astrology
taken in combat by the Nazis
yet not giving up a life's mission
with your poised colorful energy
in a cultural language to be set free,
amid canvas in your Paris studio
doing portraits of your art friends
Balthus, Mondrian, Giacometti,
poets, Char, Ponge, Bonnefoy,
and les etat-unis d'Amerique
John Ashbery.

GEORGES MATHIEU

Styled Royalist

and self aggrandized elitist

with a French TV personality
show in the less
than scandalous 1950's

wrote a pretentious

"Homage to World Poets"
his infamous live painting series
of geometric abstractions
with jazz drummers and Dali
even claimed friendships
to wash at the feet of Lacan
and Bataille, and the American
Henry Miller and Nabokov
in his aristocracy of aesthetes.

BRETON AND BRAQUE

Acrostic calendar in your studio
shivering paint and words
in a surreal hunger
of a Paris night regained
that the luminous Seine
sweeps your imagination
synchronizing poetry and art
dabbed in white palms
in oils anointed passages
as tiny droplets of rain
land on your blue berets.

BRAQUE AND REVERDY

From your half spent silence
of word and paint
brush stroke shadows emerge
and knotted images
of brothers under the sky's
same skin reciprocated
by drawing
from a language 's repose
of art's voiceless abandonment
into a total white canvas.

R.B. KITAJ'S "POET WRITING"

Great energy on double portraits
of American poets Creeley and Duncan
drawn by the expatriate Kitaj
of his two friends visiting R.B.
in 1977 London
now covered in brush works
of shadow clouds of exiled genius
escaping and dedicating their art
to us who know the connection
between the avant garde,
enriching us in painting and verse
from a still life's
mirage and collage

CHLOE(French film)

In the French film,
with alienated folks
one with a capacity for energy
follows an absent destiny
finding mad false lovers
from yolks of sad alienation
as taciturnity turns clamorous
toward being merely a cover
for what she discovers
as once glamorous and sexy.

DUFY AND APPOLINAIRE

You illustrate and draw
as designer and decorator
as a creator- diviner knowing
poetry and painting are one
emerging in recollection
from Dufy's and Apollinaire's
cubist selection in Bestiare
emerge from a canvas and page
of shaded canvas as lumiere
throbbing with memory
from its premier showing
renewed with age to share.

CHARLES MILLEVOYE'S
"FALL OF LEAVES"

In the rose of Napoleanic days
your Romantic poems
compose in scenic sadness
where music of Bizet is set
as Myerbeer's mastery
flows from your critical words
then with one word's breath
followers shed grey tears
at your poetical death throws
when your nature matures
as one with small birds of air
all you own were miracle mirrors
at your bier.

"BEBE "BERARD

Critics praise
your unique fashion
and passion
for scenic designs
in the Sauguet ballet
as in Cocteau's Orphee
you explore the chic
and even its poverty
in galleries of gay Paris
stripped to the essential
baring grey space mastery
even Poulenc
wrote a Stabat Mater
for your miracle's memory
on notes which scatter
in a flippant age engraved
to embarrass the past
with gossip and flattery,
that disintegrated lives
of artists do matter
and will last.

MONSIEURS KLINES

Losey's film
set in the Occupation
with Alain Delon
as a double mirror
of our hazardous time
a Jewish man
wanted by fascists
yet who resembles
the other Monsieur Kline
cannot escape their history
or our own.

After the war
Franz and Yves Kline
open their exhibition's art
we canvas
their nudes
of experimentation
not knowing what draws
us in.

ARGUMENT:
OF FRANZ KLINE AND FAUTRIER

Insulting is as old as art
for their part
Fautrier had a poet's mirror
inside him,
the other orbits his eyes
to flesh out gestures
all the outlines of skin games
grimace and blighted absence
both painters with equal equilibrium
breathe down the critics necks
in their obits space of time.

MY ODILON REDON'S DAYS

While studying
Redon's allegorical painting
his drawings of flowers
portraits,landscapes and Venice
for reasons I do not know
how this poet was liberated
by him as mirrors of surrealism
leaving lustrous ideas
and fantastic visions
as imaginary intimate shadows.

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC'S "WILDE"

Though faced
with disability
since childhood
you reached out
to Oscar Wilde
to console
trying to rekindle
a charm and greatness
as in your own soul
taking the shape
of a visit to London
with his portrait
posing the night before
his freedom failed
and the sun robbed outlines
of Oscar's catastrophe.

WATTEAU

Tempting the age
with a Parnassus image
always inside your canvas
your components
in a bas relief
with women in sunny nature
of gestures of a slender flower
always in hand
for hours over Gemini angel fields
by hovering demons and gods
near the scenic grounds
of wondrous woodlands
in islands of almond trees
and men merely
as fair clowns or cavalier
by accords of regretted love
yet understood by Baudelaire
in his profound Les Phares,
you were disarmed by praise
by Nerval, Hugo and Gautier
in a time of frivolity
when the opera took on
poetry,painting, music, dance
costumed by Venus at play
in the evanescence shows
of comedia del Arte
and you,Antoine Watteau
took your part
in the fusion and costumes
of the theatrical farce
and echoes of the stage
with poses of insight
to ravish your fans
in the aura of your charm
that Marcel Proust
as critic was impressed
with your artistic largesse.

MALLARME AND FONTANA

In dicey nudes on paper
with configurations
of emblems and spiral notes
embracing body and soul
from cultural apertures
on canvas' shading words
concepts, abstractions,directions
in a time of happenings
when perforated from a surface
in highly sated poems kiss us
from "Paintings of Venice"
believing they are sculpture
breaking stone from past time
arranged in a whole chronicle of a hole
by a new perspective space
discovering in an editorial
from a cast off pictorial view
as a counterpoint to what will last
from "Fine di Dio"
in an underscored modernism
and chords of once passionate allegiance
to the corporate state of mind
to disharmonize the density,
all the alchemy of language
the moving of dream reality,
from the death of a renaissance
and romanticism
to a create of greater capacity
assured in the "Gay Science "alert
of a mad nihilistic age
with a certain self abandonment
of seismic verses scattered
with a seething sagacity
of a once awed miracle God
you both in critical retrospect
are a presaged sages and pioneers
of the new symbolism.

FRAGONARD'S ETCHINGS

Your drawing room opens for us
in chimera mirrors of memory
yes ,Fragonard,
to decorative exhibition
with a hard on
of eyedropper colors,
your doors always open wide
for new impacted implicit impact
on feather bed indolence
of sex impaling turbulence
nearby closeted footnotes
its chance at love making
or from a baroque animated flippancy
others preferring your landscapes
or "The Swing"
when in the past time doldrums
from a lost romance
coming out of a figured expose
or with from a makeover exuberance
you just take a passing glance.

 "OIL ON CANVAS" BY CAVALLON

Mask and absorb
the white on first light
unsettling color
and faint precision
which your expressionism
envisions on canvas
lasting forever
in illumination's gaze
from an artist's wounds
ending time

MANET'S "OLYMPIA"
by MARGARET ATWOOD

No angel expects
the vapor in your lines
no masks decline
our reaction's breath
from poem and painting.

BRETON MEETS RIOPELLE

The masks of timeless eyelids
watching semantic footfalls
when charms of lines draw us in
from sundown's sprinkle at dusk
two artists of sensual hours
and surreal objects d'art
move on long speed scapes.

JACQUELINE DU PREY'S BACH

Oppressed by adolescence
walking into your recital
playing Bach
gave me back
my scents of life
from a tear -filled dawn
to poem gathered
expectations.

MALLARME'S SWAN
BY MOTHERWELL

The boat as phantoms sail
almost doomed
in a coral reef
of a swan on soft wings
as if elemental ice rises
in a body black and red
reflections setting out.

CABIN FEVER

No traffic
only a blizzard's snow
blew the chess board
pawns off the deck
near the lost beach umbrella
on the gazebo
covering the sand on the sea
making us feel captive
on the balcony of nature's wind
by wrinkled poetic notes
of a language's distance
to absent reality.

ON MARLBOROUGH ST.

Here in a boarding house
visiting a guy, Ringo
who rides his motorcycle
to my actors studio
from those days of the Boston
Original Theater Company
he takes dope
and watches the soaps
when he was in the Big Apple
starring in a bit part
in a Christopher Marlowe play.

WARHOL'S TIME

And Andy
was there
and Candy Darling
as intimates
devoted to each other
as "Chelsea Girls"
in projection.

ALEX KATZ'S PORTRAIT OF FRANK O'HARA

Object painted
in a photo by the avante
guarde in the museum
who who won't leave
you alone
but cruises in a nocturnal
balance in a collage
walks around by the catalogs
and holds you back
from observation.

WARHOL'S " ELIZABETH TAYLOR"

Hovering on an island
painted from photos
over a love matches an ex flame
a trailer of Elizabeth Taylor
in the asp of a caressed snake
by a laughing circle
of fans.

De KOONING'S "MARILYN MONROE"

For although years pass
in shapes's oral bare form
disposing of undulating
time, you play on colors
of falling in a man's love.

THOSE DAYS, RIVERS

Those days,Larry Rivers
and Frank O'Hara
in the Cedar Bar tavern
taking notes on jazz
about Lester Young
and Charlie Parker
when there was no
foreign body to swing on
and shape at art's fragrance
just hearing the clear jazz
from bubbles of memory.

GASTON LACHAISE'S ''STANDING WOMAN"

Rosy light
of vast body
traces a nude modernity
in mute bone white
of ideas, fragrances,outlines
in impassable dream shade.

NAKIAN'S "HEAD OF DUCHAMP"

Into the nocturnal splendor
of Duchamp
transforming colors
into the opaque wonder
of your embrace.

A GAUGUIN PAINTING

Recall the blossoming sun
in Tahiti's countryside
through orange and gold dust
watery sails of memory follow us.

IN THE PUBLIC GARDENS

First light over Moscow,
Paris and cooling Jerusalem
of winter's life's
which has known shadows
of death and distress
sowing future gardens
transforming seed
will for spring pilgrimages
open its garden gates
seeking an ageless pardon
when the first bird
on laurel or statue of angel
begins to sing its embraces
a poet is heard in Russian
French and in the language
of the wise sages
tender words along branches
fulfilled in belonging to you.

FOR MY PART

For my part
in music
I choose Mozart
and Bach
as an art critic
there is Vermeer,
it is Proust
in sheer writing,
Henry James to volunteer
is readily in the waiting,
for creating plays
the famous Shakespeare
collaborating in all his ways.

MAKING YOU OVER

Making you over
in their image
at a young age
to believe in their power
with an absence of love
yet unable to change,

Planting us by flowers
of those buried by war
we are only relieved
in a presence waking us
we wonder what we are
here for,

At this sun's hour
of breaking thunderous skies
we wait for rain
without any disguise
using a wondering voice
in a poet's refrain to be wise.