Dancing Angels

When the question was
not whether, but how many
angels danced, I imagined their small,
perfect toes and tiny, graceful hands,
the music of their gently beating
wings that carried them not too high
above the unlikely floor.

What This Means

There is no easy
explanation, no definition crammed
between two guide words,
no simple illustration for an act
of beautiful futility,
a moment of hope or foolish
abandon.

What it means is what it means,
what it feels like or looks like
up close or from a great
height or distance,
a narrow shaft of light or murky depth,
a subtle whoosh of warmth
or tumbling crash
over the edge of the flat earth,
into dragon-infested waters
over the last, high ridge and down,
always down,
to the undiscovered shore.

What It Will Always Be

Time changes
names and colors, even erases
things, some times
but we seem always to remember
with strange discrimination
the details lost to alteration:
the Blue House that hasn't been for three
coats of paint or more; the Greek
restaurant where the fried rice lunch
special beckons for $3.95; or the spot of static
on the radio where we used to hear
more of what we wanted.

Native Tongue

Before we knew,
we spoke it,
claimed our rights and cried our woes
in rhythmic grunts and lilting
wails, sang of the mysterious
beginning in voiceless fricatives
to no one's understanding, just
a tickle or a bottle or a silly face
intended to make us forget
what we knew
before we spoke.

Postcard from Fool (No. 2)

The whether
could be better
here along the shore
where great waves
crash and scatter
into so much froth
and broken
bits of shell
too small to plate
a breaking heart.

This Light

More than pale yellow
less than vibrant blue dapples
your empty pillow.

Impending

What happens
while you're waiting
for the other
thing
to happen
can be a thousand
shards
of glass
or all the light
refracted through them,
a million rainbows
you wouldn't notice
unless you were really there
to look.

Will & Grace

"In all external grace you have some part..."
—Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet 53

What elemental, eloquent design
lies underneath your public artifice,
that countenance so perfectly sublime
that jealous angels rival for your kiss
and hosts of lovers fawn to touch your skin?
What architect of heaven made your shell,
braving for glory's sake a deadly sin
that worldly thoughts of beauty would dispel
and leave instead an aching sense of loss,
a vacancy forever unfulfilled,
a palate bored by meat without the sauce,
an eye blind to the lily without gild.

Fair to wonder what good your maker meant
when the fruit of his work is discontent.

Total Recall

From the last parking spot
a block away, you could smell
the strange perfume
of smoke and beer, commingle
with the chemical reaction
between hormones and throbbing
pop music.

Armed with a week's worth
of quarters and hopes,
we breached the cavern,
dropped the cover
and eyed Brian behind
the bar for the usual.
Then came the inevitable
browse and sort,
the rank ordering of potential
disappointments
and risks worth taking
if only for the story
we could laugh about
years later.

Today.

Better Day

Morning light tumbles
through open, westward windows
on the sea's salt kiss.

Only a Test

Some answers are clear,
clearly a matter of knowing
the Earth
revolves, carving an ellipse
around the Sun.

Others become apparent,
like the value of X.

Still others beg
questions with lists of alphabetic
possibilities, fostering doubt,
forcing choice,
even offering the unlikely
options of all
or none
of the above.

Wishes

The first is lost to memory,
that earnest, eyes-closed whisper
chanted as my fist gave way
to fingers, flung the treasure
to the unseen, hungry sprites
of hope.

Other silent secrets, one
for every candled cake
and more for shimmering
cosmic cataclysms
I forgot almost as soon
as I didn't get them.

Still, somewhere between
a penny and a meteor must
be a price
for days of honey
yellow light and warm
breezes, soft edges
and softer centers,
no less than you deserve.

Swords

A girl I knew wrote angry
poems about the tyranny
of feminine
hygiene products and futility
of higher
education.

She drank gin and tonics perched
on a barstool, complaining
about the social distortion
perpetuated by the codependent
lyrics of pop songs and collecting
in a napkin all the colorful
plastic swords
the bartender used
to skewer her limes.

One night when she'd amassed
a pile to rival
Toledo's proudest Spanish
steel, I helped her
home and watched her
drop them down the long neck
of a huge glass bottle,
an arsenal of points
she wanted to remember
to make
some day.

String Theory

Kites, like captive birds,
struggle against the tether
holding them aloft.

Graceful Tumble

for Elizabeth

Practically from birth
we train
like cynical thoroughbreds
to seek surprise, dispel
astonishment before it crashes
us into fences or others staggered
by the unforeseen mouse
or sudden stinging insect.
We practice patience, vigilance
and balance, keep eyes
ahead and feet
below
until
the rug furls
like a flag,
a standard of futility,
topples us
without ceremony
leaves us only
with the graceful
way we fall.

Clever Monkey

A bigger brain, a softer head
to hold it, an upright
stance to ache
our backs and break
our arches, pale
hairless bodies, unsuited
to being unsuited, the blade
the bullet, the bomb,
spam (both kinds), cel phones, fast
food heart attacks, slow
traffic, low
self-esteem and high
blood pressure.

Better to be swinging
in mango trees.

Question About a Glass

I don't spend much time staring
at this transparent vessel,
oracle for divining true
nature by a simple
observation.

Ask me again
when I'm not so busy,
so overworked and underslept,
so obviously distracted
by ordinary magic and the politics
of thieves.

If you'd asked me Sunday, when
I got caught up on the laundry,
I'd have said "half-full"
in a New York minute.

April Afternoon

Sunlight explodes through
the deluge spreading rainbows
across the table

Self Help

Do it gently
down to darkness
quiet among the low
gray light of a stormy afternoon.

Distill notes from nature's symphony
into your theme.

Flatten mistakes
like pressed flowers
into your belly.

Slide unintended consequences
and uncomfortable silences into brown
paper envelopes and seal
them with your kisses.

Drop your anchor
and defenses long enough to know
that initmacy
is when other people are close
enough.

Cradle to Grave

Familiar names, old friends
from grammar school history
lessons transform
into targets and spoils
of war.
A silver harp, the head
of an Akkadian king, a horned
god from Ur, all gone
along with lives uncounted,
shards and blood
the remains of the futile
crescent.

Cat Vespers

Black cat in the west
window sniffs alder
and pine, breathes
day's last dust
evening's first bloom,
stretches into sunset,
clambers paw by paw
from sill to desk to sofa
lies, sunny side close,
spreads a day's warmth absorbed
along the soft, cool curve
behind my knee.

Dishonorable Mention

The hallway whisper hisses
on black scales
across the benign,
industrial carpeting, slithers
forked tongue smelling
blood or some other ooze
of desperation, twines
among the cables connecting
us, forcing
immediate intimacy
and rests on the desktop, waiting
for reply, dreading
the blind
carbon copy.

Knowledge of Angels

A matter of illumination,
geometry, geography and time,
the thing in morning knowledge, pure
intention, radiates promise
like an apple polished
on a well-pressed sleeve.

In evening knowledge, though
a tawny bruise, a speck,
the idea of a worm
dim the appetites of hungry thrones,
dominations, principalities and virtues,
all creatures of light
otherwise ignorant
of the long shapes of shadow
stealing fabric for the quilt
of dreams.

"There is a vast difference between knowing anything as it is in the Word of God, and as it is in its own nature; so that the former belongs to the day, and the latter to the evening." — St. Augustine

Running Late

Today began with grumbling
mumbling, fumbling
for a clock that lied
a daylight hour cloaked
in dim gray fog and soft
cotton sheets
too warm to leave.

All day I pined
that hour stolen,
cursed the fools
who honor the foolish,
swilled caffeine in barrels
and waited until evening,
lighter than dawn,
to make time to be in this poem.

Chances

It's not a coin
tossed high
above our heads,
spinning in breathless
anticipation of an outcome:
yes or no.

It's more like balls
held in motion
by a grinning fool
astounding and confounding
us with maybes.

Laundry

Like narrative and bowling
it will never end, never
come crashing to a halt,
exhausted and extinct,
engineered out
of common usefulness.

Not even nudists
can escape clean sheets
and towels and, for heaven's
sake, a sweater every now and then.

So it cycles:
sort, wash, rinse, dry, fold, wear,
the endless progression of skins
to hide our skins
to warm our hides.

Whites tumble in warmth
while denim sloshes,

sweaters wait, a tangle
of desperate, clinging
arms in a basket.

And when it's all done,
I'll strip off this skin
I'm wearing now
and have a start
on next week's
laundry.

Back in Time

for Elaine
Under certain circumstances
it's easy to remember
your jangling, angling way
of talking, building
clause on clause the way life
is, so much a string
of dependencies.

It's easy, too, to recall
your laugh, that crisp
eruption of mirth
that follows the best
bitter ironies and least
appropriate jokes.

Remembering now how we sat
talking with no lights
on as summer stretched day
long into the night,
I pause to imagine
after coming so close
to nothing
but remembering
the next time we'll chatter
after you're back.
In time

Scowl

The best minds of my generation,
fattened on pizza and beer, stoned cynical slovenly
drag themselves across the couch at half-time
looking for the lost remote,

tragically hip-sters hungering
for electronic stimulation from the high-definition
engine of consumer research

who prosperity cripples
with Visa® bills and student loans

who shared their demographics
blindly for a peek at porn or a better portfolio

who got slammed by dot.bombs
broken between the need for Rogaine® and Viagra®

who play with their laptops

who pay for lap dances

who pray for the lotto

with the Absolut® martini of the spreadsheet of life
poured down their throats good for a ten-minute

buzz

Note: On this day in 1955, the ACLU declared it would defend Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl against obscenity charges.

Touching Trains

This guy I knew touched
trains
for fun.

Real live moving freight
trains
hauling coal and steel
north from Wheeling
south from Braddock
creaking, clacking, rattling
down rusty tracks
that ran (still run)
through half-dead patch towns
up and down
the river valley.

Stoned or stewed,
he'd hover in the rush
of train wind,
poised like a saint
prepared to be a martyr,
hold his breath
count three
and reach,
trembling
touch and go
touch and go
touch and go.

Breathless we watched
unsure of why we couldn't stop
watching him
touch and go
touch and go
touch and go.

The Mouse Inside This Poem

The mouse inside this poem
is blind,
sad, suffering bastard,
tailless wonder
wandering
wondering
what cataclysm
brought him here
without his kin
who must be puzzling his absence
between them.

I'd reassure them
if I could
some how
some way
some day
they'll find themselves
together in some nursery
or Kindergarten,
but I don't think they'd understand
the complex, self-referential
paradigm.

So for now at least
they'll suffer uncertainty
like the rest
of us,
those other two and
the mouse inside this poem