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 night
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 regular
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