WILD CHERRY

This ain’t no regular Pepsi, friend
It’s Wild Cherry
And a dour woman practices
Her violin nearby
I inhabit the tree’s shade

Because my face is in recovery
From beers on the boardwalk
At Coney Island
Sun like a whip
We saw the pendulous

Nest of some greeny
Parrots there
Choking the electric transom
And invaded by sparrows

Foreign women walk by with
Shopping bags
Or run by in sports bras
Birds dip and shiver

In a pile of fine dust
Amid the cobblestone
A taxi screeches

Men with cigars seem ubiquitous
Coloring the air
One way to live is to write

The gist of what’s happening
So to know it

Today I loathe
Meaning and think only

In quale and burst

The dogs don’t smile
But they appear to

My very own sister approaches
Talking on the phone

With our parents
Who are in New Mexico
Overfeeding hummingbirds

The same thing
(Sugar water)
Acidly coursing my stomach

The woman with the violin now
Taking furious notes
With her free, claw-like hand
My sister’s talk

Slow and melodious
Because that’s what’s
Happening
My pen running

Out of ink
Dusk approaching sly
An elderly woman
In an orange wig
Warbling some senile aria

Oh no she spies
Me writing about her
The obvious, lazy disdain
Sing if you can sing she says
And I’m cowed again

SNOW LIKE FROZEN LIGHT

Noon is hard on
a priest. An egg
wants company
and so cracks.
This is my shepherd
this wind
patiently embracing.
I am not so
easy. Love like
an unassailable
soil. But at least
not timid
with hate. That
man that
is my father.
We know only
what might be made
to sing
through mishap.

HOLY THURSDAY

It is Thursday and I just
Read Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
A song of the poor
And of the sun’s relativity
But he is wrong
Because the sun is not
A metaphor
A song of the sun
Is continuously sung
Do the poor sing it?
Yes, they do
The poor sing of the sweet
Torpor of the sun
Moving like an ancient woman
Over the horrible silence
Of the land
What do we deserve
From the air?
It shuttles tirelessly
These hot notes
It is even less
A metaphor than the sun
First a metaphor, then the eyes
Close contentedly
And what has been lost
Drags in the melody
Of the ancient woman’s ragged
Dress, who is also not a metaphor
What has been lost
Is too easily
Found to be believed
And the poor stare directly
Into Thursday’s air
Like nothing
And everything at once

HOLY THURSDAY REPRISE

Switched from William to Blind Blake
“Panther Squall Blues”
A gift from Ed
To complement Willies
McTell and Johnson
The recording bathed in static
As if it were the secret voice of air
Set loose by time
A song about frantic love
I know the long dead
Laugh uncontrollably at our attempts
To love right
2:57
You write from work
With a barely restrained panic
Born not of love
But assuaged by it
“The sun, the warmth, the grass and your hands”
Fifteen hours fifty-eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds
Into the day
A great wind gathering
A wind that manifests while at the same time
Remaining invisible
Like the great gathering love
Which waits for you
Laughing uncontrollably

ON THE TORPOR OF NONVIOLENCE

I’m done with innocence
William Blake’s that is
Read the first half of his songs
This afternoon and now
Sit sweating while the cat sleeps
This is what it feels like
To be old snow, says Colin
As the mere effort of existence
Peels away from one like a bathing suit
Turning inside out
Eyes salty
Listening to Public Enemy
A tornado in Brooklyn
And a cockroach on the wall
The size of the mouse in the cupboard
The cat won’t kill
Startling awake on the sill
Only to yawn
Blake’s lamb's post-millennium skew
Angels dehydrated
In the air-conditioning

WAYRRULL

The big bang is an initial step. The first step taken in existence. Or, more likely, the first step after a long period of stillness, or inert intensity. Which is probably why that first step was so large and unwieldy. Whenever one takes a step there is an imbalance. This imbalance, what I call disequilibrium, is what insures that existence endures. It is only possible for things to happen in the first step of disequilibrium. And even if that first step was huge and distant and only abstractly perceptible, it still steps. The first disequilibrium, what the Aboriginals call Wayrrull, or “the thrust behind things,” is present in each consequent step, each pulse of disequilibrium that continues to this day. One way to picture it is to think of concentric rings. The big bang is the outer ring and each movement in the world taken by each thing is a new ring. We are tempted to say “directly at the center,” but how could this be? With so many loci of movement, so many steps simultaneously taken, how could there be a single center? Disequilibrium is about dance, collective. The first step is followed and interpenetrated by innumerable steps; each connected, each necessary, each unpredictable.

ALL THE SNOW IN HOLLYWOOD

Tall and wild, like
a sunflower peering
over some bleached
fence. But today
stuck on a bus
beside a woman not
reading Absalom, Absalom!
All ride it sits
there, a beautiful
old edition, unopened.
In my lap, Susan
Cataldo never closes
and the words singe
will remain here heard
like Atsuko Tanaka’s
electric dress is seen
returning something
of me to myself, tall
and wild, an ibis
but something more
drably American. This
bus will leave me
in Washington unless
it’s headed to Philly
which I fear for
at least an hour.
Worse, I fear the deep
sadnesses of girlhood
which suffuse the ones
I love even as they turn
into women. But fear
to me, tall and wild
and boyish still, though
nearly thirty, it is only
a moment of holding
my breath and gone
on the wild, translucent
air that commends us
to move impossibly fast
through it and then
into the very future.
It does not scare me
that I have to dance
to get around the TV
couch, dresser, doorway
in our suddenly tiny
apartment. Only another
week and we will
inherit the ceiling
fan. Chinese ice
coffee hurtles through
my brain. The bus
now far from Philly
thank god. If I were
a philosopher, I would
say Singing is a means
to group identification
but I know better.
A song is a button
we press when we
want to thank god
even if we never have
believed in him or her
or it or all the snow
in Hollywood.