NIGHT HAWK

You can't call for Love
in this city,
it wanders the streets
like a gypsy cab.
The pavement feigns hard
to preserve its solitary lines.
Your ears open themselves
to catch any cry,
some flock together,
others seek the heat of an updraft.
At the end of each avenue
you hear the lyrics
of its myriad migrations.
You imagine it
perched in a tall tree,
trapped in branches
until a storm stops.
You decide you
cannot decipher
even a single chirp.
You dim the lights
for the night

and kneel.
And then
one morning,
a flapping
startles you,
alighting
on the sill
of a window
you forgot to close.

For G.G.

. . . only because

it was a Thursday

(which is her Monday),

and she was walking as though

carrying something heavy

(albeit not in her hands),

and I thought I heard her sigh,

and recalled Lonnie

(who you might not know)

not Lonnie who was always

pawning his favorite bracelet

so he could feed the penny slots

or Lonnie from The Hill

who always seemed to be

half a slice short

of a sandwich,

but Lonnie from

'Lonnie's Lament'

(and here she

cocks her head and

wrinkles her nose

saying "Who?")

because whatever blew

his rain so sideways

inspired John William to put

a saxophone between his

lips and blaze

a lamentation

which matches

her Monday motion,

a wistful grace

with piano lines almost

lengthy as her legs

and a bassline that

plunges like her hair

when she combs it

into a black Niagra

which makes me wish

I could spend

the rest of my days

naked and trembling

in a wooden barrel,

falling forever through

its dark mist.

A Decent Day

I was waiting for the bus outside the Borgata casino when I turned around and looked in the direction of Philly and this haiku presented itself to me;

Atop their stalks

these windmills slicing, slicing-

the quarter moon.

This is an older poem that I finally found the right ending to.

MAN CARRYING TUNE
(after Wallace Stevens)

A poem must seduce
the senses most successfully.

Illustration:
A noir figure (back-turned) on stage
entices an audience of eyes.

The muted blues he trumpets
entice even the least open ears.

Accept them then, as key
(notes almost perceived
as known melodies,

uncertain notation of certain chords,
the roots full of doubt,

notes floating like the last of Autumn Leaves
on a soft breeze that could swirl all night,
on a key breeze of cobalt notes),

A cascade of sensation
now fully falling.

We will bathe
In these sensations all song,
as a blue mysterious

beckons in the dark.


(For Miles Davis)

SIJO IN BLUE

The Sijo (SHE-jo) is a Korean form, similar to its younger cousin haiku. They are written in 3 lines and contain no more than 46 syllables. Unlike haiku, metaphor, simile and other wordplay is permitted.


I pace the beach at dawn,
my footsteps, haiku in sand

I ask the whitecaps, why Derrion,
why only sixteen?

Lake Michigan falls on its shore,
the Hawk wheels and wails above.

A Few Haiku

I have been writing (or trying to write) haiku for over 12 years. It's only in the last couple of days that I feel like I may finally have a firm grasp of the form. This is exciting for me, because I feel like I can now begin to write a few decent pieces. We'll see; anyway here are some older attempts that I've revised.


summer sunset-
a woman crying into
her cellphone

country road-
our brakes screech at
a squirrel

Spring shower-
a white cat under the
drycleaner’s awning

summer shimmer-
that woman talking to herself
wears two coats

March wind –
The white king topples on
the chess table

the white moon-
kissing my uncle's name
in black granite

Sunrise- only lipstick in my wineglass

after the snowstorm-
not one loaf of bread
on this store's shelves

a cowrie shell in her dreadlocks-

the North star

spring sunlight-
dust devils dancing
after the broom

summer lightning-
the edge of your teeth
on my nipple

August heat-
the man in front of the bank
begs for change

sunrise-
three men shiver outside
Kogod's Liquors

at the red light-
the rain on the windshield
stops

bright afternoon-
After that swooping hawk
this swirling feather

On the Rationality of Last Night

Recall that:

the emotion is the desire plus the moan;

the emotion is to the desire as the desire is to the moan.

If we call the emotion K and the desire B, then the second statement above becomes

K is to B as T is to K − B,

or, algebraically:

Kiss is to Bite, as Bite is to Kiss minus Bite.

To say that last night was rational

means that last night was

a fraction (Kiss divided by Bite) where K and B are intertwined.

We may take (Kiss divided by Bite) to be in roughest terms

and K and B to be still tender.

But if (Kiss divided by Bite) is in roughest terms,

then the identity labeled (rationality) above

says (Bite dreaming of Kiss divided by Bite) is in still rougher terms.

That is a contradiction

which follows from the assumption

that last night was rational.

Hillel Furstenberg Greets His Newborn Son

(for Big Kenny, Little Kenny and Joel₃)

Let us define a topology
on the emotion L
by declaring a sub-love L₁
{Father, Son}
to be an open love
if and only if
it either contains
an open mouth kiss, ∅,
or it contains a union
of emotional sequences L(f, s),

where L(f, s) = hands open like wounds

= tears cascading across lips.

In other words,
a sub-love L₁ is open if and only if
every hesitant male heart
admits some non-zero condition f or s
such that L(f, s) ⊆ L₁.
The axioms for a topology
are easily verified:
By definition, an open mouth kiss, ∅, is open;
L is just the sequence L(U, I),
and so could be open as well.
Any union of open mouths is open:
for any collection of open mouths
the intersection of two
(and hence finitely many)
open mouths is open:

let U₁ and I₂ be our open mouths
and let hungry lips ∈ open mouths
(with lips s₁ and s₂

establishing membership).
Mouth f to be the

lowest common multiple of f₁ and f₂.
Then, let the mouths meet.
The topology is quite different
from the usual Euclidean one,
and has two notable properties:
Since any open mouth
contains an infinite language,
no finite mouth can be open;
put another way,
the complement of a finite mouth
cannot be a closed mouth.
The basis mouths {f, s}
can be both open and closed:
they are closed by nature,
but we can imagine L(f, s)
as the complement
of an open mouth as follows:
"There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a word . . .
. . . Love is a word, another kind of open."
Among the sounds
that are emotional multiples
of prime kisses are
thunder and rain flooding a field,
i.e. [a topology of tears]
By the first property,
the mouth (sky) on the left-hand side
cannot be closed.
On the other hand,
by the second property,
the mouth (field) is closed.
So, if there were only
finitely many prime kisses,
then the mouth (sky) on the
left-hand side would be
in a finite union of closed mouths,
and hence closed.
This would be a contradiction,
thus L(f, s) must contain
infinitely many
prime kisses.