The First Flash

The First Flash (Seeing the Lights of New York from the Bus Trip Home)


Lights rear up
like but so much better
than a dancing horse
or a carousel
or even the lights
of a Christmas tree

1 million Christmas trees
but the ecstasy
inheres in the moment:
You live in light
and all the lights
that crash up
floating above
what humans never
realized they were
releasing.

City makes music
of these lights,
which you can hear
if they let you breathe
after the first
flash glance
the first clash
of senses
with awe and
unbearable shine.

They grab you.
Then vanish.

Then...home.

To Dance With Henry

To Dance With Henry (To the Memory of Henry Braun, 1930-2014)

The same ground -

born in upstate New York,

Brandeis for undergrad,

BU for grad, Temple to teach,

both of us ABD.

at twenty four years' distance

that you broke down

with blue glints of laughter.

You knew all my favorite profs

and the ones I would have liked

to know.

You organized teach ins.

They spoke.

You read poems

that danced, then damned

the time and its war machines

in gentle anger so deep

that hate itself must have bled

on hearing.

Much later,

you made time for my questions

even those that caught you up

in spirals of ifs and mights

and rendered you late.

Your poems pressed each word

into flowers of the angriest colors,

which flowered into change

catching several fires

that woke us like war flares

into remembering.

I realized way too late

that your workshop

would have opened me

without tearing.

One day I will go to Maine,

stretch out to your essence

that dances the grave,

another amused smile,

wry gentle beauty

that catches itself just short

of anger.

Will you greet me?

On the Edge

A butterfly
is a meeting
of worlds:
caterpillar,
cocoon, then
lit frenzy in flight.

A flight
is a meeting
of worlds:
sky which is,
ground which was,
new ground in landing.

A landing
is a meeting
of worlds:
place one doesn't
know,
place one sees
in the present,
place one will know.

Knowledge
is a meeting
of worlds:
that which one hears,
that which one will hear,
and that which
one cannot hear
but senses
on the edge of
knowing.

Another Kind of Truth

Another Kind of Truth

When you read a good novel,
truth grabs you and leads you
to reflect on the nature
of stars, thoughts, worlds,
evil, happiness, ephemera.

Truth snakes in and out
of the story that could be
and is
in the dimension
of possibility.

And one day
it just might unleash
the probable.

Monet

Monet

If we returned
to the part of France
from which Monet painted,
would the light blend
and reblend
sweeping us
into a whole
greater than its dots?


Or would the sky
fall
and return us to our time -
as we spilled out
guileless, bland, refurbished
as an old hard drive?

Festival of the Clitoris (Or, When I See a Clitoris Fly)

Festival of the Clitoris


Can you imagine?
We could have...
clitoris cupcakes.
Clitoris-happy underpants.
Songs of the clitoris.
Clitoris poems.
Clitoris stories.
Clitoris paintings.
Little cuddly clitorises
to sleep with.
One of those see through
models
showing all of its
rarely discussed parts.

Fantastic clitoral oils
to zing you from
sleepy to charged
in ten seconds.

And let us not forget
clitoral videos
showing how to
and where to
and when to..

Celebrate...
with clitoris-shaped
tables.

Apply for open carry
clitorises,

And the climax...
a talking clitoris cake
which gets excited
when you smear it
with chocolate.

I AM HER CLITORIS
and I can..fly!

Fibonacci Rose

Fibonacci Rose

Your mind fills in
the petals
as the lines turn
and although
there is only one
dark space above
not the inbetweens
of dark petals
everywhere
the line that turns
on red
spirals so tightly
that it spawns
new lines
in some pathway
of mind
so fast
that they breathe
much quicker
than the petals
you see outside
of mind

only