Rochester

February 13, 2014

Rochester

Your apartment was empty.

Dark. Your family

one thousand miles away,

in a place with more sun,

in a city less bleak and...

Not depressing. Just

lonely. For now.

You might have made some friends,

some people to share a drink,

a cigar, a conversation

after work,

on weekends.

But what did you tell yourself

in the tired mornings

in the empty apartment

to get up for breakfast

and the daily commute?

What should I

tell myself?

Make a wish

March 1, 2014

Make a wish

The night is clear and the stars shine through

like diamond pinpricks. They are the same stars that you see.

The pale starlight reaching our eyes seems young and new,

but it is ancient, weary from travel through such infinite darkness.

Perhaps this star just gave its last breath, a small cry from the depths

of space, before shattering brilliantly. We will see its death, so many years later.

The stars are far apart,

and we are farther.

Elegy on Sleep

December 17, 2012

Elegy on Sleep

night falls

we are still awake

in bleary gray in the dark

illuminated only by halogen lamps and sleepless

delusions the small possibilities of the past seem almost

to materialize in our hands slippery soft as candle wax

or starlight we handle them with such delicacy

as we might an impossible task and still

they melt through our fingers why

do we do this to our bodies?  

eyes heavy and caffeine-rimmed filled

with the red of memory and distance the thrall

of self-indulgent melancholy we cannot

remember the nights once studded and bright

with magic or starshine dulled and frozen

                                                          the mind slips

dreams sharp and black as scrawled ink

curling bits of volcanic stone clawing

at the soft tissue of the brain but don’t

retrace spiked cavernous thoughts don’t

let yourself why do we

do this to our bodies?

night leaves me at the feet of a dim

white dawn dissatisfied

Distance

September 11, 2012

distance

Consider

the space between the gull

and the sea, its separate levels:

here the disparate mist,

still cold and white despite

the sun’s heat, a chilly rainbow or two;

here nothing but air and particles

of dust, floating in the currents; and here

other seabirds, swooping and calling

in scattered swarms,

and the one gull,

apart, eyeing the horizon

or the sand, until,

diving downward, crossing through

air and dust and sunlight and water,

it makes the tiniest of splashes

as the open beak touches the waves,

and emerges, and soars back up.

I consider

the golden-red stain of this October, and how

the leaves in free-fall drift along rivers,

tracing the miles between here

and there, as I, with hands

and feet, slowly pantomime

whatever I’m asked to

without you.

I long for the kind of moment

when the night sky is streaked with rain,

the stars like ocean spray: a moment when

two strangers walk past each other, and one

decides to smile.

9:10 Metro-North to Stamford

July 27, 2012

9:10 Metro-North to Stamford

i hope i have the right train she

did say track 19, didn’t she or maybe

that was just 9:10 no, it was definitely 19, this is

the right train i sit down

in the back car, the first one i come to i

don’t want to miss the train

a man with a blue cotton shirt and a sweaty forehead walks

up to the conductor in the aisle, asks for the bathroom

every other car, the conductor says

we’re leaving in like five minutes, right the man says

no, in like one minute, the conductor says

the man says, that’s okay and walks

off the train my mom tells me this story

of one time she was on a train and i was

a baby and she had to get off to use the bathroom

because the one on board wasn’t big enough

for both of us, only the difference is this man

doesn’t have a baby, and my mom

got back on the train

i slide down a little in the old vinyl seats, their

familiar colors burgundy, navy, dirty beige,

like a faded fourth of july parade, like the ones

i went to as a toddler with my family, when we sat

on the hot brick half-walls near the sidewalk on the corner

of our street and main street and as the parade

passed, my brother and sister and i clutched little

paper bags hoping some of the parading people

would throw us some candy we didn’t care much for

the fire engines or police cars or girl scout floats

or the really loud guns they fired sometimes, right in our

ears, it seemed, but we just wanted some treats

for wearing the right colors and being very good

at mamaronek, a large woman in a dark blouse,

pencil skirt, tiny high heels moves up from a different car,

sees so many seats are full, and slumps with a sigh

on the bench facing backwards, right next

to the doors and i remember the times we used to ride

on the metro, when it wasn’t as busy as this, no tired

late-night commuter ghosts with silent mouths and white wires

stringing from their ears, but when i was a kid in an empty

train, if i ever sat down it was in a backwards seat,

because it was like a rollercoaster, and i never got sick,

just like if we spun our swing at home around and around

and around and then let it go, sitting tight curled up

on the seat, we would ride and ride and ride and ride and never

ever get dizzy

in the seat across from me, a routine man has hung up

his black suit jacket on the luggage rack, making him black, white,

black, from his hair to his shirt to his pants, a sitting barcode

on the red white blue seats in his hand he has a can wrapped

in a paper bag and it makes me stare for just a second because

i didn’t know people actually did that my dad

never did, but he never drinks except two beers with dinner

every night, and sometimes when we were younger he’d let us

taste just the smallest sip of it, and it tasted awful,

but i remember a few times i was very thirsty and i didn’t want

to get my own glass of water and i would want to drink down

all of that awful stuff and maybe

there are just a whole lot of really thirsty people

a few hours ago today i walked through the dark city

streets for the first time in seven years

as the rain soaked the thirsty earth

and all the lights made the wet asphalt glitter like fireworks

i must have been grinning like an idiot even if

my throat was choking up a little, not

because it was really beautiful, but because it might

have been mine if i’d stayed, and now i was just

a stranger there was a man with stringy gray

hair that mopped his head wearing a cardboard sign

saying why life, live 4 beer, and he did a sort of

half-dance as i watched him and walked past, and he said, you

have a good night, smiley

Whispered thoughts and curled fists

June 12, 2010

Whispered thoughts and curled fists

Somewhere in the past, lightning

tears silently at the sky

until a sort of insatiable thunder rings out

and tumbles down.

You heard it.

I saw you, flinching like a jack-in-the-box,

you and your wet

artichoke heart.

Charisma, you spat.

That’s all we have.

You began to throw at my feet

every compromise you ever made,

and crushed them under your toe

until they resembled the residue of that marrow bone

your dog chewed for hours

yesterday on the hardwood floor. 

You imagined any possible

tetrahedral, stained-glass afterthoughts

we might have had,

and threw the biggest rocks you could find

until it was all just a heap of shattered stars

in our heads.

But let’s face it:

we both did.

After all,

we dreamed up such big futures for ourselves,

much too grand for the lives we led,

and for the overwhelming reality

of the way we are.

Way before us,

a thin rain starts to fall.

I needed a good storm.

I want to wake up early with you

April 10, 2012

I want to wake up early with you and walk through the morning village

Dew like silver on the black bridge,

a silent fog on the water, a canopy

softening bare silhouettes along the canal.

The sky, blue-grey,

still sleeping in a warm bed, in a room

where the cold clings to the curtains and walls,

a house with a dark, creaking floor,

the air heavy from a long winter’s night.

Four birds in the distance,

barely separate,

move through the morning and

                                             drift away.