I read somewhere there’s an
orchid whose flower is shaped
like the female of a long dead
species of bee.

Big, bitter fruits that no-one eats,
drop to the ground and rot

I almost fold your laundry, the numb air
of garments settling, the last breadth of the dryer,
call to me to care for your hot things

Marie Condo says to ask the clothes
how they should be folded
to listen to the fabric, go with the seams

I’m driving through a fog.
Home to public school, I
travel up and down hills,
the 45-mile-stretch
like an obstacle course
to test resolve.

I need this cloudy patch,
not as a puffy mattress,
but as an iron shield

I thought of you this afternoon,
laughing with your entire body
slightly curling over as you let
yourself lay bare its expression
of unconfined happiness. You were
intoxicated with life despite not having
much.

I read somewhere nature doesn’t matter
to city dwellers—not so, did you know
flowers appeared 140 million years ago

Tulips out-valued gold in some places
Orchids draw their nutrients from thin air
and flowers, they really do have powers—

Once, in an angular concrete hotel in Antibes,
you stood before the black curtain
with the massive sunlight on the other side
and a heartbeat in your chest.
You reached up, then dropped your hands.
You tapped your hands on your naked hips.
You reached up again and pulled the curtains wide.

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—