She says
always put venerable
in the same sentence as tree.

She says Van Cortlandt Park
is never far
from her heart.

She says the #1 train
will always come first
even when it breaks down.

She says
home is where you hang
yourself. No,

he says that.
She says home is
wherever there is a pen.

and the color blue dances
in the meadow with pale gray

till civil twilight
waves them off the horizon

a raccoon scales the side
of a skyscraper in Saint Paul

who knew there were raccoons
in the city

who knew Saint Paul
had skyscrapers

who knew half a lifetime
would pass

without getting any closer
to the answer to the question

is it mine
this is the glass age

and the year of light
has slipped away

we fight the darkness
with burning stick

figures we forgot we drew
when the words wouldn’t come

the best building
is no building

the best body
is nobody

she ever knew
how to awaken

without disturbing
the loam

if there really is just one system
she will keep fueling

this container filled with water
and carbon and blood

the flaw in her profile
is no accident

each snowflake that falls
on her tongue

tastes like the splinters
he used to feed her

the ones she would crave
with the disorientation of a junkie

between fixes
tin ceiling tiles bounce all this

wayward light
into her hands

it’s not snowing
on this day in mid-June

an excessive heat warning
kicks in till 7 pm

here in the middle
between the famed river and hidden channel

only the dirt and wood in her mouth
are real

what gets incinerated
can no longer forgive

I meet a hero.
She gives me an 8
to use as a boomerang.

Before he comes back to me,
a spinning jenny hovers forever
beside the hummingbird I trust most.

I try optimism
on for size.
A little tight

around the neck
and across the shoulders.
I shrug off the glitter

from its inner lining
and return to these
exercises in euphoric recall.

Memorizing the Atlantic Ocean pays off
when everything comes back

in a rhythm
only the moon
could invent.

Dressed in black
like some Goth female Jesus,
she dashes across a channel
in the deepest pocket of night
to deliver a message in the wind:

When you find your blue dress,
dance in it, swim in it,
just don’t tear off
the buttons
before it’s time.

She hears a whispered response
to kiss another evening
in another city and
look for lipstick smudges
on the near side of the moon.

Morning somewhere else
years later, she erases
all evidence
of dream seeds she planted
behind the building.

An alley is no place
for sprouting new limbs
and lineage,
no place for recall
of the euphoric kind.

Some fabric cannot be dyed
black or blue.

smile
it’s the month
for smiles

and meteor showers
and oceans
I love/

hate the month
of June
births of past lovers

including the first
who later drowns
in his own swimming pool

Father’s Day goes on
even after
the father dies

celebrate global running day
and my niece
weeks before the longest day

and shortest night
in the Northern Hemisphere
flip it in the Southern

Seersucker Thursday
Bike to Work Week
in Victoria

celebrate flip flops
surfing and Canadian rivers
Hungarian teachers

Icelandic seamen
but what about
the seawomen

doughnuts and trails
dairy goats
and thunderstorms

queens from Papua New Guinea
New Zealand
England and Norfolk Island

private reflection
in Northern Ireland
the Finnish flag

Russian inventors
and rationalizers
pixies and Dutch veterans

bomb pops and Juno
log cabins and roses
don’t forget my niece

Kenyan and Luxembourger mothers
weather whiplash
and where are the lightning bugs

moonstones and summer
meteorlogically and
astronomically speaking

honeysuckle and pearls
and the night
I may have ruined my life

(“Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion,” artist unknown, China, 1790, Minneapolis Institute of Art permanent collection)

No one knows
who carved the ancient gathering
of scholars at Lanting Pavilion
into a jade boulder.

Or how the rice wine
they drank
on a cool March day
tasted on their tongues.

Or how the poems they wrote
sounded out loud
after so many drainings
of the floating goblets.

No one knows
what the lone poet felt
when he left the others to find
the secret passage

up the mountain
where water might run
pure enough to drink
from cupped hands.

I will write a slow poem for you
that drifts down the Mississippi
on a pontoon raft created from upcycled
piano parts and plastic milk jugs.

That seeks to be snagged
by venerable tree corpses.
That detours into the mutable thickness
of a quaking bog

where walking becomes the flipside
of a footrace, and all
the duckweed-eating turtles wear
orange ribbons on their necks.

I will become your slow
poem to recite
when everything begins
to go out of tune.

Slow down,
you move too fast.
You got to make
the morning last.

And it all unravels
into yet another
thing—
late and soon.

Wordsworth and Simon and Garfunkel
and every ekphrastic poet I know
will give me a little help
along the meandering way.

Let’s live
a slow poem life
backwards and sideways
and inside out—

giddy at the sight
of another highway
closed for reconstruction
over a long weekend.

I will revisit that museum
in Cleveland
where I made my own
slow art day.

Seated on a cold wood floor,
I paused
before her
for over an hour,

tears blurring the view.
Freshly released
from the weight
of addiction

one moment at a time,
I was hanging onto
anything I could grasp
with pried-open fists.

Then a raspy voice whispered,
It’s your duty
to tell her story
any way you can:

(“Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone,” sculpture by Auguste Rodin, Cleveland Museum of Art)

Rodin’s Caryatid

Bronze pillar come rest
your arms upon your right knee,
bow your head beneath the burden
of your stone.

Your robe has fallen, a bundle
upon your left thigh,
a foot exposed, arching
taut as a dancer’s.

You would be lovely
outside those gates of hell
should you one day risk

standing. Bronze is a liquid
when boiling. You would be
lovely without that stone.

When I return
to Governors Island,
I will collect shells
from a mussel, not

spent ones
from shotguns—slugs long gone.

I will pogo around a circle
with 21st-century punks
without a stick or shtick
and nod my head vigorously

as poets shout the secret
ingredients to their broken hearts.

When I return to Governors Island,
I will bring the freshest figment
specimens I have been collecting
from empty ditches

and storied sidewalks.
I will bring the dirt.

Think how it all began
the night he discovered
the mirror
in the lake,

and she saw it too.
And they lost themselves
in the surface
of things.

Think how bog bodies
and dead monkeys
in air shafts
refuse to tell on themselves.

And how you pull a red
knit cap over your ears
in mid-May and brave
another day without a Plan B.

Think how Plan X
is so much sexier
with its brackish creek
that breeds a new ecosystem

in the fen sedge
of desire. How you never know
how I will respond
to that color on you.

Think of orange ladders
everywhere we might meet—
the evidence we leave
on those slippery metal rungs.

in this genius of place
a meadow and stream
dance together to invent

a new color
you can touch
with your favorite edge of sky

those bare birch trees
remind you to shout
bring on the dirt

how many bridges to nowhere
can you count blindfolded
is not the question to ask

with so many blackbirds
soaring noisily overhead

instead tally the pedestrian
one that leads to a garden
of sculptural delights

when it’s not closed
for the spring
maybe all summer for repairs

no one wants
another one
to fall down

don’t blame the river
no matter how angry
or lonely it gets

* from Alexander Pope’s “Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle IV to Richard Boyle”