Born January 22, 1946

Born January 22, 1946   Ashes of Auschwitz attended my bris they stayed quiet and did not speak their names a scent that I did not yet recognize dark gray sky cantilevered from the past   I shone the splendor of coming to be undergirded by the terror of it conjoint unravelling of joy and doom never ever to be broken apart   to love is to love, the question that is its own answer, to live is to live this fleeting instant, eternity’s crown, this spark that vanishes free from a name   the wound of hope bleeds and can not be stanched beyond faulting I mourn and I bless...

Fit And Counterfeit

I am my own true fit and counterfeit, true gold and fool’s gold, their opposition not surviving this life’s intricacy, neither driving out each other’s other   What am I to make of myself but ceaseless forming of unresolvable formlessness, sometimes shameless in its heated heaving sometimes weighted with patient blind waiting?   In possessing myself, I dispossess myself of myself, pass into passing, leaving behind trinkets that mark a path beyond my own way of remembrances   “Am I or am I not?” becomes the sea of “was” or “was not,”,  time’s own shoreless “be”  ...

Slant

Slant is how best it goes when it knows not wither or why it goes, truth or not ruth, entertainment or catastrophe, yet slant’s elusive as firmament’s first fire   was there a first photon or were all and awe then self-entangled, then, as now , caught in the net of nothing stretched impossibly to bear being beyond themselves, ah, light   yes light, this light, slant, makes sight and shadow the worrisome wisdom of our delight, the fierce fervor of our burgeoning fright as climate changes, so our climax, too   my self, illusion, to itself is slight and slant as well, star, lost in its own...

In Brazilian Portuguese

In Brazilian Portuguese the samba is the sonnet, lovely lazy lively lilt slipping through shoulders, hips, lips, toes, hands to be breath and so smooth how time flowers   Before there were any words, Jobim made sun, sand, sea, saudade, me, and the girl who was completely sound without need of  flesh, she of the slightest  stirrings  of our air   No knowing now, ever,  how samba means outside itself, except it lilts us  let go grip of grasping selves, dance with shadows sculpted from blocking light of this, this… life   ah, sway, syncopated, counting deeper sweeter than any beat,  more…less...

Baby

Baby   A baby rabbit flushed from the liriope, still, stares, slips back in   The baby rabbit was the Buddha whom I flushed from liriope   All encompassing baby Buddha rabbit gaze summoned me awake   This is everything and nothing, baby rabbit as still as a stone...

The Morning Dew

In pride my bare feet crushed the dew of the morning field, before life taught me   I was as the dew, nothing more than mist that had cooled into a tiny reflective globe   I apologize for who I used to be, fleeting marauder of what I failed to understand   Remorse is not the end of wisdom, but yet it seems a beginning, as I walk mornings   That I never imagined, my feet more worn and yet more tender as I’m beside the...