Beloved Simba. Muscled, friendly as a fourth grader. Whereas the white cat remains aloof, seemingly timid, watchful.

Last night at the amateur film festival, we met our acquaintance, Rich. Zen Rich. Serene Rich. I’d met him at a bookstore reciting Eliot. Next at a campsite at a poetry festival, on to Pound.

He was just parking his motorcycle. I wouldn’t have thought he was the type, but then, I’m not sure what type he should have been. Toyota Tercel, Dodge Ram, BMW – nothing seems to fit.

In the fourth film there he was, leathered-up, evil goatee, raging at one of the peep show girls, complicating the plot. After, he told me he was also the abusive boyfriend in the pickup waling on the star. The hostility seemed foreign to me, yet available.

White cat stalks a squirrel. Simba, nowhere to be seen.

Each one enters, bites. I feel
the hot fury of your hatred and hurt.
I see you on the height, raging.

When you are exhausted I let go
the bird to fly through the wound
you have opened in your defenses.

Next morning, I awoke to the sound
of you whirring berries red like God’s blood
and grinding coffee. I roasted
the duck while you shoveled what was left
of the snow back onto the walk.

We spent the rest of the day on the phone
rehearsing memories with distant families,
or in bed, or walking in the raw sunlight
and the wind like a frisky puppy

threading its leash around our legs
and down our necks, or shaking
hands and exchanging boxes
of chocolates with new neighbors.

Near the end of the day, not even halfway
through the last present and still marveling
at the miracles of whipping cream
and electricity, we played dominoes
at the familiar table, tucking in
ghosts like old friends.

December 25, 2008

with its pincers and knives,
its Catherine wheels
and little distances.

Was that your black neon
flashing in the dark
that I followed like a scent?

Your constant comparisons
are a ruler by which I lay out
my plot. Thing is,

it’s a relative measure,
it’s not absolute. It kills
me every time I use it.

And your cloak of fine
distinctions, of thought,
at first was just a loan,

but now I wear it greedily,
coveting it even
when it’s on my own shoulders,

your finger like a flipped tag
poking at my neck.

some days it seems
no wind is blowing at all

though outside the house
the trees are always stirring

Springwater, NY

and I love the way my skin seems to be
falling apart before my eyes, huge flakes
of it snowing down on my shirts and faces

of the ones I love and teach so that they
get the dry heaves even as I approach,

and I love the guy in the Hummer
this morning who ran the stop sign
in the dark and then drove slowly
on the snowy roads spitting

salt and sand on my windshield for two
miles before finally running the red light

so that I didn’t even have the chance to get
out of my car and tell him what I really thought,

and I love the two old women making
their way down the street in the dark
tonight, one hand each on the rusted cart

stuffed with shopping bags stuffed
with other shopping bags, clothes that might

or might not fit, empty pop cans,
bottles and all covered with snow.

Only in your father, or rather, in his stand-in –
the varnished study door, waiting for it to open,
trying to decipher the mysterious music
(Brahms, Gershwin, Garland) playing
muffled on the one-armed turntable
inside a suitcase-kind-of-box smelling
of felt, brass, and must; in the papers
rustling; in the occasional creaking of a chair
that bears his weight.

Enough of that: that’s when you decide
to disappear yourself. And there’s your old
friend death, whom you’d met once already
on the awful first ride into daylight. He makes
good friends with you, so that even when you
can no longer trust in God, his assurances
are stronger than any faith.

Though, his power’s now a little weaker,
remembering your mother sitting at the kitchen
table, instant coffee and cigarettes insufficient
to reignite her love for anyone, especially herself.
And your father, giving love away so freely
he seemed sometimes a circus barker,
or at least a clown.

Death sort of disappears himself
in that sort of company, and all you’re
left with are a few handfuls of memories and,
perhaps, an equal number of tomorrows,
lying like mail on the table, waiting
to be opened.

Death tells me that my feelings are trite,
that my thoughts are inaccurate,
that my actions are all in vain.

Death wants to come at me with a twelve-pound hammer and crack my skull,
with a handful of knives and slice me slowly into bleeding pieces,
with microbes that will make me shit and puke my life away.

Death stands there with an expression that is both smile and sneer.
Death holds out its arms to me.

Death wants to embrace me,
hold me against its enormous breast,
nurse me deep.

Death loves me.
Death has been waiting my entire life for me.

Now the night is a memory
and in place of the absence
which gives it form
is a color we call black.

And look how on the lawn
the white snow has melted,
revealing circles of green
like islands, some,

or little planets scattered
and forming, in my mind,
a kind of constellation,

and others massed, whole galaxies,
or, as some call them,
patches, as if the ground
were quilted with them.

And how, under its sheet of snow
the yard merges with the sleeping
field and its yellow stubble.
Or dun, or brown, or ochre.

And how the field becomes a hill,
climbs, becomes trees which
reach up with grey and purple
fingers. Or magenta, or sumac.

Or black, against a sky
where, after three days of rain
and grey, the white clouds part,

touched with a little rose
from the morning sun,
and behind those, blue,

finally, after three days,
and behind that, something
large that we compare,
finally, to night.