Back at the Beginning of the World

Back at the beginning of the world,
when the amoebas got together to caucus
about what grand thing they would become next,
ideas were traded, expanded upon.
A plan was set, and some small part of you was made.

Your atoms,
chunks of blue and red with swirling electrons
were constructed and propelled forward,
inhabiting the bodies of sea slugs
and monkeys, Cro-Magnon hunters,
Pope Joan, Galileo, and Passolini, finally landing
here,
where I found you,
generous and insecure,
in a tee-shirt and all-stars,
having been left at the bar by another man,
who, for some unfathomable reason,
walked away without you.

There are physicists, and maybe philosophers,
who crunch numbers and talk trajectories,
who measure probabilities and possibilities like they were
weather patterns, or inevitable global events:
earthquakes, tsunamis, catastrophic lottery jackpots.

Matter only wants more matter,
and I can't have you either.



Bike Riding Poem

10th Street is quiet at 1:00AM, when even the cats have gone to sleep.
But there are places to be, and cutting-edge, styleful,
never-to-be-seen-again dance moves to be performed
under jerking, acidic club lighting in hard-to-find lofts,
which overlook the wide green mouth of the Gowanus.
So you perch yourself on the seat of a bike,
pedaled by a woman drunk on whiskey and springtime,
and hold onto her warm sides as you roll down the slope, past
brownstones and broken streetlamps and cars
squeezed together so tightly that it strikes you as
a heart-wrenching humanoid imitation of a divine Utopian ideal,
where everyone gets a car and everyone gets a parking space.

There, clutching the milk crate tied to the back of the bike,
with your hips pressed against her
like a perverted version of a simple idea,
you are unexpectedly confronted with your stiff-necked, intractable self.

But, fleetingly, the opposite appears: you as an ancient butterfly,
full of lightness and depth and all the wisdom that comes from
having seen landslide
after landslide
after landslide
after landslide
in your million years of unhurried evolution,
ready to answer the inexorable call of stamens and petals,
ready to float down 10th Street in complete, utter, balls-to-the-wall trust
of the troublemaker, lowlife, loudmouth lady you adore
who helms the bike, and
who cared enough to offer you the seat behind her.



Trash Night

It started with small things
found on the street, or won
from cranky vending machines
in badly lit supermarkets
on Flatbush Avenue.
There, and worse places.
Then came demands.

I realize now that all you wanted
was for the fairness to feel like the solution,
having agreed or disagreed,
then come to something we could both live with.
To make promises and keep them.

I took all the trinkets, the bits of cloth and paper,
small flags of hope, like something a bird would bring to her nest to
make it better, to hold her children, to seal out the weather and the hunters:
The brown boots, the watercolor sets,
the books I tried to read, but couldn't.

What if the next thing, I wondered, is a tree?
Or some other exhaling thing, that will ask me to shift
my behavior from one set of know-hows to another
far more exhausting routine of watering, walking, care and feeding.
Do you understand how
eating something different for breakfast could erase me?

On trash night,
I lined everything up in rows on the sidewalk.
It looked like a garage sale,
everything you ever gave me.


Stamp Poem

If she had been a stamp, I think
she would have been the three cent,
or another such small, eccentric denomination.
She would have been
the ones you forget are made,
the ones you see rarely,
the ones you use in times of emergency,
when you are out of regular stamps,
and your letter can only be rescued by forgotten
stamps, the old kind with glue gone brown,
which you cull from the back and sides of a junk drawer,
left there maybe by your grandmother,
when she was still alive to mail you letters.

Perhaps I just want her to be a stamp,
So that someone could send her back to me.
So that I could send her back to you.