Afternoon at the Mall

I stand by the Walt Whitman Mall,
its entrance just a stone's throw
from the young poet's cradle.
His birth house stands preserved
on the crammed highway's other side,
a tiny refuge of culture
amid the sprawl of Route 110.

Could that lover of all things
have stretched his embrace so wide
to hug this leviathan bearing his name?
Leaves of Grass was painted
all around its concrete perimeter,
but now his barbaric yawp is stifled
by water valves and fast food signs
clamoring against the words.

I'm here to buy a CD player
that will work in the shower.
It seems our second son
can't endure the ten long minutes
required to cleanse himself
without the company of music.
An indulgence to be sure,
but my wife and I do it gladly,
knowing well his two siblings
will never visit in our old age.

I've been reading poetry,
and I find dead writers' images
springing at me everywhere.

A travel agency poster
shows a white-capped Irish shore
and I see a woman's body
interred by Hardy in drier ground,
her spirit escaping each night
to commune with the sea.

The girl at the Starbucks counter
where I stop for cappuccino
is dimpled, darling, nineteen.
I think of Berryman's dining woman
filling her compact & delicious body
as I fall, ridiculous, in love.

Amidst The Sharper Image junk,
I find the boy's wet music box
and can't help but ponder
Ammons' vision of human detritus
which all this must become,
disgorged to nature's current.

At the Victoria's Secret window,
I pause (as always) to inspect
their huge cardboard goddesses,
but find myself distracted
by words of imprisonment and rage
intoned by Plath and Sexton.

I'm burning to write myself,
but rarely know of what.
Privileged soul that I am,
my sorrows are lamentably small.
I suffer only the minimum anguish
required for Cowboy Junkies fans.
I am long resigned to my time,
which feels to me distressing
but altogether logical.

I think of my cousin's son,
a gentle soul now gone two weeks.
A seizure killed him at seventeen,
we learned of the horror days ago.
My daughter cried when I told her;
he had covered her, laughing, with burrs
at my aunt's stable when they were eight.
I saw him last at twelve,
a quick grin and cornsilk hair,
in his new home in High Point.
Though I faintly mourn this boy,
I wish I could write
from his mother's heart,
and infinitely more
than the lines on the card
I hoped for just a moment
might salve her terrible gaping wound.

I'm neither immersed in nature
nor irreparably estranged.
Years of numbers blunted my soul
and I want to ask Wallace Stevens
how he sold all those policies
and still wrote glowing poems.

It falls to me now, I think,
to be a writer of small things,
having little talent for metaphor,
less for images bleeding truth,
the imagination of an ox.
I will never, sadly,
envision the airborne soul of a jester
courting the heart of a queen
(nor express it perfectly if I could),
but still, there is a grudging joy
in turning the inside out
with what meager verse I can.

The overpriced toy in tow,
I drive home and think,
I will ready myself. One day,
there will be tragedy enough
and perhaps I can do it justice.

Two Statisticians

Once it was just us two,
teasing truth from the numbers
in a room with twin desks
at the back of the building.
We practiced arcane science
while the morning sun glared
on our terminal screens,
and margin flowed like wine.

I was the neophyte
aglow with possibilities,
you the earnest teacher
with your irony tempering
unshakable self-regard.
But in time I transcended you
as I learned to talk Business
and made machines dance
and the sacred memos sing.

The years carried us on.
I prattled in the boardroom
and marched, well suited,
to do battle in the courts,
skirting perjury with the best
advice money could buy.
You carefully perfected
your optimizations
in a magnificent paradigm,
not seeing its pedestal
slowly, irresistably crushed
by the weight of the changing world.

When I walked, lost in thought,
from the front of the building tonight,
the air smelled like rain.
Now it would seem
there is only room for one.

Getting Home

The low song of the train wheels
thundering softly on the tracks
was lulling me to sleep.
Thirteen hours before,
I departed Deer Park
and rode their mirror image
in the other direction,
descending abruptly near the river
into the underwater throat
and, last and finally,
the very belly of the beast
so long ago named Manhattan.

A weary day of cabs and meetings
with supplicating would-be saviors,
beating the prefab bushes
of endless vendor booths
sprung like rectangular shrubs
into the harsh convention light,
trying to flush a mink among rats.
A final dinner at Ruth's Chris
and then a dash for the 8:55.

Four-fifths home and groggy,
I hear the announcement.

Attention passengers: There has been a pedestrian accident at the Deer Park station. This train will terminate at Farmingdale. The railroad will be ordering buses to take passengers to all points further east. I repeat, this train will terminate at Farmingdale.

Farmingdale lies next on the wrecked route.
Punching HOME on the cell phone,
I call Mrs. B to say
a late day is turning later.
The passenger behind
recounts his two-hour wait
the last time buses were summoned.
I imagine the pitiable pedestrian,
flung a football field length
by a speeding locomotive.

I want to be out of this fucking suit.

The train groans to a halt,
the announcement is repeated.

I disembark with the city-chewed souls,
resigned commuter angst in every face.
A pushing match erupts in the rain
for two lonely cabs that wait,
unsuspecting, in the lot.

Four of us can be taken the five miles
to Deer Park for ten dollars each.
A bargain at 10 PM on a very wet night.

Three of us fill the back seat,
another climbs in front.
I wonder if this driver
will write of us later like another I know,
and then he starts to speak.
Clearly, no.

The man next to me explains
he's talked to the firehouse
near the station past Deer Park.
An aspiring passenger fell
from the rainsoaked platform
and was covered by the train.
He's trapped, alive,
under one of the cars.
Two cranes are rolling in
from the station beyond
on the westbound tracks I rode this morning
to lift the car off his body.

"Jesus!" says the fellow in front,
and then our group grows quiet.
I try not to empathize
as the cab moves slowly through the rain.

A silent five minutes after,
we approach the station
where an orchard of red cherries
are slashing up the night.
Fifty yards away, the train
sits dumbly on its bludgeoned victim.
A police chopper, its blades inert,
rests absurdly on the empty road ahead.
The wet army of disaster-ready personnel
waits near the platform, eerily quiet,
for the coming of the cranes.

Flares guard the parking lot entrance,
a macintoshed cop waves us curbside.
I pay the driver his ransom
and walk across the asphalt plain,
its slickness glowing somber red.
I start up the car, and follow
the slow snake of curious traffic
being guided from the lot
by waving cones of orange light.

The rain grows harder as I head home.
I switch from the distant Yankees game
that possessed my local news station
to the CD that was spinning
so many hours before,
recalling a happier night in Ontario.

Where are you tonight?
I think that I'll make it through all right,
but I'd love to have you just one more time beside me.

Morning with Mrs. B

Enrobed and groggy, I find her at the bathroom mirror
in the navy blue blazer that hugs her white turtleneck.
An eyebrow arches as she frowns at the forty-ish face
that stubbornly frowns back. I see someone different
than she does, and kiss her plump cheek in reassurance.

She's ready to leave for her other world, a war
rivaling Troy for the souls of twenty-six children.
The soft smell of flowers and musk, like a whisper,
conspires with upturned eyes and a farewell smile
to break my heart as I let her out the front door.

I've seen the quick delight on her students' faces
when we chance to meet them in town, and seeing
the empty mailbox, I wonder if I'll come home to find
the dreaded letter, neatly written in 5th-grade script,
asking if Mrs. B could please come home with them.

Court-Martial

The saints are all arraigned.
Their tiny robe-clad figures
form a line atop my computer screen.
Its glow illumines downturned faces
as they search for signs of mercy.

Piety lit their long road here.
Inspired by the Church, or in spite of it,
the path of devotion was hard but clear.
Only the depraved disparaged their chants,
and all knew the fate of infidels.

Not heaven but a Lilliputian hell awaited.
Technology's lurid flicker
is the light of this new world,
its indictment of grace
unyielding as a pyre.

Field Day

The earth of her unchained sex splattered by urine,
the wild maid unleashes the fierce garden of her reality,
thorns nettling out from the bloom of cogitation.

The wounded bull, surprised amidst his posturing,
bellows and stamps as a rising tide of sharp insistent horticulture
pierces the underside of his proud resisting nature.

Heads turn to the clash of unstoppable force and immovable object.
Carnivores and herbivores cheer gleefully on either side
and the prescient carrion glide above, circling patiently.

Halfway to Albany Road Rap (Explicit Lyrics)

with apologies to Lucinda and Notorious BIG


I get into the car
you know the rain is comin' down
gotta go pick up my boy
up where Pataki is a clown

start up the engine
gonna groove on down the line
I slip in some sounds
windshield wipers slappin' time

suckin' down the coffee
through a bendy paper straw
and then I'm thinkin-bout a poem
that I posted on the board

got the Chili Peppers playin'
you know them funky naked Reds
then jus' five mile from the house
you know it smack me in the head

the word is wrong
huh, huh, huh, said
that word is wrong


An hour crawls by
past the wet window glass
the thruway just a blur
and then the bridge crawls up my ass

you know

my brain is screamin' "fix it"
and my head just hurts
can't think of nothin' else
except that line that jus' don't work

because

the word is wrong
oww, oww, oww, said
that word is wrong


got two more hours
on this rainy fuckin' road
ain't never gonna make it
you know the miles are rollin' slow

and

my mind jus' keeps obsessin'
then a beamer cuts me off
I won't chase the motherfucker
cuz the only thing I know

is that

the word is wrong
huh, huh, huh, said
that word is wrong


The gas stop rest room
fast food phone place
is comin' up ahead
and I know I'm gonna stop

because

I seen by the phone booths
there's a terminal screen
I feed the bitch my credit card
log on and there it is

you see

the word is wrong
huh, huh, huh, said
that word is wrong


who designed this mother
man the cursor move like shit
really wish I had a mousey
cuz I gotta do this quick

and so I

backspace backspace
backspace backspace
type in five new letters
and I click the EDIT place

and now

the word ain't wrong
huh, huh, huh, said
that word ain't wrong

and now

the word ain't wrong
hallelujah I can live because
that word ain't wrong

Autumn Sonnet

When autumn makes its chilly way around,
The pumpkins on the vine will ripened be.
The leaves will all be tumbled to the ground
And gutters overflowing with debris.
My wind-blown lawn with trees' dead issue fills,
So rake with Sony Walkman strapped will I,
And toil in growing darkness 'til it kills,
The spouse (non-llama) comforts with a sigh.
My satisfaction blooms when labor's done
And at long last the withered leaves are piled.
That's when the kids come out and all dive in
And there it goes, three hours of work defiled.
But not to worry, life is but in jest,
I'll have myself a cold Oktoberfest.

Kentuckiannna on my Yankee Cell Phone

Electronic tones singing Miles From Our Home
erupt over the music and road noise,
Belly a proud marquee on the tiny silver screen.
Thumbing the ANSWER button, the vocal musing
of my favorite mass of contradictions fills my ear,
Kentucky and Texas blending brashly in her voice.
The current stop on her quest
to know what friends are thinking,
I answer her questions, but mostly I listen.
A boisterous hillbilly cackle
delimits the droll effusions of her narrative
as she paints an aural picture of a world uniquely hers.
Smiling, I return her parting assurance of love
before hearing that final drawled-out "Bye!"

The Sound of History

The air in Gettysburg whispers.

Rising slow but insistent
above the lazy buzz of flies
and gentle whir of breezes
bending the morbid grass
quite late on a summer's day,

I hear the faint but unmistakable
serial crack of musket fire,
a soft boom of artillery,
the muted shouts of generals,
and quiet vivid moans of pain
as life ebbs relentlessly
from a soldier's torn body,
his cause abandoned.

Last Night's Dream

The Western begins with a dust storm at night
savagely galing the horse-lined old street.
In an awkward apartment I shelter myself,
sharing a bedroom with four dear old friends
and their faces are all unfamiliar.
A younger Jennifer Aniston is there
but will not consent to sleep with me;
her gigantic closet has at least 30 switches,
but none will illumine the uppermost shelf
whereon, I am sure, lies the syringe
that will become crucial evidence.
Half-eaten turkey parts litter the floor
and we're all under suspicion
for a murder we may or may not have committed,
but free to go until the arraignment.
A brick in my pants delays my departure,
when I leave the flat all the others have gone.
I'm pursued by three nurses, huge and identical,
who gather to beat me with belts in the hall.
Slipping out to the street, I'm back in the dust
and the dawning light makes the cloud look like snow.
Running stark mad down the narrowing street
I dodge the dark figures moving all toward me,
emerging so sudden from the billowing glow.
My legs are yanked out and then I am flying,
pulled by a lasso, and from upside down
I can read the big banner
Welcome to Dodge
on my way out of town.

A Virgin's Lament

I seen him in the eastern field
early on a hot June morning.
His mama got sold to the Garners
and him they bring down here.
Just another strapling boy
with his grin and his straw hat,
singin' soft while he pick the cotton,
but something when he smile at me,
I feel like I can care for him.

Late at night when supper done,
I meet him in the sycamores
back the old cabins where we sleep.
He tell me about the farm he work
up further north, by Birmingham,
and how his poor mama cry
when they put him on the block.
By the by he stroke my arm,
and then I set real close to him
and lay my head down on his chest.
I hear the way his heart beat fast
and then he kiss me, warm and soft,
and I feel so bright and happy
like something in a dream.
Mama tell me, My sweet girl,
I trust you to know your time.
But mind our life ain't not our own,
fast as he here, he may be gone.

Next morning, down the Nanny come
from the house to Mama and say
they want her girl to work the kitchen,
old Mabel she too tired and sick.
Mama say she glad for me
but I rather stay in the dust and heat.

Now I wait the missus' table
and help the cook fix up the meals.
The houseman watch us day and night
and field slave can't come in the yard,
but sometime when the sun is right
I can just see that boy I love
out the small window of the pantry,
and I pretend that he see me.
I sweat with him out in the field
because he make my heart so glad.
Every night I think on going
out by the sycamore where we kiss.
I feel him hold me with his arms
and we make that sweet joy together,
but soon I know my dream is done.
I seen the massuh look at me.

Strangers in the Bathroom

She tosses her hair
and tugs at the halter,
absorbed in the mirror,
oblivious to me.

What she is thinking
I only can guess at,
boys and Eminem and
who's bringing the weed.

But I still remember
a girl in a jumpsuit
who laughed and yelled "Dad!"
as we skied in the trees.

The bike rides and zoo trips
and Halloween ghost walks,
her fond endless chatter,
the wet kiss on my cheek.

I miss her so bitterly
I choke on the toothbrush,
and the girl who replaced her
leaves without words.

insatiable

there's gotta be more
the soul ever cries
been after nirvana
since Santa Clause died

Homecoming

Familiar streets call out her name
and summon back the cold dead nights
of flame-black spoons and cheerless men
who paid for half an hour's relief.

The man whose arm she leans upon
and girl whose hand she tightly holds
know just the shiver, barely felt,
acknowledging a desperate youth.

A Gardener's Triumph

From a steadfast place inside
she flowers, proud and undefeated,
needing love to grow and lately
feeling safe enough to ask.

I wonder at her stubborn skill
in tending such a ravaged plot,
to make a patient garden thrive
where once was only dirt and tears.

Fishermaiden

A few words said warmly
and with such skill,
the hook is never sensed
in the pregnant charm
of the utterance.

Helpless on the line
and frightened by imperiled will,
there is sweet sad struggle,
then spasms of joyful pain.

Hauled onto the deck,
a glimpse of fish heaven
before being fileted.

A Poet's Choice

She wasn't meant for this world,
a stubborn mangled flower
damaged at the roots,
budding bravely among Darwinian weeds
that muscled without mercy
for their place in the sun.

No real surprise then
to learn that, appalled at the ugliness
and weary of the fight,
she decided to end her life.

Sorrow, like a blanket
wrapped around myself for comfort,
greets the note from a friend
describing the event.
A perfect tragic scene
like those she so admired:
A dozen careful roses at the bedside
in a cabin on the lapping sea,
baby's breath trembling
at her slow subsiding exhalations,
Schubert's songs on the stereo
echoing terminal despair.

It makes me sadder still
to think she chose
another's tear-filled eyes
to witness her farewell.