Poetry

The stranger across the street
Asks me if I want to die, and I say
Only if it is a happy death
If I were to die now

I’m not worried about
missing out on my first drink
being able to rent cars
owning my first house
or waiting to turn 65
for the chance to retire

Yes, my heart yearns
for the day it stops beating
It is indeed a burning
Choice out of desire
but I am not running
towards death. It must come to me

And when that day
is near arrival
Do not ask me to keep
fighting. I am taking the
passageway that leads to

my ancestors,
answers how
the Egyptians built
the Pyramids, and crafts a
body that knows no Illness

If you want to know how are we so
Compatible with death
The secret lies in           the syntax
Written in the code of
life: God’s program for humanity.

I remember your hands 
The most 
Labor-worn and never smooth 
They were large hands 
Fit for a lumberjack 
Yet old and wise 
Never withered 
Strength within each 
Groove and wrinkle 
Though gentle when you’d 
Lead me through 
Your colorful spring garden 
Blues 
Pinks 
Purples 
All bright in my youthful eyes 
You’d take me there just to see 
My smile
I was there but a flower bud 
Soaking in this day like water 

after a line from Williams

The places we visit are new
versions of our city–streets we knew
house by house           elm by oak
an alley where the phone pole
marked an end zone             a park
on a river where mailboats docked
between runs to slow freighters
What was our town and what
might be draw together like lovers
in a doorway             lips joining them
for a beat after arms and linked
hands release             After sirens             a rapt
child pulls her face from a window
and leaves a faint             warm
convolution on the glass

for Cameron

A wooden sword and candy red hair,
whirling, twirling lioness on a summer’s day,
of harm and harming, there is no care.

Grown men have fled the field and stare
“I fear I’d hurt her if I tried to play!”
A wooden sword and candy red hair,

A goblin grin, her nostrils flare.
“Beware the new girl” I hear them say,
“Of harm and harming, there is no care.”

But still they all are gathered there,
green grass, blue sky, it’s time to play.
A wooden sword and candy red hair,

the clacking wood, the humid air,
the lioness’ and goblin’s prey.
Of harm or harming, there is no care.

The seeds of friendship planted there
a tree that grows from simple play.
A wooden sword and candy red hair
of harm and harming, there is no care.

1. The trees are here because they are planted, not grown on their own. They are planted
   with pebbles that have tints of red and brown. Beautiful trees stand forever. Their
   branches grow to stretch, reaching each other, and wanting to hold on to life. They grow
   to the sky letting their leaves wave in the wind. Their colors shape from green, red,
   purple, and gold. Some are bald needing more time, more food than pebbles to grow. The
   young ones have leaves all over their trunk letting them drop down to give them new life.
   They are taller than any man-made building, not in sight but in spirit. They are the true
   homes of mother nature, where the bark holds a world of creatures ready to be fed back into the outside world.

2. What do you know about trees? The oak tree grows and knows more. More knowledge
   than any human that has or ever will live. More knowledge than the computers that will
   take us over. More knowledge than the universe itself for the trees were there at the start.
   They are the beginning and they will never be the last but carry on living. The oldest tree
   in the world reaches 5,000 years old. It lives in the harshest conditions. Cold
   temperatures and high winds would kill anything else. Any human can’t live that long
   with a healthy lifestyle or advancements let alone one with freezing temperatures. Bare to
   the bone people would die. But the tree lives on. It is slow growing. It created dense
   wood and bristlecone pine to make it resistant to insects, fungi, rot, and erosion. It knows
   how to protect itself. The tree lives longer because it grows in harsh conditions. We do
   not. We might make it out with our lives but our minds are corrupted. Trees; do not become corrupt. Even with bribery.

3. The way trees are just there. Watching. You never think twice about the tree that lives in
   your backyard or the one that’s at school until it’s gone. You look at the ground at a hold.
   At a patch of dirt messy sprinkled with grass. It reminds me of sitting in a tree. Of laying
   against it feeling the breeze as I rested from running in the park. It was when my heart
   was racing, my skin was sweaty, and my head still spinning that I felt connected to the
   tree. The wind coming through the leaves, I felt through my bones. The ground that feeds
   the roots, I felt it in my gym shoes. The way the ants climbed up the bark, I was an ant
   climbing back on my feet. The stickiness I felt on my hands and arms after I left the park was a reminder of what I felt and believed.

This Riesling carries the terroir
of the Lake Seneca coast,
the wine label says. Somebody has to
review these products. I hope you don’t
wonder who I am
when I talk like this,
that you can trust this guano
ethos attuned to mineral and stone.
The birds are mostly gone.
I don’t question owls and bats
nor do I worry
about clean talon marks along
the thoraxes of voles, but I wonder
where the birds have gone.
The carrion birds are gone;
we could use them.
There is an ethic of indifference
you may’ve noticed morphing
into a dogged brand of putrefaction
in recent years; nobody says
“feline” as an adjective
for endurance, but a grey
and white cat with a mewl
like an infant has crossed
our yard a dozen times today.
I was recently wondering
if the gerund use of mewling
could embody a genitive case
but then couldn’t figure out
what I meant by “embody”
in the commission of Cartesian
grammars. It’s easy to be
a cat and castigate the present
while ignoring the role your habits
play in the degradation of
an ecosystem.
People are different, conscious
as they are of finitude
and posterity, and there’s no question
of resources. I thought maybe
you needed me to tell you that.
People are different. There’s
no question of resources.
A cat will rarely lap wine.
A yard is three feet, but I’m using
a metaphor of municipal proportions
rather than a strict unit of measurement.
Great plural nouns like “gymnasia”
don’t beg to be used;
their sense of utility is shot
through with several frozen epochs
that see glaciations advance, retreat,
and give birth to new geologies
before they are uttered again.
Yards, however, beget
yards once the indexical
mania takes chain link and unwinds it.
Too small to accumulate
a history or significance
that we might’ve assigned Erie in its
bellwether mid-eutrophic period
(James Joyce postulated
that Atlantis lay in Erie’s algal depths,
in that great layck of oxygen),
the Finger Lakes eschew
sublimity for elegance.
The Finger Lakes lie south
of Lake Ontario on the northern
edge of the Allegheny Plateau
in an over-deepened glacial valley
below any continuous surveyor’s
line. You told me I was giving
the finger to the Finger Lakes
when I said I’d never heard
of the region’s Riesling.
We had Oneida pickerel
(such perdurant creatures) with
the wine. “That cat needs
Latin lessons,” I told you as it traipsed
through our yard again. But
what it was saying in that mewl
like an infant’s cry was clear
to me as a declension
among the redolent perfume of vines.
For language, geological and consumerist,
acutely adjectival, mycelial
in the hyphae of the neurons
it lights up, can militate
the dreadful need
to teach or geyser aqueous volcanos
in the blue ice near the shore
or soothe like the cold white wine
of winter.