EPITAPH

You land in Frisco
as a young adolescent
on the plane
playing with my cousin's
stuffed giraffe and bear
in an aimless year
scenting my family's wrath
of being on the war path
for my music career
and yet there is no secret
that I am their prodigy
who must devote time
to creating an epitaph
so sublime
it will define me
when I tell the family
on Nob Hill
I'd rather be a poet
or a saint
than chill out
for their designs on me.

STRAVINSKY

With boundless music

of energy in adolescence

from solo practicing
Stravinsky's violin concerto

in a critic's connection

on the last of summer days

under the Evergreen trees

and greensward shrubbery

with me learning to conduct

on a score
at my soundproof studio

that my professor left me

his European notes

besmirched by Russian quotes
 enjoying the sunshine

at the cleft of my window

with an enigmatic breeze

playing the twelve tone scale

allowing me to be instructed

and audited
in my Leonard Bernstein
harmony and solfeggio class

that I will not fail.

THE DISAPPEARED

Do you who love poetry,
which is like itself
the Logos, the Word
in all creation
from my children's chorus
accept an invitation
to hear a Beat poet out,
it is not weird
to think each day
of the disappeared
in Argentina, Chile,Brazil
or in the tundras
of the Russian Gulag
or under the boots
of the Stasi or Stalag
or in the still ashes
of the children in Germany
who had to wear a yellow star
only God knows where
you are.

KATHE KOLLWITZ TIME

The earth fills up
with your ashes,
as your shadow walk in
to your Berlin studio
drawing in sunlight
for your paintings
as you as a  pacifist
and famous artist offer
a canvas of peace
we remember to
look back
at your folio
there is still blood
on the European snow.

OCCUPATION

The secret police
holds your papers
and passport
in their valise
with lieutenant Laurent
in his trench overcoat
as a client of the Occupation
pretending all is well
with support from Hell
in their death knell
of a utopia they invent
with their trains
and transportation
to concentration camps
for those who refuse
or are politically for freedom
and the target to resent
the innocent politicians,
as Jews and Christians
are put on trial
in Nazi style stamped myopia
by government -spent guards
those bureaucrats who file into Paris
with belief in the names
from their own embarrassment
with reports of the secret police
pretending they are democrats
ignoring reality and fears
with the chip of spies
hidden in their eyes and ears
ending their free editorial world
which has blinded freedom
in the reality of war
turning in their friends
who are really their enemies
unwilling to apologize
yet full of sporting conviviality
from their fascist ally
whatever it meant to Germany
on those horribly taxing days
until the knock on the door
revealed their own reality
with their cavorting liberality
by hiding the gospel news
from their good neighbors
who help save minorities
true Christians and Jews
from deportation
like my brave family
to stand up to fascist authority
and wrote talented editorials
who were themselves taken away
forsaken like Jesus
on these memorial days
as Robert Desnos,
poet of and liberty
is rounded up
for his words for democracy
by the Nazi death squads
with a Resistance argument
of those who wear a cross or star
in their own involvement
by throwing rocks at our humanity
from a love which alone
at this monument
will save us for only God knew
whom they really were.

RESOLUTIONS

Resolutions do not last
they are as castaways
in the bottomless sea
as Ulysses flees his exile
when he has the chance
to return to Penelope's smile
as favored lovers
in Homer's considered romance,
resolutions are like revolutions
when at war with Troy
in tragic circumstances
that mostly annoy and do not last
for we are all castaways
when we lust
for sex is power
like King David with Bathsheba
he betrayed God's trust
whom he would deflower
he could never have success
without God and fate consulted
for a blessing,
we must address reality
suspended through adultery,
you would think humanity
would learn from mankind
from the wise Greeks
and devout Jews
extolling justice and mercy
but love hypnotizes to blind us
before we realize
what rationally we could refuse
as we rarely compromise
or cry out to reality
as Odysseus
who waits on the pagan Arete,
or are we any better
when we do no read
from Saint John's love letter
to escape our familiarity
in cognition with our fate
we make our poetic life
full of strife to complicate.

BECAUSE IT IS DAWN

Because it is dawn

walking alone along
reading my poetry aloud

on Crane's beach

except for one other soul
in the high tide
looking like a bride
in a canopy
over the diving board
in her bright bikini

knowing it's O.K.
and not remiss
as she walks toward me
with a kiss of peace
not thinking something
may be amiss
yet she seems so assured
and being Sunday
maybe she thinks
we are still in church
but I believe it is pure
agape love to behave
in a friendly way
maybe she wants to talk

to a runner along the Bay

along the marathon waves

reaching out by the quay

trying to speculate

what awaits today
for our itinerary
maybe we both are
waiting for an escaping date
out in an ocean kayak

for I'm asking this diver out

with a rising quiver on my back

for who really
is this laughing swimmer

beside me in her bikini

not thinking of me as
just some wise guy
who reaches out to play jazz
over the beach's sunrise 

for all this soul can do in reply
is to my offer to the diver

in a deep splash
or try to take on the board

the Kierkegaardian leap of faith
as I have already
secured my reward.

FEELING FORSAKEN

A student tells me
sleep walking
the college library corridors
how she even consults tellers
of fortunes outside the ivy walls
watching her pocket mirror
fall into pieces
having been tricked
into blind dates
or waiting for opportunities
which never arise
or being tortured
by endless questions
in her tutored study sessions
or she waits up
for her cellphone replies
from those who drop her
name into a hat
which never fits her head
giving out pat answers
to her in class, instead
who tease and bully her
with opprobrium
and tidbits of lies,
now she is at the shrink
hoping to think
better of herself
and expects
nothing as the bar
of justice which locks her out
as she drinks hemlock
with the latest lout
true to form
who only wants her body
not her thought
she later stands
on out on the roof and falls
by the dorm window and shouts
for a change of heart
but she is caught.

FOR ANOTHER VAN GOGH

In today's soap opera world

gossips whisper to us

in a know nothing alley

as a shivering man

below the rose's dooryard

may be a poet,composer,
scientist in his laboratory
or artist in his gallery

to bring forth
a new avant-garde dimension
or a quality of life invention
he may be another Van Gogh

who has lost one ear

but the crowd ignores
that he exists
prefers to swim the T.V. channels

for yet another show.

KENNETH PATCHEN'S WAY

Don't get in Patchen's way
in his electric confidence
of Beats who turn us on
in the war weary Sixties
from jazzed up musical minds
cutting bourgeois body thoughts
by blowing his solitary notes
out from Frisco's waterfront
for a new Renaissance
without censorship
from penchant phrases
under the distraught strain
of unpracticed praise
from him who taught peace
for a generation to sing outdoors
with an anonymous chorus
among wings of birds
from gatlings
as people are shot down
on all fours
machine gunned by armies
where death constantly pores away,
yes, renew us, Kenneth
for who is loved more
than you and your  lyrical comrades
mad Whitman, Blake,Rexroth
who keep away our complacency
and the darkness of political sloths.

OFF LONG ISLAND

Feeling abandoned
off Long island
in our navy shirts
we received our sea legs
though lost in the sandbar
by the calming quay
heading for the shore
feeling my clammy palms
like a conquistador
not looking for gold
or treasure
only sea shells or stones
while we recovered
by role playing
rehearsing in scenes
of "Measure to Measure"
from adolescent hurts
all these waking days
where we had steak
and eggs
and some ice coffee dregs
Kurt and I
fishing for salmon
under a hot August sun.

MY FRIEND TOM

An actor friend from Florida
Tom who had a balding father,
Thomas Senior in Boca
a stock broker millionaire
with a lot of savings
who owned four Jaguars,
would always get angry
every time the Marlins
would lose a baseball game
what a shame in his ravings
all over a home run
of a close play at sports
just arriving late '
at home plate
his dad became out of sorts,
like a close shaving
Tom was in the Little League
who ate to escape
his father's wrath
when he was on the war path,
Tom suddenly put
on weight in California
until we went to exercise
at the gym
where he slimmed down,
and we started to get him parts
for him in the theater,
once he played a Roualt clown
in my off off Broadway play,
and a priest told Tom
to relax
that he was precious in his sight
with holy angels there at night
to bless us
when he called out on Jesus
the Son of righteousness
and forgave his dad
for his past madness
in acts of misbehaving.

A FLOWER CHILD

On my way to Frisco
in the Sixties
with my acoustic guitar
and acrostic puzzles
in the back
of my Mack truck
hearing the lyrical song
about flowers in her hair
which stops me
from my reading
the poetry of Baudelaire
meeting her outside the library
in our flight of several stairs
as she almost fell
in her Cinderella high heels
to give her a rebel yell
a signal that all is clear
from her father,
a real big shot around here,
giving her an extra
a peanut butter sandwich
on a croissant
and gum balls
she needing a ride out West
for an audition as a model
in a fashion show
she was a great guest
whom we got along,
everything was proper
and exemplary
until a cop tried to stop her
from her ambitions
on the last rotary
for her father contacted him
on his short wave
telling her to behave
and say the rosary
as he was a daily celebrant
and a communicant,
anyway we made it
and she became famous
in Life, Look, Time, Vogue
and she even got me
a short part in a T.V. comedy
and as a pirate rogue
for the rose bowl pageant.

A BLACK NIGHT RAIN

A black night rain
washed on the windshield
remembering the gutters
will have to be fixed
for the Fall
near the chrysanthemums
in our rose garden
as birds rest on a horse blanket
on places of twilight
I'm paring my green apple
on my way to the museum
to view the pre-Raphaelites
abstract expressionists
who are on display
noticing a man thumbing
along the country road
with a strong curving arm
waving for a ride
on his way into Boston
I'm picking him up
near the baseball field,
tells me he is Dr. Paul
who writes poetry plays
in the style of Eliot
wrote his thesis on Dickens
and came to hear me
at one of my seasonal readings
and knew I played sax
told me he wrote an analysis
of my verse in a literary journal
which he taught in his class
tells me confidentially
he loves to sail on the ocean
his wife Lara keeps kosher
because of health reasons
and they raise chickens
on their farm
has a son and daughter
living at the Berklee
school of music in Boston
both studying jazz and voice
and invited me to read
at one of his classes,
Dr.Paul has a great fluency
of language,
as we enjoyed
each other's company
joined me at the museum
as the rain suddenly stopped.

TT THE DOLPHIN

A lure of TT, the dolphin
fallen into human nets
of strangled fishing lines
stranded in the waters,
help is only an e mail
or phone call away
as two Cape's scientists
and volunteers reaching out
from Wood Hole
try to sedate him in his back
T.T. dangles above the sea
puzzled about it all
knowing he is lumpy
swallowing the tiny fish
we feed him from a cup
a visiting nun says a prayer
making the sign
of the cross along the rocks
knowing he is hungry
near a teeming tourist beach
as  a bird's chorus wakes us up.

AT THE ROBERT HASS CENTER

Here in Northampton
near Smith college
he still visits you
in the night,
after the sun sets
he pours over his assurances
that your poetry's voice
will be transforming
all you stop by
to savor words and phrases
now that he has been translated
to another foreign tongue
in a starstruck universe
from nature's landmarks green
he is glancing at us here
amid the chorus of blue birds
flying from sheets of rain
of an august sky.

VALERY'S RECOGNITION

Daylight as birds in midair
cover the Seine's passages
here under a kayak in 1990
under an August blue sky
as some starlings in Paris
make me open my pale eyes
as I lecture on Paul Valery
who changed language forever
here in this slow danced eulogy
from my original passwords
of this literary critic's analysis
in a wing beat of abstraction,
as we enter a choice speed race
with the crowds on holiday
hesitant to move to the Riviera
we find our heart's camouflage
by escaping the city
facing my late summer readings
and my solo sax playing
as Valery fills your fans
with an eloquent voice.

TED GREENWALD'S LIFE
(1942-2016)

Scratching your poetry kits
into life's media perspective
recalled as a poet
without a near miss
as a modernist language guy
in the bottleneck of art
who died and went
from the earth's grievance
to carve out your part
by a redwood tree
outnumbered by the spirit
in a two cent unworthy world
rising high in the reputation
of critics who matter
about your swan lake eloquence
to give words an oral
or printed chance
to scatter painted violets,
Pacific time
away from a safe house
of a runaway status quo
from an insomniac's sleep
upon a carved sunflower bridge
hearing tremors
from a speculation's ego
as you remember
a California earth quake struck
in a mordant atmosphere
from a fifth dimension
in the sun filled dawn
resonant from your love
of a verb's declension
from shrinks ad nauseum
which scatters your remains
from your reading lips
of a cabin fever's paranoia
we hear deep music
of the nightfall
running off the aftershocks
from my composure
of a cool telephone call
to me telling me
you are gone.

LIVING

Living through
"As you Like It"
by changing channels
for the Shakespeare comedy
there is some static
like snow on the T.V.
as my room mate
of long ago
tells me
he/ she used to be an actor
leading a double life
puts on A.C.D.C.
and not wanting
any trouble for his id or ego
tell her/ him as a poet
I'll go along with it.

ALL THOSE EMPTY SPACES

All those empty spaces
in a Vermont writer's colony
my surreal drawings
over the campus lobby
waiting for a pop artist
Andy from Manhattan
with his canvas
carrying under his arms
the charismatic patterns
for future happenings
as he engages us
in art ,music, plays, films
I'm in a love song to the folks
playing my acoustic guitar
we are glancing at the stage
moving our feet in dances
to the jazz riffs and rages
of Allen G.,a Beat poet
with his sitar and bong
in the Sixties language
with India's rhythm's in heat,
viewing those spaces we see
on the bird branches
a canary flying up
here by the White Mountains
who at day's first light
may want bread or my croissant
or to drink in a thirst
for mineral water
from the city fountain
as this canary escaped
from his cage to the Elm trees
by home folks who cannot
let the tiny bird share
any invitation to be free
for those like the canary
are held in captivity,
yet hearing her song's voice
wanting a choice to be free
we rejoice in her serenity
knowing we all seek peace
as flower children
and like the bird
want harmony.

I'M BEAT

I'm Beat
with a dashing alto sax
on the nearby mountain grass
writing my elegy for
my hip generation
asking my flower child
Jan Marie,
who was eighteen
studying to be a nurse
at the hospice in Boca Raton
who stayed with us an hour
playing canasta
and shared her Zen haiku
on the tourist ship
and applied a tourniquet
to bandage up an appendage
for a sailor, Zack who lost a bet
at strip poker
while I was in Florida
visiting my great aunt Anna
the daughter of Sonny,
Hollywood's publicity writer,
she ran a fancy hotel
with a balcony
where she cooked paella
and hot calamari
always with Ginseng tea
then realizing I spoke fluently
in several languages
got me a job letter writing
all summer
for her guests at the lobby bench
in Italian, Spanish and French
knowing I needed the money
for college tuition
as for Zack the poker playing guy
he married the flower child
Jan Marie who stood on ceremony
with this early romance
so what,
as if she took an odd
chance and got to bed
with Zack
who was like "The Gambler"
of Dostoyevsky's fame
which I gave to the couple
as my wedding gift
also I'm playing jazz riffs
along the docks corridor
during the samba dancing,
soon you named your new son
Fyodor.

A POET'S LIFE

Seeking to nullify all

traumatic drives

imagining on this Dog Day

that life still survives

is a mysterious miracle

like the last rose of summer

in spite of it all, 

the murmur of gossips

bullies at school

the perilous nightmare calls

upon livid psychic shipwrecks
in the Pacific and Atlantic

wounded by strangers
hounded by

false lover sex slaves

with doppelgangers

from many an ex,
the vivid troublemakers
who have double-crossed us

not willing to behave as Quakers

yet I'm fulfilled to be as David

poet, shepherd, psalmist, king

wondrous singer and friend
of Jonathan who was once lost
in the abyss of the two faced Saul
his father,
now I am rather a fisher for souls
of the lost and found
a priest after Melchizedek

hidden in the bosom of Abraham
tempest tossed on the deck
now under cover
in many translations
with those not of this underworld
but like Ovid with ovations
from his wondrous words
in a metamorphosis of grace
with my neck out for others
or have you not heard.

GETTING UP

Getting up
early coming down hills
in my white golf shorts
going too fast
on my motorcycle
having a fish sandwich
with the Cape's harbor master
still wearing a Panama hat
who twenty years ago
resembled Elvis
which is his nickname
who plays a nasty acoustic guitar
amid this healthy repast of salad
kale,romaine lettuce and greens
under an unruly dog day sun
yet wishing summer would last
meeting my first leaf cluster
from the Evergreen trees
on the road after a rain storm
as Elvis' melody turns me on
with his two cents plain humor
I'm in semblance of my business
of being bz out here
lost for time
basking in rays on this peninsula
working on this poem
wanting to shop at the thrift shop
for a new hat the tourists
may have left
as this tall midnight cowboy
hatted guy
suddenly emerges
from the visiting sailboat
with a lean Arizona desert smile
in a skin tight rainbow bikini
asks for the rest stop
in Provincetown
as his cruising day begins
offers me his hat
but I say a prayer inside for him.

THE SEA GUEST

The sea guest
waves me down
in my orange kayak
with his lyrical harmonica
my alto sax playing riffs
sounding back to him
as a musical jazz echo
on this transient hour
of early morning
the sailor, a time traveler
at the barge docks
unloads a large salmon net
brought in baskets
setting his anchor
after flagging a Coast Guard ship
on the wind driven shore
tells me he is a poet of the tanka
named Espinoza from the Azores
emerges from his open boat
with a Lisbon rose in his lapel
introduces me to his verse
I'm refreshing his memory
as he tells me of his Atlantic trek
from his journal log and diary
when in the rambunctious wind
he survived three winter storms
by writing transparent poetry
telling me how he survived
keeping warm under an umbrella
as he grilled a red salmon
for me with a pot of green tea
under a blazing Cape Cod sun
we play backgammon.

JAMES TATE IN MEMORY

Last year you passed away
we remembering your last reading
in texts of experimentation
with a willing eccentricity
against any asphyxiated heresy
of old fashioned textbook poetry
James grooming new language
with the rough edged phrases
in my sequins of memory
naming my elegy about you,
for there is in my recollection
discloses you at seventy
with a lively spirit
in the Amherst classroom
as we discussed Emily Dickinson
when putting roses on her grave.

DADA

Dada fantasists
are daddies or dandy's
to me in my composite
of a surrealist poet
always close to my language
to cultivate,
able yet unsearchable
from a catholic cathartic state
in my Manhattan artistic sensibility
meeting at the Metropolitan
with Duchamp
Picasso, Braque, Gris, Mondrian
who create a metamorphosis
amid the Ash Can paintings
to share with me
with their charismatic
abstract opacity
together with the poets Apollinaire
Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire
to talk and walk with me
in their open exegesis,
here in the afternoon at the museum
as I sat alone in the corner
day dreaming for that one line
of geometric progression
doing my thesis and analysis
drawing in my enigmatic patterns
of my jazz riff poetry.

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

Cousin Sonny
the success of the family
while at the New School
before he would go out
to Hollywood
introduced me to the artists
of the abstract expressionist school
the good poets O'Hara,Schuyler
De Niro, father of the actor
where I met them after his classes
together with the German exile
Hans Hoffman, whom the Nazis
axed for his modernism,
there I was in the younger set with
Koch,Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher
Barbara Guest,passing glasses
to Nell Blaine in a wheel chair
from Gloucester
it's only the best company
for Sonny,
at raucous night parties
in Manhattan in my youth
where with a child's glove
I boxed in my own footing
dancing away with models,
twenty years my senior,
where I met Norman Mailer
who took me up the roof
of the loft's penthouse
to heal me of my fear
of heights.

READING BAUDELAIRE

Sandra Fisher, the wife
of R.B. Kitaj,
unwrapped her painting
"Reading Baudelaire"
in an expansive portrait
reflecting the poet's character
to share with us in 1983
reflecting the French poet's
congested character sitting
he is sitting alone
on a writer's bench chair
in Fisher's exciting  canvas
as if telling us to back up
his fatal yet angry shyness
from a secretive solitary story
of an eccentric personality
appearing out in Paris
only in the late evening
shrouded by chance's destiny
embarrassed by agents of fate
of searching for romance's love
in many unrecognized quarters
weaving his psychic maddening
strife of masking his wounds
bandaged only by language
asking God to deliver him
from his past lonely suffering
and the futility of many affairs
with only words as his evidence
yet realizing it will only be above
in the third heaven
where Baudelaire would swoon
for a life long sentence
to be remembered only by
those who are also eat the leaven
in repentance.

JAVA IN PARIS

Enjoying a java
in Paris under an azure sky
after enjoying Chardin,
Picasso Braque
and the Dutch masters
at the museum
it was like living
through a daydream
without a care
on a hammock
in an hour of leisure
with my fiend Sabine
by the berries almost green
when docked by the Seine
saying to me by her touch
that without love
life would not be much
hearing the motor boat sounds
of roaring waves of pleasure
wondering if love was found
as rain flickers through the air
we are drowned in Rimbaud,
Verlaine and Baudelaire.

OLYMPIC SPIRIT

Years in training before school
waiting for the time of truth
as you exercise your body
on the scale or trampoline
or peddle on your mountain bike,
take a hike with Lottie
to a holy grail in Florida
near De Leon's fountain of youth
or Cape Hatteras
or flow by the encantadas waves
or go up to the Andes snow
or just swim in the pool,
it's all preparation you know
for the gymnastic competition,
as you accept an invitation
for the best run of your time
in a marathon
or crashing to win the prize
in a triathlon
for bronze, silver or gold
lights up your eyes,
but what is poet yourself
seeking  a miracle told each day
which offers us a surprise
in a moving lyrical way,
we are like enfolded starfish
out of a watery shore
on the beach
as we record what is wise
and go miles within
each for an Olympic medal
with the skill of a whale,
hoping to be gallant
with strength,stamina or mettle
as we will set sail within reach
wishing for our tomorrow's goal
and like Melville's "Pierre''
follow words of a riddled tale
using our voice's preparation
and perception of a God wish
like the spirit of Baudelaire
to receive our back bench reward
when language is set loose
in Gaelic Irish, English or French
as to what is ageless and modern
like Joyce,Auden or Proust.

BREAKING

Breaking news
in an avalanche of voices
heard at daybreak
at breakfast hour
on this dog day
in my Beat nook
having a mocha
while listening to David Bowie's
song, 'Under Pressure"
getting a  long distance call
from Miami, Florida
from a former student,Betty
telling me of her non-stop
life as a school lifeguard
remembering how she
rescued beautiful turtles
with me at the sandbar
that once made their way
up the Coast to Cape Cod
fleeing the winter whirlpools
telling me she was on local T.V.
reading at a poet slam
how I inspired Betty
not to be shy in class,
now she has sent me a tape
at her first reading
in English and Spanish
remembering when I played sax
at a local gig and she
vanished by a blueberry patch
too bashful to speak.

LEONARD NIMOY'S LIFE

Your dad
gave me my first haircut
when you were televised
going into a spaceship
Leonard you once ruled
the airwaves of Boston
now you are gone
but your memory lives on.

ANDRE BRETON'S SIGNATURE

A French critic and my teacher
an attractive woman
from the Sorbonne
compared my poetry
to Andre Breton
when I was a freshman
in a class of graduate students
and not knowing Breton
ran to a bookstore
along the Seine out of breath
to remember her words
as a celebrating priest,
visiting professor
and gardener from Boston
Father Adrian
I met at a recital previously
who also delighted
by implanted languages
having been to the holy land
like me who knew
Hebrew, Aramaic, Ethiopic
Latin and Greek and Ugaritic
whom I had spoken to
a day before at the library
telling him how
as to a confessor
I always put my journals
in a French writing box
my family had given me
back in the States
he politely asks me what
writer was looking up
amid the countless shelves
with exotic names
and titles on their covers
when I told him
what the critic related about me
he found a volume
of Breton for me
with a green cover
and because we have
a literary and religious connection
he took me out to lunch
having red wine, a filet of sole
and a bon bon confection.

WIRED

Wired in a silent
corridor of a sound proof loft
at the conservatory rooms
playing the viola
in an off day
practicing a fathomless sonata
by Bax
introduced to me by Tom Goff
here with an accompanying harpist
of a British composer
not well known to me
from all my lessons
of harmony and solfege classes,
now I'm writing on a misted day
here by the Charles River
and this spent a dawn hiding out
along the sea's kayaks
and white sail boats in a regatta
out for a race to the finish
as a liasion of love reveries
by Pierre Reverdy
pierce me in my soul
the sun backs me up
by the Boston Esplanade
in the overcast August dawn
by the promenade
kick starts my memory
at a musical euphoria
of finding a new discovery
that haunts my absence
with metaphoric shadows
as my harpist notices a bird
by the rattling window
when our musical notes are rising
with the suspense of in coming tide
from the balcony's portico
returning to my loft's window
the sill still has pocket bread
for the red Cardinal who returns
with a laughing call all its own
from the ocean's corresponding wave
I am appreciating the shelter
of shadow and distance
from a myna bird and poet
devouring the staff of life
in a morning time of repast.

PICASSO BLUES

Picasso's blues
came to Hartford in 1934
near Wallace Steven's
estate as he is writing
''The Man with a Blue Guitar''
out of his poetic articulated voice
which paints from his words
his spirit's heart beat
like a local locomotive engineer
in his language of imaginative art
for two articulate surrealists
Picasso and Stevens
whose metaphoric experiments
communicate to observe
in their briefing books
folders of dada bas reliefs
in drawings of fictive colors
where an enriched poet and artist
realize their complex landscapes
of explored gestured reality
from geometric shapes and lines
now recognized by their tone
for their dramatic satisfactions
of what our time now acknowledges
with modernist prisms of technique
to open up for the modern mind.

HINDSIGHT MEMORY

The first smell
of late August's fallen leaves
near the birches
even on the weariness
of a Vermont day
we're playing Mozart
making music
with a quartet of friends
on a bench with a first violin
once pawned
now repaired miraculously
by Mr. Elder of Boston
who has golden hands,
now sharing a murdered muffin
cheese croissants
a banana and some salsa salad
drinking in a green Chinese tea
with tiny cups from India
which my aunt Sarah prepared
in a repast for me
comes down to visit us
from Fort Sewall in Marblehead
where we rehearsed for recitals
carrying this glorious breakfast tray
with Uncle Linwood
where we would practice
Bach's double violin concerto
on a summer's day waiting
in the shadows of the boat club
ready to take us on the yacht
which races for miles
for trout which we caught
as a student artist gives me
an oil drawing of our cat
now on the wall of my kitchen
next to Hockney's painting
as we jam together
and chit chat.

BRAQUE'S DAY DREAM

Not allowing any space
of impulses
to divide my time
in competition with Picasso
our surrealism will be made
from our several painted wounds
we share in common
in an uneasy studio
as Apollinaire visits us
extends his friendship's hand
a still life is reality
transforming sadness
into fulcrums of creation.

WALLACE STEVEN'S SENSIBILITY

Language invades
your sensibility
parting yourself in art
at innocent glances
of framed nuances
to disengage your life
from an emancipated time
to take a chance at your age
and engage in a balancing act
of passages of rare emotions
as nature's way
of transfiguration
inside an analysis
of your Platonic soul
from a maturation
of dramatic reveries
in days of contradictions
revives us to recollect our past
is to make a history
of your soul
in annual pilgrimages
by prominent goals
with a metamorphosis
in an ease of dreams
your elegies seasoned
with body shadows
forming monologues
of memories
based on reason
in the life of Socrates
or in your "Notes
of Supreme Fiction"
written on August dog days
your diction is dominant
in your harmonium to please,
after a brief swim
of enchantment
in a heated
somnolent nakedness
wading in
at the swimming pool
enfolding a waiting
invitation's engagement
of bubbles rising
in a nimbus of words
which welcomes
your poetry of surprise
from a gesture
of former images
you sent out
by composing exquisite letters
and maxims on your patio
now at the kitchen table filled
with chocolate sherbet
you listen to classical music
unleashed on the piano
by a Mozart and Schubert trio
by guests who arrive
requested to entertain
by your perplexed continuum
who are transfixed
by your palace of a pool,
yet Wallace you are alone
playing solitaire
keeping furtive secrets
as Baudelaire entangles
your double dream vision
and children out of school
thrill to mingle
on the sandy playground
you listen to shadowy birds
with sounds flying over
the tree shade
and a friend does a self-portrait
of a much younger Stevens
when you were a climber
doing an exercise
of a bard's body bends
on the tennis court
or composing a morning
aubade looking at the fence
in a quintet
of avant-garde poems
in your world without ends
or regret.

WANTING ACCESS

Everyone wants access
feeling weighed down
by the pressures
to succeed
so as an overachiever
playing violin
as a prodigy
as a child soloist
with a deep need
to express myself
in many formats
with jazz from the Savoy
in my  poet's convoy
of Manhattan's spirit
I return to blow jazz riffs
with a sword Damocles
weaving oversight threads
over my ink dream
literary head
being hidden away
on a journey of study
in my own
belief at French leave
casting my thinking
into an imagination cast
by reading Poe and Rimbaud
then making my own image
in one act drama and poetry
making my way in exile
around the world
realizing at nineteen
knowing on retreat
is to be alone
amid mountains and rivers
when a mystic chooses
chaff for wheat
or blood for stone,
then descending
into data centers
whose invented components
of these adverbial convoys
expose my own sit-down
thoughts of torpor
in a boy's travel
visionary dream
reading over my last review
and interview
at my own force in life.

THE MEDIA

Today the media in 1990
wants to control
our thought with kickbacks
I'm keen to cry out to God
about all of fascism's corruption
done by extortion
in the political opportunism
at theatrical realms
so a poet wanders in tourist packs
into an Italian baroque church
hoping my soul
is still intact from what I see
in the theater of life
as city fireworks
suddenly go off in Rome
and here I am far from home
waiting to be interviewed
by a local reporter
about my one act play
off off Broadway
about the movie industry
when I worked for Uncle Sonny
in the publicity department
of his film studio in West L.A.,
as Gino a muscle bound hunk
tells me in the gym he wishes
to be carefree and gay
after being an extra
in ''8 and a Half"
laughs at all my jokes
never missing a chance
to cruise by the Mediterranean
with a Manichean personality
of the pagan Caesars
hoping because of my uncle
to line him up to be a television host
as a comedian in a job with the stars.

TESTIMONY

Watching "To Russia with love"
with Sean Connery
and Lotte Lenya
at the premier
the latter I met Lotte backstage
after her fine performance
in "Brecht on Brecht"
as we gathered for her cast party
my German came back
and I recited Heine to her
telling her that after all
the book burning
the death marches
interrogations in the camps
her enduring self
kept me from blasphemy
by turning to the God of my fathers
for consolation
and knowing there is only refuge
in someone beyond art,desire
politics,and knowledge,
who remembers the ashes
in my mouth
that the unknown God
has revealed himself to me
at the love of my Messiah.

KNOWING

Knowing

at twelve midnight

we were late for a date

in Palo Alto

when I was quoting Ezra

the prophet of exile

in the Bible

and she devoting her thesis

to crazy Ezra Pound
at U.C.L.A.

with his libelous racism

being against the U.S. good guys

and I told her "get a life"

or get lost with Hitler himself

with his resounding racism

and she said to appreciate

poets for their literary bent

and not for their stance

on the government

then she sent me Pierian roses

and a book on Dorothy Shakespeare
Pound's wife

which was no apology
to my sentiment

for the souls who died

in the camps liberated

by the U.S. and Russian soldiers.

WE MET

We met in August
when I reviewed movie scripts
for a summer job
then danced away
at a Fifties mixer
from the cotillion
my aunt made me attend
and now I compose
an elegy and epitaph
to our anniversary
remembering where we hid
behind closed doors
at the Algerian pavilion plaza
when you and Uncle Sonny
worked on a movie
and we telegraphed each other
for years as you settled
in West Hollywood
working with my Uncle Sonny
as publicity director for a big studio
you who really understood me
as we sat on a box of oranges
in the desert.

RAINDROPS

Raindrops fall
in the window pane
shadowing a summer dawn
rubbing out my initials
of my name on the harbor tree
cicadas whispering
above the road of stones
by the Seine
the postman Roulin
delivers me a love letter to me
from San Francisco
in a Renoir setting in the park
as I meet a man
reading out his memoirs
during the Occupation
one of the few good Frenchmen
who fought the fascists
in word and deed
I treat him to croissants
and ice coffee
telling him of my second cousin
Mendes-France from Grenoble
where there were goats by the Alps
imprisoned by the Nazis
who became president of France
When De Gaulle's power collapsed
and came to teach politics
in Brandeis where we met
and I showed him a stamp
with his portrait on it.

OUR JAVA CUP

Our java cup
is ready for us
sipping into waking
up from a dream of Chardin
who was visiting me
to paint a gleaming landscape
that wakes a poet's thirst
here by the Seine
reading Rimbaud
while preparing for finals
at the Sorbonne
I meet Sabine who tells me
as the classic scholar in our class
an August rain will not last
nor will Helen or Paris
in the scheme of things
watching a mourning dove
rise about our river
with its wings of shadow play
as silhouetted first light
embraces our scent of passage
from adolescence embracing
the embarrassing dawn.

HOCKNEY'S ''TWO CHAIRS''

What you do after you swim
out of breath
in your half open mouth
who captures a wave
before a sprightly grin and tonic
from my laughter sides
enjoying your excursions
toward art's communication
in the pool or ocean
when competition runs deep
but there is only one Hockney
from the West Coast
pressured by your declaration
and your invitation
at the movie set in the 80's
as I look at my poster to host
my company of itinerant artists
for a bed and breakfast
who were here to visit a poet
over my kitchen table
by your portrait and signed print
called ''Two Chairs.''

R.B. KITAJ'S PORTRAITS

You smile as a Jew in a fedora
but without the Torah in exile
staring at your portraits
of poets Creeley and Duncan
as you paint a fascist cell
in Warsaw
or a Russian woman
in the Gulag
you make our century real
in the flames of our history
someday an angel in Revelation
will accept an invitation
extended from the Isle of Patmos
to open the Lamb's book
of life in seals of the great I AM,
he will reveal that the Word
is hid in our heart
only to be exposed as poetry
as in Blake's divine art.

MICHAUX'S CONTINUUM

Words drawn
in as a gesture
without any school
only attending words
in a sinuous mescaline
from a limbo subdued culture
of any mood altering time
higher than any mushroom
of a serious dawn pick
for a graffiti cool attitude
in your own masculine bailiwick.

DREAMING COROT

In my landscape dreaming Corot
from the forest by the pond
packed with the quiet earth
of a rustled Fontainebleau
with fawns on all sides
my memory never quite
asleep yet communicates
with the evacuated dawn
in the coolness of day
from a Paris pipe dream
of Helen's shadow
when a lover's landscapes
was blanketed with snow
covering mythic shapes
amid a shipwreck of wood.

IN FRANK STELLA'S WAY

His lectures inspired
like his art of attentiveness
assertive that culture's history
will answer us back
to our memory
of fascism
with an abstraction
to give truth
in a prism of satisfaction
in his Polish Village series
tells us in a thousand
scenes of glass
where Auschwitz
has a space for gas chambers.

BEN BELITT'S ENCONIUM

The illuminating Vermont
in your photographed
symmetry of description
Green Mountain
over a trek of landscaped lakes
at a annunciation's retreat
from stills transported
awakening in locution's pictures
from indifferent vacation sites
with silence of your moving days
at a timeless travelogue of vocation
transports words of originality
of Platonic monologues
into a vocation of hallucination
from posters wanted on Elm
to locate a lost golden retriever
of seasonal announcements
at a weekend barn dance
as homecomings of birds
remake your images
in a symmetry of poetic form
or about St. Augustine's epigraphs
from a charity of senses
into a narrative of humanity
from nature in ''Departures''
as you write upon Mexican scenes
of a siesta's hour
from a visionary insinuation
of compensatory objectives
as robins and orioles fly
toward the third heaven
up from your new found visualization
in several shifting  flower pictures
we receive your recognition
with love for what is an expansion
in language's cultural invitation
from querulous yet marvelous lines
asking space and time shifts
into subliminal added associations
with translucent harmonies
of clarity's tenses
of Ben Belitt's fascinations.

ALEX KATZ'S "O'HARA''

An era swimming in love
with Frank O'Hara
his fixed smile
transfixed as a guide
close to the earthy verse
by lifting a beer
at the Cedar Bar
keeping at your''lunch poems"
intact and we arrive
as the smell of a shower
of rained out circumstance
at the five star training gym
with dressing down
in sheets finding as you out
with a circus clown
in town on the elevator
your bodywork of laundering
with your one night stand
as Alex Katz paints your nexus
facing the city
with an accent by an unlit street
at midnight's soundproof jazz
near love traffic by Central Park
asking us two to play piano
for two hands by Mozart
in bare feet at the faulty window
where pigeons reside forever
near the open door
when taxi cabs await you
others flag down a limo
for those uptown
knowing your showing up late
running in the taut breeze
perspiring in a sweater
from a colorful portrait.

LOVING ANNE DUNN

The studio Interior
a comforting spot
of furniture in London
in a lemony yellow
and blue polish
in the sun
with the emptiness
of a close up
your eyes are wishful
for your sweeping
confidence
with the odor of snow
in the air
outside the gallery.

ENJOYING THE PAINTING

Enjoying the painting
''Reading Baudelaire''
of Sandra Fisher
by R.B.Kitaj's late wife
in my dream
whose ghost appears
in a French museum magazine
his warped grin
telling the world
to get lost
I awake on the Fenway's bench
in my bare feet
where my aunt plants cucumbers
at the Victory Garden
having pulled an all nighter
for my philosophy exam.

FIRST RECITAL

My Aunt Sarah makes sure

I have a chocolate milkshake

at my violin debut

having eaten a croissant

as she fixes the strings

and hairy bow with rosin

tells me not to forget to bow,

it's not easy for a five year old
in white short pants

taking a risk

with ghost of the Lowell, Emerso
Coolidge
and Howell family 

seated on deck chairs and sofas
in the front row

coming out as hosts

at he Commonwealth club's

cotillion in Boston's high society,

where the pilgrims who dance

are now getting high

and the puritans take a chance
to listen to my playing Ives

judging with an aristocratic bent
after making
a charitable contribution
to the musical charity
that my aunt spent years
in helping new immigrants

as a lady with a dog walks by
with an accent of pretending

to just get by.

JOSEPH'S CORNELL'S BOXES

In a sound proof studio
leaving off my race bike
in my first ride
waiting by the bus stop
for runaways
thinking of Arthur Miller's
"All My Sons" and how
I met his wife Marilyn
having Java with sugar
at a Broadway cafe
now murdering a Vienna roll
for a New York minute
lacking an umbrella
with raindrops falling
playing sax in the background
as I dog walk for a hairdresser
with her miniature French poodle
now sounding my sax by the MBTA
and sighting in a studio basement
a lost and found painting
of Chardin
stolen by the Nazis
I meet up with the boxes
of Joseph Cornell
opened at the ready-
my adolescence padlocked
by Hollywood stunt men
at my uncle's publicity jobs
who is a caretaker of my dreams
I am Job twice over
trying to thank God for life
having been saved on a ski lift
months ago in the Vermont snow
watching the summer skyline
erasing my motor scooter's map
calling up mom and dad
near Andy's Factory
as the midnight alarm clock
as a bomb went off
by a store ranch
selling Texas rabbit fur
wanting to take pictures
with Peter Pan
a young fashion model
and his sister Jennifer
with Cleopatra's skin
who asks me to be her partner
on Captain Hook's cat walk's
runway plank
now hearing of assassinations
of American politicians
cornered by sensational
national headlines
of conspiracy theories,
I take down a snapshot
of Ted Williams
off to Korea.

FAIRFIELD PORTER'S DECORATION

Receiving an invitation
to view ''Interior with
a Dress Pattern''
in a gallery in Manhattan
feeling flattered
in this penthouse loft
wondering was life downhill
from here among the jet set
with the blues of memory
as the day with a voice raised me
up from the backwaters
of obscurity
yet with a security of feeling
standing apart from the crowd
playing a Bach violin sonata
feeling like a jester
of entertainment
with a Bojangles angle
as angels prepare for my debut
at fourteen
without any directions
but to be cool
as Mailer takes me up the roof
after I told him my fear
of heights subtracts
this August midnight hour
and asks me to look down
at the traffic and to fight fear
he said with a bear hug
and a Bronx cheer.

GINSBERG'S GUIDE

You stood up to all the verbs
you would not adjust
to Passover's bitter herbs
or Easter's story of hope
you preferred cruising along
in the face of it
as a poet of howl
getting high on dope
saying on Merv Griffin's show
there is nothing wrong
with a thirst for a bong
from the Queens sweat lodge
with a towel over your head
when at my first urban read
with a rugby star next to him
I felt strange lips pecking
at the nape of my neck
like a wise wizened owl
but not wanting any vatic fuss
or to hear any dramatic song
from your sitar on our laps
at the edge of Indian summer
with an August insomnia's collapse
pretending we were in living
in Roman gladiator or pagan times
hearing the impending taps
at the door to an apocalypse,
there is no crime Allen
for affectionate love,
only your poor mother
did not get the Hitler-Stalin
crime connection in a Devil's pact
in fact ,she was still smarting
from the direction of pogroms
in Russia, Hungary or Romania
where fascism was aiming
its arrows at
as Dylan sang to us, post-war
"The times were a changing".

YVES BONNEFOY'S NIGHT

In a tiny Parisian bookstall
mirrored by Saturday visitors
a poet brushes by a long silence
looking on high walls
by corridors stacked with verse
with stares for poet precursors
of a boy's visionary ancestors
in an gossamer eye light
of Baudelaire and Poe
love notes fall
from above consummate shelves
opening a roomful of streaming
Bonnefoy's smoldering words
as the boy waits to receive
his voice in my inner consciousness
from budding ideas in leafs
of language spaces
at an equivocal exhibition
as I guide my hand through
to trace from darkness to choose
one slim volume's leaves
in a corner of a used bookstore
feeling completely unsure
as he leaves the bench
in a perusal of choosing
phrases in mind
intoxicated by your intimacy
of vocal lyrical verse
near my unsuited sleeves
to share a lifelong encounter
engaged with his universal spirit
purchasing to share an afternoon
in the chapters of a poet's
marooned labeled connection
in the shape of your French
amid the reinvented wounds
from a hidden fabled collection
worn as a bandage in mine.

PASOLINI'S ROME

Brushing his shiny hair
near summer foliage in fetid air
playing soccer at a home court
near garden graves of a monastery
Pier Paolo with lukewarm hands
passes the ball to another
as an extra supporting
one enthusiastic team
in the dusk dream of the uninvited
with his laughter heard by hedges
on the dewy shadowed grass
at open marsh bird fields in Rome
dividing his break time
in shop windows without much cash
searching for bread
and cheaply priced wine
excited to have woken up early
in the bird sounding street
from one hour shy of first light
when a lone orange is located
in a soup kitchen dark church
of St. Anthony
along with fresh cut greenery
before his hungry bloodshot eyes
as he shares sliced bread
with the younger ones
for youth will outshout youth
in a generous hunger
of game stamina
on the silent sparrow grounds
of adolescence
the ball is caught and yields
with pronounced energy
on the sunken open grain fields
in the shadow of being invited
suddenly the rain invades
a sunshine upon shielded plains
by the rocks of July landscape
its butterflies and birds parking
on a valley's greensward boulevard
the boys are mimicking
all who sink or fall into red phlox
moving by riverbeds for a swim
now gather wild dandelions on edges
hearing a jazz sax riff
off the docks at shore
washing into a new baptism
to listen to an unknown voice
of an outspoken Italian bard
named Pier Paolo Pasolini
who shapes his words
like playing cards
to share with friends
amid an intoxication of day stars
on a canvas of graffiti
when only his poetry amends.

ROBERT LOWELL AT 100

This Autumn you would be
one hundred years young
of waiting to celebrate
your September birthday
in a Beacon Hill dorm
if you are able to make it
through your mental storm
wondering if anyone
will remember you
as the first confessional poet
with the words of form;
now that you are translated
your spirit still calls out to us
in the warm hallways
when a poet
like Elizabeth Bishop
would visit
who could alter your mood
more than any medicine
or confession of sin
to make you feel free
facing up to your loss
with her cross reference
as a Sapphic wordsmith of poetry
in a landscape boundary
as a bailiwick of nature
reaching your mature mind
shaping words of the centuries
from a resolution's activity
in her own skills at colloquy
taking after Wordsworth
as the Romantics will
by adjusting eidetic memory
speaking of your loan of grief
who alone understood you
when she subtly returned
your belief into tell us
a good report of her lover
that made you jealous,
reporting of her recent visit
to Nova Scotia and Brazil
you discussed bas reliefs
and the petunia paintings
of Georgia O'Keeffe,
as guys still play soccer
or ice hockey
here along the Widener library wall
nearby the fireplace,
Lowell still sits with his pipe
(we still witness your face)
making us thrilled
to be warmed by your ripe verse
at the August rain
and sustained
by disarmed grace
in Robert's innovation
of history's charmed
epigrammatic individuality
that will not conform or swipe
at art in a hurting gesture
of dramatic intimacy
with a grotesque
critic's stripe
from the abyss
of his epiphanies
from a narrative's metamorphosis
in an innovation of a new age
of hip and hype
surviving from past words
and his third wife's last kiss.

KANDINSKY'S SPECTRUM

Color energizes
 nebulous cloud
transforming a canvas
into equations
of added dichotomies
shaping lemony rhomboids
in an abyss
of abstract expressions
forming human improvisation
augmented in an antic visionary,
a solo departure from the past
drawing over a black sun
of invented epigrammatic secrets
yet here is a fabulous creation
of mystic innocence
risking critical toils of silence
amid uneven memory harmonies
in brushing novice whispers
of clear iced geometrical figures
in hidden echoes
from mythic visual emanations
of a chance snow of metamorphosis
from subjective formulations
dazzled by landscape coils
with creative reflections
you remember this:
in times of separations
all things are simultaneous
from a series of Kandinsky oils.

MATTA'S " CRUCIFIXION"

Art waits an eye
to be transparent
in the momentum
of history in the making
about a soul still alive
bandaged on all sides
sublet to the earth
as half light appears
by the tomb at daybreak
as the brides of Christ
appear in the shadows.

IN SAN FRANCISCO

Playing Stravinsky
in twelve toned motion
an earthquake tremor
hits our trio
in the quickened third
movement of my vibrato
on my violin bridge
near Golden Gate
arriving here late
in so much traffic
yet singing in my tongue
at the intersection
after a local film crew
screens our session,
a writer for the Chronicle
collars me for
an interview
as I meet my Dutch uncle
who was in the Resistance
and asked him
to speak to an authentic hero.

BOSTON SCATTERS

In a tweed jacket
a button falls
on Beacon Hill
forgetting my umbrella
in the August rain shower
along the Esplanade
a cruise ship stops
as a lone runaway
with an acid face
and attitude
tries to cover
his own pain
I'm trying to remember
a passage in Walden Pond
or an ode of Emerson
deciding to go underground
again to play sax riffs
by the old corner book shop
where my latest collection
is featured at the window
wishing to be rid
of lethal insomnia
or to be a year younger
here at the train station
in a subterranean mood.

IT WAS IN PARIS

It was in Paris
at the Belmondo premier
after my play was on
wearing my sear sucker
at the cast party
when the art director
called me Shakespeare
and translated me into French
hinting I had a career
when I rang up my friend
in San Francisco
who put a few cinematic scenes
together of my minor film feature
asking to remember him by saying
life no piece of vanilla cake
even on all Saints Day.

A BEAT REPORTER

In a spurt of first light
my alto sax waits for me
at the pawn shop
near the Beacon Chambers loft,
this Beat reporter in doldrums
of the summer heat
composes a sonata
still wanting to believe in art
and not in commercialism
no matter that Andy profited
from Campbell's soup cans,
here in a back alley
on an August dog watch day
blowing riffs
wishing I didn't lose
my Spanish poncho at L.A.X.
fed up with travel cases
or getttig lost on the highways
over easy streets
picking up living roses
for my friend
named for Marilyn Monroe
by a hallway of the club
at dusk among musicians
who pack me with gossip
when all I wish for
is to be an instrument of love.

IN YOUR BOUNDLESS SPIRIT

Hours rest on your dream hands
John Ashbery
of a poet expecting cirrus clouds
in a sky of shining first light
empowers us
by his boundless spirit
when he is alone not in crowds
he knows a chorus of million lives
from his recalled posterity
in places before hidden shrouds
when his mood of archives
are deposited
full of enthralled charity
in a surprising
prolific stem of words,
somewhere a student is calling
out to your sunshine's reflection
along the Hudson
knowing how you intertwine
wings of enfolded birds,
with daws, sparrows, crows
as webbed paper cranes
rise by boats on first light
by a scullion thick river bed
delivering to him to watch
a mirror's weather vane
from a concave boasting complexity
in an outlined direction by a sphinx
on the artistically designed Coast
slipping through his Freudian fingers
in the solitude of experience
he thinks in the dexterity
of Plato and Socrates
amid white caves of feathers
and drinks a glass red wine
not expecting
any celebration of song
along the river
in a solitary catching twenty winks
meditating with a dictionary
on his pressing sentence
writing over his knobby knees
on a July 29th vacation day.

AUGUST IN CENTRAL PARK

With the dog day

that is eating up August

near potholes of a heat wave

leaving my motorcycle

with an actor

as I'm to audition

for a part in Godot

asking for a second wind

or at least a breeze

on a park bench

by a pavilion's fountain

under the blazing sun's glow

watching a runaway sailor

with innumerable tattoos

drinking from a bottle

of New Orleans bourbon

which breaks at his feet

trying to shew away a mosquito

I'm reciting psalm forty one

watching a child's choir

with black collars

singing the Latin 

of Thomas Tallis,

the dawn comes to light

under elm and chestnut trees

where a hive of bees is moving

hearing students from City College

argue about Plato, Nato, politics

Henry James and Melville 

with books of knowledge

filled under their muscular arms

and a fortune teller out of Styx

named Alice Wonderland

asks me for a dollar

offering to do magic

with salty language

turning tricks in this bailiwick

when I mention Mary Magdalene

runs away from me like the pigeons

who still move in my head

thinking of my friend Roberta's

first love, second marriage

third separation, fourth divorce

as a Marathon runner

named Martha

from Jamaica changes course

and says to me ,"Maranatha"

the Lord is coming

and I say, not soon enough for me.

MOON IN AUGUST

Life jumps out of us
as a located parachute
makes us outdated
in space and time
as we stare at the moon
under ominous stars
the sky like towers
above ancient Babylon
resembling our remote
in hours until the dawn
when we chant psalms
wanting to sail out
on our kayak on the sea
as we watch the bocce guys
behind the outback shrubs
play on the soccer field
when the things of the world
strangely grow dim
as visible gold dust
is imagined as a line in Yeats
thinking of Byzantium
as we sing an old hymn
trusting only dream visionaries
who bring their telescopes
on green mountains
showing photos of Vermont
spying a brown bear
under the apple trees
before others fish for clams
with nets spread out
wanting to fill our empty cups
with bread and wine
as my cat elopes.

TELL ME EVERYTHING

Tell me everything my friend
about lighting candles
for the victims of fascism
about your love for the lost
of Christ,
for the scarred
from my voice's mouth
with Mary's eyes of sorrow
wishing to speak your parables
for those who look at tomorrow
with only an abstraction
yet turn it into the avant-garde
migraine times of Simone Weil
the writing letters of Kierkegaard
Kafka and Gogol's death wish
not to be known who yearn
to burn their life's works
as you start learning
about the trains of thought
those about to perish
on August children of Hiroshima,
we put a stone on their graveyard
when the late day shadow
of the sun remembers
the half observed,
those who served the "Master Race"
or who still turn away their face
at the cross in the Gulag
we still ask as Mary for His grace.

MONDRIAN'S UNIVERSE

Art with all senses
the colors that sets you apart

hits you in the reality

in each of design 

of a Dutch grittiness
in the sponged face
of your "Christmas Card"

along with twice the combinations

of past and future space

leveled in the linear unknown
at touching up the avant-garde

for when your propeller splashes
us on this nape of orange
in a museum canvas

we observe merely the surface
of red sashes of geometric shapes
Mondrian's fusion drapes 

in an illusion of luminous shadow
of eccentric waves of ink dreams

brushed between two oceans

in a parachute of our senses

hushed as an eccentric painter
craves to line and draw on
all of our anxious emotions.

ROBERT FROST'S HOUSE

In a woken July landscape
peering into a bard's pastime
of my own boyhood's journey
to light my moody way
into the Derry neighborhood
of my annual Franconia pilgrimage
bicycling on the sunlit grass
on unlit roads
in memory of a folk language
heard from burdock
in New Hampshire orchards
which spoke to me
as a critic abdicating
his silences clocks out
in the solitude of a tree
from the off the cuff Frost voice
of a poet recording for us
his mood of running words
as we catch
a passing elemental sprite
of neon butterflies
and bright birds
rewarding all who visit here
until a thousand guests arrive
from dawn in the rough here
still enlightens from solitude
a choice all through the year.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S WAY

Visiting Rodin
thinking of his "Kiss
uncovers his sculpture
after he told her
not to be amiss
and leave the cover
of the cutting shroud on
but she was always
playful and spinning
railing with tales after school
like a child wonder
what she was about
experimenting
in laughter or wails
over the hallways
of her delicate mind.

AUGUST DOG DAY

Seizing to protect a pug
by the kiosk
tasting bread and wine
amid the chants
of the choir at St. Paul's
in Harvard Square
forgetting all triangular
morning masks and mysteries
near Cambridge Common
you eye Elizabeth Bishop
stopping at the crosswalk
returning from Brazil
with her luggage
in the glittering heat
of August's still noon
amid a phalanx of red birds
reaching out to a blue slate sky
when the first light
decides to shine
in taciturn airless hours
feeling the angst of Sisyphus
amid the purple flowers
burning from a high mountain
as a stone unable move or rise for us
hearing word lines of poetry
from the ancients like Ovid
sharing on divine solitary horizons
transfigured by gold star dust
or listening to sister Sappho
in a far voice dreams
from a Greek chorus
burning your imagination
as we are a little changed
in sleepwalking liquid silences
of endless fervid fevers
as David among his flock
like old Cinna or bold Catullus
among the Caesars.

A KID AT THE CHELSEA

In a hotel room with a small t.v.
staring at cartoons, commercials
game shows and comedies
where at noon in a grainy stall
you leave your lame worry
for all the walled slogans
of graffiti in a flushed shower
of a vocabulary of assaulting words
(while I'm all in prayer of St. Francis
with melancholy but hope to attain
better in an after life)
with this continued rainy abyss
finding scraps of unlettered paper
from a creepy exhibitor neighbor
waiting for a brief answer of "Yes"
I'm frightened at his proposition
at my door ignoring
a hourly shadowy invitation
in the narrow sleek darkness
holding onto my teddy bear
near my Advent clock radio
without an hour's prohibition
of doing origami for a stranger
wanting to be spent anywhere
than in this hourly Kafka burlesque
with freshly painted Robert Henry's
abstract of " New York's City Snow"
staring at me by my water closet
by the florid window
hearing a flock of pigeons and a crow
in a metamorphosis of humoresque
when the time is set for creation
or to be at another train track
to visit the 14th station
or else crossing in another direction
at no man's land at Christmas time
to be near Bethlehem's manger
yet an art director wants to view
my play tomorrow
about Roualt's colorful clown
and coming down from
the bay at Boston
to interview at off off Broadway
racked by sorrow I try to pray.

INVENTIVENESS

Intuitive with inventiveness
with the painter Soutine
of imaginations awareness
in a resonance inspection
of windswept colors
in a landscape perspective
with phantasms of memoir
escapes a sustained language
from a direction of corridors
near Paris' hemispheric roads
into a canvas of a print
magnified as a river's water lily
always asking for art's abstraction
drawing us in a simulacrum
intertwined of enlightenment
of roseate creative juiced delivery
expression spills alive
by wellsprings of consciousness
of an exiled satisfaction to survive
in his modern tunnel vision
from exposed fractured lines
with a proxy experimentation
in Chaim's living jonquils
immersed from expressionism
fulfills a career's perspective
seeking a human heart
of unique recognition.

NAGASAKI GRAFFITI

Jazz riffs are heard
from an appropriate response
on a distant recording
as dirty bombs fall
into dissonance
from a parachute convoy
of the reconnaissance
pouring a rain out
of the ghoulish sky
like skin splotches on a terrain
molted by burning out
of nature's devastation
flows from whispers
of a mechanized plane of Hell
into palms of flaming ashes
over fluid swirling over
the rivers cinematography
as a one remaining poet
journals in Nagasaki graffiti
on the city walls.

T.S.ELIOT AT ROCKPORT

It is to the rocks
at Pigeon Cove
watching the cormorants
and not to the monotonous tide
at St. Ann's sandbar
that will salvage your name
it is to the ocean
and not to the fluid borders
that will embroider you
by the stones and surf
in the morning mist
of your mineral waters
that will anoint you
from the anchors
of the tourist boat from Boston
through a water song shadow
that will offer prayer
to your conscience
in a cup's communion
and it is to the silence of the eagle
perched on the harbor dock
in the windshield of the sun
that will lock your eyelids
into your torpor of mind
familiar though a threatening storm
that will save the whole sky
in a flushed warm August dog day
of a fevered heat wave
that leaves your conflated memory
in language by a daybreak sentence
and why ,T.S., to make any sense
as the birds chatter
and the clouds scatter
why does it matter, T.S. Eliot
by the parking lots of visitors
with their mirrors of the past
that enfold across their own corridors
as Gloucester maps are lost on bridges
and are caught by the lone sail
down the hills by the rails
of the last train
that sought to visit by the dunes
or pursue a wanton shadow
of days that are narrow
as you kneel by your bed
hearing the northeastern wind
confessing your sins
it is not by the clocks
in the town
or ivy that descends over dales
as you watch sailors and wives
gather seaweed and snails
while you feel at church
only the nail scarred hands
search a sequence of designs
walking now on the beach sand
knowing as the noon bell rings
and a choir sings
inside you believes the face
of a memoir is being composed
and small birds are clinging
to Evergreen branches
by the muggy rose garden
to pardon us  all in grace.

THE SUNSHINE

The sunshine is over the ocean's
Pacific maritime and meridian
in times of fleeing
from being captive
on land locked thoughts
in barricaded awareness
of turning deep salty waters
from continued Malibu fountains
into the wine of hidden lives
as a poet moves his motioned lips
thinking over unbaptized showers
or strolling in a promenade
by a parade of mountain swallows
climbing greensward green hills
putting out hours of perceptions
from trembling fountain fingers
in papers of apocalypse words
from gestures buried by time
for cinematic tomorrows.

GLOVES OFF

Gloves off
not to boxed in
to any class
or classification
between irony's innocence
of shock waves of a Beat's
language within
a foreign tongue
reciting my lines
of unwritten ocean rhythms
time captures my island voice
transfigured from intonations
sensing the extraordinary
as I play solo alto sax
in a gig at midnight
with the blues of angels
filling my house
being caressed
by daybreak kisses
scratching my initials
on the trees of quivering trees.

NO ADMITTANCE

We could not admit
the dawn sky
on my open boat
returning to he wharf
of my home harbor
to anchor in the summer air
as the cirrus clouds
uncovering chimeras of light
plays with the farthest horizon
with an unexpected silhouette
of trout fishing by parting shadow
of a labyrinth return
hearing the sailors
from the Azores tell tales of exiles
gaze on alembic hours
when my heavy eyes glaze over
passports and u turn visas
from maps and vistas
all over the voyages seas
hearing all the nuances,accents
silences, in scissor half speech
id's, forgotten photographs
love letters to dead end roads
labors,recommendations
by sharp lettered questions
in the hunger for sunshine
the air engraves us in memory
as in the chords of my guitar
on the silver rocks
by beach combing journeys
along foreign market places
on the backstage
of an extra in a nearly full house
at slow rehearsals near cold lofts,
amid abattoirs of immense secrets
among the awkwardness
of passer by crowds
in towns and villages
but never a stranger
to words,canvas or friends
in the belly of the earth.

FOLLAIN'S MEMORY

His body refuses to mortgage
or reinvent experience
of shade or shadows
since his words began
by the breathing on the river
Seine when waves coil
the objects of his memory
looking out of the window
of high school where he writes
to reinvent each hypnotized mirror
of each moment as he raises himself
on his chair to quote his parchment
like oracles lost in time,
now he remembers word miracles
by his favorite garden chair
when he gathers in his language
as a thirst for paradise to share
a poet came by egrets
near the daybreak butterflies
not wanting to answer
to the summer foliage
in a caressed rhythmic voice.
Jean Follain,
bending the french ear
at the fountain
of an aroma's buzz
in sauntering
by the dragonflies
and birds
with the white plumage
he forgets to love
all bee hives
in the sting
of so many others
whose memory
is alive in Paris
like Mallarme's survival words
yet misses a venture
in his brother anniversaries
every other day
by the sea blown waves
he will even invent snow kisses
to survive what he craves.