The Year of Disappearing Tents
They swept up baby pictures like
they swept up obituaries. They swept up
ashes of a husband, & told no one
where to find him.
Poets Respond
Voyager
America mourns the loss of President Jimmy Carter and celebrates one hell of a life lived. I’ve been reading his poetry this week and came upon this quote: “being president is as difficult as writing the perfect poem.” If only all leaders were poets.
It’s Me Again
What if a new year dawns & I don’t change?
Each January finds me as I was:
still moribund, still sensitive & strange.
Functional Convergence
If a taxi is untaxied outside
the Herald Square Macy’s
on Christmas Eve like a kind of post
-modern Vitruvian centerpiece,
a kind of heavy metal suckling
pig, how much will the damage
—assuming no insurance coverage
—how much will the damage damage
the cabby’s next one hundred afternoons?
We Three Kings
I slide myself under our tree
like a mechanic in a body shop
& look up through the lights
& ornaments
& artificial limbs
to the tin angel tied by yarn to the top
like a drunken sailor in a crow’s nest
Crowded Heavens Over New Jersey
Even when we drag the trash cans
to the curb, we look up. A nightlife
in the sky. We heard it’s al-Qaeda,
we heard it’s the government.