Spring

A gummy sky, sick feet faltering

through Shaw’s. Picking between

two compact parking spots and

the indecisive fever of traffic

take the place of passion. I don’t

have a response anymore to leaves,

the acres of calling in them, the petals

unrolling for why not me? In another

spring I fell in love, walked slowly

through cemeteries feeling something.

The dog darted into the street and stopped

just short of traffic and it was an omen,

as was the drunk smiling daily to and

from O’Brien’s, books left on my

doorstep, my cynicism finally turned

to something more like a question with

raised ears, faltering, falling, not

quite getting up but trying.

Titular

Not a Buddhist, exactly, but there’s

a blue chair inside me and its former

occupant is strolling the grounds,

lost to orderlies and prefects alike.

There’s a light rain starting, new magnolias,

a robe that could be a nun suit or a

johnny, grass sharp if she wears no

sandals. Of course there’s a difference

between craziness and enlightenment, but

history does not give us these examples.

Sometimes, pacing my rooms and lost

in a fantasy about human possibility,

I leave in a trance, go to my car

and drive with music on, and am only

brought back when I finally hear

the voices of strangers: petty, normal,

talking about money or housing.

By a pond I recognize the panic of birds

and the frog floating dead is my language.

Beside myself I try to save myself.

I do it by scarf or needle, pulled from

a world or a part of one, a paradise.

I'll be posting some of my NaPoWriMo poems here this month. All poems are dedicated to Frank O'Hara. Here is one:

Mouse

Under the fridge hum

I hear its scratchy life

and jump. I stop all

thinking so I can feel it

breathing there. Downstairs

Richard helps the tenants

bring in the old stove, so I

hear also their floored-over

voices with the wind outside

which is blowing much too

hard and cold for April.

In the face of neighborly

pity, I admit I am a

curmudgeon, childless

while other houses explode

with infants, flowers. And

yet there’s a saggy wealth

here somewhere: pleasant

doom in the corner

of every drawer, a giddy

displacement, a shaved-

down saving of myself

and with it the memory

of gravestones yesterday

that marked the pulses each

body tried out once. Mouseless,

I swoop inside myself now

in this moment with everything

I can’t see, take one last

flying leap through my lungs,

and land tenderly in a leotard

at my own feet, astonished.