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Poetry
The Absence That Was The Tree
Two men are cutting the dead maple down: / limbs and branches first, then the trunk / in sections, all the pieces scattered in piles / on the ground out of which it grew.
April 2010Love Poem
I hear cooing and scuffling as I stand on the steps of my building / and at first, with the fluttering, hope for an angel, a visitation, but / then realize I am listening to pigeons, crammed in a window box, / mating over my head.
April 2010Turning Fifty
It was a beautiful day, rainy-gray, foggy, dismal, perfect. / I was so happy because there was nothing to do / and nowhere to go and no one to meet, and never / in my life had I felt so empty and so full.
March 2010Enlightenment Is A Bitch
At first it isn’t so bad — a taste of ecstasy, / the world covered in honey. Even snails / scrawl the names of buddhas with their silvery trails.
March 2010hank
hank fell stepping off an escalator at rockefeller center and banged his head up good/ spent the next ten days in roosevelt hospital/ crankily submitting to every test
February 2010Selected Poems
— from “A Pittsburgh Poem” | Imagine a man in a hat on a street early one morning in autumn. / This is my grandfather on his way to work at the brokerage firm. / He is a treasurer. He takes the bus down from the southern hills. / It is October 28, 1929.
February 2010The Human Realm
Sunday morning in Central Park, chilly September: / I stood, hungry, packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, / feeling like one of the huddled, shivering Antarctic penguins / I’d observed, over Burmese takeout, on a nature show.
February 2010Sparrow
What could the Bible mean / when it says no sparrow falls / without God’s notice?
January 2010New Year
Icy rain and wind outside; inside, my back’s / To the bedraggled human shape asprawl / On the comfy corner sofa at the Starbucks
January 2010Selected Poems
— from “An Encounter” | We met naked on the sun deck by the / clothing-optional hot springs, / and I saw the long scar / like a smile across his furred abdomen
January 2010
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