The houseleeks need a midwife
sometimes, their cabbage-babies
breaching, the stolon-cord refusing

to break. I don’t perform Caesareans;
I merely wiggle a baby foot; help
it make contact with the rocky earth.

I almost fell back asleep
Tossed and snugged down soft
Amid dream disquiet
Impenetrable
Implacable

Day’s debris and remnant dream
Echoes distant
Once found teeming

we are two blues
convincing the world
distance can look like devotion.

every morning
the sky lowers itself
until sailors swear
it has found the sea.

Your papery lips press mine hungry as a predator’s beak. Our ears brush: hearing aids clack and buzz.

Pull apart

Upon waking, you rise into the almost-no-longer dark and step into clothing rendered black and white by the dusting of light at the heavily shaded window.

Upon waking, Carat stretches and yawns, curls into her fur-lined basket, embraces sleep again.

I recall light spilling through
     double-story windows;
alabaster walls and high picture rails
    of the silk flowers on a grand piano,
petals fixed in perpetual bloom
in a space confined by rigid lines
s w e p t   aside by a melody shouting freedom,
lifting bodies, loosened breath

Invisible waves swept through mountains and ridges
Red blinking eyes
Restless in the sky

We heard the humming
Of the fickle algorithms
We engaged with

Ce qui me suffit cependant, car mes misères,
le long temps et ma grandeur d’âme
me font trouver que tout est bien.

Tout est bien? Is it? Is all well?
Is it well in this translation?
“Well” instead of “endurance” or “submission,”
“resignation” or some such.

What did it feel like to be the first?
emerged from the depths
to become tree-dweller and see the earth
curving beneath you, just to climb down
just to walk until exhaustion, over and over
until you’ve traveled too far to return

Table Three/Two Diners

Chicken Lo Mein
Garlic Chicken (no mushroom)

The Husband

It wasn’t this restaurant,
another Chinese place
in a town hundreds

Can ChatGPT make me a cup of tea?
Can AI give you a quick, gentle kiss goodbye?
Will Claude stay up all night talking
until our weary hearts have thawed?

Does Grok know your favorite house to walk by?

Elephants—supposedly lurking,
menacing in a vast, dark corner, heavy
and dangerous, bringing some beastly
karma to punish arrogant humans, right?

That’s not it, not at all—everywhere,
everywhere the elephants, like dancing
Disney creatures almost, but more
restrained, more unperturbed—

When I first learned you were there,
that you had been there all along,
I felt that you had been watching me
and I wondered what I was doing when you arrived.

Did you, in your maternal stillness,
know that I dwelt beyond our mutual fence?

The ritual was known
As Dragging the Main

(Drag, to pass slowly or tediously),

Or the Main Drag; conducted
On Belmont Avenue,
Friday and Saturday nights.

We nap naked
on the side of the hill
after our picnic lunch,
sun-warmed and satisfied.
We wake at the same time,
suddenly, surrounded
by cows, heads bowed,

In my argument against nothingness
I get out of bed, assert myself
by going about my day.
My goal, besides making
myself presentable and reasonable enough
no one questions my choice

Ore-clusters in the lad’s hands
glow under the fluvial sun
as he scatters their uneven
facets within the mesh perforated
like a tulle veil sieving
the lad’s momentum.

In the flaming foliage of words:
brilliant colors and undergrowth,
the hedges and briers,
the gorse, the furze of it,
the scratch and tear of it,
the brief flowering amid thorns

I walk along hollow road,
rabid raccoons to the west
in delirium tremens one dies at
our barn door
twitching and grimacing,
black bears starve to the south
on age-old migratory trails
ravage neighbors’ kitchens

He declares he will fly
with such certainty
I do not believe
he is being metaphorical.

Who am I to say perhaps,
maybe? Isn’t shaping possibilities
why I am sitting in this office?

I wish I had antlers.
They’d stop the small talk.
Nothing too fancy, maybe 30 pounds,
four or five points per side.
Every spring they’d grow,
soft and velvety.
I’d rub them against
the sides of buildings and lamposts.

One last trip
on the New Lots Line
that trundles up
from its tunnel

just as the Brooklyn neighborhoods
turn to Brownsville,
turn to near ruin.
The train takes the 90 degree

Centre Stage
The leader
Hooked on your every pluck, every strum, every bow,
Blocked out the rest of the symphony
Enthralled by you completely,
The thoughtfulness moves me

Sing, muse, where immortal tides embrace,
As Thetis leads her son beyond the mortal race;
No plea to Zeus, the ancient pact of gods holds sure,
In their sacred kinship ages pass but hearts endure.