It is often
easier to write
the landscape
without the pollution

of people.
This hillside
was once
wild with color

look into my orchid eye
and I’ll tell you a story about psilocybin sex,
how to melt into another
with full chimera absorption.

honeycombed echo’s of deep earth
as red sandstone soil covered
buried treasure

My sister held the baby as he died.
Not hers.

She held the nose-tube baby
as his mother exercised at the Y,
exorcized, for moments, grief,
setting fragile, ebbing boy in soft arms.

Threat of late Spring rain,
against the chalk scrawled blackboard,
shower of bullets.

Teachers throw bodies
splashing over stunned students
last lectures of love.

The moon is a sliver tonight,
or at least it looks it
through the buildings and the trees.

Planted, four, in a row
like towers on a grid,
I wonder if trees can love.

My parents loved each other but it’s unlikely no one was harmed
on the long, broad path to my conception, and as for fidelity,
my mitochondrial DNA is British all the way to the damsel
du chambre of Queen Philippa, born in Tonbridge Castle,
mother unknown, fathered by Edward’s ambidextrous favorite.

It will take your breath,
the endless wall,
but you will call again.
Lean out, plant the feet:
cinch of gravity at the waist,
below the wash, the rapid.

There’s a portrait of me with
cousin Frank, he’s six I’m three,
taken at my first home in the USA,
a stone apartment building at Van
Cortland Park, bedrock segue to

the rest of our lives…

Stretched over 4.2 square miles, the Azovstal steel complex
is/ was a sprawling warren of rail lines, warehouses, coal furnaces, factories, chimneys
above essentially an underground city of tunnels seen as ideal for guerrilla warfare.

Stooping down,
here,
I remember the honey blooms
on my grafted kalanchoe
and the bursting April storm clouds

the Great Chicago Fire of 1871,
the Great Boston Fire of 1872,
and the Great San Francisco Fire of 1906

crowds the chemical space
of My Great-Grandma’s Kitchen Fire of 1977.

Here on a yacht in the Gulf of Mexico,
as a shrimp boat burrows behind
through the cool, plowed path of our electric motors,
we drink another salty beer, our bare feet
sliding on the damp deck with each ocean wash.

In front of my living room window,
on a splendid May afternoon, warm and sunny,
a fat crow rapturously caws over its good fortune.
I watch in morbid fascination
as it tears apart a rodent.
Can’t fault the crow, a natural predator.

At dusk, a barn
owl puts on a riding coat
of gray-white feathers
and mounts a horse of air.
Galloping away,
he brings silent death
to mice and voles
in fields beside our home.

There is a photograph of the East Village that hangs on his wall . . .

Taken December 14, 1996, the subject matter: urban, brownstones unadorned, fire escapes to one side, cars parked bumper-to-bumper and of makes, models, styles that carbon-date the instant.

It saddens me that I am nothing waiting to be something
Never established yet deeply rooted
Hard to remember impossible to forget
Crisp Midwestern autumn
Chilled New England nights
A southern summer whirlwind
that haunts and tugs and teases

that vulnerable space, between thigh and throat
between tongue, and depleted serotonin
of rotten apple clusters seething with life
of elegantly draped
heavily dusted spider webs
looking more like torn rags from the thickness

first step, to take up the pen,
ponder it,
as instrument—

a piece of paper then,
as white and infinite
as the light—

Like a multi-faceted realm
home to the great wetlands & floodplains
Lies a pool of water
that lures you to stay
It’s
Lake Bangweulu
~ where the water meets the sky ~

At the aptly named Jackson Theater
when you were twelve
you saw John Wayne’s visually ambitious
gloriously fictitious
version of The Alamo
— yet another story already told to you through TV
— and so of course yet another lie.

In my early, disruptive thirties,
I wondered through
An aimless, broken land,
With a slew of past sins as my guide.

Along my travels,
I found a temple made of marble stone
Standing in the middle of nowhere.

Sleepless cities hate shutting down, but also,
Distancing protocols dismantle congregations in dozy towns.
Trauma afflicts the already jobless.
New York nights avoid turning dark & idle,
Yet theatres close-down & spotlights shut-off,
Covid has proven that seductive consumptions are not worth the cough.

Flying home from Seattle,
A man behind me mentions
The 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
I turn to see if it is you. A crazy thought.
Why would you be here?
Fifteen years since I heard your voice.
Still, I recall its timbre.
When you talked it sounded as if
You had a mouthful of stones.

I walk back from intensive care,
automatically shuffle for solitaire
and report the numbers to siblings
as I try to deal:
pressure urine cc’s and temp,
peeling off the first three cards
and nothing changing.