It’s not enough to
say light bends and space curves and
time can, but doesn’t
Sentience
This May morning, I open the windows; light,
filtered, inexorable, fills all; the breeze
is cool, soft, heavy, variable; the leaves
are shades—light and bright and deep—of green; the sky
is subtly mottled creamy grey; now the birds
chirp and, as dark specks, lift and fly—here, away.
Occurrences
A child laughs, across the street, a flash of red.
A barking dog, cars rush, continuities
break—cough of a starting car, mother speaking
in rhythms slipping into abrupt stillness.
We don’t comprehend anything that occurs—
silky cool sheer smoothness of morning quiet.
Reading
To catch you in the act, the fact, of reading—
to catch me in the act, the fact, of writing—
naked time in this promiscuous meeting—
naked space in flagrante delicto—wing
it, in the long crying, in the dark lifting,
the birds’ sudden red clamor interrupting
Non sequitur
My mother, father, aunt, and uncle—”just us”—
talk on the train in an exquisite other
world of transitory time and space; the mood
of intimate solitude opens between . . .
but then sudden interrupting eavesdropping . . .
the glance, the mute decision to talk nonsense,
All
All’s words squirreling on thinly present lines
before they leap vast voids in singular bounds,
the lattice window casting patterns of light,
angled sunlight in an unclouded morning,
the same patterns, still and soft, in falling dusk,
from the street light after I turn the lights out.
Serendipity
Pick a word, any word—serendipity
say, an admittedly scampish, campy tramp—
a loosey-goosey waif. Her father conceived
her, commendably assisted in her birth,
named her, and then abandoned her; her mother,
magic, was, he said, a “fairy-tale” rumor—
